Word: china
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Dates: during 2010-2019
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...afternoon last fall, on an unusually humid day in Beijing, the center of the city was buzzing as teams of designers, soldiers and Communist Party officials finalized preparations for the 60th anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic of China. The event would be broadcast nationwide to one of those billion-person audiences only China can deliver. The party had planned a parade with fighter-jet flyovers, missiles that would roll along Eternal Peace Street and the once-a-decade ritual in which the top leader dons a Mao suit, stands in the open sunroof of a 1950s...
...Party officials working on one element of the program, the nighttime fireworks display, had a particular request of the designers. China, they worried, is like many other nations - a place where the line between healthy patriotism and nationalism isn't apparent until you've stepped over it. They fretted that after a day of military adrenaline, a night of explosive percussion might be too much. So they asked, Would it be possible to arrange for a big, beautiful, calming fireworks display? (See pictures of U.S. Presidents in China...
Scrabble players around the world had to double-check their calendars this week after Mattel announced that it was releasing a new version of the game called Scrabble Trickster, which allows players to use proper nouns such as Quzhou (a city in southern China, worth 27 points) and Zuma (the surname of South Africa's President, worth 15 points). "I was sure it was an April Fools' joke," says John Chew, co-president of the North American Scrabble Players Association. "I thought someone was a few days late reading the press release and the joke was on them...
...their first month; a third of these don't survive their first day. In Jharkhand and Orissa, two of east India's most impoverished and underserved states, the numbers are worse still - 49 and 45 deaths per 1,000 live births, respectively. The neonatal mortality rate in China, by comparison, lingers under 15. "Just improving health services will not do," says Dr. Prasanta Tripathy, who founded the Indian social welfare NGO Ekjut with his wife Dr. Nirmala Nair. "Communities need to be made aware of what it is in their own power to accomplish." (Read 'India's Medical Emergency...
...Western allies - the only force protecting him from a surging Taliban, which hanged the last foreign-backed President when it reached Kabul in 1996. Having infuriated the Obama Administration by continuing to drag his feet on corruption - and then cozying up to Iran and China when Washington turned up the heat - Karzai ratcheted up the rhetoric last week. He accused the U.S. of trying to dominate his country, blamed the West for last year's electoral fraud (which his campaign was accused of masterminding) and made comments that verged on sanctifying the Taliban insurgency as a "national resistance" against foreign...