HARBEL, Liberia — White latex oozed from the vein of the rubber tree, dripping into a small plastic bucket. Saa Morris, an illiterate 48 year old and father of nine, used his knife-edged pole to slice into the vein. Then the “tapper” moved on to another tree on one of the world’s largest rubber plantations, owned by American tire maker Firestone. By his own account, Morris taps no less than 750 trees in a day and sometimes as many as 903. That earns him his daily wage of $3.30. “We doing hard work in the bush here, but no good [...]
BANGKOK, Thailand — China’s warming relationship with the Southeast Asian military regime the West loves to hate is emerging as a vital element in solving one of Beijing’s biggest problems — energy security. The jungles of Burma now seem certain to provide a shortcut for oil from the Middle East and Africa to the Chinese border. With China scouring the world for oil and gas supplies to replace its own rapidly decreasing reserves, strategists have pondered the potential security problem posed for Beijing by the Malacca Strait, wedged between Indonesia and Malaysia and through which between 70 and 80 percent [...]
The U.S. military is working on an array of non-lethal weaponry for use in both Iraq and Afghanistan in hopes of curtailing civilian casualties, according to military officials. Some non-lethal devices for crowd control and thwarting suspected suicide bombers are already in use in Iraq, albeit in a limited capacity, though most have yet to make a debut on the battlefield or at checkpoints. That could soon change. Last month, the Pentagon unveiled what appears to be the flagship of its non-lethal deterrent arsenal, a system that uses focused “millimeter waves” of energy to create an intolerable heat sensation on [...]
