Word: taboo
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...tone for the Bush administration. Campaigning last fall, Bush pegged China as a strategic competitor. Earlier this year, defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld suggested it was time for the military to orient its strategic thinking toward the objective of containing Chinese regional ambitions in Asia. Bush also broke a taboo by vowing to "do whatever it takes" to defend Taiwan against an attack from the mainland - although that may have been a rhetorical slip, given his hurried efforts immediately afterwards to reassure Beijing and worried U.S. allies that there had been no departure from Washington's longstanding "One China" policy...
...watch as her 12-year-old daughter was gang-raped and murdered by the Khmer Rouge. She came through the darkness by "forgetting, loving, working" and now helps others do the same. He visits Greenland, where depression affects as much as 80% of the population. Yet the Inuits' taboo against "being a cloud in the sky for other people" prevents them from seeking help. Solomon's tales of suffering among America's poor, where depression occurs three times as often as among the general population, were rejected by a big-circulation newsmagazine as so "implausibly horrendous it becomes comical...
...ingredients. But placenta--the embryonic tissue formed in pregnant mammals and used for decades as a wrinkle reducer--is one beautifier that has long been kept under wraps. That may be changing: Mila Skin Care's new Amber Cream Placental has become a hot seller by proudly promoting the taboo ingredient. A 59-year-old aesthetician in Beverly Hills, Calif., says she gave up Botox injections a month after she started using the skin smoother. "The lines are just staying away," she says...
...Japanese voyeurs, sensational drama unfolds regularly on Channel 2, which claims some 8 million hits a day and is the country's eighth most accessed site. The bulletin board wasn't meant to be a soapbox for deranged malcontents but rather a rare haven for Japanese to discuss normally taboo subjects, like the yakuza, the royal family and discrimination against Koreans?topics the mainstream media either sanitizes or simply won't touch. "The Emperor is a war criminal. How is it that we haven't yet done away with the Imperial system?" asks an outspoken visitor to the history page...
...Whatever the motives of the gallows crowds of old, they at least acknowledged execution as a collective act. Today it is a tribal taboo, a purification ritual that dirties those who come in contact with it. And just as the majority of Americans still agree that it is right to kill killers but don't agree on why (revenge? deterrence? respect?), we are also not certain why it is wrong simply to watch the deed carried out. Would it horrify us or make us jaded? (Or - dare we say it - sympathetic?) Would it feed our bloodlust or weaken our will...