Word: timbers
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...Burma's currency, wiping out the savings of millions, and introduced new bank notes that were divisible by the number 9 simply because he considered the digit auspicious. Things haven't gotten much better since then--even though Burma is blessed with lucrative natural resources like natural gas and timber. Obsessed with its own survival, the junta spends 40% of the nation's annual budget on the 450,000-strong army while 90% of the population lives near or below the poverty line. Inflation is more than 30%. A fuel hike last month led to a tripling of bus fares...
...economic front is no better. Roughly 90% of the population lives near or below the poverty line, even though Burma is blessed with lucrative resources like natural gas and timber. The country's generals are hardly known for their financial savvy: one former regime chief denominated bank notes by the number nine simply because he considered the digit auspicious. Obsessed with its survival, the junta has dramatically expanded the military; 40% of the nation's annual budget is believed to be spent on the 450,000-strong army. Inflation is running at more than 30%. Last month's fuel hike...
...Bush's veto threat, and accuse the President of abandoning Louisiana. It's true that the bill includes some projects to help restore Louisiana's vanishing coastal marshes and cypress swamps, which provide natural protection for New Orleans. (It's also true that Vitter had pushed to help timber firms to log those cypress swamps.) But as I explain in TIMR, the bill's main Louisiana project - a 72-mile levee for some bayou towns - is a giant step in the wrong direction, accelerating the wetlands losses that left New Orleans exposed to Katrina...
...reach that level, however, proponents of avoided deforestation must satisfy the skeptics who kept such projects off the Kyoto Protocol when the environmental treaty's carbon-trading program was set up in 2001. Negotiators at the time worried that the carbon released by cut or burned timber was too difficult to track accurately--just try counting the trees in the Amazon basin--so countries could have ended up receiving credit for preserving nonexistent forests. But since then, scientists have vastly improved their ability to monitor deforestation through satellite technology...
Franklin Roosevelt's unsuccessful opponent in 1944, Thomas Dewey, ran again in 1948, when he famously did not defeat Harry Truman. And then the parade of New York presidential candidates stopped. A number of ambitious New York politicians looked like presidential timber, but Governor Nelson Rockefeller, New York City Mayor John Lindsay and Representative Jack Kemp failed to win their parties' nominations; Governor Mario Cuomo never declared his candidacy. Colin Powell was a flash in the pan; Donald Trump was a flash in his own brainpan. No New Yorker has headed a presidential ticket in almost 60 years --the longest...