Word: neighborhooding
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...Every Afghan has a story about corruption. The electronics shop owner in my old neighborhood in the capital Kabul hasn't had electricity for the past year. Reason: he refuses to pay the $400 bribe to secure a connection to the electrical grid. That, of course, is a minor issue. Need, aggravated by limited supply, allows petty corruption to flourish in every corner of the world without necessarily feeding an insurgency. But what about the driver of an Afghan friend who was picked up one day by the police, beaten, stripped naked and left outside in the snow for several...
...young children. Last summer, as the final batch of 30,000 additional American troops requisitioned by General David Petraeus was arriving in Iraq, the bus driver and his family left their refuge in Syria to return home. It had been nearly two years since they fled their neighborhood, al-Dora, after al-Qaeda in Iraq terrorists killed the wife and son of Hammadi's brother. His friends and fellow refugees in Damascus warned him that Baghdad was still too dangerous, with dozens being killed daily in sectarian tit-for-tat attacks. But Hammadi, 46, was counting on the increased...
Going back to al-Dora was out of the question: it would be six months before al-Qaeda in Iraq would be driven from the neighborhood. But in nearby Saydiyah, Hammadi found a family heading in the opposite direction--to Syria--and offered to live in their house as an unpaid caretaker. He borrowed some money to buy a dilapidated minibus. Ferrying kids to and from school brought him a meager $10 a day, but it was better than living off handouts from cousins in Damascus. His wife Shada, 30, supplemented the family income by baking bread and selling...
...city looks different too. In our neighborhood, there are several new restaurants and kebab stands. Here and there, apartment buildings have received a fresh coat of paint. Even the concrete walls that crisscross much of Baghdad, erected by the U.S. military to protect neighborhoods from sectarian militias, have been prettified. The government has paid artists to paint huge, brightly colored murals on the walls, so a drive now takes you past bucolic scenes of farmers planting rice, fishermen in the marshes, peasants dancing in verdant valleys. The walls give Baghdad a somewhat disjointed feel, making it less a city than...
...006th) concert by the Rolling Stones? Why, it's Martin Scorsese, instructing a camera operator to catch the action on the street and above. Gloriously above. The shot zooms upward from Scorsese to catch the crowd, then higher and faster so we see the marquee, then the neighborhood; and faster still, in an astronaut's view of receding Earth, until we can see all of Manhattan island illuminated by a full moon that dissolves into the Stones' jolly red-tongue logo. In Shine a Light, the master of the impossible tracking shot has topped himself again...