Word: underground
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Lately, the pace of transformation has been picking up, and the World Cup is one of the reasons. In 2004, South Africa won the contest to host the 2010 soccer championships, ushering in a $10 billion national infrastructure upgrade. In Joburg, that includes an underground train linking the city to a new airport, roads, a rapid bus system and two rehabbed stadiums. Most of the improvements were already planned, but as Williamson says, the Cup meant "a five-year plan became a two-year...
North Korea is great at scaring its neighbors. The isolated dictatorship carries a real nuclear threat, and tested its latest device this May in an underground bunker. Tensions in East Asia heightened this week after Pyongyang threatened "a fire shower of nuclear retaliation" if the U.S. or its allies in the region attempted any provocative action when trying to curb North Korea's missile program. Even those with historically warmer ties to the pariah state, such as Russia and China, have bristled at Pyongyang's latest moves. Still, North Korea may not be without friends...
North Korean links with Burma range far beyond small firearms - indeed, ties between the two outcast nations are literally deep. North Korean engineers reportedly aided the Burma's junta in building a vast series of 600 to 800 tunnel complexes and underground facilities, particularly beneath the junta's secretive new capital of Naypyidaw. Photographs leaked earlier this month to YaleGlobal, an international affairs website, show North Korean technicians milling around guest houses in the capital. Others published by the Oslo-based Democratic Voice of Burma, an anti-government television channel, detail the extent of some of these complexes, which have...
...Although most of the East German fashion underground's protagonists didn't consider themselves political, their celebration of individuality and ostentatious narcissism certainly was. The Mob was not afraid to play around with socialist symbols, such as the hammer and sickle, or to use Russian army wear as the basis for its designs. Doing so was not without risk in a country where the secret police would ban you from Alexanderplatz, the East German capital's central square, for nothing more than wearing a little glitter spray in your hair. (See the Green Design...
...Even more problematic are the regime's overriding security preoccupations. Key power and telecom transmissions are buried underground, which complicates much needed maintenance and upgrades. More communications also means eroded state control, which is a vital regime concern. There are currently only a little more than 1 million domestic phone lines - about 5 per 100 inhabitants - although just 10% belong to individuals or households. Unauthorized international calls abroad can lead to fines and arrest and in one case reportedly led to the public execution of a plant manager in October 2007, according to Good Friends, a Seoul-based aid organization...