Palestinians won't be driven off says Fayyad (IHT)

Reuters
Wednesday, October 22, 2008
By Wafa Amr
Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad joined West Bank farmers to pick olives on Wednesday and slammed assaults by Jewish settlers on the harvesters as "terrorism."
Fayyad rolled up his shirt sleeves and climbed up a ladder to help an old woman pluck olives from her tree in Mazra al-Gharbiyeh, a village north of the West Bank city of Ramallah which is surrounded by Jewish settlements.
His visit was "a clear message that we are here to stay," the Palestinian premier said.
"The settlers being here in itself is illegitimate. And on top of that they engage in acts of violence against our citizens, particularly at this time of year when they pick olives, with all that the olive tree signifies to our people," Fayyad told Reuters.
"This is nothing short of terrorism by the settlers."
Fayyad said the olive tree was not only a source of income for most Palestinians, but more importantly a "symbol of the determination of the Palestinian people to stay on their land and to preserve and defend it."
About 300,000 Jews live in settlements built by Israel in occupied West Bank land captured in the 1967 Six Day war.
Settlement expansion has seriously obstructed U.S.-sponsored peace talks. The Palestinians say they cannot achieve a viable, contiguous state of their own alongside Israel if the territory they secure is riddled with Jewish settlements and outposts.
Palestinians, the United Nations and Israeli leaders have expressed concern in the past month about an increase in violence by hardline Jewish settlers, who believe they have a divine right to the land.
The violence is seen partly as a warning to the Israeli government that some settlers will not go quietly if Israel agrees to return West Bank land as part of a peace settlement of the 60-year-old conflict.
Israeli Defence Minister Ehud Barak said on Monday "the assaults by hooligans in the area ... deserve condemnation," but Israeli troops could not be everywhere to protect harvesters.
Israel had deployed forces to permit the harvest to proceed in peace, Barak told Israeli Army Radio. But Palestinians say the army does little to stop settler assaults and often breaks up clashes by forcing the farmers to leave the area.
An editorial in the left-leaning Israeli daily Haaretz on Wednesday said Barak was offering a "dubious excuse" for what it considered criminal failure to uphold the law.
Settlers had been "stealing the land of powerless farmers for decades" and were not averse to stealing their fruit as well. "This year, as every year, fairly small groups manage to reach the olive groves, where they beat, steal then return home safely," the paper said.
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas on Sunday condemned settler attacks and pledged to fund the planting of a million trees to make the rocky West Bank terrain greener.
(Editing by Douglas Hamilton)

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Tajik farmers enslaved where cotton is king (IHT)

Women in a cotton field in the Kabodiyon district of Tajikistan, on a former collective farm. (Carolyn Drake for The New York Times )

By David L. Stern
Wednesday, October 15, 2008
SHAARTUZ DISTRICT, Tajikistan: Farhod, a farmer in this dusty southwestern spit of land pushed up against the Afghan and Uzbek borders, said that he had committed a subversive and potentially punishable act this growing season. He planted watermelons in addition to the usual cotton.
Such is the precarious position of growers throughout this impoverished republic of seven million that Farhod refused to be photographed or to give his real name. He fears the authorities will destroy his crop, even though they had assured him that he could plant whatever he wanted this year.
"They press down on us from all sides," said Farhod, a father of eight, as he looked out on his neatly planted rows of millionaire, shakira and maistros watermelons. Cotton is king in Tajikistan, at least as far as the government is concerned. In fact, say agricultural experts, the regal metaphor is apt: the system is close to feudal.
Farmers are shackled to the land - "like slaves," one European official says - and forced to grow cotton through a complex system of debts and obligations.
The fact that cotton is often grown to the exclusion of other crops could have catastrophic implications this winter. After a dry summer, Tajikistan and possibly other Central Asian countries are facing severe food shortages, and international aid organizations are girding for a possible crisis.
Cotton is at the core of Tajikistan's economy and, reportedly, corruption. Companies associated with President Emomali Rahmon's inner circle monopolize the business, diplomats and industry experts say, paying taxes that account for 25 percent of the country's annual budget.
The cozy arrangement contributes to what the International Crisis Group, a private research organization, called in a 2005 report "political repression, economic stagnation, widespread poverty and environmental degradation."
Cotton growing, the group said, is "simple and exploitative."
For instance, Tajikistan's and Uzbekistan's governments have traditionally mobilized tens of thousands of university students and children as young as 10 to pick the harvest by hand, since many men from the work force emigrate to other countries for seasonal work.
For Farhod, as for other Tajik farmers, the problems began from his first days as an independent farmer three years ago, when the local collective farm, which dated from the Soviet era, was broken up. He was allotted, but does not own, 16 hectares, or 40 acres, of land and a $5,000 debt carried over automatically from the farm's arrears.
Each year most of his profits go to working off the debt, which was assumed by a cotton trading company. The company maintains a monopoly over all cotton trade in the Shaartuz region and sells Farhod his supplies on credit - at inflated prices, he said - and then buys his production at below-market prices.
Under this system the farmers are perpetually strapped, as they never see any cash. Farhod and others say that what little they earn goes for food and other essentials, but since they have no money in hand, they are forced to buy from the trading company at inflated prices.
"They pay us, but only 14 months later when they sell the cotton," Farhod said. "Each year the debts get bigger and bigger."
The government works in tandem with the trading companies, say Western experts, who spoke off the record because they need to work with Tajik officials. Until recently, officials enforced an unwritten law requiring farmers to devote 80 percent to 90 percent of their arable land to cotton production. When farmers have tried to grow something else, officials and the companies have claimed breach of contract and plowed the field under, farmers say.
Cotton's significance was underlined early this year when the International Monetary Fund revealed that the Tajik government had secretly diverted its hard currency reserves to use as collateral for $240 million in foreign loans for the cotton trading companies.
The scandal broke just as the country was paralyzed last winter by a heat and electricity crisis, which laid bare what many Western experts saw as the Tajik government's ineptitude and inadequacy.
Following a crippling civil war in the 1990s, international donors funneled hundreds of millions of dollars into the country, but now are beginning to question this policy.
Carlos Pinerua, an IMF official formerly responsible for Tajikistan, said in a telephone interview that the bar was set high for the Tajiks to regain the trust of the international multilaterals, which are multinational organizations that finance development.
Noting that the Tajiks had lied to the IMF over a 10-year period, he said, "We will have to look at how to help the country - they are an IMF member - but financing will be very hard."
With Tajikistan's currency reserves now close to zero, the country is highly vulnerable to economic shocks, like the current credit crisis, Western diplomats say. Also complicating the picture is Tajikistan's endemic governmental dysfunction and corruption.
A case in point is the fate of one of the government officials at the heart of the loan scandal, the governor of the central bank, Murodali Alimardon. Far from being fired, Alimardon was promoted to deputy prime minister, and put in charge of agricultural reforms.
This year the Tajik government issued a decree guaranteeing farmers the right to cultivate their land as they see best. Farhod says that he has been planting about 12 hectares of the 16 hectares in cotton and the rest in other crops.
Other farmers say that the cotton quota remains in effect, though slightly lower at 70 percent.
But few here place much trust in a decree. "So far, they're not against the melons, but we'll see," Farhod said.








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Bootleggers playing hide-and-seek on the Alaskan tundra (IHT)

By Dan Barry
Monday, October 13, 2008
BETHEL, Alaska: On a misty day the color of lead, a few people linger outside a general store in the small and remote city of Bethel, struggling but failing to achieve an air of purposeful loitering. Try as they might to feign enjoyment of the damp cold, they are clearly looking to score.
Jess Carson, a plainclothes investigator for the Alaska State Troopers, watches their fidgeting performance through the windshield of his pickup truck, a cramped theater that smells of wet dog, courtesy of Kilo, his scent-sensitive German shepherd. Carson seems less than riveted by an act he has seen too many times before.
This show is not about heroin or cocaine; it's about booze. Many rural Alaskan communities consider alcohol to be the primary accelerant for crime, domestic strife and other social problems, and either ban it outright or, as in Bethel, tightly restrict its use.
And with illicit alcohol come bootleggers who lack any roguish Prohibition-era charm; just one case of their whiskey can upend a small native village.
An outsider might scan an Alaska State Troopers annual report, come across that photograph of Coors Light cases stacked beside bottles of R&R whiskey, and see ingredients for a holiday party. But many people here see it the way others would a few kilos of cocaine, piled in a pyramid for the camera — as seized contraband.
By the way, a fifth of R&R — which stands for Rich & Rare, a highbrow name for a bottom-shelf blend — sells for $10 or so in Anchorage. But that same bottle can sell for as much as $300 in a dry village in the tundra, making R&R the bootlegger's current alcohol of choice and the trooper's alcohol of interest.
"Ninety-five percent of all bootlegged alcohol in the Bethel area is R&R, and because of that we tend to focus on it," Carson says. But the brand is not for discriminating tastes, he adds. "Even the bootleggers don't like it."
Of course, bootleggers need go-betweens, some of whom will gladly work for the promise of a bottle. These runners and hustlers often congregate outside this corrugated warehouse of a store called the AC Value Center, where Listerine, Lysol and other items containing alcohol are kept behind the counter.
Carson sees something through his windshield: a woman in a yellow parka may have just slipped money to a runner now spiriting away. He steps out to question the woman. She says she has no idea what he's talking about, as those around her scatter like shards from a dropped bottle.
If need be, the woman will wait all day for that bootlegger's runner to return with her liquor. But there are so many other leaks to plug in the Alaskan bush, which some say has nowhere near the complement of officers needed to stem the illegal alcohol flow. The trooper returns to his dog-reeking truck and pulls away.
Carson, a boyish 32, has an innocent way that masks a street savvy culled from years as a narcotics investigator in Fairbanks, not far from his eastern Alaska hometown of Tok. Eighteen months ago he was transferred to Bethel, a western outpost of 6,000 that serves as a base for 56 native villages in the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta.
Where he once concentrated on cocaine and heroin, he now focuses on beer, wine and spirits, with no doubt in the value of his mission. "Most of the sexual assaults, suicides and homicides are alcohol-related here," Carson says. "Whenever you show up at a scene, you'll see the alcohol. It increases the importance of getting that off the street."
He works out of a small office near the regional airport with a few other troopers, including Investigator Jerry Evan, 38, a Yup'ik Eskimo from the village of Napaskiak. Carson says his colleague's fluency in Yup'ik, understanding of native culture and prowess as a hunter have been invaluable in a region where often the only way to get from here to there is by boat or plane.
Evan, who listens more than he speaks, says he well knows the devastation that alcohol can do to a village like his. Suicides. Drownings. People freezing to death.
"Alcohol has always been an issue," he says.
So much so that dozens of communities have voted over the years to restrict or ban the importation, sale and possession of alcohol. These include many native villages, where alcohol is a relatively new addition to the culture.
"This is not a bunch of lawyers from Anchorage and Juneau, flying in from southeast Alaska to impose our law," says James Fayette, a supervising assistant attorney general for Alaska. "We're flying in to impose their law."
Then Fayette says something startling: "You need to understand that a case of bootleg whiskey in a small Alaska village of 600 people can shut down that village for a week."
The comment may sound hyperbolic, but various studies have documented the insidious effect of alcohol in the bush. And when Fayette's words are repeated to four elders in the native village of Akiachak, a short flight from here, the men nod in sad agreement. Then one growls, "I hate bootleggers."
Life in rural Alaska can sometimes seem like one long chase scene from "The Dukes of Hazzard," Fayette says. Two months ago, state troopers in Aniak, about 90 miles to the northeast, reported chasing two drunken bootleggers 25 miles up the Kuskokwim River, sometimes at speeds topping 40 miles an hour. The suspects were finally caught — with five bottles of vodka.
Here in Bethel, you can possess alcohol, but not sell it. There are no bars or package stores, so many people, including several known bootleggers, have it sent by airmail from businesses in Anchorage with evocative names like Gold Rush and Brown Jug.
Though the amount someone can purchase in one month is limited — and closely monitored by troopers when it lands at the airport — people still smuggle. They tape bottles to their legs, or fill water bottles with vodka and apple juice bottles with whiskey, or use the name of some hanger-on down at the general store to exceed the monthly limit.
The bootleggers also know that troopers will actually listen to luggage, trying to detect the glug-glug sound of liquid in a bottle. So the smugglers will buy liquor that comes in plastic containers, "burp the bottle" by releasing the contained air without breaking the seal, then cover the cap with tape.
"It's identical to the drug trade," Carson says.
His pickup splashes its way out of the rutted parking lot of the AC Value Center and on through the misty gray of Bethel, a place so isolated that it has only a dozen miles of paved road. He checks out the loiterers outside another general store, then heads to the airport to record who is receiving what and how much.
At the Alaska Airlines depot, Carson logs in a case of vodka and two cases of beer. As he leaves, though, he passes a known bootlegger who is carrying away a case of R&R on his shoulder. Delivered legally, received legally, and within the limits of a Bethel resident's monthly allowance of purchased alcohol.
The trooper doubts the man will taste a drop of that scorching stuff.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/10/13/america/13land.php





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Tata finds a new home for Nano factory (IHT)

Villagers celebrating near the proposed site of the new Nano factory.

Tata Motors will open its factory on what is now a government-owned cow pasture.

(Ajit Solanki/The Associated Press)

Tata finds a new home for Nano factory
The Associated Press
Wednesday, October 8, 2008
MUMBAI: The car billed as the cheapest in the world has a new, $416.6 million home.
Tata Motors said Tuesday that it would manufacture the ultra-cheap Nano on what is now a government-owned cow pasture in the western state of Gujarat after two years of increasingly violent protests from farmers forced the company to pull its factory from West Bengal.
"We now have a new home," Ratan Tata said, speaking in Ahmedabad, the commercial capital of Gujarat.
Tata said the new factory would initially produce about 250,000 Nanos and that the company would do its best to launch the 100,000 rupee, or $2,100, car by year's end, as planned - possibly by initiating production at existing factories in Pune and Pantnagar.
He said he did not anticipate that the delay and relocation would cause any "appreciable loss" on the company's books.
The new factory and ancillary vendor park, which Tata says will generate 10,000 jobs, will be housed on 450 hectares, or 1,100 acres, that Anand Agricultural University had been using to graze cattle. The deal will halve the campus's size.
The Gujarat government acquired an additional 20 hectares of land from farmers adjacent to the campus in Sanand, outside Ahmedabad city, for an access road - the deal was completed in just six hours on Monday, said three locals who sold their land.
"I have no problem whatsoever if the government wants land," said Nazirkhan Pathan, who said he sold two acres to the government for 1,100 rupees a square meter, far more than the market price. "After all, it will bring prosperity to the entire state."
Suresh Rangarajan, a Tata spokesman, said the company picked the Gujarat site because the land has been in government hands for a century and work could get started quickly.
He said that seven farmers sold their land to make way for the access road. "They are very forward-looking," he said. "They want investment and development."
Tata's venture in Singur, West Bengal, collapsed Friday after intensifying protests by farmers and opposition party leaders who said the state's governing Communist Party hadn't fairly compensated locals for their property.
The mood in West Bengal was mixed Tuesday evening.
Manik Das, 36, an opposition party activist, vowed to continue protesting until she gets her two acres back. "It does not matter to me whether Tata set up their plant at Gujarat or anywhere else," she said. "I want my land back - not the money."
Bonani Ghosh, 35, had started a canteen for Nano plant workers. "My lifestyle as well as my family's got more comfortable after running this canteen," she said. "With Gujarat being selected for the production of the car, we have no more hope."
It's not yet clear what will happen to the abandoned plant site, but the West Bengal minister of industry, Nirupam Sen, has said that by law the land, which he insists was acquired legally, cannot be returned to farmers.
The Tata dispute was not the first time that West Bengal leaders have faced allegations of using strong-arm tactics to wrench land from poor farmers.
Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International say that at least 30 people were killed, hundreds injured and thousands displaced in Nandigram, West Bengal, after villagers protested last year, eventually forcing the authorities to scrap plans for a shipyard and a petrochemical plant spread over more than 8,900 hectares of farmland.

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A major crisis for the Bolivian president (IHT)

Bolivian farmers who support President Evo Morales fought Saturday against those who called for more autonomy from his government. (Bruno Domingos/Reuters)

LA PAZ: President Evo Morales is facing the most acute crisis of his presidency as deaths from violence in rebellious northern Bolivia increased to almost 30 over the weekend. Supporters of Morales said that the death toll could rise with dozens of people caught up in the violence and still unaccounted for.
Relative calm returned to the northern department of Pando on Sunday after Morales declared martial law there and troops dispatched from La Paz seized the airport and other facilities in Cobija, the departmental capital. But the threat of unrest persists in other parts of Bolivia, and political leaders in the tropical lowlands bordering on Brazil said they would resume protests if killings in Pando continued.
Morales said that the violence was a massacre carried out partly by "Peruvian and Brazilian mercenaries" hired by the governor of Pando, Leopoldo Fernández, who went into hiding to avoid arrest. In comments to local radio, Fernández denied that accusation, asserting that the deaths resulted from clashes between anti-government protesters and the president's supporters.
On Sunday, Juan Ramón Quintana, a top aide to Morales, told a local radio station that Fernández had been arrested, The Associated Press reported.
The violence points to renewed tension over Morales's attempts to redistribute petroleum royalties and to overhaul the constitution to speed land reform and create a separate legal system for Bolivia's indigenous majority. Most of Bolivia's natural gas and food is produced in the eastern lowlands, and those departmental governments have chafed at the president's proposals.


The polarization of the country intensified in August after Morales won 67 percent approval in a nationwide referendum over his policies, reflecting intense support for him in the rural highlands and in large cities like La Paz and Cochabamba. But governors in the eastern departments who urge greater political and economic autonomy from Morales's government were reaffirmed in their posts with similar margins.
"You have a conflict between a constitutional national power and a de facto regional power that can only be resolved by constitutional force," said Heinz Dieterich, a political analyst base din Mexico who writes widely on leftist movements in Latin America. "If Evo does not use the judiciary and the military, there is no way he can govern."


http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/09/15/america/bolivia.php











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From Palin, lessons on the role of the frontier in the American psyche (IHT)

NEWS ANALYSIS
By Katherine Roberts
Sunday, September 14, 2008
As Americans get to know Sarah Palin, they're taking a crash course on life in the Last Frontier. There is her sport of moose hunting, for example.
Shooting the prey turns out to be the easy part. The hard part is figuring out where to do the deed, according to the Alaska Division of Wildlife Conservation: "When choosing an area to hunt and a means of transportation, remember that you will have about 400 to 700 pounds of meat and up to 65 pounds of antlers to transport from the kill-site to home. That's why many seasoned Alaskan moose hunters say, 'Never kill a moose more than a mile from a vehicle of some sort.' "
No wonder, then, that Palin has been photographed driving a tank-like ATV As for the field-dressing, it's no joke to brave the blowflies while carving up a half-ton animal.
A few weeks ago a national conversation about such arcana would have seemed unlikely. But that was before the emergence of a candidate who has divided the country in unexpected ways not simply because of her record and her views, but also because Governor Palin comes from a place in the West that embodies deep-seated ideas and myths and contradictions about the role of the frontier in the American psyche. In some sense, Palin has become a metaphor for Alaska itself, and as grand a landscape as Alaska is, the current discussion is less about a geographical location than about a state of mind, or states of mind.
"The West was another name for opportunity," Frederick Jackson Turner wrote in 1893, in his famous essay that declared an end to the frontier, which in his definition meant the end of free land. More than a century later, the dreams and myths about the West persist. So do fantasies and outright misperceptions. Some originated in the East, with its vision of the frontier as being at once a majestic playground and a site of commercial depredation, of strip mines and strip malls. ("The East," Turner wrote, "has always feared the result of an unregulated advance of the frontier, and has tried to check and guide it.")
Other simplifications flourish in the West, with its self-regarding belief in an untamed wilderness brought to heel by fiercely independent souls.
The truth has always been more ambiguous, not least because of the region's tangled relationship with the federal government, which had cleared the land of Indians and offered the handout of the Homestead Act in 1862, itself adopted after some 70 years of debate about the rightful disposition of public lands.
In the 20th century, accounts of the West often centered on this paradox. The inhabitants boasted of their autonomy, even as the government did the dirty work, took the risks and offered sweet deals to settlers, so they could expand the borders of the United States. Without this help, as many writers have noted, the waves of Western pioneers wouldn't have had the luxury of hating Washington bureaucrats.
This attitude, of wanting it both ways, was neatly summed up a half-century ago by the historian Bernard DeVoto as: "Get out and give us more money." The novelist Wallace Stegner was just as unsparing when he observed, in 1986: "Westerners who would like to return to the old days of free grab, people of the kind described as having made America great by their initiative and energy in committing mass trespass on the minerals, grass, timber and water of the Public Domain, complain that no Western state is master in its own house."
Competing ideas about the West have dominated our politics for many decades now. No candidate was so synonymous with the regional ideal as Barry Goldwater of Arizona, who spoke Navajo and posed, like Governor Palin, in rugged outdoor outfits, sometimes with a rifle. "We didn't know the federal government," he said of his forebears who came to Arizona in 1860. "Everything that was done, we did it ourselves."
But, as Rick Perlstein pointed out in "Before the Storm," his history of Goldwater's 1964 presidential campaign, the land Goldwater's grandfather traveled "to follow a gold strike," in fact "developed as a virtual ward of the federal government," and the money for the first Goldwater general store in 1872 "came largely from contracts for provisioning army camps and delivering mail." Barry Goldwater, who was born in 1909, grew up with "a nurse, chauffeur and a live-in maid," Perlstein added.
As a politician, Goldwater excelled at playing both sides of the game. He railed against federal intrusion in the West, but was first in line to demand the billions of dollars that came to his state from Washington in the form of water projects, to cite one gargantuan example.
Today, the West is not the federal economic colony it once was. Nor is it the uncrowded rural paradise of lore. In fact, it has long been the most urbanized part of the country. This transformation has enticed a new brand of fortune-seeker, from the telecommuting migrants in mountain enclaves to the influx of people into metropolitan "boomburgs" where they are employed in the same jobs as people in the rest of the country.
It has been fully 15 years since the last Sagebrush Rebellion, the movement of boisterous anti-government types who aimed to "take back" their land from Washington, by force if necessary. It doesn't hurt that all those energy companies now drilling on federal lands pay high wages and provide many jobs.
The region's politics, never as uniform as portrayed, is more diverse today than it has been in years. There are now Democratic governors in Colorado, Montana, Wyoming, New Mexico, Colorado and Arizona, not one of whom was elected by praising the federal government or calling for a Buffalo Commons. Barack Obama is mounting strong campaigns in several of these states where Democratic presidential candidates have often struggled mightily for 30 years.
It is, to some extent, the collapsing of the old distinctions, and with it the continuing convergence of East and West, that explains the sudden fascination with Alaska now that Palin has become a national figure. The state, for all its suburban big-box resemblance to the rest of the West, remains in some ways the last true frontier — at least in the sense that it remains distant and exotic to most Americans, with its mammoth size, its severe climate, its many unpopulated miles.
Its contradictions, however, are the same ones noted by DeVoto and Stegner, only starker and more extreme. While half the land in the Western states in the lower 48 is owned by the federal government, in Alaska, it's closer to 70 percent, and only 1 percent of the state is privately owned.
Alaska's dependence on and disdain for government date back to its territory days. John McPhee captured the paradox in his book "Coming Into the Country," published in 1976: "When one adds in the existing parks, government forests and wildlife refuges and a vast federal petroleum reserve in the north, not much remains, so it is one of the ironies of Alaska that in the midst of this tremendous wilderness people consider themselves fortunate to have (anywhere at all) a 50-by-100 -foot lot they can call their own."
The most cantankerous assessment, perhaps, came from the nature writer Edward Abbey. "Alaska is not, as the state license place asserts, 'the Last Frontier,' " Abbey wrote in the 1980s. "Alaska is the final big bite on the American table, where there is never enough to go around. ... Alaska, like the rest of our public domain, has been strapped down and laid open to the lust and greed of the international corporations. ... Anchorage, Fairbanks and outposts like Barter Island, with their glass-and-aluminum office buildings, their airlift prefab fiberboard hovels for the natives and the workers, their compounds of elaborate and destructive machinery, exhibit merely the latest development in the planetary expansion of space-age sleaze not a frontier, but a high-technology slum. For Americans, Alaska is the last pork chop."
Palin's critics have tried to tie her to all the supposed evils Abbey detailed and some new ones, too relationships that any governor of Alaska might expect to be questioned about. If Palin stood up to the oil companies, was it so she would raise taxes for the state treasury? What about her on-and-off stand on that symbol of federal pork, the Bridge to Nowhere? While she may attack earmarks, as she did in her interview with ABC News, what funds has she sent back to Washington, given that Alaskans get $231 per person in earmarks, compared with $22 per person in Obama's Illinois?
The governor's supporters have painted her detractors as out-of-touch elitists, blind to their own insularity and entitlements and self-regard. Behind this view lurks a feeling of injustice rooted in another difference between East and West, the feeling that access to a particular kind of prestige and power is still off-limits to much of the country, to graduates of the University of Idaho, like Palin, rather than to those who went to Columbia and Harvard, where Obama got his degrees.
This in turn points to a very different though related continental rift, one whose origins are not so much regional as socioeconomic, and rooted less in competing myths about place than about class.
Turner saw all that too in 1893. "Free lands and the consciousness of working out their social destiny did more than turn the Westerner to material interests and devote him to a restless existence," he wrote. "They promoted equality among the Western settlers, and reacted as a check on the aristocratic influences of the East." Economic equality followed, and "this involved political equality."
"Not without a struggle would the Western man abandon this ideal," he concluded, "and it goes far to explain the unrest in the remote West today."
And it may also explain the uneasiness so many Easterners now feel as they are confronted, once again, with their own assumptions about the American frontier.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/09/14/america/14roberts.php



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Loggers still advance on Amazon Indians (IHT)

BRASILIA: Isolated native Indians in the Amazon forest of Brazil and Peru remain threatened by advancing loggers despite growing international attention to their plight, a senior Brazilian official said on Thursday.
"Pressure from Peruvian loggers continues, it's a concern," Marcio Meira, head of the government's Indian affairs agency, Funai, told the foreign press association in Brasilia.
Brazil's Acre state along the border with Peru is one of the world's last refuges for such groups, but increasing activity by wildcat miners and loggers puts them at risk.
Dramatic pictures of pigment-covered Indians from the region threatening the photographer's aircraft with bows and arrows were carried in May by media worldwide.
The Peruvian ambassador to Brazil subsequently told Meira his government was concerned about the issue and preparing measures, without detailing what these were.
Brazil has 26 confirmed native Indian tribes that live with little or no contact with the outside world. There are unconfirmed reports of an additional 35 such groups.
Many of them live in the forest like their forefathers did centuries ago, hunting and gathering.
More than three months after the photographs sparked an international media frenzy, Funai officials continue to witness logging activity in the region. "There is evidence. We see timber floating down the river which originates in Peru," said Meira.
Survival International, a group that campaigns for tribal peoples' rights, said last week that the Peruvian government had not lived up to its promise of publishing an investigation into accusations of illegal logging.
"The Peruvian government must not be allowed to bury this issue, or to turn their backs on the uncontacted tribes," said Survival's director, Stephen Corry.
The issue will be discussed at an international conference on native Indians in Georgetown, Guyana, later this month, Meira said.
Advancing loggers also threaten isolated tribes in Brazil's northern Mato Gross state and along the upper Xingu river in Para state, Meira said.
http://www.iht.com/articles/reuters/2008/09/11/america/OUKWD-UK-BRAZIL-INDIANS.php




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Dwindling forests pose a severe threat to Kenya (IHT)

NAROK, Kenya: Joseph Nkolia, a Maasai goatherd, pointed dismissively at two shallow pools, the only water in a parched stream west of the Kenyan town of Narok.
"It rained yesterday and look at it," he said. "Two years ago it used to flow strongly through here. Now I often have to get a lorry to bring water from Narok for us and our animals, and it costs a lot." His flock went by without bothering to drink the scant brown water.
The stream is a tributary of the Ewaso Ngiro, one of 12 rivers fed from the Mau Complex, the biggest Kenyan forest and a vital water collection basin in the west of the country.
Destruction of the woodland by rampant illegal settlement, logging and charcoal burning threatens severe damage to the Kenyan economy with an impact on energy, tourism, agriculture and water supplies for cities and industry.
A familiar Kenyan saga of corruption, illegal land grabs and the use of state resources to buy votes has destroyed a quarter of the 400,000-hectare, or 988,000-acre, forest in the past decade, with an impact that may be felt as far away as Egypt.

The Mau was broken into 22 blocks by human settlement over the past century but the real destruction began in 1997, when large plots were given away by the government of former President Daniel arap Moi to win votes in an election.
"My life will be completely ruined if I cannot get water for us and our livestock, our land will turn into a desert. We will all die," said another Maasai, Moses Mundati, standing on sunbaked ground that the Ewaso Ngiro once flowed across. As he spoke, people brought yellow containers to gather water from the narrowed river beside him.
But if the saga is familiar, the recent reaction is not.
Kenya's new coalition government set up a task force in July to reverse the destruction of the forest, which the United Nations Environment Program says could cost the tourism, tea and energy sectors alone at least $300 million.
"Such an extensive and ongoing destruction of a key natural asset for the country is nothing less than a national emergency," Prime Minister Raila Odinga said.
So drastic is the problem, the inauguration of the 60-megawatt Sondu Miriu hydroelectric project in western Kenya has been delayed because of inadequate water flow. The $260 million Japanese-financed project was designed to depend on water from the Mau and has only a small storage reservoir.
As high oil prices push Kenya to look for alternative energy, experts say water from the Mau, if it is preserved, could generate nearly 60 percent of current national capacity.
Lake Nakuru, center of a popular game park, and Lake Natron in Tanzania, breeding ground for the Rift Valley's famous flamingos, are both receding. "If we don't take action, in 10 years Lake Nakuru will be gone," said Francis Nkako, head of the local development authority.
The rivers fed by the forest's giant moisture reservoir and generation of rain also supply Lake Victoria, source of the Nile, and two other Kenyan lakes.
Revenue from tea, a leading export for Kenya, has declined while tourism, is also under threat, after already suffering a 23 percent drop because of a bloody post-election crisis earlier this year.
"This is destabilizing the environment to such an extent that it has a huge impact on economic development at a national level," said Christian Lambrechts, a forestry expert with the UN Environment Program. "It is basically a suicide process."
The government stance changed drastically this year when first the finance minister, John Michuki, and then Odinga, the prime minister, were flown over the forest. Officials say they were shocked by the huge scars in once densely wooded areas.
Officials say Odinga and President Mwai Kibaki - bitter rivals until their power-sharing deal ended the political crisis - are united on the issue. But saving the forest is likely to be painful: Lambrechts estimates there are 25,000 squatters in the forest.
"We are not going to go anywhere," said Nicodemus Yegon, one of thousands of people living in the southern Maasai Mau block who say they have title deeds to land in what officials say is protected forest. "When God descends, he will find us here."
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/09/03/business/forest.php

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