Word: regionals
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...Russian region of Dagestan this week, few were surprised when the sound of heavy artillery and helicopter gunships began to reverberate from the forests around the city of Gubden. The husband of one of the suicide bombers who blew herself up on the Moscow subway on March 29 had been hiding out in the area, and the security forces were bound to come looking for him and his cohorts. The hunt began on April 11, turning several square miles of forest into a war zone on Russia's southern flank. Now it seems clear that the more measured approach...
...Zhari is strategically crucial, the gateway to Kandahar city from the west, the staging area for most Taliban activity in the region. It is a largely rural district straddling the Afghan Ring Road and the Arghandab River. It includes the Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar's hometown of Sangsar. The Taliban aren't outside agitators here; they are neighbors - not exactly beloved neighbors, given their propensity for violence and peremptory taxation, but more trustworthy than a deeply corrupt Afghan government and much more familiar than the foreign troops. Senjaray is the largest population center, a town of somewhere from...
...high plains of Qinghai province, where a massive earthquake killed hundreds on Wednesday, there was a grim realization that if not for the changing of the season, the devastation could have been much worse. In recent weeks many of the migrant herders in the region moved from their winter grounds, where they live in mud-brick houses, to summer pastures, where they live in tents, making it more likely they would survive the 7.1-magnitude quake. "Most have moved out of winter herding areas, so they won't be greatly impacted," says Marc Foggin, chief representative of Plateau Perspectives...
That's the countryside. But even this remote western region hasn't avoided China's crush of urbanization, and Jiegu, the seat of Yushu County, was pummeled by the quake. As herders have moved off the land, towns like Jiegu have swollen, with workers living in quickly built apartment blocks on the outskirts. The urban area of Jiegu houses a population of about 100,000 and is expanding. More than 85% of the houses in Jiegu collapsed in the quake, according to the state-run Xinhua news service. The official death toll has reached 617, state media reported, with...
...enormous responsibility, essentially serving as Vatican Prime Minister, charged with making the wheels of the billion-strong church turn smoothly, while the Pope focuses on being shepherd to the flock and teacher in chief. Though well liked, the tall and bespectacled Salesian from Italy's northern Piedmont region has not been getting good reviews. "Bertone is a disaster," a Vatican official told me before the latest public brouhaha. "He doesn't have a sense of how things work outside of Italy...