Word: northerner
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Henriette Zoughebi says there's all that in places Parisians and tourists rarely think of looking. First among them is the northern suburb of St.-Denis--known to much of France as the home of some of the most disaffected and explosive of the nation's unemployment-racked housing projects. Zoughebi, an elected official on the regional council, points out that St.-Denis also hosts the Basilica of St.-Denis--the burial place of French royalty since Clovis I--which French and foreign visitors flock to in spite of the area's less noble reputation...
...visiting St.-Denis's basilica and Versailles's château, tourists are also inspecting Paris' peripheries. Trips to the National Dance Center in northeastern Pantin, the MAC/Val museum of contemporary art in the southeastern suburb of Vitry-sur-Seine and the City of Science and Industry on Paris' northern border with Aubervilliers are on the rise. St.-Denis, meanwhile, boasts popular tours of the architecturally stunning sports stadium Stade de France, which was built to host the 1998 World Cup but has wound up becoming a magnet for the area since then...
...chupacabras was supposedly terrorizing a rural farming community outside the colonial city of Leon, a former government vampire hunter told the local press that the real blood-sucking culprit was a giant vampire bat with a 5-ft wingspan, which he claims to have once caught in the northern mountains of Nicaragua. Bat experts and other vampire hunters insist there's no way a vampire could grow that big, but zoologist Bill Schutt says the hunter could have caught the Vampyrum spectrum, a monstrous carnivorous bat found in Nicaragua. The Vampyrum spectrum is an extremely rare predator with fierce teeth...
Jihadi Breeding Grounds Younger generations have acquired traumas of their own. Nahr al-Bared was once the most pleasant Palestinian camp in Lebanon, located near the northern city of Tripoli where a cold mountain stream meets the sea, and surrounded by orange orchards and banana plantations. Now it is a miniature Stalingrad on the Mediterranean. An uprising in the summer of 2007 by an insurgent jihadist group, Fatah al-Islam, reduced Nahr al-Bared to rubble and made its 31,000 residents homeless. Though most Fatah al-Islam members were not Palestinians but foreign Arabs from places such as Iraq...
Housing world-class criminals for more than a few months can still test the limits of Colombia's prison system. Take the strange saga of Boss of Bosses Montoya, who headed the Northern Valley cartel. After he was arrested in 2007, Montoya presented such a security risk that prison officials decided to house him on a Navy ship off Colombia's Pacific Coast. But during his transfer there, clueless Colombian agents picked up the wrong prisoner, a paramilitary warlord known as Don Berna. After the confusion was cleared up, the two dons were eventually extradited...