Word: burma
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...black and white images are of wartime in the 1940s. Nestor Burma, private detective, sticks his head out of the train window as it pulls out of the busy urban station. In the crowd of soldiers and milling civilians he spies his chunky colleague, Bob, who chases after the train, waving for Burma to get off. Suddenly, Bob clutches his chest. He shouts an address, "120, rue de la Gare," and falls, the back of his coat soaked in blood from multiple gunshots. As Burma tumbles out of the train, a beautiful girl in a trench coat stands...
...Nazi occupation. Where most detective fiction involves a city unofficially run by gangsters, here the villains are outwardly in control. As atmospheres go, it doesn't get much more corrupt and poisonous than this. On streets darkened by air-raid blackout conditions and plastered with anti-Semitic propaganda, Burma goes about his stoic business...
...Burma's investigations take him from a POW camp to Lyons to Paris. Along the way he discovers Bob's recent interest in the long-closed case of a jewel thief who left a strange posthumous riddle. Meanwhile the girl at the station has vanished and the address Bob shouted doesn't exist. Things heat up when Burma gets ambushed on a bridge but the attacker winds up a corpse in the river. The cast quickly expands to include several cops, a reporter, another P.I., the P.I.'s secretary, her lover, Burma's secretary, a shifty doctor and a well...
...Investors, which manages about $160 billion in assets, fund managers think Total needs to do more. A September 2001 accident at a Total fertilizer plant in Toulouse that killed 30 people raised questions about the company's safety record, says Henderson's Nick Robins, and its continuing presence in Burma puts it off limits for inclusion in some of Henderson's socially responsible funds. "We're looking for consistent year-on-year improvements," Robins says. "We recognize Total is trying to change, but we need another two to three years" to ensure that it is. Even internally, Total is still...
...farmers and fishermen who live in jungle villages along the southern coast of Burma were long overlooked and neglected by their government. And they liked it that way, given the notorious methods of the country's military dictatorship. But their lives changed horribly, they say, after two oil companies, the U.S. giant Unocal and its French partner Total, began exploiting natural-gas deposits offshore. The gas discovery prompted construction of a $1.2 billion pipeline through hundreds of miles of rain forest to an electrical plant in neighboring Thailand. At that point, villagers contend, the government began to view them...