Deserts thwart communist ambitions
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Half a century after Mao Zedong's "Great Leap Forward" brought irrigation to the arid grasslands in this remote corner of northwest China, the government is giving up on its attempt to make a breadbasket out of what has increasingly become a stretch of scrub and sand dunes.
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LA PAZ, Bolivia  - Tourists and political pilgrims  can now follow "Che's trail" in Bolivia, which traces Ernesto  Guevara's fatal attempt to export the Cuban revolution to one  of Latin America's poorest countries.
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HUATUSCO, Mexico  - In 1904, the ice cream cone  made its debut, Russia and Japan were at war and Manuel Sedas  was born into a lifelong struggle to extricate himself and  fellow Mexican peasants from poverty.
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A desert in China&#39;s Inner Mongolia that has the highest sand dunes in the world holds a vast store of underground water which, if used wisely, could ease the chronic water shortage afflicting the north of the country, a study says.
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DUOLUN COUNTY, China  - Until giant sand dunes swallowed his home, Deng Baogui was a shepherd and wheat farmer in an Inner Mongolian village where his family had lived for three generations.
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redeploying troops away from Palestinian towns and villages in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and halting military operations. obstacles,&quot; Ammar Dweik, the head of the Palestinian central elections commission, told Reuters.
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MOKRA GORA, Serbia and Montenegro  - The Sargan  Eight train twists gently through the remote green mountain  ridges of deepest Serbia, triggering flashbacks from the fabled  days of Tito's partisan guerrillas.
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Ukraine's leap toward democracy has inspired opposition leaders in formerly Soviet Central Asia and alarmed its long-ruling autocrats, but analysts say the region isn't ready for a democratic revolution.
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KANDAHAR, Afghanistan -- As the US Black Hawk helicopter skimmed low over the desert, the signs of approaching spring were everywhere: melting frost in the hollows, the first shoots of green in the nearby fields, shrinking snowcaps on distant peaks.
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GORAZDEVAC, Serbia and Montenegro  - Milisav Dakic  said his wife had warned him not to let the children play  outside their Serb enclave in Kosovo. But the summer heat was  stifling, and the nearby stream was a popular place to cool  off.
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SILVERBELL, Ariz. -- Among the statuesque saguaro cactuses in the desert south of this old mining town lies the remnant of a crime scene that federal authorities say signals a troubling and escalated level of violence associated with the human smuggling trade.
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BAZARAK, Afghanistan  - Its high peaks and proudly  independent people protected Afghanistan's Panjsher Valley from  the Soviets and the Taliban, but this very isolation and pride  could see it left behind in the race for development.
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A plea to prevent a Russian teacher from being sentenced to detention in Siberian prison camps is coming from an unlikely source: former Soviet Union leader Mikhail Gorbachev.
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DASHTAK, Afghanistan -- The village of Dashtak sits on a bumpy, washed-out specter of a road, an hour's drive off the main highway between Kabul and Afghanistan's lawless southeast.
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Customs officers in this dusty Saharan town turned a blind eye as yet another creaking truck piled with grain, smuggled cigarettes and dozens of migrants heading for Europe rumbled off into the desert.
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Out in the deserts of Afghanistan's Helmand province, young British troops are getting their first taste of combat in austere conditions, with air support sometimes a long time coming and trucks that are not roadworthy.
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The rulings, the latest legal setbacks for the governmentâs effort to bring war crimes charges against detainees, could stall the militaryâs prosecutions at GuantÃ¡namo Bay.