![ground zero orlando gay flag color ground zero orlando gay flag color](https://venturebeat.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/Capture3.png)
Overhead, columns of clouds as tall as skyscrapers swell from the fueling dust formations until they burst into gushes of rainwater. The dust that had been simmering in the daytime heat starts dancing, small swirls at first, then intense twirling spins that sweep across the landscape. Stand in the Sahel on a steamy summer's day, and you are apt to see a rainstorm develop. But when it does rain, it pours, triggering floods because the ground is too hard to absorb the water.
![ground zero orlando gay flag color ground zero orlando gay flag color](https://s3-us-east-2.amazonaws.com/orbitz-media/blog/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/16131320/orbitz_harbour-bridge-syndey-australia-600x401.jpg)
That's barely enough water in one place to fill a hot tub in Boca Raton. Stripped of its dignity and beauty, the Sahel now attracts less rain in a year than Florida gets in half a summer's month. Anything of nourishment is unlikely to ever grow here again. In time, the sands of the advancing Sahara will construct dunes over much of the Sahel, as they already have to the north. The soil is hard and scorched, its protective layer of nutrition stripped by thousands of years of weather, changes in global climate and greed. The trunks have eroded into boulders built by termites as monuments to the land's demise. The few remaining trees are dormant, their petrified skeletons resembling sad scarecrows. If not for a few scattered wells and the meandering, cappuccino-colored Niger River, which reeks with pollution, there wouldn't be any water. There is little left in the Sahel for the animals to eat, and little left for people to hunt.
![ground zero orlando gay flag color ground zero orlando gay flag color](https://i.pinimg.com/736x/80/f1/35/80f1356d25d223473e1dacab4e52703e--serie-tv-jake-weber.jpg)
Today, your best chance of seeing a lion in the Sahel is at the zoo in Niamey, the capital of Niger. Up until 30 years ago, tribes hunted with spears and bows and arrows. Game roamed the land for thousands of years. The intercontinental tropical connection comes of age in the vast region known as the Sahel - or shore - so named thousands of years ago because the sawgrass here was once tall enough to make the Everglades jealous. That beige glaze on windshields didn't come from our beaches but from the sprawling Sahara outside Timbuktu. In a recent study at the University of Miami, sand from African deserts made up more than half the dust particles floating over Miami. To understand Africa's connection to Florida, take a rag to your car window on a humid afternoon. That collision forms thunderclouds, which sometimes mushroom into violent weather systems that draw the attention of American meteorologists who monitor satellite images half a world away.Īlmost everything that happens in rural West Africa - subtle changes in climate, human activity that improves or degrades the landscape, famines, droughts - is a factor in whether the Americas will be battered by killer storms. There this hot, dusty air meets cooler ripples of wind descending from the volcanic Tibesti Mountains of Chad. Maybe they’d feel differently if, instead of spending millions of dollars, the board was in charge of dispensing draft beer and Viagra.What weather watchers know is that the searing heat of West Africa fuels storms as vapors rise from the dusty ground into the upper atmosphere. Like most Americans, they’re not interested in local politics. According to Blechman, most show little interest in seizing control of their community from a leader they never see. But his most potent argument against the IRS comes from the Villages’ residents themselves. So far Morse has politicians from both parties going to bat for him to make the IRS back off. Those seats are supposed to be filled by residents, the IRS said. Why? Because everyone who sits on the district board-like everything else in the Villages- is controlled by Morse. But the IRS ruled last month that the Villages’ CDD bonds did not deserve to be tax-exempt. The CDDs in the Villages paid Morse millions of dollars to buy golf courses, guardhouses, and other amenities from him. The district levies fees on the homeowners to pay for roads and other improvements and under state law can borrow money using tax-free bonds. Like many Florida developers, Morse financed a big chunk of construction using something called a community development district, or CDD for short. According to the Internal Revenue Service, the way Morse has built this grand empire may be about as rock-solid as the sinkhole-prone ground beneath it. But here’s where it gets really interesting.