Word: goldings
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...Nagano is best known for the 1998 Winter Olympics held in its capital, a postcard-pretty ski resort of 363,000. The entire prefecture bought into an Olympic pipe dream, convinced that building a luge run and hosting Lycra-clad skaters would somehow translate into a big pot of gold. A bullet-train line was built from Tokyo, hotels went up, airport runways were laid down. In all, nearly $1 billion was spent. But once the Olympic torch was extinguished, Nagano's post-Olympic boom failed to materialize. The city's downtown looks deserted and there's plenty of room...
Femmy Arimula bent forward over the swell of her pregnant belly so that she could aim the blowtorch directly onto the small, silver lump. At first nothing happened, the flame blazed down in a blue and orange column. Then, suddenly, the silver surface began to peel away and gold glittered underneath. More and more of the silver coating retreated under the blue flame until only a pebble of pure gold remained. Femmy cut the gas off and coughed, something catching at the back of her throat. She had heard that burning mercury was dangerous, but she didn't believe...
...endured the three months with gnawing fear of what she had done to her baby by working all day in the ore processing factory. Almost every hour of every day had meant touching or breathing mercury: it is used to bind with, then separate the tiny bits of gold from the stone; then it has to be burned off to isolate the precious metal. When the baby finally arrived, the doctor waited until an hour after the birth before telling Femmy what had happened. Her son's intestines were outside of his body. And he had no fingers...
...Afterward, Femmy didn't want to talk about it. People in her village, most of whom also work in processing units or mines, didn't want to know about the dangers. They were poor, and the gold brought money and jobs. So, day and night, in the hills above Manado, capital of Indonesia's North Sulawesi province, you can hear the noise from the processing units, the ore and water and stones and mercury sloshing and banging in steel barrels, the roar of the diesel motors turning the long lines of drums...
...This inflammatory article portrays Radcliffe women as gold-digging ditzes, and though the author's opinion may have been representative of the social prejudices of the time, it has no place in this year's paper...