Word: valleyful
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...Austria the deluge caused an estimated $3 billion in damage, transforming the Eferdinger basin, a valley dotted with vegetable farms, into a 20- sq.-mi. lake. Saxony bore the brunt in eastern Germany, where a television station broadcast footage of an elderly woman plunging more than 30 feet into the roiling floodwater when rescuers attempted to airlift her out of danger; she later died in the hospital. Dozens of patients in Dresden's hospitals, including a day-old, 1-lb. 8-oz. baby, had to be evacuated by car and helicopter. With the Elbe River rising to its highest level...
...solve problems similar to those we face today--especially problems of deforestation, water management, topsoil loss and climate change. The long list of victims includes the Anasazi in the U.S. Southwest, the Maya, Easter Islanders, the Greenland Norse, Mycenaean Greeks and inhabitants of the Fertile Crescent, the Indus Valley, Great Zimbabwe and Angkor Wat. The outcomes ranged from "just" a collapse of society, to the deaths of most people, to (in some cases) everyone's ending up dead. What can we learn from these events? I see four main sets of lessons...
Chiran is a hike. Located on the southernmost tip of Japan, the tiny town lies hours from any major city and deep in a valley surrounded by a fortress of mountains. Yet on a mid-August national holiday, visitors throng its sleepy streets and pack its inns. They've come not for Chiran's green tea and purple yams, nor for its exquisitely preserved samurai estates?but to honor its kamikaze pilots...
...fall of 1944, facing defeat and short of resources, the imperial army began to send off pilots in planes with enough fuel only for a one-way trip. Chiran's location in a hidden valley close to Okinawa made it an ideal launchpad for the so-called Tokkotai, or Special Attack Corps. Tome ran the Tomiya eatery in Chiran. The pilots, many still teenagers, spent their last days hanging around her place. She cooked their favorite meals, smuggled their farewell letters to sweethearts past military censors, and gave the airmen their final hugs goodbye. Tome, then a middle-aged mother...
...Zadran wants the governorship of the province (and two others besides) for himself. So, in late April, he started lobbing rockets into Gardez in a campaign that killed 36 civilians. A rival clan in the city returned fire, sending artillery back into Zadran's valley over the heads of U.S. special forces. The Americans were literally caught in the middle...