TEPATEPEC, Mexico (AP) — For more than 100 years, most of what gets flushed down Mexico City’s toilets has resurfaced two hours to the north in the rivers and reservoirs of the rural Mezquital Valley. A massive new water treatment plant is about to change this. But rather than welcoming …
BANGKOK (AP) — Trudging up a lush mountainside to a remote village, plunging through a swift-moving river in the footsteps of elephants and cruising Bangkok’s gleaming luxury malls — with each step, I walked into different worlds, each one beautiful, all in Thailand. Don’t forget glittering temples, bustling night markets …
BANGKOK (AP) — Thailand has undergone a dramatic transformation over King Bhumibol Adulyadej’s 70-year reign, largely propelled by one of the world’s fastest-growing economies and a willingness to open up to the outside world. Some of the changes since the king ascended the throne in 1946, when the kingdom …
LONOKE, Ark. (AP) — Heavy rain that brought record flooding to Louisiana recently has put a damper on the nation’s harvest of rice, a food staple that usually likes water as it grows but can’t be gathered by machine if fields are inundated. While rice is an aquatic plant, this …
BANGKOK (AP) — Thailand’s military government announced Monday that it intends to sue a former prime minister for billions of dollars in losses it alleges were incurred by her administration’s rice subsidy program. The Cabinet official in charge of the prime minister’s office, Panadda Diskul, said a specially appointed committee …
CONCORD, N.H. (AP) — At Lavoie’s Farm in New Hampshire, beans and corn haven’t broken through the ground yet and fields of strawberries are stunted. The drought that has taken hold in the Northeast is especially felt at John Lavoie’s farm in Hollis, presenting him with some tough choices. Irrigation …
ROCKY FORD, Colo. (AP) — From where Peggy Sheahan stands, deep in rural Colorado, the last eight years were abysmal. Otero County, where Sheahan lives, is steadily losing population. Middle-class jobs vanished years ago as pickling and packing plants closed. She’s had to cut back on her business repairing broken …
KAFR HAMOUDA, Egypt (AP) — “For a thousand years,” Abdullah Sheikh’s family has been working the land the same way — flooding fields in Egypt’s Nile Delta and planting seeds by hand. But now a small, relatively cheap plow has changed all that, allowing him to nearly double the yields …
BOUSRA, Cambodia (AP) — For generations, the indigenous Bunong were famous as the great elephant keepers and masters of the forests in eastern Cambodia. They called the fertile, rolling hills of their ancestral homeland “meh ne,” or mother — a source of food, livelihoods and self-identity. From its rich red …
HANOI, Vietnam (AP) — As China opened one of its six dams on the upper Mekong River last month to help parched Southeast Asian countries down river cope with a record drought, it was hailed as benevolent water diplomacy. But to critics of hydroelectric dams built on the Mekong over …
GERMANTOWN, N.Y. (AP) — Dennis Nesel converts barley to malt the way it was done hundreds of years ago, spreading the water-soaked grain on his malt house floor and turning it with a shovel as it germinates to release the sugar needed for fermentation. “This is old-school heritage malting,” says …
TRACH, Cambodia (AP) — It’s been a busy morning for Cletus, Meynard, Victoria and others of their furry band. Tiny noses and long whiskers twitching, they’ve scurried and sniffed their way across 775 square meters (8,300 square feet) of fields to eliminate a scourge that has killed thousands of Cambodians: …