Wednesday, November 27, 2019

The Countries Where Coca-Cola Is Not Sold

The Countries Where Coca-Cola Is Not Sold In 2013, Coca-Cola brought its product to Myanmar after relations between Myanmar and the international community began to improve. Today, the popular assertion is that Cuba and North Korea are the only two countries where Coca-Cola is not officially sold. Coca-Colas website claims that Coca-Cola is available in over 200 countries but there are actually only 196 independent countries on the planet. Further inspection of the Coca-Cola list reveals that numerous countries are missing (such as East Timor, Kosovo, Vatican City, San Marino, Somalia, Sudan, South Sudan- you get the picture). Therefore, the assertion that Coca-Cola is missing only from Cuba, and North Korea is most likely a falsehood. Additionally, in looking at the Coca-Cola website list, it is obvious that more than a dozen listed countries are not countries at all (such as French Guiana, New Caledonia, Puerto Rico, U.S. Virgin Islands, etc.). Thus, while Coca-Cola is widely distributed, there quite a few independent countries where the beverage is not available. Nonetheless, Coca-Cola likely remains the most widely distributed American product on the planet, even exceeding McDonalds and Subway restaurants.

Saturday, November 23, 2019

The eNotes Blog 2013 National Book AwardWinners

2013 National Book AwardWinners Is your Kindle finger itching? Do you have a yearning to go to the bookstore or library but dont know what sounds good? Well, maybe this will help.   Last night, this years National Book Awards were announced. Here is the complete list of winners and finalists. James McBride took the fiction prize for his novel The Good Lord Bird (Riverhead Books/Penguin Group USA): Abolitionist John Brown calls her â€Å"Little Onion,† but her real name is Henry. A slave in Kansas mistaken for a girl due to the sackcloth smock he was wearing when Brown shot his master, the light-skinned, curly-haired 12-year-old ends up living as a young woman, most often encamped with Brown’s renegade band of freedom warriors as they traverse the country, raising arms and ammunition for their battle against slavery. Though they travel to Rochester, New York, to meet with Frederick Douglass and Canada to enlist the help of Harriet Tubman, Brown and his ragtag army fail to muster sufficient support for their mission to liberate African Americans, heading inexorably to the infamously bloody and pathetic raid on Harpers Ferry.   Starred Review, Booklist   Carol Haggas Finalists for the prize included: Rachel Kushner, The Flamethrowers (Scribner/Simon Schuster) Jhumpa Lahiri, The Lowland (Alfred A. Knopf/Random House) Thomas Pynchon, Bleeding Edge (The Penguin Press/Penguin Group USA) George Saunders, Tenth of December (Random House) The winner for non-fiction is George Packer for The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) How have we come to feel that neither the government nor the private sector works as it should and that the shrinking middle class has few prospects of recovering its former glory? Through profiles of several Americans, from a factory worker to an Internet billionaire, Packer, staff writer for the New Yorker, offers a broad and compelling perspective on a nation in crisis. Packer focuses on the lives of a North Carolina evangelist, son of a tobacco farmer, pondering the new economy of the rural South; a Youngstown, Ohio, factory worker struggling to survive the decline of the manufacturing sector; a Washington lobbyist confronting the distance between his ideals and the realities of the nation’s capital; and a Silicon Valley entrepreneur pondering the role of e-commerce in a radically changing economy. Interspersed throughout are profiles of leading economic, political, and cultural figures, including Newt Gingrich, Colin Powell, Raymond Carver, Sam Walton, and Jay-Z. Also spr inkled throughout are alarming headlines, news bites, song lyrics, and slogans that capture the unsettling feeling that the nation and its people are adrift. Packer offers an illuminating, in-depth, sometimes frightening view of the complexities of decline and the enduring hope for recovery.   Starred Review, Booklist Vanessa Bush Finalists in the Non-Fiction Category were: Jill Lepore, Book of Ages: The Life and Opinions of Jane Franklin (Alfred A. Knopf/Random House) Wendy Lower, Hitler’s Furies: German Women in the Nazi Killing Fields (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) Alan Taylor, The Internal Enemy: Slavery and War in Virginia, 1772-1832 (W.W. Norton Company) Lawrence Wright, Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, the Prison of Belief (Alfred A. Knopf/Random House) Mary Szybist took the Poetry Prize for her collection,   Incarnadine: Poems (Graywolf Press) Love poetry and poetry of religious faith blend and blur into one transcendent, humbled substance. . . . Whether or not readers are attuned to the religious content, these are gorgeous lyrics, in traditional and invented formsone poem is a diagrammed sentence while another radiates from an empty space at the center of the pagewhich create close encounters with not-quite-paraphrasable truths. This is essential poetry.  - Publishers Weekly Poetry finalists included: Frank Bidart, Metaphysical Dog (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) Lucie Brock-Broido, Stay, Illusion (Alfred A. Knopf) Adrian Matejka, The Big Smoke (Penguin Poets/Penguin Group USA) Matt Rasmussen, Black Aperture (Louisiana State University Press) The winner for young peoples literature is Cynthia Kadohata for The Thing About Luck (Atheneum Books for Young Readers/Simon Schuster) It seems that if Summer’s Japanese American family didn’t have bad luck, they’d have no luck at all. Certainly good luck (kouun) is elusive. Consider that Summer has had malaria; her little brother, Jaz, is friendless; her parents have to fly to Japan to take care of elderly relatives; and her grandmother (Obaa-chan) and grandfather (Jii-chan) must pay the mortgage by coming out of retirement to work for a custom harvesting company. When the siblings accompany their grandparents on the harvest, Summer helps her grandmother, a cook, while Jaz is Jaz: intense, focused, and bad-tempered. At first, things go reasonably well, but then Jii-chan becomes sick, and it appears that it might be up to Summer to save the day. Will she succeed? Kadohata has written a gentle family story that is unusual in its focus on the mechanics of wheat harvesting.   (Grades 4-8) Starred Review,   Booklist Michael Cart Finalist for the young peoples literature award included: Kathi Appelt, The True Blue Scouts of Sugar Man Swamp   (Atheneum Books for Young Readers/Simon Schuster) Tom McNeal, Far Far Away (Alfred A. Knopf/Random House) Meg Rosoff, Picture Me Gone (G.P. Putnam’s Sons, a division of Penguin Group USA) Gene Luen Yang, Boxers Saints (First Second/Macmillan)

Thursday, November 21, 2019

Child labour and its impact on childhood and child health Essay

Child labour and its impact on childhood and child health - Essay Example The study â€Å"Child labour and its impact on childhood and child health† examines the issue of child labour on a global scale. According to the International Labour Organization, approximately 215 million children worldwide are employed as full time labour with little or no access to education and play. They have no access to proper nutrition or care and are essentially, deprived of their right to childhood. A significant number of these children live in third world countries, where the children are exposed to hazardous environments, which are deemed to be detrimental for their physical and mental health. According to estimates, almost 14 per cent of the world's children under the age of 18 are engaged in active employment. This proportion is higher in third world countries such as India, Nigeria, Pakistan, and Yemen. The interest in child labour issues has increased significantly over the recent decades indicating the gravity of the issue and its far reaching impacts on the children globally. Research indicates that the environmental conditions of workplaces play a key role in the health and well-being of the workers. Children are far more vulnerable to ill-health if made to work in extreme conditions, as compared to adults. Research suggests that due to anatomical differences between the children and adults, child workers are relatively more vulnerable to occupational health hazards. Constant exposure to carcinogens is known to cause cancer among children as compared to adults with similar amounts of exposure.... For instance, constant exposure to carcinogens is known to cause cancer among children as compared to adults with similar amounts of exposure. Furthermore children are prone to occupational injuries at work places as compared to adults, since they experience more fatigue and stress and have less knowledge and poor judgement than adults. Also, they are often made to work with tools which are mainly designed for adults thus making it difficult for them to handle them effectively (Bekele & Meyers, 1995). Furthermore child labour diversely affects the children’s education, and robs them of their basic right to rest, play, and leisure. Involvement of children in hazardous occupations at an early age may lead to serious health consequences affecting their physical as well as mental development. It may even lead to irreversible damage resulting in permanent disability (Hindman, 2009). According to WHO almost 111 million children under the age of 15 are involved in hazardous work whic h includes environments with high levels of chemicals, noise, and ergonomic risks such as lifting heavy loads etc. It also includes longer durations of work, night work, and work environments which may lead to physical and sexual harassment (WHO, 2012). It is argued that children in full time employment and forced to work for long hours are deprived of their right to leisure (Hobbs, McKechnie, and Lavalette, 1999; Haspels & Jankanish, 2000) thus resulting in emotional and psychological stress (Tienda & Wilson, 2002). Some researchers have observed that children are often paid a meagre amount for the same amount of work done by their adult peers. Furthermore child