Word: rural
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...claim to be basking in life apr?s coup. But his mere shadow-even an ostensibly retired one-is enough to cause jitters among Thailand's ruling junta. Thaksin presided over a deeply divided nation. Even as the citified middle class rallied for months to dislodge him from office, rural masses clung to a leader whose populist policies were seen as evidence of his devotion to the poor. If general elections were held today, Thaksin might very well win, courtesy of a silent majority rising up from their paddies and mountain villages. Just ask rice farmer Mukda Phardthaisong, who lives...
...Yubari is a very Japanese story: Since the postwar era, Tokyo has channeled massive subsidies to its underperforming hinterland. That formula secured the government reliable votes, but it also enabled rural people to enjoy higher income levels, sparing Japan from the social inequality that has beset such rapidly growing neighbors as China. But the policy was sustainable only as long as Tokyo had budget surpluses to burn. Today, Japan may be the world's second-richest nation, but its public debt that is more than 1.5 times the size of its GDP, the highest in the developed world...
...more atmospheric than graphic, more romantic than journalistic, Zoo examines the culture of zoophiles, people with an erotic attraction to animals. Seattle filmmaker Robinson Devor tells the true story of "Mr. Hands," a 45-year-old man who died shortly after being anonymously dropped at an emergency room in rural Washington in 2005. Police investigating the case followed clues to a nearby horse farm, where they found buckets of videos of the man and others having sex with Arabian stallions. Mr. Hands' cause of death was a perforated colon. Because bestiality wasn't illegal in Washington State at the time...
...always so: Indeed, the Sunni-Shi'ite hostility in Lebanon is a new phenomenon, now overshadowing the more traditional Christian-Muslim divide. When Lebanon gained independence from France in 1943, the Shi'ites were confined mainly to the impoverished rural south and east, politically and economically marginalized by the Christian and Sunni elite in the coastal cities and ruled over by a handful of feudal landlords...
...1970s, rural poverty and incessant cross-border hostilities between Israel and Palestinian militants operating from south Lebanon spurred tens of thousands of Shi'ites to migrate to the slums of southern Beirut, dubbed the "belt of misery," bringing them into contact with the city-dwelling Sunnis...