Word: ir
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...story begins with a right-wing Jewish settler organization called Elad, but also known as the Ir David Foundation, which for the past four years has exerted control over most of the holy city's excavations. Led by David Be'eri, an ex-Israeli commando who used to disguise himself as an Arab for undercover missions in the Palestinian territories, Elad now has the backing of the Israeli Prime Minister's office, the municipality, and the vaunted Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA), which monitors all archaeological work in the country and which Elad helps finance. Elad's own funding comes through...
...make it virtually impossible for the Palestinians to turn their section of the city into a future capital. According to Duke University's Meyers, Elad is "misusing archaeology as a tool of dispossession." Putting an ideologically motivated settler group in charge of excavations, says Daniel Seidemann, a lawyer from Ir-Amim, a Jerusalem-based civil rights organization, is like "outsourcing the fire department to a pyromaniac." (Elad founder Be'eri did not respond to repeated interview requests from TIME for this article...
Sarah Kreimer, associate director of Ir Amim, a left-wing Israeli pressure group, says that Plan No. 13157 will complete a chain of development projects designed to prevent any possibility that a Palestinian state gains a toehold in the southern part of East Jerusalem bordering Bethlehem. There are a lot of large projects that are now moving through the planning process, Kreimer tells TIME. "They create an urban wedge between Jerusalem and Bethlehem. It closes off the option of any kind of negotiations on the whole southern border...
...more charity. IR wants to compete. Hoping to grab more of the long-haul freight business lost to truckers in recent years, rail bosses plan to borrow at least $15 billion to build a dedicated fast-freight corridor between Mumbai, New Delhi and Kolkata (formerly Calcutta). They also have big plans for some of the 1 million acres (420,000 hectares) of land that IR owns along rail lines and around stations and shunt yards. Real estate developers are currently bidding to overhaul the first of 16 major stations. At New Delhi's central station, which is likely worth billions...
...Still, IR has miles to go before it can be called a first-class operation. Train travel in India remains infuriatingly slow. A 1,378-mile (2,217 km) trip from New Delhi to Goa just before Christmas, for instance, took me 35 hours, almost a day longer than a train trip over a similar distance in Europe would take. Because of a lack of equipment and tiny station platforms, freight is sometimes thrown from trains in heaps. The heavier loading, critics charge, has caused more breakdowns. (Kumar denies this.) Older carriages can be dirty, shabby and full of cockroaches...