Word: africas
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...glories: the huge creature's magnificent tusks of ivory. Since the early 1980s, the price of ivory has surged from $25 per lb. to $80 per lb. As a result, growing bands of wily and ruthless poachers have taken to hunting down elephants illegally all across Africa, killing the animals with everything from automatic weapons to poison. About 10% of the remaining African elephants were killed last year, reducing their ranks to fewer than 750,000. If the slaughter continues at the present pace, the wild elephant could be close to extinction within a decade...
...much for theory. In reality, the quota system has been ineffective in controlling the trade. Up to 90% of the tusks that enter the marketplace have been taken illegally by poachers, and smugglers have little trouble getting the ivory out of Africa. Angolan rebel leader Jonas Savimbi has reportedly financed his insurrection with ivory taken from more than 100,000 elephants. Some countries seem to be conduits for the illegal trade. With roughly 4,500 elephants of its own, Somalia has still managed to export tusks from an estimated 13,800 elephants in the past three years, evidence that...
...statement, which is not a papal encyclical but simply an advisory document put out by the Church's Pontifical Commission on Peace and Justice at the Pope's request, condemns South Africa by name for its apartheid system. It also calls on the South African regime to overcome the prejudices which motivate it so it may "build the future on the principle of the equal dignity of every person...
...contrast to South Africa, the Church document cites the United States as a place where society has "found increased vitality in the melting pot cultures." But the document also points to latent racial tensions in American society that express themselves when "exaggerated nationalism" degenerates into "xenophobia or even racial hatred...
...freshman in-the-know, you are probably aware that every spring there is a resurgence of student activism at Harvard. A few years ago, the burning issue among students was the University's investments in firms doing business with the apartheid regime in South Africa. Last spring, it was the embarrassingly low numbers of minorities on Harvard's faculty...