Word: area
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...young man named Suranto wakes early on a Sunday, wraps a red T shirt around his head and ambles off to the fields to work. Suranto isn't a local; he has come from northern Sumatra because there are jobs in Riau. The forests and peatlands of the area are being transformed into plantations, and workers are being paid to plant tens of thousands of young oil-palm trees in fields stripped bare of their native vegetation by burning. As Suranto stoops and digs one hole after another amid the blackened stumps of an old tropical forest, he looks like...
...Which is exactly what Riau province is, in a way. Roughly the size of Taiwan, the area has become the focus of a green-versus-green tussle pitting environmentalists trying to protect Indonesia's disappearing forests against a fast-growing alternative-energy business. Palm oil, a byproduct of the oil-palm tree such as those being planted in Riau, is used for cooking and as a food additive. Growing it has long been a big business in Southeast Asia. But it can also be used in the production of a relatively clean-burning alternative fuel: biodiesel. As oil prices have...
...involved in the advance, James Thompson, pointed out that Bush’s “ethical” approach (i.e. repeatedly vetoing bills that would loosen regulations on the research) is what set stem cell research back about four years. Bush is taking credit for funding a particular area of science when he was in fact one of the main opponents (fiscally and vocally) of what many scientists believe to be the most promising area of the research: human embryos...
...when two local youths were killed during a traffic accident with a police car. After two nights of considerable disorder that left around 80 police injured (versus 200 for the entire three weeks of rioting in 2005), a massive deployment of riot officers helped bring near order to the area Tuesday evening. Limited skirmishes were in stark contrast to the pitched battles, arson and even gunshots that rioters inflicted on police during the previous two evenings. Fear that unrest would spread to similarly disgruntled residents of blighted French projects - as it did in 2005 - waned, meanwhile, when youths...
...routine events in France's banlieues. University of Grenoble Sociology and security professor Sebastian Roché estimates around 100 cars are burned across France on an average night, and limited battles with police common. But what makes events in Villiers-le-Bel different - and potentially contagious to other blighted areas across France - is the passion they've generated. Roché says levels of frustration felt in banlieues usually produce an equally powerful reaction to provocation - in this case the death of innocents that mobilized scores of enraged youths into street assemblies. Added to that Roché adds, is an intensity...