Word: plights
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...greater reductions may be needed as the global economic slump deepens. Toyota's plight illustrates the challenges faced by Japan Inc. The company recently achieved its long-standing goal of surpassing GM as the world's top automaker - only to run head-on into a recession far more severe than anyone anticipated. With its global sales down 4% last year, Toyota has already announced a management shakeup as well as plans to temporarily close factories for an additional 11 days over the next two months. The goal is to slash output to less than half the number of vehicles Toyota...
Living under the thumb of a brutal junta, the average Burmese hardly leads an easy life. But the plight of the country's ethnic minorities, many of whom once waged long and bloody insurgencies against the military regime, is even worse. As a new human-rights report released on Jan. 28, as well as the recent stories of destitute refugees who fled Burma attest to, members of Burma's ethnic groups face persistent discrimination by the military regime. They are the targets of unpaid forced labor campaigns, scorched-earth policies that destroy farmland and relocation programs that require entire villages...
...filmmakers will argue that the real issue here is the terrible plight of the Burmese people. In one sense, they are right. In a clever sequence, we are watching the annual military parade when the frame freezes and then quickly rewinds through recent Burmese history. First, it is comic - the regime's troops, marching backward - then tragic. We glimpse survivors of Cyclone Nargis, dazed and clad in rags; refugees fleeing the smoldering remains of houses laid waste by Burmese troops; blood-drenched protesters on the streets back in 1988, when the last democracy uprising was snuffed out and thousands were...
...film to shame. For these qualities, you can thank Simon Beaufoy, who wrote the script from Vikas Swarup's novel Q&A, and director Danny Boyle. Eleven years ago, Beaufoy was Oscar-nominated for another screenplay about underdogs going public, The Full Monty. Boyle has often dealt with the plight of the working-class young, notably in Trainspotting and Millions. Both men know how to mine poor folks in parlous straits for humor and heartbreak...
...With the world's largest netizen population of 300 million, China is struggling with a new plight: Internet obsession among its youth. Since the 2004 establishment of the country's first Internet Addiction Center, the military-run boot camp in Beijing where Wang took her son, more than 3,000 adolescent and young-adult patients have been treated for Internet addiction. Hundreds of similar treatment centers have mushroomed in recent years in China, joining other centers operating elsewhere in Asia and the U.S. The U.S.-based Center for Internet Addiction Recovery classifies the disorder as compulsive behavior in which...