My Seven Years In The World Of Gangsters: As of March 19, 2006 at 00:45, there have been 1,729,215 page views and 21,584 comments. The rest of this story is mixed in with the comments. The translator does not know how long the story goes on because he has not made it past even a small fraction of the comments ...

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The Yuexi Boat Disaster: The purpose of this exercise is to illustrate how difficult it is to get a reasonable understanding of an incident, and how it is necessary to refer to multiple accounts in order to piece together a picture which may not even be correct.

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The high price paid by China's miners : Nearly 6,000 died last year alone in more than 3,000 fires, floods, explosions and other accidents.

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Kiss warning to Malaysia tourists : The Malaysian government has had to step in to stop a number of organisations from forming private snoop squads to spy on the public and report immoral behaviour.

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Are Facts Obsolete?: For example, slavery is an issue that is widely discussed as if it were something peculiar to Africans enslaved by Europeans, instead of something suffered and inflicted around the world by people of every race, color, and religion. Two books about more European slaves brought to North Africa than there were African slaves brought to America have been published in recent years. They are "Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters" by Robert Davis and "White Gold" by Giles Milton. Both books have been largely ignored by the media and academia alike -- and the first went out of print, less than 6 months after being published. Biff- I checked excerpts from both books at Amazon and neither seems to make the claim that more Europeans were enslaved than the estimated 12 million Africans who were enslaved for the transatlantic trade. That said, at the risk of overgeneralizing, a slave is a slave and not a happy camper. And the slave trade isn't a team sport in which, by today's loony standards, that location with the most slaves historically wins. Enslaved Christians in North Africa in the end amounted to about one million.