Word: backed
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Dates: during 2010-2019
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...American officials say Karzai knows he must deliver good government to Marjah - something he has failed to do in Kabul - and quickly, or the drug syndicates will be back. Much of the burden will fall to dozens of Afghan officials who arrived on the back of the military offensive to set up a new local administration - McChrystal's so-called government in a box. It has not gotten off to a promising start, though. Abdul Zahir Aryan, the man picked to be the district chief of the new Marjah administration, has a far-from-stellar record. He left for Germany...
...fighters didn't have to go very far to hide from McChrystal's troops. Abdul Rahman Jan, a tribal elder and former Helmand-province police chief, points out that "hardly a single gun was captured by the NATO forces." He believes that many of the Taliban fighters simply moved back from their quarters inside Marjah's mosques and madrasahs to stay with their families. Wherever they are, the insurgents will keep an eye on the poppy crop. Says Jan: "When the trees and fields get greener and bigger, the Taliban will show themselves again." The battle for Marjah...
...part of my moonlighting experiment, I pushed through an article with a few factual errors. A copy editor bounced it back with a terse note to check my sourcing. When I strayed too far from an assignment's parameters, I was asked for a rewrite. All told, 40% of the 20 or so articles I submitted required some additional work before they got posted. My deliberate haste and sloppiness with Demand stories have led copy editors to give me, on a five-point scale, a pretty crummy 3.5 for grammar and 3.7 for research. If my scores...
...first NCAA men's basketball tournament, held back in 1939, had only eight teams. What a boring bracket. America's obsession with college basketball has helped the tournament, more colloquially known as March Madness, grow into a 65-team sports celebration. Every year die-hard fans and clueless cubicle dwellers alike navigate the maze of March Madness seeding brackets trying to predict the winner in their office pools. Last March, President Obama's bracket received as much scrutiny as his economic policies. The tournament season has grown so mad, in fact, that a cottage industry has sprouted around...
...also love to talk back. This year, the Oscars' In Memoriam clip reel conspicuously ignored the passing of Farrah Fawcett; within moments, Farrah Fawcett was a top phrase on Twitter's real-time "trending topics" list. When an unidentified woman Kanye'd the Best Documentary Short director, barging onstage and taking the mike as he gave his acceptance speech, viewers were baffled - unless they were following Twitter, whose hive mind quickly deduced that she was the film's producer, kept from accepting the award after a falling...