Word: driver
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...year. Reason: he refuses to pay the $400 bribe to secure a connection to the electrical grid. That, of course, is a minor issue. Need, aggravated by limited supply, allows petty corruption to flourish in every corner of the world without necessarily feeding an insurgency. But what about the driver of an Afghan friend who was picked up one day by the police, beaten, stripped naked and left outside in the snow for several nights until his employer paid a bribe of $3,000 to release him? "We could have complained afterwards," says the employer. "But then we could have...
Andalus Abdel-Rahim Hammadi, a Baghdad school-bus driver, has this much in common with John McCain: both men gambled on the U.S. military's "surge" in Iraq long before it looked like a sure thing. If the Arizona Senator risked his presidential ambitions on it, the stakes for Hammadi were higher: his life and the lives of his wife and two young children. Last summer, as the final batch of 30,000 additional American troops requisitioned by General David Petraeus was arriving in Iraq, the bus driver and his family left their refuge in Syria to return home...
...Hammadis were settling into their new life when I left Baghdad last fall after spending the best part of five years covering Iraq. Unlike the bus driver, I was far from sanguine about the surge; I had seen too many military plans promise much and deliver little. But by the end of the year, Hammadi's optimism was looking prescient. Sunni insurgents I had known for years--men who had sworn blood oaths to fight the "occupier" until their dying breath--were joining forces with the Americans to fight al-Qaeda in Iraq. The vehemently anti-American Shi'ite cleric...
Scorsese is revered by many as the foremost American picturemaker of his generation. From 1973's Mean Streets through Taxi Driver, Raging Bull and Goodfellas up to his 2006 The Departed (for which he finally won a Best Director Oscar), he has blended elegance with agitation, depicted the anomie of the cunning, late--20th century brute in classical style. Though he's earned his renown with these movies, he's equally adept directing documentaries. Making films like Shine a Light is a vacation from his vocation--an escape from the straitjacket of narrative and from the rigidities...
...same "choice architecture," as the authors call it, could be used to bolster the nation's ranks of organ donors. In one survey, only 64% of people wishing to be organ donors had marked that choice on their driver's license. If, instead of making people choose to donate, states asked them to check a box if they chose not to, participation rates would skyrocket--from 42% to 82% in one experiment. Even just forcing people to make a decision one way or another (with no default) boosts participation to 79%. More lives saved, and more people following through...