Word: ag
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Stepping through a low doorway into his small house, Fida Ag Mohammed sits at a table and pats a pile of books in front of him. Even in the dim light it's clear that these are no ordinary volumes. The books are covered with intricately hand-tooled sheep- or goatskin; inside, hundreds of pages of yellowed paper are filled with Arabic calligraphy - the painstaking penmanship of Mohammed's forebears centuries ago. "One of my ancestors from the 12th century began our family library," Mohammed says. "There are hundreds of collections like this...
...boys leading donkeys that haul spindly thorn branches home for firewood, might seem remote and protected. But when I arrived there in May, collectors had recently visited in search of manuscripts, according to locals. "Since April, people have descended on the village from Libya, Burkina Faso, Morocco," says Mohammed Ag Mahmoud, 83, the imam of the tiny community of mostly Tuareg tribesman...
Preserving the documents in normal times is not easy: a flood flattened one house in Ber last October, obliterating more than 700 manuscripts. Mahmoud says his family's collection of thousands of manuscripts include many with termite damage. One of his sons, Omar Ag Mohammed, shows me about 30 of the books, which are kept stashed in a rickety wooden closet in his small house. The most cherished volumes are not here, but buried in the desert. "We use ashes to protect them from the termites," he tells me. "Then we build a dome on top of them...
...Benz have all reported double-digit sales declines so far this year. On the plus side, the overall German share of the market is up slightly, but hanging on doesn't guarantee success. Both Porsche, which is in danger of being swallowed by BMW, and Mercedes-Benz parent Daimler AG have gone to the Middle East for more cash...
...leery of the bill, but was brought around by concessions from Energy & Commerce Committee chairman Henry Waxman. Those changes and other last-minute compromises made to appease Agriculture Committee chairman Collin Peterson are "going to go a long way toward getting a lot of those fence-sitters on the Ag committee to become yes votes," Doyle said. Many manufacturers and small businesses are afraid that increased energy prices might make them less competitive on the global market, and Doyle spent much of his day Wednesday and Thursday reassuring nervous members that he doesn't believe the bill will pass...