Word: fin
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...often now it feels as though we’re living in the fin-de-something. Blogs at either political extreme adopt a tone of pre-apocalyptic hysteria. And the hysteric in me would call it the end of America. But the realist in me knows that miscounted votes in Clyde do not presage the end of America. They just presage the end of the America I invented during Ohio summers in my childhood, a country where silos and schoolhouses and soybeans stand for an inherent decency that does not exist, that may never have existed...
...Informal finance isn't just for mom-and-pop shops. Wenzhou's biggest restaurant, the 200-table Golden Fields Village, opened in May and specializes in shark-fin soup, giant snails and stingrays. Owner Wu Jianguan started the business by borrowing $100,000 from banks by mortgaging his home. But that wasn't enough to pay for the floor-to-ceiling fish tanks and staff of 150 hostesses in purple evening gowns, so he borrowed five times more from friends at higher rates. The cornerstones of such informal lending are relationships far stronger than Wu's connections to the bank...
...presence is unquestionably illegal. But the foreign fishers have few alternatives. Almost all of them are from Merauke, a village in Indonesia's Irian Jaya, about 145 nautical mi. (270 km) to the northwest. If they can avoid detection, the men could bring home a spectacular catch of shark fin (which can sell for $A200 a kg) and retire. The court houses and lock-ups on Thursday Island and in the Arnhem Land town of Nhulunbuy are stretched due to an official crackdown on FFVs. In 2003, 138 vessels were apprehended, mostly in northern waters; this year the tally...
...minutes later, Cummins makes radio contact with the tender. The boarding party has been successful; there's been no struggle. A preliminary search has found evidence of shark fin, fresh blood, baited hooks, long lines, three floats and a compass. A report is prepared and faxed to the Australian Fisheries Management Authority; Cummins is recommending that the boat, Merauke-based Buna Perawan, be apprehended and towed back to Thursday Island. But first Cummins wants the eight fishermen to retrieve their buoys and lines; Coastwatch has located the gear 9 nautical mi. away. "The lines are an environmental hazard," says Geoff...
...Certainly not from Bangkok's Association of Shark Fin Restaurants, a group of about 30 Chinatown eateries. They're biting back with a $2.7 million lawsuit against WildAid and the local office of J. Walter Thompson, the New York City-based advertising agency that created the campaign for free. The charge: false claims by WildAid have caused their sales of shark dishes to drop by 50%. Last week in court, David Lau, secretary-general of the association, personally cross-examined Galster, alleging that the American conservationist had staged videos and faked photos of dying sharks. To TIME, he also claimed...