Word: townes
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Bill Clinton came from a little town called Hope. Chairman Mao sprung from the chili-eating village of Shaoshan, a place whose entire economy now relies on promoting its native son. So it's instructive to think for a moment of the rural district of Kepala Batas, home to Malaysia's Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi. The locals of Kepala Batas, located in western Malaysia's Penang state, consider Abdullah, whose ruling National Front coalition is contesting the March 8 general elections, a kindly, avuncular presence. But their real respect appears to be reserved for his father and grandfather, both...
...been fully inundated yet, most of the people have demolished their homes for scrap and moved on. At present, the village looks like it has been carpet-bombed, with piles of rubble rising out of the greasy water. Purwanto points out an especially large mound: the remains of the town's grandest house. His own more modest home is gone except for the broken stubble of the walls. "I was born at this house," Purwanto says, sucking contemplatively on a clove-scented cigarette. From a nearby mosque, still being used despite the rising mud, the call of the muezzin echoes...
...hate crimes, the 1993 murder of Brandon Teena. An adult when he was murdered, Teena had endured bullying throughout his life for his gender transgressions. Born female he began, at a young age, to identify and live as a man. When an adult he moved to the small Nebraska town of Falls City, hoping to live peacefully as a man and, perhaps at some point, to undergo sex change surgery. Teena dated women and befriended guys successfully, until a couple of his friends discovered his secret. Aghast at the affront to their masculine sensitivities and their hitherto manly friendship...
Carl Hughes is a banker in Marion, Ohio, the sort of guy who takes the pillar-of-the-community part of the program seriously. Last spring, he attended a meeting for people in town with health-insurance problems, called by Ohio's Democratic governor, Ted Strickland. "It was very emotional," Hughes remembered, "very upsetting." And so Hughes decided to pay for the insurance of the three families who seemed most desperate. "You want to see this problem fixed on the national level, but sometimes immediate action is needed," Hughes told me during a Sunday-morning visit to a pancake house...
...Marion is in relatively good shape-compared with Mansfield, a town the governor and I visited earlier that morning. Strickland is a former minister, and we began our day at the United Methodist Church, a lovely place with a guitar-playing preacher. Back in the 1960s, Mansfield had been home to famous American brand names like Westinghouse and Tappan. Now the town was shriveling slowly, the young people moving away. "I'm the only one I know who went to a four-year college and came back home to live," Ben Stauffer, a young high school teacher, told me later...