Abandon All Hope: The Russian Region That’s Been Left to Die

Having tucked into his first bottle of vodka earlier than usual, Anatoly Zhbanov goes on an afternoon stroll to buy another one along the dirt road through Lopotova, a dying village on Russia’s western edge, in the region of Pskov. It is mid-April, and clumps of snow are still melting at the roadside where Zhbanov, a local artist, stops to peer inside a lopsided cabin, the home of a local bootlegger.

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Who Can’t Stop the Rain: Colombia’s Very, Very Wet 11 Months

In the novel One Hundred Years of Solitude, a five-year-long downpour imprisons people in their homes, washes away the banana plantation and reduces the town of Macondo to ruins. But the deluge dreamed up by Colombian novelist Gabriel Garca Mrquez in his magical-realist masterpiece pales compared to the real-life flooding of his homeland now.

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Death Comes for the Master Terrorist: Osama bin Laden (1957-2011)

Almost 10 years ago, Osama bin Laden ghosted away from the Afghan battlefields. Since then, it is as if the doomsday sheikh had slipped into a twilight zone where the only proof that he was alive was the chilling voice on a spool of tape, the occasional video image — and a string of terrorist outrages and wars lengthening around the globe that claim inspiration from him and his cause.

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Heavy Metal

Over the past six years, The Consumer Product Safety Commission has recalled more than 180 million pieces of metal jewelry that contained dangerous levels of lead, and in August 2009 it lowered the acceptable amount of lead in children’s jewelry to 300 parts per million . But the progress in regulating lead appears to have propelled manufacturers to use another toxic metal, cadmium

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