Word: coal
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...Americans even coined a word for doing things without permission in this land of the unfree: "freedalisms." On one occasion, the four swam across a river to pilfer a bag of coal tar from a government construction site to repair their (illegal) fishing boat. "To steal something from the North Korean government is immediately punishable by death," Jenkins said during his court-martial. "I think we all secretly wished we would be caught." Another time, they stumbled upon an array of microphones in the attic of their house and blackmailed their leader (who feared he would suffer if his superiors...
...coal-mine shaft was called cutting face no. 2, located deep in the mountains of North Korea, near a town called Kaechon, 200 km north of Pyongyang. Coal mining anywhere is dirty, dangerous work, but this was no ordinary coal mine. It was part of a camp for political prisoners in North Korea where "perceived political wrongdoers," as a recent human-rights report put it, are sent without trial or charge for sentences of unspecified lengths...
...Yong, 54, was one of roughly 15,000 prisoners at Kaechon in the late 1990s, and he is one of the lucky ones. Kim told veteran American human-rights activist David Hawk that he escaped in 1999 by hiding in a coal train that delivered the miners' daily take to a nearby town. He eventually made his way across the border to China, and then to Seoul, where, along with other refugees from the camps, he has been able to tell his story. Constant hunger is a way of life for the prisoners-malnutrition and disease were rampant, well before...
...brisk tone of Caley's journal offers little praise for his surroundings. The names he bestows along the way - the Devil's Wilderness, Dismal Dingle (a valley "like a coal-pit"), Dark Valley - hint at his impressions. When his men spotted two crows, they joked that the birds must be lost, "or else they would never stop in such a place as this." Climbing in the heat through one windless gully after another, pushing through prickly scrub amid leeches, flies and furious ants, sweaty and smeared with charcoal from burned trees, it's understandable why he spent little time...
That doesn't mean China's robust economic engine will grind to a halt. The mainland meets more than two-thirds of its energy needs with coal and boasts the world's largest reserves. But to keep its economy racing ahead--and to ease some of the pollution that comes from burning coal--China's leaders have been forced to seek ever greater supplies of petroleum from overseas. More than half of China's oil imports currently come from the volatile Middle East, making oil security a growing concern in Beijing. China plans to build a strategic oil reserve...