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...There is beauty in these visions as well. Ayers favors playing in a tunnel under a freeway, where he can hear "the pigeons clapping." As delivered by Foxx in mumbled tones, this is garbled poetry, halfway to making sense. Later, when you've almost forgotten that, Wright pulls the camera up to helicopter level, over the loops and cement curlicues of the freeway. Up from its core rise two pigeons, which indeed, seem to be clapping...
...whiz coolness of modern-day electronic devices - flat-screen high-def TVs, 2-lb. laptop computers, the iPhone - the national power grid we plug them into is almost as old and unchanged as Edison's lightbulb. We rely on the grid to juice everything from vacuum cleaners to dialysis machines, but it is a dinosaur, a leaky, money-wasting, carbon-dioxide-spewing system that remains shockingly vulnerable to accidents and terrorist attacks...
...retrospect, the apparent change of heart was almost a self-fulfilling prophecy: after all, it was Obama himself who last week ordered the release of four Bush Administration legal memos justifying interrogations that included waterboarding, sleep deprivation and other harsh methods. The documents - with their excruciating details largely intact, despite CIA Director Leon Panetta's call that more be blacked out - outraged partisans on both sides...
...Until recently, that deterrent simply didn't exist in Malacca. The main countries along the route - Malaysia, Indonesia and Singapore - were not working together. With their militaries distrustful of one another, the governments almost never shared information on pirate activities, allowing them to operate unchecked. But in 2004, the piracy problem became so severe that it was threatening local economies - especially Malaysia and Singapore, which rely heavily on trade for economic growth. Fears were also raised in regional capitals that outside powers - whose own trade was being affected in the seizures - would intervene in the strait if the local governments...
...today, it's the pirates who are on the run. While piracy in Africa has become a major international security concern, the problem in the strait has been almost completely eradicated. Only two attacks were attempted there in 2008, even as the global total reached a record high. In the first quarter of 2009, the bureau reported that the number of pirate attacks around the world nearly doubled, to 102 incidents, compared with the same period last year; only one of them occurred in the Strait of Malacca. (Read a brief history of pirates...