conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me a description for a book titled Blood on the Stone about Maya, Mystery, Writers with the genre: Literature & Fiction, Action & Adventure.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: the author is a member of the Mystery Writers of America and the Maya Research Program. As a journalist in the U.S. Air Force, he wrote news releases and feature articles that were published in national and international media. As a university professor, he has published over a dozen articles and translations and delivered papers nationally and internationally. An avocational archeologist, Smoking Frog Lives!, his first mystery book is set in the modern Yucatan with a classic Maya background. The follow on, Blood on the Stone, is set in Guatemala. Contrary to popular belief he is not Indiana Jones.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Reverse the sentences.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Contrary to popular belief he is not Indiana Jones.. The follow on, Blood on the Stone, is set in Guatemala. An avocational archeologist, Smoking Frog Lives!, his first mystery book is set in the modern Yucatan with a classic Maya background. As a university professor, he has published over a dozen articles and translations and delivered papers nationally and internationally. Air Force, he wrote news releases and feature articles that were published in national and international media.S. As a journalist in the U.the author is a member of the Mystery Writers of America and the Maya Research Program
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the first four paragraphs for this book.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Blood on the Stone
  The 11th Kimberley meeting was held in a snowy Ottawa, in March 2002. Here one of the outstanding issues was at last resolved. Governments agreed that they would provide quarterly diamond trade statistics and semi-annual production statistics, even though it would take another 18 months to get a data-gathering system up, if not exactly running. This would make it possible to verify whether exports from Angola to Belgium, for example, equalled Belgian imports from Angola. The massive discrepancies of the past would now no longer be possible. A delegation from Taiwan arrived but the Chairman of the Kimberley Process - the head of South Africa's Diamond Board - nimbly avoided them. When the delegation phoned his hotel, they found his line blocked. They were then told he had checked out, and when they went to the Westin Hotel and sat in the lobby planning to corner him in person, they had no way of identifying him, short of accosting each of the many Africans who had come for the meeting. This was diplomacy in the Kimberley Process.
  So, what would now prevent someone from walking past customs with illicit goods and going straight to Hovenierstraat in Antwerp or 47th Street in New York? Nothing. But the industry chain of warranties - part of the system - was designed to provide an audit trail. Dealers handling rough diamonds would be required to keep records showing incomings and outgoings, by weight and value. The approach might vary from country to country. But each participating government agreed to 'maintain dissuasive and proportional penalties for transgressions' - something that had never before happened in the diamond industry.
  The system was not perfect. Diamonds are small and easy to conceal. But the illicit trade on which conflict diamonds had piggy-backed was founded on tax evasion and money laundering. Those trading in illicit diamonds in order to evade tax would now have to think twice, because some countries began to write the word 'forfeiture' into their regulations. Avoiding a thousand dollars in taxes might not be worth the risk of losing a million dollars in diamonds. Volume is the attraction for money launderers, and with better statistics and audit trails, large-scale money laundering would become more visible. Diamond theft, of course, will never be stopped completely, any more than car theft will be stopped completely. In the case of automobiles, the first deterrent - a hundred years ago - was door locks. Then came ignition locks, steering locks, serial numbers, alarms, fuel disablers and tracking devices. All serve to make car theft more difficult. That is what the Kimberley Process was all about: making it more difficult in a hitherto unregulated industry, to exchange stolen diamonds for weapons.
  The dilemma for NGOs centred squarely on the problem of monitoring, which seemed like a no-brainer. They were wrong. Although the industry had been slow, the barriers to an effective certification system were now being erected by governments. As the Kimberley negotiations progressed, it became obvious that some, notably Russia, Israel and China, would not agree to regular independent monitoring. Cost, commercial sensitivity and national sovereignty became their mantra - chanted at every meeting while most other governments sat on their hands and said nothing. Commercial sensitivity, however, was not a real issue because the standards to be monitored were systemic rather than financial in nature. No commercial secrets - in fact no commercial information of any kind - would be sought in a review mission. And if the total bill for all review missions in a year cost one or two million dollars, it would not add more than fifteen cents to a five hundred dollar diamond ring - in an industry that spent $170 million more in advertising than it had only two years earlier.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me five more paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: During 2003 and 2004 as the Kimberley Process began to gather strength, the signs were promising. The fact of the KP negotiations alone had helped choke diamond supplies to rebel movements in Angola and Sierra Leone, and contributed to the end of hostilities. And the KPCS was credited by several countries as having a direct impact on the growth in legitimate diamond exports, and thus of tax revenue. In 2005, Sierra Leone exported $142 million worth of diamonds, a huge increase on $26 million in 2001 and as good an indication as any that many more miners, buyers and exporters had decided that crime no longer paid. In 2003, the DRC had its best diamond export year in history. As important as stemming the flow of conflict diamonds might be, the KPCS also helped to formalize and clean up an industry that - at its edges - had operated for a century with little transparency and few paper trails, making it a fertile playground for all manner of illicit activity and for some of the world's most ruthless killers.
  The Kimberley Process data base, weak at first, was gradually transformed into the best and most reliable set of statistics on the world's rough diamond production and trade. The peer review system showed that the Kimberley Process could bare its teeth when it became the basis for expelling Congo-Brazzaville from the system in 2004. The Republic of Congo (Brazzaville), a long-time conduit for smuggled diamonds from neighbouring Democratic Republic of the Congo (Kinshasa), had no explanation for the large volumes it continued to export, and the solution was obvious.
  But the peer reviews, solid at first, soon became a hit and miss business. The cost of each participant on a team had to be met by his or her employer, which constrained many governments and limited participation. Some reviews were thorough, others were not. The worst example was a bloated 2008 review of Guinea. There the problem did not lie in finding enough members. Instead of the usual three government representatives and one each from industry and civil society, the team had nine members. But they spent less than two hours on the ground outside the capital city, and they did not complete their report for 11 months. This was not just dilatory, it was irresponsible in dealing with a country that had registered a staggering two-year 600 per cent increase in diamond production, and whose eastern border was immediately adjacent to the rebel diamond mining areas of Côte d'lvoire.
  Even where reports were thorough, recommendations often attracted little attention and no follow-up. Reviews in 2004 and 2005 of Angola and the DRC found that those governments could not say where as many as half of the diamonds they exported were mined. The same was true to a lesser extent in Guinea, Sierra Leone and other countries. This was the whole point of the Kimberley Process: to certify with confidence where diamonds came from. Subsequent studies by NGOs between 2005 and 2009, and by the Kimberley Process itself in 2009 showed that nothing had changed.
  Perhaps the worst example of blatant non-compliance occurred in Venezuela, a smallish diamond producer, but a founding member of the Kimberley Process and an important link in the overall diamond pipeline. Early in 2005, Venezuela simply stopped issuing Kimberley Certificates. There was no explanation, and no amount of correspondence from the Kimberley Process succeeded in re-establishing contact. Finally, at the end of 2006, Partnership Africa Canada sent an investigator to Venezuela. His report showed that diamonds were still being mined and were being openly smuggled into Brazil and Guyana. When the story reached the media, the Kimberley Process and the government of Venezuela both appeared to awaken, as if from a siesta. Venezuela sent a senior official to KP meetings where he denounced PAC. Finally, in October 2008, the KP sent a high-level team to Caracas for discussions. NGOs, an integral part of the Kimberley Process and members of all reviews up to that point, were forbidden, and the Potemkin team obligingly ate up Potemkin promises, never visiting diamond mining areas or easy-to-reach trans-border smuggling points. It simply regurgitated the blandishments it had been fed in Caracas. Venezuela, it was agreed, did have some problems regulating its diamonds, and the government offered to suspend all exports for two years while it revamped its controls. But Venezuela had already 'suspended' shipments years before, in the sense that it had issued no certificates and submitted no production or export data since 2005.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the last paragraph.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Up-country in Sierra Leone, in Koidu Town where I taught school in the 1960s, damaged buildings are being reconstructed. Aid money has helped returning refugees to resettle. Markets are bustling. There was also, until not very long ago, something that none of us who lived there in the 1960s could possibly have imagined: Koidu Secondary School, once crowded with boys and girls eager for what looked like a bright future, was for a time the headquarters of UNAMSIL's Pakistan Battalion, there to prevent a recurrence of the terrible past. The last of the foreign troops left at the end of 2005, and Sierra Leone is once again on its own. Koidu Secondary School is once again a place where boys and girls attend class and think about what they will be when they grow up. Not more than a mile away, however, other children stand waist-deep in filth and mud at a place called Kaisombo. There, they dig for diamonds.