Word: corrupts
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...good idea: I couldn't persuade any of them to share my rental house in the city's walled Old Town. If they had heard of Cartagena at all, it was only as the backdrop of the classic 1980s romantic caper Romancing the Stone, a place of corrupt juntas and bodice-ripper-reading drug dealers - a parody turned deadly serious by four decades of civil war, Pablo Escobar and cocaine cartels. But what my friends - who spent their vacations standing in line at Space Mountain or screaming down the Atlantis waterslide - failed to realize is that Cartagena has become...
...office in Paris and revealed the names on its accounts, the Swiss passed a law in 1934 making such disclosures criminal. Years later, Swiss banks both sheltered the assets of German Jews and accepted looted Nazi gold (and later set up a $1.25 billion compensation fund for Holocaust victims). Corrupt leaders ranging from the Philippines' Ferdinand Marcos to Nigeria's Sani Abacha have used Swiss banks to hide ill-gotten gains. (See the top 10 financial collapses...
...doesn't fail." Like many locals, he was antagonized by the Taliban's violent methods but supports the call for Shari'a law. "The real issue was the courts," he says. "It took too long to get justice. People are fed up with this system. It's also corrupt." (See pictures of Pakistan's militant challenge...
...Vietnamese New Year. Tet is Vietnam's equivalent of Christmas; it's a holiday of family gatherings and lavish spending on gifts. But this year, a time for giving turned out to be a time for taking. It appears that many of the cash handouts were pocketed by corrupt local officials.(See pictures from the 1979 border war between Vietnam and China...
...surprised at the scope of the looting, says Tuong Lai, former director of the government-run Institute of Sociology in Hanoi. Vietnamese officials at all levels have a reputation for sticky fingers. Last Year, a survey on public-sector corruption by Transparency International ranked Vietnam 121st most corrupt out of 180 countries. "Stealing from the poor is nothing particularly new," says Lai. "But after a year of terrible difficulties, the Tet gift was supposed to be a gesture to help improve the trust of the Vietnamese people." Instead, Lai notes, it sabotaged...