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...There's no question about whom the villagers blame for their distress. At a refugee camp in a local outdoor market, where more than 2,000 people live in converted, tarp-covered stalls amid goats grazing contentedly on piles of garbage, graffiti makes their target clear: "Lapindo terrorist," one reads. The company provides food for everyone in the camp, along with services such as a medical clinic and a makeshift mosque. But the villagers are quick to recite a litany of complaints, from the quality of the rations to the health effects of the mud (though the government team says...
...Lapindo for $2 to a company based on the island of Jersey but owned by Bakrie's family conglomerate. When Indonesian financial regulators blocked that sale, Energi Mega tried to sell half the beleaguered Lapindo to the Freehold Group, registered in the British Virgin Islands. That deal also collapsed amid controversy. The attempted corporate reshuffling raised fears among many that Lapindo was preparing to declare bankruptcy, thus potentially allowing parent company Energi Mega Persada to evade any liability for Lusi. Lapindo says it is committed to compensating Lusi's victims...
...thanks to the historic concert by the New York Phil, coming amid a slow-motion diplomatic thaw already underway between Pyongyang and Washington, I would finally get to see a little of the place for myself. The North Koreans, to say the least, are control freaks, and hordes of minders immediately surrounded us on the tarmac as we waited for the orchestra leader, Lorin Maazel, and his musicians to follow us down and take a "class photo" in front of a beaming mosaic of the Great Leader. The deputy minister of culture, Song Sok Hwan, stepped forward to greet Maazel...
Pocketbook issues loom large in Spaniards' minds as they prepare to vote amid gathering signs of an economic downturn. Unemployment reached 8.6% in January, the first quarterly rise since 2003. And though most of Zapatero's term was marked by continued economic expansion - begun under his Popular Party predecessor, José María Aznar - up to one-quarter of GDP growth over the past seven years has been linked to housing starts. The resulting housing glut stemmed above all from overconfidence about tourism and speculation on second-home purchases. But José García-Montalvo, an economics professor...
Ballard liked to think of his books as radical, "a desperate attempt to prove ... that two and two made five in the moral arithmetic of the 1960s." Many critics preferred old-fashioned math, though, and by the time of Crash, his 1973 tale of erotic pleasures amid the carnage of car wrecks, even his own publisher's view was that "this author is beyond psychiatric help." As if to prove that a new moral compass was at work in inner space, Ballard's book attracted little controversy until 23 years later, when the shock-horror director David Cronenberg brought Crash...