Word: gongs
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CHINA Welcoming the Year of the Horse The Chinese celebrated the lunar New Year with lion and dragon dances and the customary televised musical marathon. Beijing police said protests in Tiananmen Square by foreign followers of the banned Falun Gong spiritual movement were intended to stop the Chinese from enjoying the festival. They deported most of the more than 40 foreign nationals arrested. Since 1999 many Falun Gong supporters have been imprisoned without trial, and the movement claims over 1,600 have died in custody...
...lion?s share of the thanks for that should go to the New York Police Department, who have laid down a security cordon around the Waldorf-Astoria and other midtown hotels, and manned (or womaned) it, by and large, with great good humor. Demonstrators - followers of Falun Gong have been the most prominent - have been segregated across the street, squashed into a narrow area behind barricades. The main demonstration, on Saturday, went off remarkably quietly, as the marchers were kept well away from the delegates; I had no idea that the NYPD had so many police horses...
...even death. They accounted for 17 percent of pregnancy and childbirth-related deaths in 1965 alone, and even today the World Health Organization estimates 78,000 women die each year from unsafe abortions. If safe and legal abortion is legislated away or ruled off the table, we're gong to see a return of the "back-alley butchers" made infamous during the court battles leading up to Roe. Women will die - women whose lives might have been saved by sane, realistic abortion laws that treat women like grown-ups, rather than as overgrown wards of the state...
...That sentiment is precisely what worries Beijing. As China gears up for an expected succession struggle in the Politburo later this year, the Communist Party wants to ensure that no group nibbles away at its hold on power. Thus Beijing's severe crackdown on Falun Gong, the Buddhist-exercise movement that spooked China's leaders by getting 10,000 followers to protest in front of Beijing's leadership compound three years ago. The demonstration prompted the hasty passage of a law dictating harsh punishment to anyone involved in a cult?while conveniently failing to define what exactly constitutes one. "Anytime...
...hour days in Beijing helping craft key documents. When the International Olympic Committee sent an evaluation crew to grill the committee, Phillips and his team suggested answers the Chinese might have muffed, such as making them omit the usual "evil-cult" epithet from comments on the underground Falun Gong spiritual movement. Phillips even solved Beijing's dreaded puppy problem. Many Chinese eat dogs, and dog farms import the frozen sperm of St. Bernards to breed quick-growing canine roasters. Beijing officials were certain that Swiss visitors would protest at seeing their rescue pooches on chopsticks, and they wanted a response...