Today's Story Line
Relations between old neighbors figure prominently in today's edition.
In Austria, the across-the-fence dispute is over community safety. We're not talking a loud party or a smoky BBQ. The Czech Republic has a new nuclear power plant. The Austrians have no nukes, don't want any, and are essentially arguing that if the Czechs want to be members of the EU, they'd better consider the feelings of the rest of the neighborhood.
For South Koreans, tension is rising over the rowdy behavior of their 37,000 live-in neighbors from the US and the prime real- estate occupied by military bases (page 7).
In the Middle East, the familiar neighborhood beef between Israelis and Palestinians is not just violent, it's economic. But what hurts one pocketbook also impacts the other (page 1).
David Clark Scott World editor
CELLULOID WINDOW: Jakarta-based reporter Dan Murphy hadn't seen the movie "The Year of Living Dangerously" for 15 years. He went to its debut in Indonesia Wednesday and was struck by the audience reaction. When the actor portraying President Sukarno first appeared on the screen, the audience gasped. "It was such an unusual experience for Indonesians to see any kind of popular depiction of Sukarno," says Dan. But another reaction puzzled him. The audience kept tittering whenever it heard Bahasa Indonesia spoken in the background (the movie was in English). Later, he asked a friend why. "The realism dissolved each time they spoke. Most of the 'Indonesians' in the film were Filipinos speaking Bahasa in a Philippine accent. The film was shot in the Philippines," Dan says.
HAVE NOTEBOOK, WILL TRAVEL: The Monitor's Ilene Prusher knew that the hit television series "M*A*S*H*" was based on Uijongbu, so when she visited Korea for today's story, she was expecting something like a remote, rural village. "Instead, I found a pretty modern bedroom city of Seoul," Ilene says. While wandering around a dense neighborhood adjacent to the base, she heard the sounds of spiritual singing and cymbals wafting out of one tiny house. The woman inside was a shamanist who invited Ilene and another reporter in, "but she didn't want to talk much about the troops. She was, however, happy to serve us fresh fruit while we sat on her heated floor - a Korean specialty much appreciated on a brisk day," says Ilene. Then the woman offered to do a "reading" ... for a price. Egged on by her colleague, "I coughed up the equivalent of about $25 to be told that I was someone who would wander around the world for many years. Big revelation there."
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