Stopping the Pillage

In Peru, villagers mobilize against the looters who
ransack ancient sites

A lean man in his 50s with skin burnished from a lifetime working in sugar cane fields, Gregorio Becerra remembers the days when his father used to bring home ancient ceramic pots to their home in the village of Úcupe. Birds, faces, fruits, animals — the whole pantheon of ancient Peruvian pottery stood on their living room shelf, where his father would place the perfectly preserved vessels he and his buddies dug up.

"Everyone had a few pots in his house. They were nice decorations," said Becerra.

But sometime around 1990, all that changed.

The Curse of Cancer

Kevin Webster couldn’t go outside to play in the snow, his favorite thing to do. A fever and lung congestion kept the active two-year old inside.

America’s "Give While You Live" Philanthropist

Diane Granat

"I can testify that it is nearly always easier to make $1,000,000 honestly than it is to dispose of it wisely."

Julius Rosenwald, 1929

On The Americana Road Again

As a photographer and writer I have spent nearly 30 years crisscrossing the continental United States in search of unique and typical examples of roadside and Main Street architecture and design.

Disease: Shrimp Aquaculture’s Biggest Problem

A mass of gulls hung like kites in the clear air above a shrimp farm in Sonora, Mexico. The birds indicated of a situation familiar in every country where shrimp are grown. "Birds are the first sign of disease," said Jose Reyna, a technical consultant for Camaron Dorado, a shrimp hatchery in Santa Barbara, Sonora, on the Gulf of California.

Secret Land Swaps That Taxpayers Finance

Fred Ruskin wants thousand of acres of national forest land in Northern Arizona to build a shopping center, subdivisions and other developments that assure his family’s financial fortunes.

A Citizen On Paper Has No Weight

Last week, I registered to vote. Yaser Esam Hamdi made me do it.

Choosing Servility To Staff America's Trains

He was a black man in a white jacket and sable hat. He only recently had stepped out of the cotton fields, and now was stepping onto one of the locomotives that had symbolized freedom to slavehands like him. He lit the candles that illuminated the passenger carriage, stoked the pot-bellied Baker Heater, and made down the hinged berths that transformed a day coach into an overnight compartment. He was part chambermaid, part butler, shining shoes, nursing hangovers, tempering tempers and performing other tasks that won tips and made him indispensable to the wealthy white travelers who snapped their fingers in the air when they needed him. It was the only traveling he would ever do.

Gateways of India’s Globalization

Globalization is hardly a new force affecting India. To think so is to ignore a diverse and pluralistic long-standing civilization that was shaped by a long list of "invading" (globalizing) cultures that became what we now know as India. The previous globalizers of India include the Aryans, Hindus, Dravidians, Greeks, Buddhists, Turks, Afghans, Scythians, Muslims and most recently, the Europeans, Portuguese, French, Dutch and finally the English. One has to understand that as India has been globalized it has also been a globalizer too, with millennia of colonialism across Southeast Asia, with temples like Angkor Wat left behind as a reminders of India’s one time presence.