Word: un
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...hundreds of thousands of people who are alive in Darfur who wouldn't be if it hadn't been for that public movement. It raised the costs to Sudan so that the Sudanese military or the Janjaweed couldn't attack some of the refugee camps. And it led the UN to feed some of these people and avert starvation. It didn't work nearly as well as it could have, but it was vastly better than the alternative...
...Un claims to have been born, firstly, as a mare near the Caspian Sea in 1125 B.C. In A.D. 1402, he says, he was reincarnated as a peddler in Samarkand and, half a millennium later, after stints as a firewood collector and an "innkeeper in an unknown land," he says he was born the eldest son of a farmer in Gunsan, present day South Korea, in 1933. Walking home from school one day in that "obscure corner of the world" - then like the rest of the country under Japanese colonial occupation, but now a drab port with an American...
...governments in the 1970s and '80s, has been turned into a museum of horrors, a red-brick Grand Guignol of simulated torture chambers as chilling as Tuol Sleng in Phnom Penh or Changi in Singapore. To visit is upsetting but essential if you're to see Korea the Ko Un way - that is, an experience of harmonious extremes, a bracing yin and yang of Buddhas and booze, temples and taverns and, if you've scored a visa to Pyongyang, visits to both sides of the 38th parallel...
...After all, the idea of a cooking contest is downright bizarre. Why not have a kissing contest? Or a baby-naming battle? The notion of taking something so subjective, personal and essentially un-competitive as cooking and making a Mortal Kombat-style tournament seems, at least on its surface, patently insane. (The original Japanese Iron Chef took this as a given, and presented the contests as the whim of a wealthy madman.) If you've ever participated in a cook-off, you know how meaningless the scoring is, how opaque and arbitrary the judges' standards are, how random and unpredictable...
...seems like it would be distinctly un-fun to be here,” she said...