Word: sand
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...from Tel Aviv. The red and white striped communications tower of an Israeli military post marks the northeast corner of the fence surrounding the Gaza Strip. Beyond, where 1.5 million Palestinians live in the dull concrete of densely-packed apartment blocks. The gray is punctuated with blazing strips of sand - these are the open spaces farmed by Israeli settlers who raise crops in greenhouses to counter the barrenness of the dunes...
...Perhaps Tanna's most fascinating dialogue between the old and the imported can be found an hour's bumpy drive south of Lenakel, past beaches covered in glittering black sand, to Green Point. About 3,000 villagers here are ardent members of the John Frum Movement, which follows the teaching of a European-looking spirit-man who they say appeared to senior men in the area just before World War II, urging them to reject missionary rule and return to kastom living. Green Point men, sitting under the fern-clad branches of an enormous banyan tree, say Frum's original...
...senior man Johnson Kuanu. Some new things, he told them, would be good, including parts of Christianity, and some bad. "He said we had to be careful." Along a winding track leading from the banyan, a wind-blown cliff looks down to where the forest surges to meet the sand. This is where John Frum is believed to have first appeared, and where the sacred stones he left behind are still watched over. When he disappeared at the end of 1942, he promised to come back one day. "People still hope that he is coming," says Kuanu...
Roberts' resume reads so perfectly that it is easy to find the little flakes of destiny littered through his storybook life. Born in Buffalo, N.Y., but raised in Long Beach, Ind., a small town sprung from the sand dunes on the southeastern edge of Lake Michigan, Roberts was in second grade when he won his first case. He had got in a fight with classmate Timmy, which climaxed with his hurling an orange at Timmy's head and splattering a classroom wall instead. Called to account in the principal's office, he argued that the classroom mess was "all Timmy...
...caught between a command that makes ludicrous demands (at one point, they are ordered not to return fire when shot at because al-Jazeera is taping) and an enemy that preys on their decency, hiding behind civilians. Even personal morality gets upended. The soldier who keeps calling Arabs "sand niggers," for instance, is black...