Word: forest
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...surrounded them, scientists have come up with several theories. Anthropologist Henry McHenry, of the University of California, Davis, for example, champions the idea that climate variation was part of the picture after all. When Africa dried out, say McHenry and his colleague Peter Rodman, the change left patches of forest widely spaced between open savannah. The first hominids lived mostly in these forest refuges but couldn't find enough food in any one place. Learning to walk on two legs helped them travel long distances over ground to the next woodsy patch, and thus to more food...
...police, India's most wanted bandit Koose Muniswamy Veerappan is a cold-blooded thug. The career criminal is accused of committing at least 120 murders, slaughtering some 2,000 elephants for their tusks, and leading a violent gang that has smuggled rare sandalwood from forest reserves for 30 years. But to the desperately poor living in the fringes of southern India's forests, Veerappan is a near folk hero. In a region with few jobs, he employs them to fell and transport sandalwood trees, pays for people's weddings and, by avoiding capture for decades, has successfully thumbed his nose...
...swashbuckling Bollywood image doesn't hurt either: Veerappan favors camouflage gear, sports a long, twirled mustache and is rarely seen without his rifle. It was his audacious kidnapping of popular south Indian film star Raj Kumar last year that catapulted the 54-year-old forest bandit from local Robin Hood to the world stage. Veerappan's mysterious release of the celebrity after 108 days of headlines and hype?apparently with no demands met?only added to his aura and provided grist to rumors of secret government payoffs. In a gripping new book, Veerappan, The Untold Story (Penguin Books India...
...blood-splattered incident to the next. As a young boy in the 1950s, Veerappan quickly learned he could earn respect by carrying a gun?and using it. He started his illicit career by killing elephants, bribing forestry and police officials to get past checkpoints protecting the dwindling herds in forest reserves, and selling the ivory for lucrative sums to traders. Utilizing the same techniques and connections, he recruited villagers to illegally fell sandalwood trees, which he then smuggled to northern Indian factories that produce oil for perfumeries abroad. Veerappan has repeatedly reduced to abject helplessness the authorities of three different...
...carries around a bullet inscribed with the name of the police officer whom he holds responsible for the death of his brother and fellow gang member, Arjunan. In one of the book's more chilling anecdotes, he kills and then, drawing a sickle from his bag, graphically beheads a forest officer who had built a local school and clinic and tried to wean the community away from criminal activity. Veerappan blamed the official for the suicide of his sister who worked in the man's clinic...