Rural Areas

The South African government recently announced the abolition of the hated pass laws, the network of statutes and regulations that controlled the lives of millions of black South Africans. Hundreds of thousands were arrested and jailed annually for pass law offenses. These laws broke up families (a man could not take his wife and children with him when he found work in the city) and made technical criminals of ordinary people looking for work.

WASHINGTON -- The United States Postal Service stayed the sword hanging over thousands of rural post offices, opting instead to cut opening hours in a bid to stem devastating financial losses. The USPS estimates that the plan will save $500 million a year once it is fully implemented in 2014. A previous proposal to close down more than 3,000 rural post offices completely would have saved $200 million a year. Under the proposal outlined Wednesday, 13,167 post offices will open for between two and six hours a day. A spokeswoman for the USPS said no post offices will be forced to close, although communities could choose closure and switch to home delivery.

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski wants to overhaul a much-criticized program that helps provide phone service to rural areas by focusing instead on supplying high-speed Internet. The decades-old Universal Service Fund, funded by phone carrier fees charged to long-distance customers, has spread phone service to residents in hard-to-reach areas that often are unprofitable for companies to serve, Genachowski said in a speech Monday to the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation.

The stops along bus route 86 read like a roll call of rural British charm: Ansty, Cuckfield, Partridge Green — sleepy villages spread out on a lazy green quilt of trapezoidal fields and huddles of trees. But there's nothing quaint about what Robert Ellis says he'll do if the bus line gets axed because of government cutbacks. "Starve," he declares with a poker face, before cracking a crooked grin. Ellis lives in Bolney, a one-horse town without the horse. Or a store.

The young man told the emergency room doctor at Sutter Coast Hospital that he had come to await the end of the world under the big trees. He realized he needed help. But there are no psychiatric beds here, and not a single psychiatrist practices in Del Norte County. A nurse got on the phone -- to seven facilities as far south as San Francisco, more than 300 miles away. None had room. Stabilized on medication, the young man walked out of the ER alone the next afternoon.

Ventura County and the California Conservation Corps have together landed a $23,124 state grant to promote recycling in the county's rural and unincorporated areas. Officials say they will use the money to educate residents about recycling. Paul Magie, conservation supervisor with the corps' Camarillo Service District, said the money will also help with collecting information on what people recycle and with building compost bins.

In the rural counties of California, the boom of the 1980s didn't happen. Mining and lumber, the industries that kept many of them going for a century, are in a slump that is now several decades old. Agriculture, the mainstay of others, has been shrinking. The most telling evidence came last month when a last-minute state bailout prevented Butte County from being forced to file for bankruptcy.

Rural areas have arrest rates for drug- and alcohol-related offenses as high as cities do, according to government researchers, who recommend that rural states pool their resources to deal with the problem. The General Accounting Office, in a report released Thursday by several rural-state senators, found also that most prison inmates in sparsely populated states have abused alcohol or drugs.

Most of China's 800 million peasants enjoyed a sharp increase in living standards during the past 12 months, while urban families barely kept pace with accelerating inflation, according to official statistics released Tuesday. Consumer prices in June stood 19% higher than they were in June of 1987, Zhang Zhongji, a spokesman for the State Statistical Bureau, said at a news conference. This marks by far the highest level of inflation for a 12-month period since the 1949 Communist revolution.

One by one, the businesses that once gave this town its vitality have vanished--the meat market, the farm implement dealer, a grocery store, two car dealerships. But the hardest blow came three years ago, when Lake Preston's little hospital lost a 30-year struggle to stay open and the town's only doctor moved clear across the state. Now a physician makes it through town only once a week, and a nurse practitioner runs the Lake Preston Clinic the rest of the time.

Richard Maher can't remember the last time he wrote a personal letter to anyone — and he works for the U.S. Postal Service. That's how bad things have gotten for the government agency that, in the age of email, Facebook and Twitter, not to mention FedEx and United Parcel Service, announced last week that it lost $5.1 billion in the last year. And the losses would have been more than double that amount — a record $10.6 billion — if Congress hadn't allowed the postal service to engage in a little creative bookkeeping and shift an outstanding $5.5-billion payment for retiree healthcare into the current fiscal year.

Apple's iPad at $499, Amazon's Kindle Fire at $199 and the HP TouchPad at $99. How about a tablet computer for $35 with hope of an eventual $10 price tag? India on Wednesday unveiled the Aakash, which means "sky" in Hindi, and billed it as the world's least-expensive tablet. The plan is to distribute thousands of the computers in coming months to students at a government-subsidized rate of $35. It has taken several years to develop, faced a lot of skepticism and received help from taxpayers given the state's actual cost of around $50. But the Aakash offers the promise of computing to millions of people in rural India who seem to be living more in the 19th century than the 21st.

It's a stultifying afternoon outside the Delhi District Court as Arun Yadav slides a sheet of paper into his decades-old Remington and revs up his daily 30-word-a-minute tap dance. Nearby, hundreds of other workers clatter away on manual typewriters amid a sea of broken chairs and wobbly tables as the occasional wildlife thumps on the leaky tin roof above. "Sometimes the monkeys steal the affidavits," Yadav said. "That can be a real nuisance. " The factories that make the machines may be going silent, but India's typewriter culture remains defiantly alive, fighting on bravely against that omnipresent upstart, the computer.

The budget-cutting fervor in Washington is forcing lawmakers to reconsider not just the total amount they spend, but also where the dollars are going and why. The recipients with the most to lose are the ones in rural America, who are almost twice as reliant on federal largesse as city dwellers and suburbanites. A recent fight over subsidies for flights to small-town airports is a good example of the battles likely to come. It also illustrates the trade-offs that Congress will confront as it tries to close the yawning federal budget gap. Depending on how one looks at the data, rural America is receiving either too rich or too scanty a share of the federal fisc.

— Beneath a star-filled African sky, crowds of city dwellers and rural farmers gather before a giant inflatable screen. It's movie night in Rwanda and thousands have come to see films selected in this year's Rwanda Film Festival. Most of them have never seen a motion picture on a large screen before and for many this will be the first feature-length film they have ever seen — in any format. Seventeen years after the genocide that tore this country apart — killing more than 800,000 in just 100 days — there is a palpable sense of renewal in Rwanda.

Offering new meaning to the expression "tough town," German and Canadian neuroscientists have shown that living in a city -- or being raised in one -- is associated with differences in the way the brain handles stress. The discovery, reported Wednesday in the journal Nature, marks the first time researchers have used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to identify specific brain regions that are affected by urban life.  Hooking study subjects up to fMRI machines and stressing them by administering a timed math test (and then criticizing their performance)

Contradicting the rationale behind recent changes in speed limits that permit a 65 m.p.h. maximum on non-urban superhighways, two motor vehicle crash studies have found that isolated rural roadways have the most dismal injury and fatality rates. According to one research team, whose findings were reported last week, rural counties outstrip large, populous areas in terms of motor-vehicle death toll by factors of several hundred to one.

The war was only a distant murmur to Lorenza Granado until Sandinista soldiers landed at her ranch in Punta Gorda, declared it a combat zone and ordered her family to board a helicopter. Forced to leave behind livestock and personal belongings, she was resettled on a state-run cooperative farm. Her two grown sons were arrested as suspected contra rebels. Several weeks later and 45 miles away, contras burst into Carmen Luques Vasquez' dirt-floor shack in the sleepy town of Rio Rama.

It is the little-noticed force behind the revolutions in the Arab world, the new protests in China and the economic booms in India, Turkey and South America: The largest population shift in human history, currently at its peak, is probably the most significant, and misunderstood, global event of our time. In Asia, the Indian subcontinent, the Middle East, Africa and Latin America, hundreds of millions of people are rapidly moving from rural areas, where they practiced peasant agriculture, to cities — a shift that makes itself felt in the rough-and-tumble transitional neighborhoods where rural migrants first land, both in their own countries and in places like the United States, where they are make up the largest group of immigrants.

My ZIP code is a black hole for individual health insurance. That's what I recently discovered when I tried to find the coverage I want at an affordable price. What hubris I had. My story started in 2009, when my position as a journalism professor at a small college was eliminated, and I lost my health benefits along with the job. In the ensuing months, as the clock ticked on my COBRA extension , I began to focus on finding a new health plan. I thought it would be a matter of dealing with mild sticker shock and doing comparative shopping.