Saber

Some of the biggest winds in the world blow through the stormy South Atlantic, but none stormier than the political hyperbole that's sweeping through the region lately. It's just 30 years since the Falkland Islands war that took 900 young lives and saved the government of British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher while bringing down one of South America's foulest military dictatorships. All this for possession of some 770 chilly islands totaling about half the area of Los Angeles County and with about the same year-round population (3,200)

Hope Rising (yes, her real name) says that the day she watched her husband pull out of their driveway for the last time, she collapsed, clutching her stomach in pain. That was, she says, in March 2012, a day before the couple's seventh wedding anniversary. Rising says she begged him not to go, and after he left, she couldn't get out of bed for days, though she rarely slept. "Usually I'd just lie in bed and stare at the wall or the ceiling," Rising, 47, said. "I was angry that he left, and then I'd think about what I could have done differently for him not to leave.

Tortoise power Re " The solar desert: An uneasy coexistence ," March 4 I was utterly amazed, though not surprised, by the attempts to "save" the desert tortoise at such a tremendous expense of dollars, personnel, programs, sacrifices and concessions. There is a severe shortage of renewable clean energy on this planet. There are millions of children who go to bed hungry each day. There are millions of humans who do not have access to clean drinking water. But by all means let's have a private company spend in excess of $56 million to provide food, housing, medical care and security for the desert tortoise.

Oil prices shot up nearly $3 per barrel Wednesday after British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher warned that war could be imminent in the Persian Gulf. The surge gained momentum when a confidante of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak said the countdown for confrontation had begun, resurrecting anxiety among oil traders that the flow of petroleum supplies would face disruptions. Traders were also responding to reports that Secretary of State James A.

Few creatures that roamed what is now Southern California thousands of years ago were a match for the fierce saber-toothed tiger, a predator that dined regularly on animals many times its size. With long, saber-shaped teeth protruding from its upper jaw, the magnificent beast carved its living out of what was then a pine-covered rain forest, long before the Los Angeles Basin became the arid land that it is today.

In determining their November vote, most Americans probably paid little regard to foreign military policy, except perhaps to feel that the Republicans would display a surer grasp of American interests than would the Clinton Administration. It is still early, but the warning signs are already flashing: The initial pronouncements of senior Republicans on such subjects as Bosnia, NATO and North Korea contain all too much political posturing unrelated to real events on the ground.

The day before she flew to Paris for the Kosovo peace talks, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright met in her office with a small delegation of Kosovo Serbs led by Bishop Artemije Radosavljevic. She delighted them by speaking a few words of Serbian and recalling fondly her childhood days in Belgrade. She assured her visitors that she harbored no animus against the Serbian people. Twenty-four hours later in Paris, she remarked brusquely that the Serbs should "wake up and smell the coffee."

On the subject of drugs and the dangers they pose to the nation, baseball Commissioner Peter Ueberroth has seemed to assume a public posture of political saber rattling. Employ AWACS reconnaissance aircraft. Call out the Marines. Scorch the poppy and marijuana fields--wherever they are found. Privately, however, in his own domain, the question seems to be: Has Ueberroth been operating with only a pop gun?

The Indian sharpshooters sit on the hill just over the border, so close to this Pakistani village that they can shoot anything they like. "Men, women, cows, even the chickens they kill," said Mohammad Hussain, 50, a wheat farmer. "They can fire any time. We always have to be alert."