National / International News

Double Brit winner Emeli Sande could be in line for further accolades, having been nominated for two prizes at next month's Ivor Novello awards.

Computer glitches at home can be frustrating, but what about when they keep an entire airline company from taking off? That’s what happened yesterday, when American Airlines had to cancel over 400 flights and deal with massive delays because employees couldn't access its computerized reservation system, Sabre.

"Airline reservation systems tend to be very, very complex integrated networks," says Ken Colburn, CEO of Data Doctors, which helps companies recover data after a disaster or a system meltdown. "All it takes is one portion of the network to malfunction and it can really cause disruption across the system.

While American Airlines is nearing a merger with US Airways, the two companies haven't yet tried to combine their complicated reservation software and data. Colburn says finding problems within large systems can be like searching for a needle in a haystack. A hardware failure, a wonky piece of code, or that age-old classic: an honest mistake.

"It's entirely possible that it's just one of those really dumb human error things -- somebody tripped over a cord, somebody removed a file," he says. "Most of these systems are really looking for outside hackers or outside issues, and a lot of times it ends up being something really benign internally that just spun out of control."

American Airlines representatives said they would refund cancellations and waive fees for rescheduling.

Tesco's annual profits fall for the first time in almost 20 years as the UK's biggest supermarket confirms it is pulling out of the US.

Car registrations across Europe were down 10.3% in March from a year earlier, marking the 18th consecutive month of falls.

A new study shows allowing unauthorized immigrants in Arizona to become legal citizens would improve their pay and working conditions.

The Morrison Institute Latino Public Policy Center at Arizona State University released the study Wednesday. It says the state's estimated 190,000 unauthorized workers would see a pay increase of 8 to 11 percent if they were granted citizenship. 

"They do better because they can compete for jobs that are available only to U.S. citizens. But more than that, becoming a citizen shows your commitment to America," says author Mike Slaven. 

Slaven says employers will invest in those committed workers. According to the study, a path to citizenship could mean up to $246 million a year in extra income for Arizona's low-wage immigrant workforce. This trend applies to the whole country, because "every state has people who fall into that category," Slaven says. 

Still, citizenship may not be a magic tonic. The UCLA Labor Center's Victor Narro points to 1986 — when a wave of three-million people were granted amnesty. He says that law had something very important missing from it. It did not guard against wage theft and workplace discrimination.

"We need to make sure that no matter what comes out of Congress, there has to be a commitment of resources to make sure worker protection laws are going to be enforced," Narro says.

Otherwise, he adds wages will stay low.

Unbeaten Australian mare Black Caviar is to be retired after winning 25 consecutive races during a four-year career.

Richard LeParmentier, the US character actor known to millions as one of Darth Vader's first victims in Star Wars, has died aged 66, his family announces.

Fox pulls a recent episode of the show from its websites that depicted people being run over by a car at the Boston Marathon.

Retracing Graham Greene's footsteps to a sacred waterfall

Springtime in Central China’s Hubei province is marked with bright yellow terraced fields of rapeseed blossoms -- life abounds. But inside a small home in the tiny village of Niuchong, death is near. 42-year-old Zhang Runxiang is curled up in the fetal position on her bed inside a bare concrete room, insulated from the sound of birds singing to each other outside. She’s suffering through the late stages of uterine cancer. Her mother sits beside her, caressing her pale white hand, sobbing. Zhang’s husband Zhou Yuansheng walks out of the room, shaking his head.

“My wife was diagnosed with cancer three years ago after they started digging underneath our home,” recalls Zhou. “She got it from the drinking water. It changed color and it developed a thick layer of sediment from all the mining.”

Economy at the expense of the environment

Like many other villagers here who have lost loved ones to cancer in recent years, Zhou blames his wife’s condition on Dasheng Chemical, the village’s phosphate mining operation and fertilizer factory that began operations nearly a decade ago.

“Now many people here have cancer,” says Zhou, shaking his head, “all kinds of cancer.”

Stories like this have become more common as China begins to come to terms with three decades of historic economic growth that has left much of the nation’s countryside –the source of China’s massive food supply -- contaminated with toxic chemicals. It’s also left Chinese people suffering from an 80 percent increase in cancer rates from 30 years ago, at the start of the country’s economic reforms.

“Our existing economic growth model –the relentless pursuit of GDP growth- is built on sacrificing the environment,” says Zeng Xiangbin, a Wuhan-based environmental lawyer. “There is simply no pollution site that I visit where I don’t feel heartbroken.”

Zeng has made a career out of defending farmers who live in China’s so-called “cancer villages” against local industry and government officials. On this day, he’s in Niuchong village to assess the damage from Dasheng Chemical’s mining and fertilizer production operation. A one thousand foot-high pile of ash looms above a river valley, blending in with the mountains that surround the village. Each day, Dasheng Chemical’s dump trucks unload more ash onto the hill, dumping piles of phosphogypsum, an industrial byproduct of phosphate fertilizer that contains cancer-causing chemicals like arsenic, chromium-6, and cadmium. Factories have dumped 300 million tons of phosphogypsum in villages like Niuchong all over the country. China produces nearly half of the world’s phosphate fertilizer, exporting nearly a fifth of it to other countries.

In 2009, Chinese journalist Deng Fei published a map highlighting a number of China's 'cancer villages.' Stella Xie translated this version of the map.

View China's Cancer Vilages in a larger map

It takes a village

Niuchong Villager Yao Chengying, a straight-talking pig farmer in her 50s, says the runoff from the mountain of phosphogypsum combined with the emissions from Dasheng’s fertilizer factory have poisoned the village’s crops. “All the crops just died,” says Yao. “The watermelons were inedible. Even the pigs wouldn’t eat them.”

Yao’s piglets were born with deformed bodies as her other pigs slowly died off. She tried to fall back on her rice crop, but as the pollution became worse, more regional purchasers avoided the region, labelling rice from Niuchong village as poisonous. And that’s when farmers in Niuchong realized the battle for safer food in China started with them.

“Ever since 2010, we’ve assembled a group of farmers to protest at the Dasheng factory gates on a weekly basis,” says Yao. Farmers have even made several trips to Beijing to petition to the central government authorities. Facing pressure from the provincial government, Dasheng chemical reimbursed the first two farming families to complain about lost livestock and crops. And then more farmers protested.

“The local government quickly became scared,” says Yao, “so police arrested the two residents -- my husband included -- who’ve managed to get reimbursed by the company as a warning to the other farmers who were protesting.”

Yao’s husband Wei Kaizu and villager Yu Dinghai were arrested by police six months ago, charged with blackmailing Dasheng Chemical. Yao says the two men were framed by the local government, which owns a stake in Dasheng Chemical and was doing the company a favor.

Neither Dasheng Chemical nor officials from the city of Zhongxiang, which carried out the arrest, agreed to an interview with Marketplace. The trial of the two men is was originally scheduled for April 9th. It’s been postponsed until the end of April.

Village chief: "I'm ashamed."

Meanwhile, the village chief of Niuchong has been busy mediating the near-constant struggle between his villagers, Dasheng Chemical, and government officials in Zhongxiang, the city that has jurisdiction over the village.

“As the head of the village, I’m ashamed that I can’t do more to help get villagers access to cleaner water,” says Li Jun, “They have every right to complain about it. I’ve appealed many times to my superiors in the city government, but since it’s going to cost a lot to install new water lines here, they’ve put the village on a waiting list.”

In the past year, city officials have sent Li to Beijing multiple times to intercept local villagers who made it to Beijing to file official complaints against local officials.

“My villagers made it to Beijing three times last year,” recalls Li, “I was finally removed from my previous party secretary role because of my failure to rein them in.”

But Li’s got other things to worry about. His father is one of dozens in Niuchong village who are dying of cancer.

At the home of Zhou Yuansheng, family from throughout the region crowd around the bed of his wife, who is in her final days of battling cancer. His 20 year-old son has just arrived from Southern China.

“Before she became sick, we made enough money to ensure that our son would finish high school and go onto university,” says Zhou. “But we’ve spent so much on her chemotherapy treatment, my son had to drop out of high school to earn more money at a factory.”

Two days later, Zhou’s wife Zhang Runxiang died at the age of 42, the latest villager in Niuchong to succumb to cancer.

Correction: Due to a translation error, the original article misstated the type of cancer Zhang Runxiang suffered from. She died from uterine cancer. The text has been corrected.

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