Word: rugged
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...fringe benefits of being a Middle East correspondent is that my travels in the region have allowed me to start a decent little collection of Oriental rugs and, in the process, get better at the art of buying them. I bought my first one--a prayer rug, to celebrate my safe return from Iraq--at a suq in the Old City of Damascus. Carpet seekers flock to similarly byzantine markets in Morocco and Turkey, among other countries. But Syria is a particularly good place to pick up rugs and has been ever since Silk Road travelers from the great weaving...
...matter how good the rug selection, the endless variations in style and quality make bazaar bargaining a daunting exercise. And any transaction can conjure old clichés of naive Americans and wily, opaque locals. But such clichés are exactly that. Rug traders drive a hard bargain for the same reason everyone else does: money. And anyone who thinks Western capitalism is transparent should look to the subprime-mortgage-derivatives mess. Still, there are some useful lessons I've learned from buying rugs, which, when taken with a healthy dose of skepticism for metaphor, are also perhaps a useful guide...
...Corruption has proved an inflammatory issue in the past - it added fuel to the Tiananmen protest in 1989 - and mixed with student deaths it could be explosive. Beijing's first instinct will be to sweep the schools scandal under the rug. Much of the online anger over the collapsed schools has been deleted and all discussion of the topic has been banned. But Jiang of the University of Alberta says that, as China's civil society develops, leaders know they must adapt. "It will be extremely tempting for the control types and ideologues to use [the earthquake] to glorify...
Corruption has proved an inflammatory issue in the past--it was one of the driving forces behind the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989--and mixed with student deaths, it could be explosive. Beijing's first instinct will be to sweep the schools scandal under the rug. Much of the online anger over the collapsed schools has been deleted, and all discussion of the topic has been banned. But the University of Alberta's Jiang says that as China's civil society develops, leaders know they must adapt. "It will be extremely tempting for the control types and ideologues...
...damaging the party by trying to wrest the nomination away from the first viable African-American contender. "Everyone says, 'You can't take this away from a strong black candidate,'" Ickes says. "Well, how about the first woman candidate of consequence? That's been almost swept under the rug while people have been mesmerized by Obama. Yes, he's a very strong candidate. But so is Hillary. She's a pretty big deal...