Word: foreign
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Michael (Quinton Aaron) appears to most of the students and faculty at Wingate Christian School. The abandoned son of a crack-addict mom (his father vanished and was murdered years later), he's the kind of kid for whom a written test looks like a scrawl in hieroglyphics, as foreign to him as a quick pass to the wideout might be to a more studious child. It asks him to strain muscles he has never been encouraged to use. His teachers dismiss him as stupid, illiterate, unteachable; his classmates shy away from him; and the ladies who lunch with Leigh...
...days of providing a blank check [to Afghan President Hamid Karzai] are over." Still, how he would do so, and what would happen if Karzai's government did not clean up its corrupt ways, was unclear. Officials say the most likely punishment would be a withdrawal of U.S. and foreign funding to those ministries that are clearly corrupt or that underperform. As for development, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, speaking on Monday in New York, said Washington's "goals in Afghanistan include providing the government with the support that it needs to take full responsibility for its own country. That...
...past eight years, foreign experts have been tasked with similar, expensive development objectives with little return. There needs to be a renewed commitment toward enabling Afghans to do the work themselves, without having to rely on foreign advisers. That will take more than 18 months and require substantial investment not just in facilities and pilot projects, but also in actual and widespread training and education. Special representative of the U.N. Secretary-General for Afghanistan Kai Eide emphasized in a frank talk with journalists on Tuesday that the foreign community should focus on a transition strategy, rather than an exit strategy...
...Afghanistan, the reality is that education and literacy levels are abysmally low. It matters little how many aid dollars are spent on school buildings when the teachers inside operate at a reading level only slightly higher than that of their students. A fraction of the money spent on expensive foreign development consultants or military assets could be invested in nationwide literacy programs with far greater returns. For those who complain that education programs take at least a generation to mature, imagine what Afghanistan would be like today if there had been widespread investment in literacy and education eight years...
Rafiullah Shavzkhil, an employee at the Ministry of Finance, worries that focusing on the number of foreign troops, rather than the quality of their Afghan experience and intelligence, is as much a mistake as not sending troops at all. Twice his uncle, a prominent member of his community, has been detained by U.S. forces (once at Guantánamo for five years) due to false information planted by rivals, says Shavzkhil. "The problem with foreign forces is in the system, not in the numbers. If the U.S. troops keep listening to the wrong guys, or if they don't check...