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IMB Cities in Focus
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WORLDVIEW: Mumbai is the urban future - 6/11/2009
MUMBAI, India (BP)--Flying into Mumbai at night, you see millions of pretty lights glittering along the curving coast, like jewels on the neck of a queen.
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Gospel spreads among Mumbai's Muslims - 6/11/2009
MUMBAI, India (BP)—Farooq* walked right into the trap set for him.
A Muslim-background follower of Christ in the Indian urban giant of Mumbai, Farooq was teaching other Muslims about the Gospel in a "seeker meeting."
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Mumbai: Seeking truth in India's 'City of Gold' - 6/11/2009
MUMBAI, India (BP)--Television writer Sankalp Tak steers his late-model compact through the streets of Mumbai, India's largest city, dodging waves of cars and motorized rickshaws to park behind a nondescript warehouse.
Inside -- barely controlled chaos, like Mumbai itself.
It's the set of a TV comedy about upscale students at a fictional Indian college. Production crew members rush to break down one scene and set up the next. The director huddles with the producer and cameramen while the actors practice their lines and check their makeup with hand mirrors.
Everyone greets Tak, age 27. He's one of the creative forces behind the production, which airs four nights a week on India's popular Star One network. He auditioned about 1,000 actors to cast the show and used to spend all day, every day, on the set as a creative director before he switched to scriptwriting.
Tak misses the daily craziness -- but not too much.
"Politics is not a virtue in this business," he says. "You have to be aggressive, even heartless sometimes, to handle the chaos on the set or push someone who's already worked to 10 or 11 to go until 2 a.m."
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NAIROBI: Healing Africa's wounded urban heart - 2/19/2009
NAIROBI, Kenya (BP)--Sixty-six "poor urban settlements" -- some small, some enormous -- bump against Nairobi's sleek, downtown skyline like moths circling a light bulb.
Kibera, a 6-kilometer-long expanse of tin-roofed shacks following the railway, is home to 1 million people -- one of the largest slums in the world. Mathare counts at least 500,000 people. Dandora surrounds a city dump that stretches as far as the eye can see (see "No throwaway people" story here).
The "poor urban settlements" contain more than half of the 4 million people (some say 5 million) in Kenya's capital city, but they occupy only part of the urban landscape.
Extensive middle-class and upscale communities lie west of Nairobi's central business district -- roughly where white Europeans lived during former British colonial rule. The city center pulses with the energy of business, universities, embassies, national government, culture and night life.
Nairobi is the economic, political and cultural capital of East Africa. Most multinational corporations, nongovernmental organizations and Christian mission groups involved in the region base offices there.
"It's a continental city ..."
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Hope flickers in Nairobi's slums - 2/19/2009
NAIROBI, Kenya (BP)--Think you're going through tough times? Try living in a Nairobi slum.
Running water and electricity are rare; open sewage trenches are common.
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No throwaway people: Kenya church assists forgotten 'trash dump' community - 2/19/2009
NAIROBI, Kenya (BP)--You smell it long before you see it, but you've got to see it to believe it.
The municipal dump at Dandora, just south of Nairobi proper, stretches 30 acres.
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Penetrating Nairobi's business scene - 2/19/2009
NAIROBI, Kenya (BP)--Fifty human resource managers file into the auditorium, grab some pastry and coffee and take their seats.
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Nairobi's south Asians respond to prayer - 2/19/2009
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Cruising Nairobi's 'Little Mogadishu' - 2/19/2009
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WORLDVIEW: The next Nairobi - 2/19/2009
"If we want to visualize a 'typical' contemporary Christian, we should think of a woman living in a village in Nigeria or in a Brazilian favela [shantytown]."
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Mumbai's people 'numbed' by terrorist attacks, need prayer - 12/1/2008
MUMBAI, India (BP)--The smoke from days of terrorism has barely cleared. Nearly 200 people in India's largest city are dead. Hundreds more lie wounded.
Yet world attention already is shifting from Mumbai itself to international fallout from the attacks: whether the bloody assault on Mumbai will spark a retaliation from India against its bitter rival Pakistan, from which the terrorists reportedly came. Both powers possess nuclear arms and have come close to using them against each other in the past. And what would new India-Pakistan tensions mean for the war against the Taliban in Afghanistan and lawless northwest Pakistan?
While military and political analysts monitor those possibilities, Mumbai's people need prayer, said an American Christian worker based there.
"Our city has been a scene of tragedy and terror over the past few days, but it's not over," the worker said. "The effects will be deeply felt for months and years to come by the families of those who have lost loved ones -- and for those who have felt their sense of security in this city slip away."
TV news reports may be showing Mumbai's people getting back to normal in the city of more than 18 million or defiantly protesting the attacks and the politicians they believe failed to prevent them. But the trauma goes deep.
"The fact of the terrorist attacks has numbed the city's population," the worker noted. "People were indiscriminately murdered for reasons as yet only speculated about. Please pray for God to work in this horrible human tragedy to draw people of all religions to the end of themselves, of their own plans and dreams, and desire to know the real truth about the reason for their tenuous existence."
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Multicultural London: 'capital of the world,' faith in flux - 11/18/2008
LONDON (BP)--On a crisp October day in London's Trafalgar Square, the solemn marble monuments of Great Britain's former empire gaze upon a curious scene:
It's "Simcha on the Square," a celebration of 350 years of Jewish life in London. Thousands gather -- and not just English Jews and gentiles eager to enjoy some kosher food and traditional music. The crowd includes people of nearly every conceivable appearance and background: turban-wearing Sikhs, Indians, Chinese, Africans, Rastafarians, hipsters, bikers. They dance or tap their toes to the beat of performances by "the Jewish Elvis" and "K-Groove," a Klezmer-reggae-jazz band.
Multicultural bliss, at least for an afternoon.
Welcome to the new London. Bowler-hat London no longer exists. Nor does the London of Shakespeare, of Charles Dickens or even the 20th-century London of the Beatles. Sure, millions of tourists still visit the great sites of the old city. They still ride the double-decker red buses and flock to watch the queen and the changing of the guard.
But London is no longer really an English city; it is a world city. Set to host the 2012 Summer Olympics, it now proclaims itself the "capital of the world."
'A WORLD IN ONE CITY'
With a population of some 8.5 million people (estimates range as high as 14 million for the greater metro region), London vies with Paris as the largest city in Western Europe. Much of the world's high-powered finance flows through its gleaming office towers and great investment houses.
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Coffee shop prayer yields fruit in London - 11/18/2008
LONDON (BP)--Patrick and Sarah Sims*, International Mission Board team leaders for London, believe in practicing what they preach.
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Vietnam refugee fulfills vow in London - 11/18/2008
LONDON (BP)--Eyes brighten when Southern Baptist missionary Peter Le steps into Las Vegas Nails, one of the scores of Vietnamese-owned nail salons in east London's Hackney district.
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Brit returns to a new mission field - 11/18/2008
LONDON (BP)--When British Baptist missionary Boyd Williams arrived home from Brazil 30 years ago to lead London's Southall Baptist Church, he got a rude awakening.
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