Word: berlin
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...Berlin Wall fell, the Soviet Union collapsed. Communism was history. But not the N.P.A. Like Asia's other communist rebel groups-India's Naxalites and Nepal's Maoists-the Philippine rebels have survived because they are primarily fueled not by foreign ideology but by domestic realities: poverty, corruption, unemployment. Some 40% of Filipinos live on less than $2 a day, while a tenth of the 87 million population seeks work abroad. Corruption watchdog Transparency International ranks the Philippines near the bottom of its corruption index, alongside Nepal and Rwanda. The N.P.A. promotes communism as the only cure for the Philippines...
...contrast, Victor-a well-educated cadre from a "petit-bourgeois family" (his words)-gives an eloquent if specious defense of the N.P.A.'s core ideology. No communist state has ever collapsed, he argues, because none has ever existed. East Germany, Hungary, Czechoslovakia-none had "true" communist governments when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, while the Soviet Union and post-Mao China "were socialist in name but capitalist in practice." The same jungle that has shielded the N.P.A. from military defeat has also isolated its fighters from a modern world where their cherished ideology is deader than disco...
...politicians] cast themselves in these mantles of competing nationalisms, but the bottom line is they're a bunch of crooks," says the Western diplomat. Reinforcing that impression, Bangladesh has had the unhappy distinction over the past five years of being ranked worst or near worst on Berlin-based Transparency International's Corruption Perceptions Index. (As for the years the country was not the most corrupt, Bangladeshis joke that officials must have bribed their way out of the bottom spot.) Muzaffer Ahmad, chairman of Transparency International's Bangladesh chapter, says both main parties are guilty of sleaze: "Making money...
Allow me to take this opportunity to tell you that I have never been to Istanbul, Berlin or Copenhagen, all of which I hear are magnificent urban areas. Nation building? No way! If I am President, while I am in those cities, you have my word that I will not engage in metropolis building. What's more, I will not march into a single municipal edifice and do so much as change a lightbulb...
...Award?winning The Grisly Wife, was written from notes made while Hall walked his dogs at his beloved headland home on the far south coast of New South Wales. His most recent novel, The Last Love Story (2004), was another peripatetic affair, penciled between coffee shops in Melbourne and Berlin. "If you live long enough, and I seem to have lived an awful long time, you accumulate things," says the sociable Hall, 71, who also happens to be a skilled baroque recorder player, actor and director. "I'm one of those people who have to go out and do things...