Aside from this jarring image, Tirin Kot is a bucolic-seeming place, a market town of flat-topped adobe houses and little shops on a low bluff on the eastern shore of the Tirinrud River, in a long valley bounded by open desert and jagged, treeless mountains.

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Use VoIP with Skype or Fring if you have a flat-rate data plan, or use a local SIM card if you are on shore.

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Meanwhile the Israeli army, caught flat-footed both on the Golan Heights and on the border with Lebanon, will have to shore up the border, at least in the north, to make it physically impassable.

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One day, I flew due west from Anchorage to the town of Bethel, on the flat, drab sprawl of waterlogged tundra that reaches between the deltas of the Yukon and Kuskokwim Rivers to the shore of the Bering Sea.

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