Word: mansoor
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...power grid is far from perfect. On any given day, 500,000 Americans experience an outage, says Arshad Mansoor of the Electric Power Research Institute, which is funded by the utility industry. Why is this a good thing? Because it means the grid deals with breakdowns all the time, and the industry knows how to fix them. The grid has built-in redundancies and manual overrides that allow for restoration of supply. Mansoor is careful to point out that these are "not defenses against cyberattacks, but for dealing with the consequence of such attacks...
...larger point is that in most cases, damage done to the power supply can be undone. "In the banking system, if someone hacks the system and steals information about 500,000 credit cards, it's incredibly tough to undo that damage," says Mansoor. "But if a section of the power grid goes down, we start it up again...
Muneera Habib Mansoor was at a garden party in Kabul in 1997 when she stepped on a land mine. Her first leg was blown off, the second had to be amputated. Najmuddin Helal drove over a land mine in 1982 and lost both legs. Gulandam Karami, a widow with three children, stepped on one last year as she was taking her goats to pasture. She lost both legs at the hip, and is only just now learning to walk on prosthetics. She is progressing well, but worries that her new legs - shod in bright red Adidas - will not be able...
...been significant. The number of victims killed or maimed annually has fallen from 26,000 in 1996 to less than half that today. Afghanistan, which signed the treaty in 2002, has seen cases more than halved from 2000 in 2001 to 796 last year. Still, the stories of Helal, Mansoor and Karami reveal a reality that no treaty can erase. "Mines don't just cut off legs," says Mansoor, "they destroy the soul. If someone loses a limb, we can replace it. But we can't repair the soul...
...center's 250 employees make prosthetics, practice physiotherapy and teach new patients how to use their new arms and legs. "I know what they are going through," says 35-year-old Mansoor, who started work at the center soon after she received her prosthetic legs. Now she crafts braces for polio victims. "And they see me, working, so they know that they can go out and still do something with their lives...