Word: soiling
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Then came the wind, great gusty blasts out of the Northwest. It lifted the dust from the parched fields and swirled it across the land. It tore the powdery soil from the roots of the wheat and deposited it like snowdrifts miles away. Concrete highways were buried under six inches of dust. The rich fertility of a million farms took to the air: 300,000,000 tons of soil billowing through the sky. Housewives in Des Moines could write their names in grime upon their table tops. Aviators had to climb 15,000 ft. to get above the pall...
California cliff and canyon dwellers might as well get ready for more devastation. Up and down the coastline, hundreds of hillsides are starting to slump and slide. And the reason, say experts, is simple. Weeks of relentless rain have saturated not just the top few inches of soil but also underlying layers of bedrock, causing structural weakening deep down. By itself, waterlogged ground is a nuisance. Combined with California's mountainous terrain, says Doug Morton of the U.S. Geological Survey in Riverside, Calif., it can very quickly add up to disaster. Imagine living on the edge of a steep, quivering...
...anthrax had been in the air for days as America focused on Saddam Hussein and his germ-making factories: of how quickly the bacteria could kill, how widely the havoc could spread, how easily the deadly spores could be obtained. And the nightmare seemed to materialize on American soil last week after the FBI arrested two men at a medical complex in Henderson, Nev. In their possession were eight to 10 flight bags containing what federal agents believed to be anthrax. More troubling was the fact that one of the men was Larry Wayne Harris, a self-styled microbiologist with...
...broad support and intimated that Arab leaders were more accommodating in private than in public. As soon as she landed in Washington, the support began slipping away. Egypt pronounced against military action. Turkey and Saudi Arabia told the U.S. it could not use air bases on their soil to attack Iraq. Then Bahrain's Information Minister announced that no strikes could be mounted from his country, a key land base for U.S. fighters and warships...
...Banks' thunderous epic Cloudsplitter. The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton (Knopf; 448 pages; $26) follows Lidie, a sturdy young Illinois bride, to the dust-blown outpost of Lawrence, Kans., in the tumultuous year of 1855. Lawrence is a raw, ill-favored roost of newly arrived Free Soil settlers, jostled by drunken proslave irregulars from Missouri and protected, mostly with words, by gassy politicians. John Brown and his terrible sons, the focus of Banks' harsh panorama, are just out of sight in Smiley's account, raiding and murdering...