Word: regionalization
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...heart of the PA is made that much more difficult by the Quartet's refusal to deal with Hamas. In a speech last week, President Bush announced a plan to continue Hamas's international isolation, while lavishing money and weapons of Fatah - a scheme that few observers in the region believe is likely to bring peace any closer...
...dozens of conference attendees - a group drawn primarily from the ranks of former military officers, Ba'athist officials, and the Sunni insurgency - gathered for a catered dinner beside the hotel's outdoor pool. Several, including a high-ranking former military officer now overseeing Ba'athist resistance activities in his region, talked openly, if carefully, about strategy, although some asked that their names be withheld. ("We are not afraid," said the former Iraqi army colonel, as waiters delivered the main course of steak and carrots, "but we do not want to give the [Shi'a] militias justification to kill us.") They...
...nuclear complex, which processed materials for the first Soviet atomic weapons. During the 1940s and '50s, Mayak pumped nuclear waste directly into the rivers that ran through villages in the area, exposing hundreds of thousands to dangerous levels of radiation. Though dumping has been since halted, many of the region's waterways remain at least faintly radioactive, and residents still suffer from elevated cancer rates...
...That sentiment seems to be shared by many of the region's nouveaux riches, who have flocked to build summer mansions along the region's lakes. Indeed, with basic infrastructure failing to even come close to keeping pace with development, the garbage produced by the holiday-makers may pose more of a threat to the environment than does the Mayak nuclear waste. Kabriov drives me to one of the illegal trash dumps that have grown up in the thick trees around Lake Uvil-dui, where a stream of waste runs from the water's edge deep into the forest...
...Russia's wild-west capitalism has not exactly encouraged conservation, or even planning for the future. Guiding a motorboat around Lake Uvil'dui, Kabriov points out a series of increasingly elaborate lake houses whose style mimics 19th century Russian castles. "That one belongs to the deputy governor of the region," he says. Pointing to the next one, he adds, "That one belongs to the head of the local duma [legislature]." What of the owner of that half-finished mansion? "He was shot," says Kabriov, his failure to elaborate a reminder that such a fate was not uncommon in the rough...