Word: fighter
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...When it comes to protecting ourselves from terrorist attacks, we tend to romanticize about scrambling fighter pilots, rapidly deployed interceptive missiles, and secret agents pulling a Jack Bauer to save thousands of lives. As Professor Elaine Scarry has written, these notions go hand in hand with counterterrorism policies where major decisions are rushed (just 24 hours to save us, Jack!) and a handful of officials make them in secret, where torture is justified by the need for speed and preventive detention by simple expedience...
...what if all of this governmental hastiness doesn’t get us anywhere? After all, the only effective national defense that took place on 9/11 was bottom-up rather than top-down: the passengers who took back United Flight 93. The fighter jets could not scramble fast enough, and we may not have wanted them to: Who decides to shoot down a passenger plane, and what criteria does he or she use? We must stop assuming that we face a choice between heroic governmental protection from terrorism and no protection at all. At least with regard to airborne terror...
Each year, in its City to City program, the Festival highlights a foreign cinema; and when TIFF chose Tel Aviv as the 2009 city, controversy erupted. "Tel Aviv is the military center of Israel," said Canadian author Naomi Klein, "a place from which fighter jets departed on their missions to Gaza last December-January." Soon it was mandatory for politically active stars to take sides. Sacha Baron Cohen, Jerry Seinfeld, Jon Voight and Oprah Winfrey voiced their support for the program; Harry Belafonte, Julie Christie, Jane Fonda and Viggo Mortensen were all for a boycott. Politics aside (which it never...
...slide, the sport is trying to go back to the future. Saturday night's highly anticipated match-up between the undefeated Mayweather (39-0, 25 KO's), who is returning to boxing after a 21-month hiatus, and Juan Manuel Marquez (50-4-1, 37 KOs), the top fighter in Mexico, will be shown in 170 movie theaters around the country. It will be the first big fight shown in theaters since 1980, when Sugar Ray Leonard beat Roberto Duran. The move harks back to the sport's glory days, when thousands of fans filled theaters to watch Joe Louis...
...cutoff in new Western funds to the program has crippled whatever chances the amnesty project had of coaxing in Taliban fighters. The Kandahar office says it now operates with a budget of $700 a month and has only reeled in 537 disaffected Taliban in nearly two years. "We can only offer them $20 for their weapon. They can get far more than that in the bazaar," says Kandahar director Haji Agha Lalai. "We should be able to give them a job, rent money, but we can't." This paltry offering cannot compete with the wages and benefits that a Taliban...