Word: congos
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Hooper re-creates the early days of polio-vaccine research and weaves this narrative into the story of HIV's origins, which is pretty solid until it hits Africa. HIV can be traced back to bustling villages along the Congo River in the 1950s. From there, however, the story line frays into dozens of related but possibly unconnected threads. Hooper picks up several of these, including, tantalizingly, the fact that the earliest recorded AIDS cases coincide almost perfectly with a map of the polio-vaccine testing sites. But there is no evidence that cells from African chimps were used...
...curse or a blessing. They have taken at least one country, Botswana, from rags to riches. In terms of value, half the world's diamonds come from South Africa, Botswana or Namibia. The control of the diamond fields in Sierra Leone and the Democratic Republic of Congo has always been at the heart of dark and bloody civil wars in those nations as well. But Angola is a case unto itself, a land where a hijacked diamond industry continues to feed the fires of misery even as it swells the coffers of a rebel movement...
...retrospect, it's certainly not offensive stuff, and incredibly easy to listen to. That said, there are some tracks that just don't quite work. The faint tribal chanting on "Congo" seems experimental for experiment's sake, and the guitars on "Throwing It All Away" are pretty, but the sentiment is a little overwrought, as are the lyrics overly-melodramatic to the point of banality on "Follow You, Follow Me." It seems as though the producers, probably under the urging of the current band members, were stretching to select tracks to fill a pre-determined quota. It might have been...
...China), the Colorado River (U.S.) and the segment of the Nile River that runs into the Mediterranean (Africa) are in terrible shape, due mostly to agricultural and industrial run-off, as well as increased rates of evaporation. On the bright(er) side, the relatively sheltered Amazon (South America) and Congo (sub-Saharan Africa) are looking pretty robust. For the moment, anyway...
...into the apathy shown toward Africa's humanitarian crises? None of the transgressors can be considered "important" in that context, so why have America and the rest of the world shown scant interest in the suffering of the innocent civilians of Angola, Eritrea, Ethiopia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and other African states? PAUL MATHIAS Pretoria, South Africa...