Word: rainforests
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Horseback riding and the swampy tidal flats of Singapore aren't images that go hand in hand, but half a mile down a deserted road - in the middle of a tropical rainforest - lies a small patch of England's Berkshire, complete with paddocks, stables and riding trails crisscrossing the lush hills. This is the domain of the Bukit Timah Saddle Club, and it's where, on a weekend morning, the scions of Singapore's great and good trot by on their steeds...
...company's answer to the challenge of updating and translating "It's a Small World" appears to lie in improved special effects and cross-promotional branding. As the Hong Kong ride's water propulsion system nudged our craft past scenes familiar from my childhood - the Taj Mahal, the rainforest, the singing mermaids - it became clear that the basic concept and signature, blocky 1960s motifs of Disney artist Mary Blair had been retained. The Hong Kong sets look more vibrant thanks to lighting techniques, while a more sophisticated sound system belts out "it's a world of hopes...
Wisps of evaporating water rise from the dark green Amazon rainforest as an Ecuadorian military helicopter swerves along the San Miguel River. Each day, slim boats with outboard motors ferry dozens of people between the hamlets of Puerto Nuevo, Ecuador, and Teteye, Colombia, across the brown and winding border waterway. Most are doing business or visiting relatives. But this year boatmen are increasingly carrying Ecuadorian mourners to retrieve the bodies of loved ones. Most, they say, were killed by Colombian troops because they were suspected of aiding the Marxist guerrillas known as the Colombian Revolutionary Armed Forces, or FARC...
Border life inside the dark green Amazon rainforest is murky and dangerous enough without guerrilla politics mingled in. But along the San Miguel River, communities are feeling squeezed as never before by the FARC, which makes a habit of encamping inside Ecuador, and the Colombian military, which for the first time ever has the FARC on the run. Now, in its pursuit, the Colombians feel emboldened enough to ignore the frontier. Last month Colombian special forces made a raid into Ecuador and killed the FARC's No. 2 comandante, Raul Reyes...
...million each year to patrol the area. But for about 20 years FARC units like the 48th Front have regularly slipped across the porous border into Ecuador - there are only two points along the 250-mile (400 km) frontier where passports are even checked - under cover of the rainforest's lush vegetation to retreat, rest or replenish supplies. Half a million Colombians are estimated to have moved into Ecuador with them. (Ecuador has recognized about 60,000 as war refugees.) Muddy Ecuadorian border villages like Puerto Nuevo are growing and are now overwhelmingly Colombian, says Fabian Narvaez, head...