Word: tolls
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...tens of thousands of mines scattered across the windblasted ocher hills northeast of Beijing. It is here--more than in the textile factories of the south where Western activists complain of sweatshop conditions--that Chinese pay in blood for their country's economic success. The official death toll fell some 20% last year, but as with many government statistics in China, the figures aren't sparking celebrations, even among safety officials. In fact, many industry observers believe that accidents are heavily underreported. Robin Munro, a human-rights activist at the Hong Kong--based China Labor Bulletin, working from an unofficial...
...toll highlights more than the awful conditions in an industry that the China Labor Bulletin calls "blood coal." It also exposes one of the most critical issues faced by Beijing: the inability of the central government to get local authorities to follow orders. The official Chinese media repeatedly feature stories on how local administrators ignore orders from Beijing on everything from controlling public spending and cracking down on corruption to protecting the environment. "Mining is the perfect case study of central-government relations with local government in China," says Arthur Kroeber, editor of the China Economic Quarterly. "The clash...
Still, I wanted to see how Café 150's founding chef, Nate Keller, managed to serve more than 400 purely local meals a day. Most chefs simply place orders with suppliers. Good cooks understand that quality and origin are related because of the toll extracted by transportation, but in the end, if Emeril Lagasse wants to serve wild salmon one night, he can just order it from Alaska. Keller, who recently became the chef at another Google restaurant, couldn't do that. Although just a freckly 30-year-old, he had to plan his menus the way preindustrial cooks...
...Regardless, Nanking is bound to cause deeply uneasy feelings in Japan, where many members of the extreme right either deny that the massacre occurred, or claim that the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal greatly exaggerated the death toll when it concluded that Japanese troops killed about 260,000 Chinese soldiers and civilians in Nanjing between 1937 and 1938. (Some also argue that photos of the atrocities were faked, including the beheading shown at left). At a news conference on Jan. 24, filmmaker Satoru Mizushima-who also runs a Japanese satellite-TV station-lashed out at Nanking, calling it "a setup...
...then all hell would be let loose. Iraq is a country where almost every household has at least one AK-47. If there is no Sunni-Shi'ite rapprochement, a full-blown civil war would raise the daily death toll from the scores to the hundreds--to say nothing of the escalation that would come if neighboring countries became involved, Iran backing the Shi'ite militias, Arab states sponsoring the Sunnis. Such a war could continue for years, with each sectarian community splitting into smaller factions led by rival warlords. In Baghdad, the ethnic cleansing would continue to its logical...