Word: shantytowns
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Around the runways of Beirut's international airport, the low, sandbagged bunkers form ragged lines, cluttering a 2½-sq.-mi. stretch of barren, unprotected ground. On two sides the old airport fence topped with barbed wire divides the encampment from the predominantly Shi'ite shantytown of Hay es Sullum, where bombed-out buildings sometimes shelter Muslim fighters armed with mortars and rocket-propelled grenades. In the surrounding hills that rise 3,000 ft. from the plain, Druze and Christian militias clash, igniting the night skies with tracer rounds and exploding shells...
Much of the dialogue confuses grandiosity with meaning, and often degenerates into pretentiousness and pomposity. "I SHALL MOVE A MOUNTAIN!" Fitzcarraldo shouts exultantly, as the subtitles drain their stock of capital letters. "I want my opera house!" he screams, staggering around the church beltry that overlooks the squalid shantytown where he proposes to build it. Long before the film is over, this sort of rhetoric sounds as tinny, hollow, and mechanical as the old Caruso 78s that constantly blare out of Fitzcarraldo's favorite icon, his gramophone...
What gave the clumsy power grab more importance, however, was that the airmen were almost immediately joined by students from the University of Nairobi and by hordes of ragged shantytown dwellers, who went on a rampage of looting and destruction. They proceeded to plunder everything that they could carry away from the stores of downtown Nairobi's predominantly Asian retailers (estimated losses due to the looting: $50 million). Recalls one eyewitness to the destructive orgy: "Guys were running around stuffing money into their pants, and when their pockets were full they stuck the money in their underpants...
...course, this Administration has never been much on complexity. Like the tourists who look out of their Jamaican hotel windows and see bone-white beaches but not the burgeoning squalor of shantytown, Ronald Reagan looks south and sees only Cuban bogeymen,--not a region with a history of colonization, racial injustice, and monoculture...
...Romans do under a Communist administration. Communist Mayor Luigi Petroselli, 47, and his Communist predecessor have pushed forward a slum clearance program that has won only the enmity of the city's poor. Instead of being grateful, families that were moved into new apartment buildings in Rome from shantytowns outside the capital complained that they had to pay city taxes and electric bills. Formerly, the shantytown dwellers had obtained free electricity by tapping power lines. They also complained that apartment living made it impossible to keep the kitchen gardens and chicken coops to which they were accustomed. Critics have...