Word: slum
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...Baghdad has doubled in five years (to about 1 million), and the capital is booming. Streets are jammed with American cars, creating a monumental traffic problem that the Development Board's new bridges over the Tigris have not begun to solve. The board's bulldozers are flattening 300 slum houses and bazaar shops to open a new freeway through the city center. Now that the floods have been stemmed, the city is spreading beyond the dikes where handsome villas are rising for the new, well-to-do middle classes ... France's Le Corbusier will build a sports stadium...
Every morning 24-year-old Shahida Begum leaves her home in a Dhaka slum, wends her way through a posh diplomatic enclave and turns up for work at a garment factory overlooking the U.S. embassy. It's a commute she may not be making much longer. Like most of Bangladesh's 1.8 million textile workers, she has heard rumors that next year the American and European companies that buy clothes from her country will switch to Chinese manufacturers, leading to a shutdown of garment factories in Dhaka. The zero-sum math of globalization makes little sense...
McSweeney's Enchanted Chamber of Astonishing Stories skews a little trashier but in the best possible way. It has the promiscuous atmosphere of one of those speakeasies where socialites slum with gangsters in an effort to mutually increase everybody's street cred. Atwood and Joyce Carol Oates mingle with the likes of Stephen King and Poppy Z. Brite. The results are remarkably pleasing. Atwood contributes a delicious, melancholy first-person piece about what it's like to be a young girl who turns into a yellow-eyed, red-clawed monster. Mitchell, who was short-listed for this year's Booker...
...elusive study, returning from Europe in 1953 to live a double life: one Pol Pot holds secret political meetings in a spartan shack in a Phnom Penh slum; the other courts a high-society belle in a black Citro?n sedan and "dances very well, in the Western style," a colleague recalled. Short attributes this duality to a "gift for subterfuge"?Pol Pot was so secretive that many mid-level Khmer Rouge officials did not know his real identity until two years after he had seized power. (Pol Pot is a nom de guerre adopted in 1970.) "You could not tell...
...conflict where the thing it does best--fighting--can't win the war. In Iraq today, brute force is a wasting asset, as Major General Peter Chiarelli, commander of the 1st Cavalry Division, knows firsthand. On a hot late-summer day, his soldiers entered Baghdad's Sadr City slum to quell attacks from militiamen loyal to rebel cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. Chiarelli's troops came under fierce fire as dozens of rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs) pounded their vehicles, and roadside bombs blew the tracks off a tank. For four hours, the two forces battled until the outmatched gunmen melted into...