New Coal Isn't Old Coal

In the coal business, lawsuits are as common as roof falls and black lung disease. They’re part of doing business.

At first blush, the West Virginia coal industry took the lawsuit styled Bragg v. Robertson as just another nuisance, more trouble-making by misty-eyed tree huggers and coal field malcontents egged on by liberal agitators, the press, and a few lawyers. Named for a combative young woman from Pigeon Creek in Mingo County and a colonel of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the suit filed in July 1998 was notable mainly because it was so obviously quixotic. In effect, it was a bid to stop mountaintop removal, the most efficient and most profitable (not to mention the most destructive) coal mining technology ever seen in Appalachia.

An Amazon Preserve

What immediately strikes a newcomer upon entering the forest is how noisy it is, and how dark, beneath the canopy. Late last summer, I found myself standing in a preserve, a few hours drive from Manaus, Brazil in "continuous forest" which stretches for hundreds of miles to the Venezuela border. Leaves as big as your head rained down steadily, creating overlapping layers of brown, red, purple, and gray across the forest floor. A low roar from insects, including the leaf katydid, with its odd, bulbous mouth and spiky legs, built, pulselike, to periodic crescendos. Birds, including the scarlet macaw and yellow-ridged toucan, issued raspy calls. Marmosets and capuchin monkeys dropped detritus, cackling. The monkeys talked, bush dogs barked, wild pigs snuffled through the underbrush.

A Letter From Baku:
The Story Behind the Oil

Text and Photos by Stanley Greene

The first oil rush has attracted gangsters, spies and multinationals to frontier city Baku, Azerbaijan. At any hour in Baku you’re likely to run into Turkish "gangsters," Chechen revolutionaries, Russian spies and oil men of every stripe, looking to make money any way they can.

Azerbaijan is a former Soviet Republic located in a disagreeable spot just south of Russia and north of Iran. It is known for nothing except oil and the smell of it is everywhere.

The Life and Legacy of Paul de Kruif

It was the first day of the 2001 Key West Literary Seminar — an annual event that attracts hundreds of readers and writers to the southernmost town in the United States — and one of the panelists was observing that the whole enterprise of literary seminars seemed pretty weird. "What if someone looked down from another planet and saw what was going on here?" asked Timothy Ferris, a best-selling science writer brought to Key West to hold forth, with a dozen or so others, on "Science and Literature: Narratives of Discovery." "How would you explain it to him?"

Murdering Women For Entertainment

In the last decade alone, movie-makers have raped, murdered and mutilated more women than all the serial killers combined. Worse yet, they went about it and continue to do so with the same sadistic enthusiasm as the monsters they pretend to revile.

Tremors from the Enola Gay Controversy:
An Argument for the Postmodern Museum

WASHINGTON — Sitting in his book-lined office at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum, Michael Neufeld talks bitterly about his role as the much-maligned curator of the most infamous museum exhibition never mounted.

What Bodies?

Leon Daniel, as did others who reported from Vietnam during the 1960s, knew about war and death. So he was puzzled by the lack of corpses at the tip of the Neutral Zone between Saudi Arabia and Iraq on Feb. 25, 1991. Clearly there had been plenty of killing. The 1^st Infantry Division (Mechanized) had smashed through the defensive front-line of Saddam Hussein’s army the day before, Feb. 24, the opening of the Desert Storm ground war to retake Kuwait. Daniel, representing United Press International, was part of a press pool held back from witnessing the assault on 8,000 Iraqi defenders. "They wouldn’t let us see anything," said Daniel, who had seen about everything as a combat correspondent.

Haitians in New York

Brooklyn, NY — It was one of those New York City summer days when the heat bounced back and forth between buildings and the asphalt seemed to sweat. The temperature alone was cause for irritation.

The police department’s timing could not have been worse. Convinced that a murder suspect was hiding in an East Flatbush neighborhood, several patrolmen blocked off the busy intersection of Nostrand Avenue and Beverly Road and randomly stopped and checked cars.

On any other day, residents of this bustling Haitian immigrant enclave might have considered the searches just another inconvenience of urban life. But this was no ordinary day. It was June 8, 1999 and the mixed and controversial verdicts had just been announced in a federal court case involving several police officers accused of brutally beating and torturing a Haitian immigrant. One officer was convicted and three were acquitted.

Belly of the Beast

On a broad and shallow lake situated in the middle of a vast oil field north of the city of Surgut in northwestern Siberia, a Khanty (han-tee) fisherman poles his battered metal boat — an old Russian motorboat sans the motor — across placid, slate blue water. Save for a faint line along the horizon, it is difficult to differentiate between water and the mist laden sky above. The fisherman, a man in his late twenties named Vacia, is boating home to a small cabin on the lake’s far shore.

General on a Tightrope

With his country’s domestic and foreign policies largely buried in the wreckage of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, General Pervez Musharraf, the military ruler of Pakistan, faced a stark choice: to align his country solidly behind the United States’ war against terrorism — the first battleground of which was just across his border in Afghanistan — or to be ostracized as the leader of a pariah state. In 48 hours in October, the 58-year-old general made his choice. He abandoned his country’s sponsorship of the Taliban, Afghanistan’s ruling student militia which Pakistan largely had spawned. He confronted tens of thousands of angry demonstrators on his streets, whose loyalties were not so much with Pakistan, as with the Taliban extremists and Osama bin Laden, Washington’s most wanted man. And then, to the surprise of many and the incredulity of most, he purged his army of the three key generals who had brought him to power less than two years before, as the leader of a cabal of fellow generals.

The Dichotomies in Indian Women’s Lives

For every truth you find in India, the opposite is equally true. This well-worn cliché is doubly true when looking at the lives of Indian women. Indira Gandhi’s rule as Prime Minister of India, for example, was a triumph for women in leadership, yet the nation under her rule was populated by hundreds of millions of impoverished women, whose lives changed remarkably little during her term. In the 1990s, India had one of the highest number of international beauty contest winners and one of the lowest rates of female literacy in the world. Maternal mortality rates in some rural areas of India are among the worst in the world, yet India has the world’s largest number of professionally qualified women, with more trained female doctors, surgeons, scientists and professors than the United States.