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...crucial opportunity to recruit disaffected Indian Muslims to the cause of violence. The increasing frequency of terrorist attacks on Indian targets in recent years has, however, repeatedly been traced to Pakistan. One assault, on India's Parliament in December 2001 by Pakistan-based militants, nearly triggered a full-scale war. This year, U.S. intelligence sources publicly revealed that the suicide bombing of the Indian embassy in Kabul in July had been conducted at the behest of Pakistan's military intelligence agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence...
...boom. "Deep down, there is this pervasive feeling of massive government failure," says Mujibur Rehman, a political scientist at the Centre for Dalit and Minorities Studies at the Jamia Millia Islamia university in New Delhi. The attacks on Mumbai have forced India to confront those issues on an unprecedented scale. This is the first attack that has made a significant impact on India's wealthy and middle classes, those who have so far been insulated from the worst of the violence that has pockmarked so much of India over the past 20 years. "We, meaning the middle classes, live...
Epidra, a private firm in Athens, Ga., is exploring larger-scale applications, such as pyrolysis systems that can produce both enough energy to power a tractor and a biochar tailored to improve particular soils. "If you're going to grow food, you have to do it responsibly," says Bob Hawkins, Eprida's project manager. "And one way of doing that is to use it to generate sustainable energy." A prototype can turn a ton of ground peanut shells into 600 lb. (270 kg) of biochar, with energy as the bonus...
...though, that the spreading of global financial pain is far from simple. The microfinance industry, for instance, may be resistant to some of the volatility now plaguing financial markets. That's because those who borrow in small amounts from micro lenders often work on projects unaffected by large-scale global banking travails. Recent studies have confirmed the robust reliability of borrowers at the bottom end of the global income scale. The world's poorest are affected, though, by commodity price volatility and fluctuating food and fuel costs. Mary Ellen Iskenderian, CEO of Women's World Banking, a global network...
...than the group might be comfortable counter-guaranteeing. Group lending, where large groups of borrowers are jointly responsible for making sure loans are repaid, is an excellent introduction to finance for micro-entrepreneurs, but the businesses tend to remain quite small, purely income-generating activities that rarely grow to scale. Like group lending, the individual lending methodology does not require the borrower to have collateral since the MFI's lending decision is based on the household's capacity to pay. Marketing is another relatively new area that has not traditionally been a focus of the microfinance industry. Yet as MFIs...