There are delayed ledes and then there are ledes that slam the reader head-on. Check out The Chicago Tribune's Salopek on Mogadishu Here are the first few paragraphs:
There are so many ways to die in Mogadishu.
You can walk, as an old lady here recently did, into the path of a roadside bomb planted by Islamic rebels. The insurgents haven't perfected their timers. They missed the passing government patrol. The grandmother was decapitated.
Just as likely -- and lucklessly -- you might cross paths with renegade units of the half-starved government troops. Two weeks ago these forces shelled the Hawa Abdi displaced persons' camp with an anti-aircraft cannon. They wanted to steal the camp's donated food. Armed refugees fought back fiercely.
Everyone is hungry in Mogadishu. And, of course, that can kill you too. Shops are closing. The price of rice has doubled. And skeletal, ocean-eyed babies are appearing at the city's few feeding centers -- tiny harbingers of a man-made famine.
Finally, in a typically resourceful Somali twist, there is death by cell phone call. Mogadishu still offers one of the cheapest mobile phone services in Africa. Aid workers marvel at former city residents who hide in the bush, calling from cardboard hovels to request emergency food. Yet today even this remnant of normalcy is becoming an instrument of murder.
"When the phone's screen says 'Private Number' most people don't answer," said Abdirahman Yusuf Sheik, a sleep-deprived journalist with Radio Shabelle who receives up to four phoned death threats a day. "It means someone is calling to assassinate you."
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