Word: mud
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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After three days of what it called fierce fighting, the army seized control of Shelwasti village, on a rocky, largely barren hilltop in the Sherwangai Valley. "We moved in as a battalion at night to take the terrorists by surprise," says Lieut. Colonel Inam Rasheed Tarar. Mud-walled homes divided by narrow alleyways served as the militants' hideouts. A wide-ranging reserve of weaponry, documents, laptop computers and plans for explosive devices put out on display by the army revealed an apparently sophisticated and well-resourced enemy that may have once sheltered leading members of al-Qaeda. (See pictures...
...with the Swat refugee crisis earlier this year, the demands of hospitality can be heavy. In a rural suburb of Dera Ismail Khan, Hayat Khan, 55, gives a tour of a cramped, mud-walled two-room home where he brought 10 members of his family to join the 12 who already live there. A deep hole in the ground serves as a makeshift toilet. Barefoot children run around, their hair streaked red and large brown spots on their faces - both signs of severe malnutrition...
...investment annually. "Governments are scrambling to fix some of the problems, but it will take time," says Akmal Siddiq, a natural-resources economist at the Asian Development Bank in Manila. Farmers like Namdeo Sidam, 48, know that all too well. He, his wife and three sons live in a mud-walled shack in the fly-infested village of Marathwakadi in Vidarbha, and aside from a free plow, the government's ample funds have yet to trickle his way. Sidam gets no subsidies for his seeds, no guaranteed rural work has been available in the area and no new water resources...
Albert Casis swerves his tricycle taxi to a stop just before the floodwater, lapping over a speed bump in the road. He knows the mud-colored water could be contaminated with a potentially deadly rat-borne disease that is still threatening communities in and around Manila a month after tropical storm Ketsana hit the Philippines' capital. "I saw the warnings on TV," says the lanky 19-year-old, watching pedestrians wade through the knee-high water covering part of a road in the capital's Pasig district, one of the worst flood-hit areas...
...Congress enacted the Combat Methamphetamine Epidemic Act four years ago, it created a lucrative trafficking niche for La Familia. Michoacán has long been a meth-producing region, much like the northern state of Durango is known for making most of Mexico's heroin (called "brown mud"). La Familia and other Mexican gangs manufacture meth at industrial superlabs that dwarf small-town U.S. shops like those depicted on the AMC cable drama Breaking Bad, churning out tons of the white, flaky crystal each day. And while U.S. law blocks the export of pseudoephedrine to Mexico, La Familia can easily...