Word: canals
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...leaders who espoused dreams of victory and grandeur. The tragic result has been decades of tyranny, conflict and stagnation for millions of Arabs rather than the blossoming of an Arab renaissance. Egypt's Gamal Abdul Nasser became Arab nationalism's first populist leader with his nationalization of the Suez Canal. But a decade later, he blundered the Arabs into the devastating 1967 war with Israel that spelled the beginning of the end for Arab nationalism...
...more senseless than paratroopers leading humvee convoys in Iraq. But as we look backward at our lost 3,000, it's worth hoping one more time that the ending stanza for the paratroopers today will be better than Owen's. He was killed in action trying to take a canal from German defenses, just one week before the Armistice ended the war for good. He never saw his verse published in a book. War can make poets and war can kill them...
...protest has been more effective than the Legrands had imagined. Sustained media coverage has lured interested visitors and sympathizers to the canal, turning up the heat on politicians. Conservative presidential hopeful Nicolas Sarkozy was the first to respond, issuing a vague campaign promise to virtually eradicate homelessness - a socially ambitious position for an otherwise militantly free-market candidate. Initially reticent to respond to what it snubbed as a grandstanding manipulation of unfortunates, France's conservative government returned from its Christmas break with promises to increase and improve shelter capacity for the homeless. Under personal orders of President Jacques Chirac...
...Supporters of the homeless - officially estimated to number 85,000 in a nation of 60 million, although some put the number closer to 150,000 - say that isn't enough, and vow to remain in their canal encampment until they have shaped public opinion in support of long-term remedial action. Temporary shelters and emergency aid, they argue, are but a temporary solution that will eventually leave the homeless back on the streets. Instead, experts say state funding would be better spent creating or requisitioning subsidized housing for the homeless, offering a base of stability from which they can reintegrate...
...Back along the canal Saint-Martin, hundreds of people continue bedding down on freezing concrete and paving stones, inside thin nylon tents propped up on cardboard or wooden pallets as insulation. Along a stretch of embankment an improvised sign has renamed "SDF Boulevard," G?rard backs into and zips up his tent to prepare for what he good-naturedly anticipates will be "another night, and more people wandering by." Further upstream, in a series of more permanent homeless camps by the canal, visitors are greeted with far less cheer - and told to go "back down there if you want a show...