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As the American military winds down its efforts in Afghanistan, grand plans for nation building are giving way to limited, practical steps: building up the Afghan forces and denying the Taliban key terrain, especially the approaches to Kabul.

About an hour south of the capital Kabul, one Green Beret team returned to a village where American forces had pulled out.

Lt. Col. Brad Moses, who was in the Sayed Abad district four years ago, wandered around the government center and expressed disappointment at the scene.

Glass is shattered at some buildings. The roof of one has caved in. Across the yard are stacks of scorched and twisted cars. All this damage is the work of a truck bomb in 2011 that killed five Afghans and injured nearly 80 U.S. soldiers. After that, the American forces pulled out.

"This was the agriculture building over here, and the women's affairs and all the line ministers that were working out of here," Moses says. "It was nice ... the glass fronts, that was all civil affairs projects put in there, the flag pole, demonstrating their resolve."

The small team of Americans here now is riding around in all-terrain vehicles and large armored trucks, wearing body armor and carrying weapons. One of the Afghan government workers greets them.

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Only a few years ago, even large commercial vessels wouldn't take on the ice-bound Northwest Passage linking the Atlantic and Pacific via the Canadian north — but climate change has changed all that.

Now, a group of hearty adventurers hopes to be the first to row the 1,900-mile route this summer.

"Several people have kayaked it [a section at a time] over several years. But no one has ever done this under human power in a single season. Not even close," Kevin Vallely, who is heading up the rowing team, told The Globe and Mail on Wednesday.

Vallely has completed his last shakedown cruise and plans to set off at the beginning of July from Inuvik in northern Canada with three crew mates in a custom-built, 23-foot rowboat. They expect to take 75 days to reach their eastern destination, the town of Pond Inlet. Along the way they're bracing for encounters with dangerous ice, storms and polar bears, not to mention the psychological challenge of four men in a small boat in those difficult circumstances.

"We have guns" as a precaution against polar bears, Vallely tells The Globe and Mail. "But we'll have rubber bullets and bear bangers ... we don't want to kill a bear."

The newspaper says Vallely, "who has done numerous wilderness treks over the past 20 years, said if your physical conditioning is just right, body fitness peaks during a long journey and then slowly deteriorates."

" 'Obviously you have to train enough that you don't get injured [by the exertion of the expedition]. But you don't want to train too much, because if you go into it Tour de France fit, in a couple of weeks you would be fried,' he said. 'So you go into it fit, but not crazy fit, and you build up and you get really strong about half-way through. And then you slowly start to fall apart. By the end you want to be tired, happy to be done, but not completely baked.' "

The newborn boy whose rescue from a sewer pipe in eastern China drew attention around the world earlier this week has been released from a hospital and is now in the care of his mother's family, according to media reports from Beijing.

There's also word that the mother will not be facing any charges. According to The Associated Press:

"The mother had initially raised the alarm about the baby when he got stuck Saturday in a pipe just below a squat toilet in a public restroom of a residential building. But she had cleaned the room of signs of a fresh birth and did not initially come forward as the mother, officials have been quoted as saying.

"She admitted she was the mother two days later when confronted by police who had found baby toys and blood-stained tissues in her apartment, the reports said.

"Police later concluded that the incident was an accident and that the woman did not initially come forward because she was frightened, but that she later started telling the truth, the Jinhua Evening News and a Pujiang county propaganda official said."

On the Indonesian island of Sumatra, a backhoe stacks freshly cut trees to be made into pulp and paper. Asia Pulp and Paper, or APP, is Indonesia's largest papermaker, and the company and its suppliers operate vast plantations of acacia trees here that have transformed the local landscape.

APP has sold billions of dollars' worth of paper products to Staples, Disney and other big U.S. corporations. But environmental groups have accused APP of causing deforestation, destroying the habitat of Sumatran tigers and orangutans, and trampling on the rights of forest dwellers.

Asril Amran is the head of a nearby village. He says that the plantations have ruined the local environment.

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