Whiskey is for drinking. Water is for fighting. In less colorful words, securing water is worth going to war.
Ethiopia and Egypt are now engaged in a vicious struggle over Nile River water rights. Their confrontation began well over a decade ago.....MORE
If the opening epigram strikes you as cliche Hollywood western dialogue, then good chance you've never suffered thirst with a sandpaper throat; been a farmer watching crops wither; or scratched it out as a pastoralist -- a fancy term for animal herder anywhere in any era, Mesopotamia to Oklahoma -- watching sheep, cattle or goats die from lack of H2O.
Human survival, individual and societal, requires water. Just ask Egyptians. At least 7,000 years of life on the Nile has proven the adage "Egypt is the Nile" to be true. From Aswan north to Alexandria, the green band bordering the great river is home to 90% of Egypt's population.
Twenty-first-century Egypt still confronts pharaoh-era East African geographic and climactic facts. Egypt gets 80% to 90% of its annual water needs from the Nile. The Blue Nile River originates in Ethiopia's watered highlands. Tributary? The Blue Nile provides roughly 85% of all Nile water. The Blue Nile meets the White Nile near Sudan's capital, Khartoum. Enriched in Sudan, the world's longest river rolls north, through Egypt and into the Mediterranean.
Regional politics add complexity. Ethiopia objects to the 1929 Nile Waters Agreement, a colonial document engineered by Great Britain, which gives Egypt the right to veto upstream water projects. Ethiopia signed the agreement, but it also affects Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania, whose water feeds the White Nile. In 2010, Ethiopia authored the Entebbe Agreement, which would give Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania a diplomatic mechanism for altering the 1929 division of Nile water rights. Rwanda and Burundi also support the Entebbe agreement....
Yesterday:
"The Mekong River, Water Wars, and Information Wars"
Also at Strategy Page, one of NASA's airplanes:
Posted: 04/07/2020
NASA’s Super Guppy arrives at the 179th Airlift Wing
in Mansfield, Ohio, March 22, 2020. The 179th AW is assisting the Super
Guppy in transporting parts of the Orion Space Project that recently
completed testing at the Glenn Research Center in Sandusky, Ohio. (U.S.
Air National Guard photo by Tech. Sgt. Joe Harwood)
I'd be willing to bet this is, hands down, the favorite airplane among the three-year-old set.
Here's another pic.
