Word: cooks
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When Captain Nicholas M. Cook arrived in the Dora neighborhood of southern Baghdad in May, the place was like a ghost town. Nearly 50% of the homes were abandoned and the residents that remained rarely ventured out. Only the crackle of gunfire pierced the streets. "Everyday it was like clockwork - 10 to 11:30 am gunfire would start. They would break for lunch and then start up again in the afternoon," says Cook, a West Point graduate from Lansing, Michigan who is on his second tour in Iraq...
...Cook's unit managed to turn the area around by patrolling 24-hours a day and putting up walls to choke off the flow of insurgents from the low-lying areas to the south. They went house to house, meeting every family they could find, asking about their problems, offering to help where they could and in the process building a network of reliable contacts and informants. They called these operations called 'close encounters...
Today the neighborhood's abandonment rate is closer to 5%; where there used to be just 11 shops, 160 shops are now open on the main street. There hasn't been a major incident against Cook and his men for almost three months. (He lost five men while routing out insurgents and turning the neighborhood around; about a third of his men have been awarded Purple Hearts). Between Cook's area and an adjoining one, the U.S. spent close to $3 million, jumpstarting the local economy by hiring and sourcing locally. Another $4.7 million is budgeted for future projects...
...shopping cart and, for dessert, threw in a pineapple from Hawaii (which was cheating, it turned out, at just 2,500 miles, but it looked so good and my sense of geography is so bad) and a young coconut from Thailand. When I got home and started to cook, I was thrilled to find that my olive oil was from Italy, my salt was from France and the smoked paprika I doused the fish in was from Spain. And since I felt like red wine, and America can barely make a white that won't overpower fish, I had that...
Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun aptly described this endless activity as "tinker[ing] with the machinery of death." He spoke as a veteran tinkerer, having helped cook up an abstruse set of requirements for calculating the aggravating and mitigating factors in a prisoner's life and crimes--a concept that continues to bog down juries and judges a generation later. Other veterans of the Supreme Court's long struggle with capital punishment have also soured on the experiment. Justice Lewis Powell told a biographer that the vote he most regretted was the one he cast in 1987 to save capital...