Word: drought
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...last time the IMF and World Bank suspended loans to Kenya was in the late 1990s, under Moi's dictatorial rule. All this comes at a trying time for the country. The Kenyan economy has been hobbled by the post-election violence and a punishing drought. Staff who conducted a recent census have been unpaid, and the financial crisis has robbed many people of their income, meaning fewer tax receipts...
...Detroit had been savaged by a hurricane and submerged by a ravenous flood, we'd know a lot more about it. If drought and carelessness had spread brush fires across the city, we'd see it on the evening news every night. Earthquake, tornadoes, you name it - if natural disaster had devastated the city that was once the living proof of American prosperity, the rest of the country might take notice. (See pictures of the remains of Detroit...
...have a modest loincloth on. It's this rather wonderful homoerotic work of art that I was hoping to put in the middle of this tiny little town where I was born. Unfortunately the fortunes of Warracknabeal are so grim at the moment with the recession and this chronic drought that's going on that it feels a little in bad taste to erect a giant gold statue...
...stillness that worried firefighters most. The wildfires that now annually singe Southern California came early this year, spreading slowly from drought-stricken wilderness to the foothills near Los Angeles. Fire season is usually worst in October, when the hot Santa Ana winds blow over the San Gabriel Mountains. But this inferno needed no wind--the Station fire in Angeles National Forest burned more than 100,000 acres (40,500 hectares), threatened thousands of homes and killed two firefighters in the dry heat of late summer. The stillness kept the flames from spreading quickly--a climatologist called it the "Jabba...
...hand? The Nature researchers noticed one potential signal: the sudden variance between two distinct states within one system, known by the less technical term squealing. In an ecological system like a forest, for example, squealing might look like an alternation between two stable states - barren versus fertile - before a drought takes its final toll on the woodland and transforms it into a desert, at which point even monsoons won't bring the field back to life. Fish populations seem to collapse suddenly as well - overfishing causes fluctuations in fish stocks until it passes a threshold, at which point there...