Word: lande
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MICHAEL PHELPS: Awkward on land...
...minute laws before leaving the White House, but George W. Bush's final agenda is angering environmentalists. Critics say these "midnight regulations"--Bush is pushing through a record number of them--have consequences that will not be easily reversed. The new laws would allow: ? Federal agencies to develop land without scientific oversight ? Farms to dump waste into nearby waterways ? Weaker standards for safe drinking water ? Uranium mining near the Grand Canyon and oil drilling in Colorado, Utah and Wyoming ? Increased emissions for coal-fired stations ? Loaded, concealed firearms in national parks...
...That leaves the international community with two unappealing options. The short-term fix is to try to neutralize the pirates by pursuing them on land. Hence a U.S. draft proposal authorizing military action inside Somalia currently before the U.N. Security Council. But sending troops into Somalia is fraught with danger, as the American soldiers of Blackhawk Down, and now the Ethiopians, know to their cost. Present day U.S. operations against the Islamists - publicly confined to air strikes, but also including some clandestine fighting on the ground - have killed two significant leaders, including the bomb-maker in the 1998 al-Qaeda...
...make friends of two of the most dangerous groups in Somalia, who until now have been enemies. U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates underlined those concerns in Bahrain. "With the level of information we have at the moment, we're not in a position to do that kind of land-based operation," he said, adding any such intervention would need to "minimize collateral damage...
Somalia is a land that has descended so deeply into misery that "failed state" is now too generous a description for the country. Yet it was hard not to marvel at local politicians, appointed by outside forces, wielding almost no power at all but still able to find ways to make things worse. Case in point: on Sunday, President Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed announced that he had fired the Prime Minister, and 24 hours later, parliament rebuffed him. The standoff has further hardened the political paralysis that has denied any prospect of peace to the country's long-suffering people...