Word: angola
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Conditions were not always so relaxed and congenial at the Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola. Just three years ago, the main prison and five outcamps at the 18,000-acre maximum-security prison farm -- physically the largest lockup in the country -- were rocking with murders, suicides and escape attempts. The mood was so tense that a federal judge declared a state of emergency, which included a state investigation and tightened federal oversight. Discontent among the 5,186 inmates could be summed up in a word: hopelessness. Prisoners, the vast majority of them lifers in a state where a life term...
Enter John Whitley, a quiet-spoken Louisiana native with a lazy smile, whose cowboy hats and elephant-hide boots make more of an impression than his low- key manner. In just 32 months, he has turned Angola around, relying on little more than his sense of decency and fairness. The number of stabbings, hangings and escape attempts has dropped dramatically. The malaise has lifted. Security officers say Whitley has improved communications between the prisoners and the 1,545-member staff. Inmates credit Whitley with providing new educational and recreational programs. Most important, inmates feel they have an advocate in Whitley...
Because of their proximity to power, the hired guns in Bush's posse are the most controversial. Charles Black, the unpaid senior political adviser to the Bush campaign, is a partner in the public relations firm of Black, Manafort, Stone and Kelly, which represents a rebel faction in Angola; the governments of Greece and Nigeria; and the Pacific Seafood Processors Association, which battled the Commerce Department earlier this year for the right to process a larger share of the $800 million Alaskan pollack catch. James Lake, Bush's unpaid deputy campaign manager, is a partner in the public relations firm...
...EVER SAID PEACE AND DEMOCRACY WOULD come easily. Sixteen bloody years after they were granted abrupt and unprepared independence from Portuguese rule, the southern African states of Mozambique and Angola finally have peace in sight. In Angola, two weeks after the country's first democratic election, the contenders seemed at last prepared to accept the outcome of the vote. In Mozambique President Joaquim Chissano and Afonso Dhlakama, leader of the guerrilla resistance movement Renamo, finally signed a peace pact last week...
...these reconciliations remained elusive right to the end, if indeed there is a peaceful end. Piqued at losing the vote to the governing Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA), erstwhile rebel Jonas Savimbi, leader of the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA), claimed that the MPLA rigged the result and only reluctantly withdrew his threat to take his troops out of the newly unified Angolan army, a move that would have put the country back on the brink of civil war. In Mozambique the immediate problem is to get the message of peace...