Word: switchbacked
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...Caught in the government policy switchback are three of the biggest names in the business: Honda, Yamaha and Suzuki. The quotas, announced in September, will cost the Japanese manufacturers an estimated $267 million in lost revenue this year. Honda and Yamaha each has had to shut down its Vietnam factory until the end of the year, and Suzuki says it will also run out of parts any day. Japanese executives are fuming, hinting the abrupt policy shift could hurt Vietnam's bid to join the World Trade Organization. After a delegation from the big three bikemakers were snubbed earlier this...
...gates of Kabul, the Taliban found an enthusiastic new benefactor. Osama bin Laden, who had spent some of his family fortune to finance the anti-Soviet mujahedin, needed a new home after Sudan succumbed to U.S. blandishments to kick him out. In exchange for a haven in Afghanistan's switchback valleys and rugged passes, bin Laden offered the Taliban money and fighters. Afghan and Western sources say he gave $3 million that helped push the Taliban into control of the capital and the country in September 1996. It was, according to intelligence reports, one of the last times Omar...
...standing on the rim videotaping the canyon, panning from left to right and then right to left, and you plunge down the trail, which is broad and not too steep and studded with mule manure, and a hundred or so feet down, once you come around the second switchback, all the hubbub of the rim vanishes, and you enter into a magnificent silence...
...ascent you have a clear goal ahead, and you get happier and happier as you keep pressing upward, one switchback after another. You overtake other climbers. You feel great. At a trailside shelter you run into teenagers weeping into an emergency phone. Two girls trying to convince a park ranger that they really, really, really, really can't go another step and need to be airlifted out. Two well-fed American girls in nice clothes, both ambulatory. One of them sobs in a well-practiced way, and if you weren't here to see her, you'd think...
Such lofty ruminations were a long way from the thoughts of the typical visitor as he swung around his 14th switchback in 10 minutes, in a bus that labored painfully up the mountain curves like a slaloming snail, its driver consulting a map as he lurched along on the two-hour trip from Albertville to such distant sites as Courchevel and Val d'Isere. Any time not spent in a bus in the days before the Games seemed to be spent in a line for a bus. And on the epic rides along treacherous, icy roads, the passenger could...