Word: oversight
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...this worked? To research my book, The Heartless Stone, I traveled in 2004 and '05 to Africa, where diamonds are mined in conditions that range from the orderly to the horrific, and found virtually no oversight of the violence-prone alluvial-mining sites. Many stones have made their way out of the jungle and into suburban malls via somebody's lower intestinal tract. Even when the diamonds are not smuggled or traded for guns, the wages for the miners can be outrageously unfair. I met a team of diggers in the Central African Republic who were routinely paid...
Human-rights campaigners, however, welcome Hollywood's focus on the issue and say it has helped tighten industry oversight even before the film's release. In the run-up to the holiday period--peak season for diamond sales and blockbuster movies--the public spat makes an interesting study of how a big studio movie can threaten a $60 billion-a-year global retail industry, one that has previously thrived on its association with all things Hollywood, and how that business can fight back...
...diamonds are conflict free. Activists say that the situation is better but that diamonds are the cause of continuing misery. Two weeks ago, when Kimberley Process members sat down to their annual plenary meeting in Botswana to discuss how the watchdog system was working, the pressure for tighter oversight had ratcheted up. Responding to a U.N. report that poor controls are allowing conflict diamonds from war-torn Ivory Coast to enter the legitimate trade through neighboring Ghana, where they are being certified as conflict free, the diamond industry agreed not only to send a group to Ghana to ensure that...
Even though the city of Miami has the third worst poverty rate in the nation, there have been few credible attempts to help the lowest earners find housing. One problem is weak government oversight of development--a sign, some complain, that Miami's sun-soaked complacency has addled its political leaders as well. "Planning is disdained as the enemy here," says Gihan Perera, director of the Miami Workers Center. Local anger boiled over recently at a housing scandal that Perera's group helped the Miami Herald expose: Miami-Dade's government housing agency paid millions of dollars to politically connected...
...approved for massive infrastructure improvements, a half-penny tax to build up their virtually nonexistent public-transit system, and a new $400 million downtown performing-arts center. And a majority of Miamians support Alvarez's efforts to reduce the inordinate powers of their county commission--which include housing-agency oversight--especially since its members have long run Miami-Dade like a collection of venal fiefdoms. A judge has ordered the commission to schedule a referendum on the issue. But in the meantime, Miamians are likely to see more of their neighbors winging north...