Peasants

LIMA, Peru -- For Magna Morales and Bernadina Alva, peasant Andean women who could barely afford to feed their families, it was a troubling offer but one they found hard to refuse. Shortly before Christmas, government health workers promised gifts of food and clothing if they underwent a sterilization procedure called tubal ligation.The operation went well for Alva, 26, who received two dresses for her daughter and a T-shirt for her son. But Morales, 34, died of complications 10 days after the surgery, leaving three young children and a husband behind.

Poland's former Communist Party, which came out ahead in national elections last month, formed a coalition with the Polish Peasants' Party yesterday. The move will allow the former Communists to form a government but could force them to pay homage to nationalistic and anti-European groups. The coalition will give the former Communists, the Democratic Left Alliance, control over a solid majority in the Parliament. But it could also complicate governing because the peasants' party is more hostile to budget austerity and other reforms necessary for Poland to win membership in the European Union.

For us Italians, food is a serious affair. For us, gastronomy is more a way of life than a way of cooking; food, the eating and the talking of it, is part of the texture of everyday life.Since the remotest of times, Italy has suffered invasions, pillaging and the resulting famines, the harshest of times for the rich and the poor: Under those conditions, food, the idea of food, escalates to become the most important event of the day. By now, food -- the whole pleasurable concept of it -- is in our blood.

JINGBIAN, China - Consigned by geology to be among China's poorest farmers, the peasants in northern Shaanxi province, on the front porch of the Gobi Desert, hoped for a better life under the Communist Party, which made its base in this region during the revolution. The farmers' great chance finally came during the 1990s, when the state allowed them to take part in private oil drilling, an ambitious experiment in free enterprise in the undeveloped Chinese countryside. But when the experiment ended abruptly last year, it became a disaster for tens of thousands of farmers, a failure ordained this time by both geology and Communist rule.

SHANGSHAN, China - The oxygen tank at Wu Shengfu's side fills his scarred lungs with enough air to breathe but not enough to talk for long about why, at 48 years old, he will be dying soon. His friends do their best to help explain, even at the risk of being harassed by police, because many of them too will succumb to an early death. Slowly, the men of this village in central China are dying, and the local authorities here, having profited from their labors, would prefer that they die in silence.

KRASNY MAI, Russia - The little wooden houses sit dark and modest under a gray summer sky, their shelves heavy with the cut-glass champagne flutes, vases, bowls and tumblers that hold the inhabitants prisoner. Nearly everyone here works for the Krasny Mai - Red May - glass factory. They work, but most haven't been paid for five years. Instead of money, the factory doles out cut glass every month and a loaf of bread every day. Too poor to leave town, the people stay and work and dream of freedom, held in bondage by their cut glass.

Bravo, bread soups. Not one bread crumb goes to waste.For centuries, Italians have turned leftover loaves into scrumptious recycled repasts. Stale bread plumps as it absorbs the luscious flavors from the warm broth. It softens into a glorious texture, filled with the scent of fresh vegetables, legumes and herbs.Not so long ago, it was difficult to find rustic, artisan-style breads, the key ingredient in these soups. But now coarse-textured, hard-crusted beauties are sold in almost every supermarket.

It was said upon the creation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in April of 1949 that NATO's purpose was three-fold: to keep the Russians out, the Americans in and the Germans down. In the 1960s, French President Charles de Gaulle removed his forces from NATO joint command, feeling slighted by the U.S. and Great Britain. He built his own Force de Frappe — a three-pronged strike force designed to rain nuclear destruction on the Soviets in a quick response to any attack on La Belle France.

LAGUNA MIRAMAR, Mexico -- From the air, the forest looks like a green blanket tossed over a campfire. It is tattered, scorched and smoldering -- slowly being burned to bits.The Selva Lacandona is Mexico's largest rain forest, but at least 40 percent of its original 4 million acres has been destroyed. Although commercial logging is the cause of destruction in many forests, it is not the main issue here. The remoteness and density of the Lacandona have protected much of it from the ravages of clear-cutting.

BARINAS, Venezuela - Richard Padron was born under democracy and into modern-day vassalage. "My dad worked on a cattle ranch," says the sinewy Padron, 25, wearing mud-coated, black rubber boots and with a butcher knife in a leather sheath at his side. "The owner let him use five acres to grow corn and a few other crops to eat. The wages were enough for food, but not much else. I left school and began working with him when I was 14." Padron still lives in poverty. He and his wife and two children survive largely off corn, and they sleep in hammocks with several other families in a dilapidated concrete-block farmhouse.