The resort town of Abbottabad is a familiar one to day-tripping Pakistanis seeking escape from the urban tumult of the Punjab plain. Just 75 miles from the capital, Islamabad, colonial-era bungalows abut modern whitewashed villas on small streets largely devoid of traffic.
Tag Archives: capital
Visiting Chernobyl 25 Years Later: Lessons for Fukushima
The 18.5-mile radius around the Chernobyl nuclear power plant is known officially as the “zone of alienation.” Abandoned cars, tractors, buildings and homes litter the landscape and are slowly being devoured by trees and shrubs. A classroom bulletin board not far from the central Lenin Street in the town where the plant workers used to live reads, “No return
Jordan’s Islamists Take the Reins of the Protests
After sitting out a three-month long wave of protests, Jordan’s Islamists have finally taken to the streets.
Iran: Could the MEK Be Evicted from Camp Ashraf by Iraqi Military?
For years, Iraq’s increasingly pro-Iranian government has threatened to evict the 3,400 Iranian members of the Mujahedin-e Khalq , a fiercely anti-Tehran group, from its sprawling former military base at Camp Ashraf, some 40 miles from Baghdad, the Iraqi capital, and 50 miles from the Iranian border. Despite the heated rhetoric, however, Baghdad has never fully articulated how it will uproot the exiles — who refuse to leave their decades-old enclave — beyond saying it will not forcibly do so
Holidays in Hell: Bali’s Ongoing Woes
The annual monsoon transforms Bali. Rain sweeps across slumbering volcanoes
Cambodia’s Child Sex Crackdown
In his 17 years on the Cambodian police force, Keo Thea has seen a lot. But nothing quite prepared the deputy chief of Phnom Penh’s anti-human trafficking police for the raid on the home of German national Karl Heinz Henning in August
To Tweet or Not to Tweet
The economy may be troubled, but one area is thriving: social media. They begin with Facebook and extend through a dizzying array of companies that barely existed five years ago: Twitter, LinkedIn, Groupon, Yammer, Yelp, Flickr, Ning, Digg–and the list goes on
Massive Accounting Fraud Fells WorldCom
Is there anybody out there investors can trust? Wall Street was pondering that today as markets were hammered following last night’s announcement that WorldCom had inflated profits by a staggering $3.8 billion over the past five quarters
Extended Stay Bankruptcy Examiner Mabey Files Report Under Seal
Extended Stay Hotels Inc.’s examiner filed under seal his report addressing claims that two private-equity firms schemed with the hotel chain’s senior lenders to push out junior debt holders and take over the company by bankrupting it. Ralph Mabey, a former bankruptcy judge, filed his report under seal yesterday in Extended Stay’s case docket. U.S. […]
Opening Up North Korea
A nuclear test and the resulting international outcry, the detention of two U.S. journalists for illegal entry, a spat with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton , serious food shortages