Word: coale
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...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...
...snarl. He puts maggoty meat on his family's dinner table while gambling away his earnings, beats and rapes his estranged wife, and hurls his stepdaughter down a staircase. When a worker at his fish-cake factory begs for back pay, Kim responds by applying a hot coal to the man's cheek. After the business takes off, Kim invests his gains in a loan-sharking operation, opening up vast new reserves of people to exploit and brutalize. To Kim, power is to be abused, affection to be crushed...
...travels in China in the 13th century, Marco Polo was amazed at the widespread burning of coal. He referred to the fuel as "black stones," and reported that "they may be had in the greatest abundance, and at a cheap rate." Today, China is the world's largest coal producer, increasing output each year to feed its rapidly growing economy. But the cost in human lives is anything but low. Thousands of miners die in China's coal mines every year. The government put the number at 6,434 last year, but labor- and human-rights groups say the true...
...government announced plans to consolidate the industry into 13 large-scale production groups to allow closer mine oversight, particularly for the smaller, private pits that are the most dangerous. Whether that action ends up being too little, it certainly is too late. Last Wednesday an explosion at a coal mine in China's southwestern Guizhou province killed 16 people...