Word: roads
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...convoy of 18 SUVs pulls to a halt on the narrow road above Sanjiang, Wenchuan county, Sichuan, the gleeful shrieks of an excited crowd float upwards through the autumnal mist. The vehicles have made the three-hour journey from the provincial capital Chengdu, spending two hours of it crawling through countryside affected by the cataclysmic earthquake in May. We say countryside - in fact, the view through the windows is an unsettling inversion of what the term normally evokes. Giant fissures sunder the hills and there are yawning voids where roads should be. Broad swaths of boulders and debris remain...
...Villagers have been lining the road to Sanjiang, awaiting the convoy's arrival, and now they slip and surge down muddy paths in the hope of getting closer to its head. A vehicle door finally swings open and Donatella Versace - of all people - shyly emerges from her sanctum of tinted windows and tobacco smoke. Standing in blonde tresses and heels, she is a fabulously incongruous sight here in the mountains. But the good villagers of Sichuan have no idea who she is. They are here, instead, to see her companion for the day - Li Lianjie, otherwise known...
...celebrity duo is visiting a school and counseling facility for children affected by the Sichuan earthquake, paid for by Versace and operated under the auspices of Li's charity, the One Foundation. The occasion is only theoretically private. Hundreds of people pour in from the road or strain at the wire mesh that separates the school from the tract of temporary housing it adjoins. There is barely room to stage the songs and dances that the children have so assiduously rehearsed. When Li and Versace tour a classroom, they do so while amazed farmers press faces at every window. Those...
...Another issue is the country's 228-km land border with Indonesia, which squirms its mostly unmarked way through dense jungles, over rugged hills and along broad rivers. Just beyond Batugade, at the most northwesterly point of the border, barbed wire and guards block the road into Indonesia. But a kilometer south is a large unfenced clearing amid thickets of stubby palm trees where the constant smugglers' traffic has flattened an area the size of a basketball court. It is littered with the yellow hessian bags used to carry contraband and the remains of smugglers' campfires. "I see the police...
...have your clients' dispositions changed over the time you've known them since 2004? Right now I think they're more optimistic than they've ever been, but it's been a very rocky road. Think about being in a prison setting for seven years. For the first three, you're denied access to almost anybody besides the Red Cross and interrogators and finally lawyers get there in 2004. And yet the lawyers aren't able to do anything effectively for you until four years later. It's a long time to wait...