Word: soiling
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Libya plans to irrigate nearly half a million acres of land with the water. Although irrigation may initially produce bumper crops, some scientists say persistent intensive irrigation will release salts in the soil, leading to such a high level of salinity that agriculture in the area may be threatened. "Irrigation schemes around the world don't have a good track record," says Tony Debney of the Wallingford institute. In California, he notes, large tracts of land have become barren because of long-term irrigation...
...issue has been further complicated because the presence of the contras on Honduran soil violates the principle of self-determination enshrined in the country's constitution. Honduran officials are therefore wont to deny the guerrillas' presence in one breath and, in the next, to explain that the contras are needed to defend the 508-mile border with Nicaragua. Having seen the Sandinistas invade their country in pursuit of contras only last March, some Hondurans believe the guerrillas are not preventing war so much as provoking it. "Of course U.S. economic aid helps us," says Efrain Diaz, head of the opposition...
Indeed, the majority of Hondurans respond to their liminal position with a paradoxical longing: that the contras be replaced by U.S. troops, and the indecisive border skirmishing by a full-scale U.S. invasion of Nicaragua. As it is, Washington currently has only 750 troops on Honduran soil in a constantly fluctuating rotation that sometimes involves as many as 5,800. "The only way to get rid of the Sandinistas," says Conchita Canales, a Nicaraguan exile now working as a cook in the Honduran border town of San Marcos, "is with the kind of action the U.S. pulled off in that...
...Northern California today, with one exception: that far north, the sun never sets in summer and never rises in winter. "How did the trees grow so lushly in five months a year of blackness, without photosynthesis?" McMillan wonders. Francis, now back in Australia with samples of wood, leaves and soil from the island, suggests one possibility: "It may be that they shed their leaves and just stood dormant until it became light again, and then grew like...
...like Basinger, McMillan is most intrigued by the scientific potential. "There's going to be a generation of work done now in this area," he explains. "When you have so many stumps, when you can see what the forest floor was like, when you have the soil of that time, when you know the angle of the sun giving the months of dark, you have a heck of a lot of facts to work on. We're going to have our fling...