from independent:
Mao Zedong, founder of the People's Republic of China, qualifies as the greatest mass murderer in world history, an expert who had unprecedented access to official Communist Party archives said yesterday.
Speaking at The Independent Woodstock Literary Festival, Frank Dikötter, a Hong Kong-based historian, said he found that during the time that Mao was enforcing the Great Leap Forward in 1958, in an effort to catch up with the economy of the Western world, he was responsible for overseeing "one of the worst catastrophes the world has ever known".
Mr Dikötter, who has been studying Chinese rural history from 1958 to 1962, when the nation was facing a famine, compared the systematic torture, brutality, starvation and killing of Chinese peasants to the Second World War in its magnitude. At least 45 million people were worked, starved or beaten to death in China over these four years; the worldwide death toll of the Second World War was 55 million.
from upi:
Followers of Chinese communist leader Mao Zedong managed to shutdown the sole bottler of Coke in Nepal over an ongoing employment dispute.
The Times of India reported that since Saturday, a Maoist labor union has effectively shut down two bottling plants owned by Bottlers Nepal in an attempt to force the Coke producer to rehire 55 contract workers.
The 55 workers had been recently laid off from plants in the Nepalese cities of Kathmandu and Bharatpur, ultimately leading to the labor standoff.
The movement by the Maoist group against worker exploitation comes as Coke is beginning an international mobile campaign aimed at promoting its carbonated products.
The standoff also marks the second such occurrence in the area for a soft drink company after Pepsi recently encountered a similar incident.
The paper said earlier this month, Varun Beverages, Nepal's Pepsi bottler, lost nearly a week of production after a Maoist union held back workers seeking better facilities and permanent positions.
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