Word: sleepers
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Recently on a sleeper train in China's northwest Xinjiang province, I shared a cabin with two Pakistani traders who were returning home overland from a business trip to Hong Kong. One, in a Harley-Davidson cap, showed me two toy remote-control U.S. military helicopters he had bought in Shenzhen for his young sons. Beaming, he professed his love for America. But he also applauded the Taliban and al-Qaeda and how they "looked after" his Muslim brethren. It's just such a paradoxical pose, at once insular and international, Islamist and secular, that befuddles those outside Pakistan...
...trial of Sabahuddin Ahmed for his work in facilitating last year's Mumbai massacre reveals an uncomfortable truth about India. Unlike his fellow accused, the Pakistani gunman Mohammad Amir Ajmal Qasab, Sabahuddin is Indian and for five years he was an alleged one-man sleeper cell hiding in plain sight. Even though he was arrested almost 10 months before the Mumbai attack, Sabahuddin had allegedly managed to provide enough information in terms of directions and diagrams to allow the terrorists to launch their assault with "absolute precision...
...Paris qui dort,” French filmmakers have been unable to tear their attention away from the City of Light. This is unfortunate for Cédric Klapisch, previously the director of “L’Auberge Espagnole,” a 2002 sleeper hit popular enough to inspire a 2005 sequel, with another in the works. In his latest film, “Paris,” Klapisch squanders both his own considerable skill and creativity and that of the majority of his cast on a paean to the city that borrows shamelessly from other, better...
...fear and fetishize them over more likely but duller threats; that's a common flaw of risk assessment. Ideally, the media should help us place our worries in perspective. But often they encourage the disaster mentality by focusing on the trendy menace--the sleeper cell, the Obama-conspiracy e-mails, the pandemic, the shark--jumping on hot-button distractions and rushing to label every new crisis the worst ever...
...kids tend to be far less devastating than for poor ones; they are less likely to become teenage parents and high school dropouts. But children of divorced middle-class parents do less well in school and at college compared with underprivileged kids from two-parent households. "There's a 'sleeper effect' to divorce that we are just beginning to understand," says David Blankenhorn, president of the Institute for American Values. It is an effect that pioneering scholars like McLanahan and Judith Wallerstein have devoted their careers to studying, revealing truths that many of us may find uncomfortable. It's dismissive...