Word: rubbers
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Both Chile and Haiti sit atop large, volatile fault lines. In recent decades, Chile has mandated earthquake-proofing for new structures, requiring that materials like rubber and features like counterweights be built into the architectural designs to allow buildings to bend and sway rather than break during temblors. Haiti, by contrast, lets its buildings rise with little if any input from engineers and plenty of bribes to so-called government inspectors. Structures have scant reinforcement and are often set on weak foundations. That's why 13 of 15 federal ministry buildings pancaked in the Jan. 12 earthquake...
...letter to the British Foreign Office in March 1911. Casement, a diplomat and activist, had just returned to London from the Amazon jungle, where he had spent several months investigating the rumoured exploitation of Barbadian workers—at that time, British subjects—by a rubber manufacturing company. The Peruvian Amazon Company, Casement found, was abusing not only its Barbadian employees, but also enslaving and terrorizing the local Indian population. In the years following these revelations, until his death in 1916, Casement worked tirelessly to bring the man he considered responsible—the Peruvian rubber baron, Julio...
...descriptions of gang rape, the torture of children (by burning their hands and feet until they betrayed the whereabouts of their parents), and deliberate regimes of starvation—all tactics to maintain an atmosphere of terror in which the Indians would not dare to fall short of the rubber-collecting quotas...
...brisk, unadorned prose, and with frequent recourse to historical sources. We cannot help but share Goodman’s obvious admiration for Casement, who had established his humanitarian credentials in 1903 with a report exposing the wholesale abuse of the native population—again, in the name of rubber production—of the Congo Free State under King Leopold II of Belgium. “Wherever he went and whomever he met, Roger Casement rarely failed to make a deep, lasting, highly favourable impression,” Goodman tells us. He quotes a fellow activist, Edmund Morel, recalling...
...between defenders and abusers of human rights, between heartfelt humanitarianism and ruthless capitalism. This is, to an extent, justified, given the enormity of the crimes committed against the native population of Putumayo by the Peruvian Amazon Company in the name of Europe’s ever-increasing demand for rubber...