Word: nickels
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...positive sign for the economy that the Art of Shaving's revenues rose 19% during the last quarter of the year. If people will fork over insane amounts of money to properly trim their facial hair - in a New York City store, a razor with a nickel-plated brass handle costs $175 - perhaps national spending will finally loosen. "We're definitely linked to the economy," says Eric Malka, co-founder and CEO of the Art of Shaving. "As consumer confidence comes back and the stock market comes back, our consumers have been more willing to purchase our products...
Lunch at the site of the future Ramu nickel and cobalt mine in the remote hills of Papua New Guinea is a hurried affair, food shoveled into eager mouths. But the menu is as divided as the two distinct groups of workers squatting in the heat, swatting away flies and filling their bellies before their nine-hour, seven-day-a-week shifts begin again. In one huddle are local laborers chewing chunks of sweet potato and the canned fish known in pidgin dialect as tinpis. In another clump are imported workers from China who dig into rice topped with pork...
...Notes of culture clash ring everywhere I wander in the vast construction zones that by the end of this year will turn a pristine stretch of virgin forest and grassland into one of the world's largest nickel-extraction sites. On the palm-fringed coast of Basamuk Bay, where the Ramu refinery will be situated, a chatty Beijing-born building engineer tells me that before the Chinese arrived, "the natives were completely uncivilized and running around almost naked." I voice my doubts, telling him that I've just talked to a nearby villager who described a PowerPoint presentation she recently...
...impression the Chinese have left on many P.N.G. nationals isn't much better. A local landowner whose ancestral territory lies in the middle of the mine site alleges, improbably, that the nickel will be used to feed a secret Chinese weapons program. In the capital Port Moresby, my driver announces that if a gang to evict Chinese from P.N.G. is formed, he will be the first to join. "I will sharpen my bush knife and chop 10 or 20 heads," he says. The unease about Chinese influence extends to government circles, even if the Ramu mine promises...
...Ramu site had lain dormant for four decades, as a series of Australian firms calculated that the low-grade nickel wasn't worth extracting in such a remote area rife with shifting clan allegiances. But Ramu NiCo, the subsidiary of China Metallurgical Group that has developed the mine, thought it could succeed where others were afraid to try. In 2007, Ramu NiCo dispatched battalions of Chinese workers, who macheted their way through dense foliage and built a mirage-like Chinatown where elephant grass and kwila trees used to be. Today, in what was a malarial stretch of hills and valley...