Word: townes
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...unusual for an election nerve center. For one thing, it's clean, and quiet: no spilled coffee, no half-eaten pizza slices, no one cursing into a phone. The staff are unfailingly polite, and they don't run-they walk. As befits Hong Kong's profile as a financial town above all else, Tsang's election office is in a commercial tower, on the 28th floor. (Hong Kong people consider 28 to be an advantageous number because, in Cantonese, it sounds like "easy to prosper.") In case that isn't powerful enough joss, a large Chinese character written on gold...
...Tsang is acting as if he's in a real race. He has gone to the trouble of releasing a manifesto that spells out his ambitious plans to make Hong Kong a richer, cleaner, more equitable and more democratic society. In a town run by an aggregation of élites, he has pressed the flesh in working-class neighborhoods, engaged in televised candidate debates with Leong, and even taken a ride in an open-topped bus, waving to people who can't vote for him. Tsang is doing all this because he wants a wider mandate...
...Anywhere else, such setbacks would not harm someone's political reputation for long. But Hong Kong is such a can-do town of winners that just a couple of reversals can be magnified to give you a loser's image. Tsang's supporters say his retreats are a sign of pragmatism. "He is bold and determined," says Choy So-yuk, a Legislative Council member from the pro-Beijing Democratic Alliance for the Betterment and Progress of Hong Kong (DAB). "In areas like West Kowloon, he knows when to give up when facing public opposition." Yet for an official who declared...
...security convoy was ambushed by gunmen in Fallujah, Iraq. The four men were dragged from their cars, mutilated by a mob and set on fire. The torsos of Helvenston and fellow Blackwater employee Jerry Zovko were hung from the green steel girders of a bridge on the edge of town. In Fallujah, it's still known as Blackwater Bridge...
...loss not just for four families. It was a turning point in an already foundering war. An ecstatic mob in the center of a major Iraqi town had torn Americans limb from limb in front of rolling cameras. A series of catastrophic recriminations followed. Muqtada al-Sadr, emboldened by the attack, called for the first Shi'ite uprising against the occupation. U.S. Marines retook Fallujah but flattened parts of the city in the process and set the stage for future cycles of invasion and uprising that have scarred the city--and the country--ever since...