Word: mooning
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...forgiven for feeling a little lost. With shirtless young backpackers drinking beer and suntanning, it looks more like an Ibizan beach town than a Laotian village. But no, you didn't take a wrong turn at the Thai border. This is Vang Vieng - a farm town turned full-moon party, smack in the middle of a communist state. Once a resting place for opium-addled sojourners on sweet, slow tours of the East, Vang Vieng is now a haven of a different sort. It has become a popular stopover for gap-year students on Southeast Asia's well-trodden holiday...
...millions of years and that we are hard-wired to interact with our environment - with the air, water, plants, other animals. But in the past two centuries, beginning with the Industrial Revolution, people have been steadily removed from the natural world, our lives regulated not by the sun or moon but instead by the factory clock. Recently it's gotten worse, with the rise of the Internet and other technologies, like iPhones and BlackBerrys, that dominate our lives, pushing us even further from any appreciation of our natural surroundings. (See the best iPhone applications...
...good. But he has refused - even after declaring victory - to allow the press or international observers to verify those claims. No journalists or U.N. agencies have been permitted into the former war zone (with the exception of an entourage flying over it with U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon), and journalists are allowed into the camps only on government-sponsored tours. The U.N. and other international agencies - "58 of them!" Rajapaksa points out - do have some access to the camps, but they are not permitted to talk to the people inside to monitor their conditions. He insists that restrictions...
...moon • 40th anniversary of men walking around...
Wirth praises Ban Ki-moon for the same quality of persistence. The U.N., Wirth says, gets dumped with the problems that great powers can't solve, like nudging the regime in Burma into improving its miserable human-rights record or bringing peace to Darfur in southern Sudan, where bitter fighting raged for years. The U.N. had long been unable to come to any consensus on how to handle Darfur, with deep divisions in the Security Council about whether and how to send a peacekeeping force there. Wirth praises Ban's diplomatic skills in finally getting Security Council approval...