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Railway to ruin: Hanoi train factory fades from glory

2018-06-23T20:51:04Z

Ulrike7916:

The Gia Lam train factory in Hanoi was the first in the then-French territory established to bolster the expanding rail network of the time Built by the French to fix trains for their fast-developing Vietnamese colony, the Gia Lam factory later churned out weapons to fuel the country's independence fight, and then survived the onslaught of American bombers during the war. But the storied Hanoi plant is now in decline, a victim of the rising consumer power of Vietnam's middle classes as passengers turn from trains to planes. The storied Hanoi plant is now in decline, a victim of the rising consumer power of Vietnam's middle classes as passengers turn from trains to planes "In the past, I was proud to work here because this factory was the biggest in Indochina," repairman Au Duy Hien told AFP. Opened in 1905, Gia Lam was the first train factory in the then-French territory, which spanned modern-day Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. Mechanics used the base to first fix and then assemble the engines and carriages that served the region's rapid push toward industrialisation. The factory was taken over by the Vietnamese in the 1940s, expanding production to make bazookas and grenades for revolutionaries fighting the colonial rulers who were finally thrown out in 1954 The factory [http://www.vtr.org.vn/cam-nang-du-lich-bac-kinh-5-ngay-4-dem.html tour bắc kinh từ hà nội] was taken over by the Vietnamese in the 1940s, expanding production to make bazookas and grenades for revolutionaries fighting the colonial rulers who were finally thrown out in 1954. And then it continued to make weapons during the Vietnam War -- even as it was bombed by US planes targeting Communist-backed revolutionaries in northern Vietnam. - Running out of steam - Output at the factory [http://www.vtr.org.vn/cam-nang-du-lich-bac-kinh-5-ngay-4-dem.html vtr.org.vn] is down more than 90 percent since its 1990s heyday and it is now mostly used to repair old trains, with little demand for new carriages on the country's vast but outdated rail network But today, output is down more than 90 percent since its 1990s heyday. It is now mostly used to repair old trains, with little demand for new carriages on the country's vast but outdated rail network. The industry [http://www.vtr.org.vn/cam-nang-du-lich-bac-kinh-5-ngay-4-dem.html tour bắc kinh từ hà nội] is struggling to keep pace with the lure of low-cost air travel. For many, the choice between a clanging, slow-moving train or a quick -- and cheap -- plane is a no-brainer. In 2015, 31 million people travelled by air, more than double the number in 2010, according to official statistics. Train use remained steady at 11 million for the year. Today, some companies are seeking to revive the colonial romance of rail travel, offering first-class trips, wood-lined cabins with restaurant car. The air travel industry in Vietnam has taken off in recent years, aided by the launch of low-cost airlines offering cheap tickets. In 2015, 31 million Vietnamese took to the skies, more than double the number who flew in 2010 "If rail transportation isn't developed, then the railway industry cannot be revived," [http://Www.estateguideblog.com/?s=union%20boss union boss] Nguyen Anh Tuan told AFP. Some lawmakers recently called for private investment into the state-controlled sector, and the country's parliament is currently considering revising the law. But unless the industry sees a major upturn in fortunes, Gia Lam employees fear it will soon run out of steam. Advertisement

Green Tea Diet - Weight Loss

2018-06-23T17:53:47Z

Ulrike7916:

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Believe it or not 1968 was worse

2018-06-20T01:27:26Z

Ulrike7916:

By Maurice Isserman July 12 (Reuters) - According to the Chinese Zodiac, 1968 and 2016 are both the Year of the Monkey. But maybe we should call this the [http://www.vtr.org.vn/cam-nang-du-lich-bac-kinh-5-ngay-4-dem.html tour bắc kinh từ hà nội] Year of the Ghost Monkey of 1968. From the presidential primaries to the convention platform battles to bloody mayhem in the streets, 1968 is the go-to, default metaphor for what we seem to be reliving. This year, like 1968, is certainly one of bitter conflict and wrenching change. And why is that a surprise? Some things don't change. A nation of several hundred million people, drawn from all over the world, can never exactly become a peaceable kingdom, a beloved community. Creeds differ, values clash; rival factions, communities and priorities compete. Harmony would be nice - and an end to bloodshed is a goal to which most Americans can subscribe. But bear in mind that it has always been through conflict that Americans have decided who [http://www.vtr.org.vn/cam-nang-du-lich-bac-kinh-5-ngay-4-dem.html du lịch Bắc Kinh] they are as a nation, discarding old assumptions and redefining identity and mission. I've been thinking about one of my favorite 1960s writers, the remarkable Vietnam War correspondent Michael Herr, who died two weeks ago. He covered the Vietnam War for "Esquire" in 1967-68, and his book, "Dispatches," remains one of the greatest works about that troubled conflict. (Herr also contributed to the screenplays of two iconic Hollywood movies about the war, "Apocalypse Now" and "Full Metal Jacket.") "Dispatches" is more than a war memoir, however. It offers genuine insight into American history and the American character. "There was such a dense concentration of American energy there," Herr wrote of Vietnam in the late 1960s. "American and essentially adolescent, if that energy could have been channeled into anything more than waste and pain it would have lighted up Indochina for a thousand years." I can't think of any other American writer who has managed to pack into one sentence so much love for his country - and so much disdain for the folly in which, in that instance, it was engaged. Another passage in "Dispatches" also came to mind last week. Herr describes the first time he went on a mission with a company of Marines, and ended up caught in a fire-fight, hugging the ground for hours, "listening to it going on, the moaning and whining and the dull repetitions of whump whump whump and dit dit dit, listening to a boy who'd somehow broken his thumb sobbing and gagging, and thinking 'Oh my God, this f-ing thing is on a loop!...'" Here's last week's loop: Tuesday, "whump whump whump," black man in Louisiana pinned to the ground by police officers then shot to death. Wednesday, "dit dit dit," another black man, this time in Minnesota, shot and killed in the front seat of his car as, his girlfriend said, he tried to produce the driver's license demanded by a police officer -- she sat in the seat beside him, her young daughter in the back seat. Thursday night, "dit whump dit," five Dallas policemen targeted and murdered by a vengeful rooftop sniper, seven others wounded. Senseless death of innocent victims, brought home in disturbingly graphic detail via cable news and social media. Is it apocalypse now in the streets of America? And all this in the context of recent years [http://www.vtr.org.vn/cam-nang-du-lich-bac-kinh-5-ngay-4-dem.html vtr.org.vn] of fervent protest over issues of racial injustice, in a nation beset by repeated acts of violence, both random and targeted, in the midst of a presidential campaign running off the tracks, with one candidate in particular displaying an ability to stir up as much rancor and discord as possible. If history is on a loop, are we back in the world of "Dispatches"? Is this 1968 redux? Do we really have to sit through this movie again? Not likely. Fifty years have indeed changed America. The country is more diverse, ethnically, racially and religiously. There is a far more substantial black middle class than in 1968. (While at the same time the problem of black poverty, and for that matter white poverty, seems more intractable than ever.) Although it's sometimes hard to remember with all the noise generated by polarizing politicians, the United States is more tolerant than it was a half century ago - when the idea that there would someday be a black president seemed impossibly remote, and the notion of gay marriage unimaginable. In 1968, the nation was still adjusting to the U.S. Supreme Court's wonderfully named decision "Loving v. Virginia," issued the previous June, which overturned laws that banned interracial marriage. Until then, nearly one-third of American states had such laws on their books. Today at least 12 percent of all new marriages in the United States unite interracial couples, and the trend is expected to expand as millennials, least concerned of all Americans about race, reach marriage age. Reminded by the Iraq invasion of the consequences of national hubris in international affairs, a lesson learned and then forgotten after Vietnam, Americans are again skeptical of "boots on the ground" scenarios for remaking the world in their own image. The fact that this skepticism, even in the absence of a draft, is shared across the generational spectrum - and is, to some extent, bipartisan - is another important difference between 1968 and today. Americans are also asking important questions about economic policies and decisions taken in Washington and corporate board rooms, that have increased income inequality to levels not seen since the 1920s. Americans as a people, many of them anyway, are more self-aware and thoughtful in this second decade of the 21st century than has been the case for some decades. It's true that the presumptive presidential candidate of the party of Abraham Lincoln wants to make America "great again" by turning back the clock to the imagined splendor of an era of racial and ethnic homogeneity. But come November, after all the shouting and posturing, there will come a great moment of clarity, when the diverse population of America votes. Speaking of clarifying moments in American history, in his first speech as president in March 1861, the first Republican president of the United States beseeched his fellow countrymen to listen to the "better angels of their nature" and avoid the looming Civil War. That did not, Lincoln assured Southerners, mean the end of slavery, at least in the short run. His appeal fell on deaf ears. But just two and a half years later, in a November 1863 address at Gettysburg, Lincoln proclaimed a "new birth of freedom," carrying on and transforming the meaning of the American experiment, in which there no longer was a place for human servitude. And, in doing so, [https://Www.sportsblog.com/search?search=changed changed] the nation. History was not on a loop in the 1860s. Nor in the 1960s. In a Memphis church on April 3, 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. reflected on the possibility of his own death. He had been nearly killed by a deranged assailant in 1958, and he explained why he was glad to have survived - and not just because he loved life. "I wouldn't have been around here in 1960," King recalled, "when students all over the South started sitting in at lunch counters." What those students were doing, he said, was making America great again by setting out to challenge and change its injustices: "They were really standing up for the best in the American dream, and taking the whole nation back to those great wells of democracy the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution." Lincoln and King lived in difficult times, as we do. It is in just such eras that Americans have rediscovered and refashioned the best traditions bound up in our national experience. Can we resolve in the years that follow the tumultuous election year of 2016 to listen to the better angels of our nature, and turn the dense concentration of American energy away from waste and pain - and use it instead to light our world? (Maurice Isserman) Advertisement

Japan s tiny refugee community urges Tokyo to open doors wider

2018-06-13T18:04:47Z

Ulrike7916:

By Kiyoshi Takenaka YOKOHAMA, Japan, Nov 29 (Reuters) - Hitoshi Kino, a bespectacled clerical employee at a university near Tokyo, doesn't stand out. Only a slight Vietnamese accent betrays his past, as he speaks in Japanese about being stranded on a rickety boat in waters off his war-torn homeland in 1980, starving with 32 others and left by pirates with nothing but his underpants. Kino, who was then Ky Tu Duong, is one of more than 11,000 refugees that Japan took in over the three decades to 2005 in the aftermath of the Vietnam War, under a little-remembered open-door policy which has never been repeated on such a scale. Now, Kino and other "boat people" who have resettled in Japan believe Tokyo should again open its doors and let in some of today's asylum seekers, including those from Syria, not just for those in distress but for Japan's sake as well "Japan should open up a little to them to align itself with the international community," Kino, who became a Japanese citizen in mid-1980s, said over [http://Search.About.com/?q=Chinese%20dumplings Chinese dumplings] and stir-fry at [http://www.vtr.org.vn/cam-nang-du-lich-bac-kinh-5-ngay-4-dem.html tour bắc kinh từ hà nội] a restaurant near his home west of Tokyo. "It could be just 100, or 50. But it would be better than doing nothing." Japan took just 11 of 5,000 asylum-seekers last year, or 0.2 percent, the lowest acceptance rate in the club of rich nations, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development. In contrast, France took 22 percent and Germany 42 percent. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has offered nearly $2 billion to help other nations manage the flood of refugees from Syria's civil war, but his government has virtually shut the door on those fleeing Europe's worst migrant crisis since World War Two. [http://www.vtr.org.vn/cam-nang-du-lich-bac-kinh-5-ngay-4-dem.html vtr.org.vn] This month's attacks in Paris, in which 130 people were killed in mass shootings and suicide bombings blamed on Islamic State, could make any public discussion of accepting refugees into Japan even more difficult. The government's reluctance to accept refugees shows that opening up to immigration is still politically unpalatable, despite an alarming shrinkage in the country's population. After the 2011 nuclear disaster caused by earthquake and tsunami, "foreigners scrambled to leave Japan. But few of us former refugees fled", Kino said. "Japan helped us and took care of us. We would not desert such a country." Indochina refugees speak not only of gratitude toward their adopted country but also of difficulties they have faced trying to fit into society, which prides itself on its homogeneous culture. Foreigners make up only 2 percent of the population. On the job, some Japanese "assume we don't understand things easily and we are not smart", said Hoai Takahashi, another refugee from Vietnam who changed his name from Hoang Drong Hoai. "They even say things like 'This job should not be left to these people,' in our very presence." Banri Kawai, formerly Nguyen Van Ry, works at a facility in eastern Japan that houses five former Vietnamese refugees with mental illness. He said they had been bullied by their Japanese seniors at work. "They lost sleep and developed mental conditions," he said after attending Sunday service with Takahashi at a Catholic church north of Tokyo. Chrisna Ito, who arrived in Japan at the age of 15, says she was rebuked at a factory dorm for using the communal bath before others had finished. She assumed they thought she was dirty because her skin was darker than that of a typical Japanese. Ito, a 43-year-old nursery school worker who was Cheth Chan Chrisna before fleeing Cambodia, had to start working at the rubber factory to support her family after six months of language and other adjustment training. It was [http://www.vtr.org.vn/cam-nang-du-lich-bac-kinh-5-ngay-4-dem.html tour bắc kinh từ hà nội] only after she married and had children - now in high school and college - that she fulfilled her aspiration to go to junior high and high school. Asked how she feels about the government support she received, Ito reflected for a moment. "I am grateful. But at the same time, I cannot help wondering if Japan could have done a little better." (Additional reporting by Thomas Wilson; Editing by William Mallard and Mark Bendeich) Advertisement

User:Ulrike7916

2018-06-13T18:04:42Z

Ulrike7916: Created page with "My name's Ulrike Fannin but everybody calls me Ulrike. I'm from Netherlands. I'm studying at the college (3rd year) and I play the Clarinet for 5 years. Usually I choose music..."

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