Word: blacking
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...unemployment rises to the highest level in more than a quarter-century, retailers are readying for one of the country's biggest shopping days of the year - Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, which marks the official start of the Christmas shopping season - which will likely foretell the success or failure of 2009's holiday sales season...
...psychological day for us, to have 1,200 stores and 160,000 people ready for the next 35 days of mayhem," says Mike Vitelli, executive vice president of Best Buy's customer operating groups. "It's the gun start of the race." (See pictures from Black Friday...
...easy for retailers to hold the line as they face a showdown with frugal shoppers. "Inventories are in good shape, but sales may suffer more than we thought as retailers are forced to blink on promotions to drive traffic," says Jeff Black, director at Barclays Capital, who expects holiday sales to be flat with year-ago levels. (See 20 tech gadgets...
...painful irony of the black jails is that they sprang up after an earlier effort by Beijing to reform the national detention system. In 2003 a migrant worker in Guangzhou named Sun Zhigang was beaten to death while in police custody. Sun, who had been stopped for not carrying his temporary-residence certificate, was detained under a system known as "custody and repatriation." That system, a series of detention centers as well as the legal framework to hold people on administrative charges, was used to round up vagrants, beggars and petitioners...
...Following a public outcry over Sun's death, the government eliminated "custody and repatriation," or shourong in Mandarin. "But vagrancy-detention-era abuses did not end with the abolition of shourong," states the Human Rights Watch report. "Instead, such abuses have been driven underground into new extrajudicial 'black jails.' " It's an unpleasant lesson in the dangers of treating the symptoms without addressing the cause...