Ahead of CITES, pressure to ban Thai ivory trade  You can buy it
freely in urban markets and rural stalls set up at elephant
shows in Thailand every day: ivory, carved into everything from
intricate statuettes of the pachyderm-headed Hindu deity Ganesh
that go for more than $1,000 a piece to tiny tusk pendants worth
less than $10.  But the thriving trade here, conservationists
say, is helping fuel the unprecedented slaughter of elephants
thousands of miles away in Africa, where the largest land
mammals on earth are facing their worst poaching epidemic in
decades. It's a crisis so grave experts now believe more are
being killed than are being born.  How to slow the slaughter and
curb the trade in "blood ivory" will be among the most critical
issues up for debate at the 177-nation Convention on
International Trade in Endangered Species, or CITES, that gets
under way Sunday in Bangkok. And the meeting's host, Thailand,
will be under particular pressure to take action.  That's
because this Southeast Asian country