Word: vietnam
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...travels, veterans accost him with thank-yous. "It's pretty heady," Hanks says. "But now the Korean War guys have started coming up to me, saying, 'Hey, what about us?' I get good-natured guff from so many veterans saying things like, 'When you going to do something on Vietnam?' And the fact that I hadn't worked on a Pacific War project - forget about it! Those guys would say to me things like, 'If you ain't telling the story of Saipan, you ain't tellin' the story of World War II.'" (See pictures of Tom Hanks' roles...
...eventually taught himself. As a teenager, Hanks was a straight arrow wanting to earn a decent paycheck. He believed in the American Dream, and the Vietnam War made him uneasy. The closest Hanks got to protesting Vietnam, however, was privately rooting for the Smothers Brothers, whose show was eventually canceled by CBS because of their antiwar banter. Immune to Berkeley radicalism and too "unhip" - his word - for Richard Pryor or Lenny Bruce, Hanks' comedic sensibility tilted more toward Bob Hope. Hanks was so square that he remembers rebuking a peer in his high school government class for saying in April...
...Because of the hydropower projects on its side of the border, China frequently gets the blame for water shortages downstream. Indeed, Vietnam's neighbor has been on an aggressive campaign to damn the Mekong River, which begins on the Tibetan plateau and travels through five other countries before it empties into the South China Sea. According to the Mekong River Commission, a regional advisory agency, China has built or is planning to build eight dams along the Mekong. But while dams raise huge concerns about interfering with sediment flow and fish migration, they can also have a positive impact, says...
...north, Vietnam has been busy building hydropower dams as well. The government recently released enough water from those projects to help farmers in the Red River Delta with spring planting. Now with reservoir levels in the north at critical lows, the state-owned electricity company says it can't let go of much more; power demand is expected to break records as temperatures soar this month. Even with the small amount released, Nguyen Van Thang, director of the agriculture department in Vinh Phuc province, is not hopeful. High temperatures and evaporation are the enemy. "Even if farmers bail every single...
...crisis has been a "wakeup call" for Vietnam, says Ian Wilderspin, senior technical adviser for disaster risk management at the U.N. Development Program in Hanoi. The drought was predicted, he says, referring to last year's projections that El Niño would bring an unusually warm and dry winter. Yet Vietnam traditionally prepares for floods and typhoons, which are more dramatic and devastating when they hit. "Drought is a slow, silent disaster, which in the long run will have a more profound impact on peoples' livelihoods," he says...