Word: nam
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Laos' Quaintly-titled Vice Minister for Industry and Handicrafts sits in his office in Vientiane and allows himself to dream. From his desk, Nam Viyaketh points to a map of the country pinned on the far wall. It's dotted with dozens of red spots, each a potential site for a hydroelectric dam. Within 30 years, says Nam, Laos could have a generation capaciy of 12,000 MW of electricity (it currently has a production capacity of 700 MW) and exporting it to energy-hungry neighbors like Thailand and China, generating billions of dollars in revenue. "We can be like...
...Nam, a Soviet-trained engineer, his is the logical grand plan for a landlocked country blessed with mountains, rivers?and little else. "We don't want to be such a poor country anymore," Nam says. "We want to change." This week, the World Bank will take a step to turn that dream into a concrete reality. The Bank's executive board of directors will meet in Washington, D.C. on Thursday and is expected to endorse a controversial $1.25 billion hydroelectric dam that even developers admit will have major social and environmental impact. Yet the dam could earn the country...
...both the World Bank and the Laos government believe that the Nam Theun 2 dam can help fix it. The project is the cornerstone of the government's giddy goal of becoming the "battery of Southeast Asia," and has been on the drawing board for almost 20 years. The dam will flood an area the size of Singapore, bleed one river almost dry and swell another, force the relocation of 6,200 people, and affect as many as another 100,000 living in and around the country's central Nakai Plateau. A joint project between the Laos government...
...world isn't privy to the inner workings of the secretive regime, but the succession delay may reflect a problem of Kim's own making. A playboy as a young man, he had sons with at least two women but married neither. The mother of Jong Nam was a movie starlet Kim fell for in the 1960s. She was later displaced by an equally attractive dancer named Ko Young Hee, who had his two younger sons...
...there's no Wife No. 1, whose son is in line for the throne? As the eldest, Jong Nam is the logical choice, but he is thought to be odd even by Kim family standards and unfit to rule. The apparent deal breaker occurred in 2001 when he was caught trying to sneak into Japan on a Dominican passport so he could visit Tokyo Disneyland. In 2002, state media seemed to be clearing a path for one of Kim's younger sons by boosting the profile of Ko, but her death last year, reportedly of cancer, may have thrown...