Word: barriers
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...longboarder's paradise. Tanned, blonde wahines - that's lady surfers, if you aren't up on the argot - navigate waist-high waves. The area is also a magnet for pro surfers, but they eschew the small stuff and charter boats out to the nearby southern fringes of the Great Barrier Reef, where perfect, empty barrels unload onto jagged coral. When it's flat, there's good fishing and diving...
When I soon discovered the local restaurants and tried using the taxis, the anxiety caused by my very-limited Chinese started to subside, and I learned that pointing or flashing numbers often got my message across the language barrier. But relief at my improvisational skills soon turned into bewilderment: Where was this culture shock for which I had braced? As I walked the streets unable to verbally communicate and trying to observe human behavior as much as possible, it dawned on me that this linguistic bubble shielded me from the types of personal encounters and social perceptions that can cause...
...hear many complaints about boredom from Tucson Sector agents. Lukeville is getting a double barrier, Dart explained, but "as fast as they put it up, on the southern side they take plasma torches and cut holes." There's a vehicle barrier south of the tiny town of Menninger's, but drug smugglers use hydraulic ramps to boost cars over for a quick dash into town. In the rolling pasturelands east of Nogales, the fence is a so-called Normandy barrier of crisscrossing railroad iron. Smugglers like to cut this fence with torches, then carefully put everything back in place...
...border and aggressively patrolling it can reduce illegal activity. The fence also carries a lesson about limits, for it is only as effective as the force that backs it up. Even the Great Wall of China was not impermeable. Osmosis explains why concentrations of water seek equilibrium across a barrier. Something similar applies to money. The difference in per capita income between the U.S. and Mexico is among the greatest cross-border contrasts in the world, according to David Kennedy, a noted historian at Stanford. As long as that remains true, the border fence will be under extreme pressure. People...
Poverty makes people desperate. We got a glimpse of that when we watched a family boost their 10-year-old boy over a 12-ft fence, where a slip could easily mean a broken leg, miles from the nearest doctor. Or when we stood at the rusty steel barrier between the U.S. town of Calexico and the Mexican city of Mexicali in California's Imperial Valley. Through a gap in this wall flows the New River, perhaps the most polluted waterway in North America--a foamy, green mix of industrial waste, farm runoff and untreated human sewage. This river...