Word: bordered
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...accident of geography turns these ordinary lives into one of India's most surreal dramas. The border between India and Bangladesh, drawn in haste just before India's independence in 1947, snakes through Panidhar. It runs right in front of the modest, thatched-roof home of Fazlur Rehman, 50, the village's unofficial headman. His younger brother lives next door - in another country. "His child, my child are the same," Rehman says. But in Panidhar, the children violate international law every time they run around the small patch of mango and betel-nut trees. A few hundred meters away, Indian...
...Neither the children nor their parents can ignore the reality of the border - it's rushing up to meet them. Panidhar sits near Pillar No. 1, where the land border between the two countries begins. For the past 60 years, those markers were the only sign that there were two nations encompassed in this one village. But there is a new one nearby, made of steel, concrete and barbed wire. Like the U.S., Israel and other countries, India is constructing a massive frontier fence, hoping that it will act as a bulwark against what the government in New Delhi perceives...
...that created its new neighbor. But their numbers have swelled to at least 10 million and a backlash has started. The fence, now two-thirds complete, was begun in earnest three years ago as a way to stop illegal migration and terrorist groups operating in the border areas. The siege of Mumbai - the most dramatic of more than a dozen deadly attacks on Indian cities in the past year - has turned the fence into a political imperative; it is presented as, literally, a concrete solution to India's border problems...
...Major General Dipankar Banerjee, director of the Institute of Peace and Conflict Studies in New Delhi. "It's not a source of strength." From terrorism to rural development to its troubled relationships with its neighbors, almost every challenge that India faces is played out in some way along the border. But instead of resolving them, it only throws them into relief. "Fencing can't stop anything," says Adilur Khan, head of a Bangladeshi human-rights group called Odhikar. "It's kind of building the Berlin Wall again...
...strategic partner. Moscow has underlined that it owes Washington no favors, and a cooperative relationship will come at a price. Much of this, of course, involves muscle-flexing: days after Obama was elected, Russia announced that it would deploy medium-range Iskander nuclear missiles in Kaliningrad, near the border with Poland, in response to Washington's planned missile shield. Just this week, Moscow quietly withdrew that threat...