Word: localism
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...Alice Waters was serving statement salads at her influential California restaurant Chez Panisse. The idea got bigger and bigger and won the hearts of Gen X chefs in the 1990s. What New York magazine critic Adam Platt called "haute barnyard" had come to define America. Words like seasonal, local and, best of all, green market were shibboleths for every self-respecting cook from potato peeler on up. It made for a lot of roasted heritage pork and hand-foraged hen of the woods mushrooms, but it's something of a stylistic dead end. (See pictures of urban farming around...
...invitation of the paramilitary Frontier Corps, the front-line force in the battle against the Pakistan Taliban, to help improve its poor counterinsurgency capability. In 2008, Washington dispatched 100 military personnel to train Pakistani officers, who would in turn pass on their skills to rank-and-file soldiers; but local sensitivities precluded the Americans from being given direct access to the troops. As U.S. special envoy Richard Holbrooke told reporters in Washington, "There is nothing secret about their presence there...
...Wednesday, a group of these trainers was traveling in a convoy with Pakistani security forces and local journalists to a school freshly renovated at U.S. expense. They had been invited to attend its opening ceremony, a symbolically significant event in a former Taliban stronghold where girls' schools were routinely bombed. As they rolled through Koto, a roadside bomb exploded near a girls' school along the way. (See pictures of a police academy in Pakistan...
...Three of the Americans were killed, two others injured. Also among the dead were two teenage schoolgirls and a Pakistani paramilitary. More than 100 people were injured, most of them schoolgirls, according to Médecins Sans Frontières doctors at a local hospital. Television images showed grim but now depressingly familiar scenes of the charred remains of nearby cars, broken masonry from the school building, scattered books and bags, and rescue workers scrambling through the debris in search of survivors...
...Taliban deny that Hakimullah was killed, they had initially issued similarly fierce denials when his predecessor, Baitullah Mehsud, was killed by a drone strike last August. There are strong signs that a change of leadership may be under way in the ranks of the Pakistani Taliban. According to local reports, Hakimullah was taken to Mamozai village in Orakzai tribal agency, where he had first emerged as a Taliban commander and where his second wife lives. A doctor was summoned from nearby Hangu to treat his injuries. But well-placed sources believe Hakimullah died from his injuries and was buried...