Word: wastelands
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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ETHIOPIA. The long lines of gaunt, potbellied children with matchstick limbs are dispiritingly familiar. During the 1973 drought, 200,000 Ethiopians died; this year's disaster is even more pervasive. Gondar province, once known as Ethiopia's grain basket, has become a shriveled wasteland. Where rain has fallen, there are no seeds to plant; where it has not, there is no wood for building, and nothing but straw and dung for fuel. In addition, the remoteness of the area makes communication difficult and the provision of supplies almost impossible. In some camps refugees must either wait 36 hours...
Brotherhood indeed! True, those male jet jockeys opened the space age with daredevil rides in rinky-dink tin capsules and kangaroo hops across the lunar wasteland. But move over, buddy. The women are coming, breaching that old space boys' club and bursting into what Ms. magazine sardonically calls NASA's world of "flaming, phallic rockets." During the next shuttle launch, sitting right there behind the skipper and his copilot, watching those blinking dials and video displays with her eagle eyes, will be Sally Kristen Ride, 32, former schoolgirl tennis star, Ph.D. in physics, cool, witty and attractive...
...problem began last April, when U.S. officials asked the Canadians for permission to test unarmed cruise missiles at the Primrose Lake test range in northeastern Alberta. The Pentagon argued that the region's vast stretches of snow-covered wasteland made it similar to Siberia and thus a suitable proving ground for the missile's sophisticated terrain-reading equipment. Trudeau tentatively agreed to the proposal. But the news was leaked to a Canadian reporter in Washington, and it ended up on the front page of newspapers across Canada. In the uproar that followed, Trudeau hastily denied any binding commitment...
...hostile wasteland of flat sands and marching dunes, where the temperatures have soared to 122° F, and the rain falls only once in 30 to 50 years. But for thousands of years, there have been tales that the Sahara's arid surface concealed a "large river without water." Last week a team of scientists from the U.S. and Egypt announced that they had definitive evidence that long ago a region of the vast desert in southern Egypt and northern Sudan was a lacy network of major water ways. The proof: radar images of the Sahara taken...
Television has this strange habit of doing its best in the off-hours. To culture critics denouncing TV's wasteland, the explanation is simple: whatever is aimed at mass audiences is inevitably broader, shallower and shoddier...