Word: hanged
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Despite the fact that they get from France more than they pay back in the form of sugar, rum, coffee and bananas, the islanders are now demanding an ever greater share of the central government's money. They complain that the minimum wages still hang below mainland standards, fret about the population surge that is adding 16,000 people a year to Martinique's current 265,000 (on 385 sq. mi.) and Guadeloupe's 250,000 (on 588 sq. mi.). A potential income source is tourism; the islands offer balmy beaches, inexpensive French champagne and perfume...
...drink yourself to death. You become obsessed by sex. You spend all your time talking . . . You are an expatriate, see? You hang around cafes...
...Chih Hang was a Chinese Buddhist monk and widely known as a good man, but he feared that he might be unworthy of the faith his disciples placed in him. When, on Formosa, he felt death approaching, he called them together and gave them unusual instructions. "When I die," he said, "do not bury my body, but seal it in an urn. After three years, open the urn, and if my body has decayed, bury it in the ground. But if it has not, encase it in gold and place it in a pagoda...
...took them five years to find the funds. When they had the money at last (about $270), the urn was opened, and there was Chih Hang-his body considerably thinned, but firm and uncorrupted. Last week, in another shrine, guarded by stone lions and surrounded by Buddha figures, Chih sat for his gilding. Throngs of pilgrims came carrying incense sticks, bearing rice offerings, dropping coins in collection boxes. Meanwhile, Chen Lu-kuan, a goldsmith from Taipei, covered the body with a lacquered silk cloth and tenderly began to apply gilt with a brush...
When decapitation and crucifixion were not effective, the shoguns invented tsurushi, in which the victim was suspended head downward in a pit, often partly filled with offal, to hang in agony sometimes a week or more before dying. "The persecuters were well aware that entire districts would be depopulated if all Christians were killed," says Drummond, "and so from the beginning they aimed to make apostates rather than martyrs." Many Japanese preferred to give up their Christianity. But a surprising number held out to the death. In Shimabara 36,000 men, women and children, offered the way to freedom...