Word: burma
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...Burma spared? The closeted nation's military rulers have a history of covering up natural disasters, including a 1984 fire that all but destroyed the city of Mandalay. So when the junta announced in the wake of December's tsunami that fewer than 100 people died in the disaster, international aid groups were highly suspicious. Last Monday, the U.N.'s World Food Programme speculated that hundreds of Burmese fishermen had probably been killed by the waves, and that 30,000 people had likely been left homeless. Yet as the week wore on and the official death toll held, a startling...
...lucky mix of geography and plate tectonics explains Burma's good fortune. The earthquake that created the tsunami occurred along a north-south fault line near Sumatra, sending the strongest waves to the east and west. According to computer models done by scientists at the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center in Hawaii, the waves that struck Burma, which lies mostly north of the fault, were much weaker than those that hit Thailand and Sri Lanka. "If the fault line had been running east-west, there could have been considerably more damage to Burma," says Jason Ali, a geoscientist at the University...
...plates--of the southern Indian Ocean as complex because a number of plates converge there. The floor of the Indian Ocean--the Indian plate--is moving north at around 2.5 in. per year, about twice the rate that your fingernails grow. As it moves, it is forced under the Burma plate to its east. Eighteen miles below the surface of the ocean, stresses that had been gradually accumulating forced the Burma plate to snap upward. That was a huge geological event, eventually measured at 9.0 on the Richter scale. The dislocation of the boundary between the Indian and Burma plates...
Doing business in Burma has often cost American companies p.r. points: Pepsi, Apple Computer and Levi Strauss are just a few of the U.S. firms that pulled out of the military-ruled state after being pressured by human-rights groups. Now, however, doing business with regimes like the one in Rangoon may cost American companies cash as well as goodwill. Last week, California-based oil giant Unocal chose to settle a landmark lawsuit launched by 14 Burmese refugees who alleged that the company was responsible for human-rights abuses by Burmese soldiers working on the $1.2 billion Yadana gas pipeline...
...Unocal case is the first time that a defendant has concluded a settlement under which compensation will be paid. "I'm thrilled with the outcome of this case," said Katherine Redford of Washington D.C.-based law firm EarthRights International, who conceived of the suit after visiting the Thailand?Burma border a decade ago as a law student. "General counsel for corporations around the world will pay considerable attention to this settlement," says Sean Murphy, a professor of international law at the George Washington University Law School. Saw Tuday Kaw of the Karen Information Committee, a group of refugees from Burma...