Word: dirt-poor
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Beginning around 2005, Colombian traffickers began arriving in Guinea Bissau, smuggling in cocaine worth about 10 times the country's annual GDP, according to U.N. officials. The cartels found ideal terrain for their massive trafficking operations. The dirt-poor country has few natural resources and only 1.6 million people. And there are dozens of remote tropical islands, with about 24 airfields built during colonial days. There the traffickers flew small aircraft, dropping hundreds of pounds of cocaine almost weekly direct from Colombia. According to European Union drug reports, the cocaine was then smuggled in small quantities into Europe. The government...
...credit side of the ledger, that's about it. Piracy is nasty, brutish--and old. As long as richly laden ships have sailed within reach of dirt-poor land, piracy has been part of our heritage. That has long been true in the Mediterranean, the South China Sea, the Caribbean--and is true now in the waters off the Horn of Africa. This year alone, pirates based in Somalia, where any semblance of a functioning state broke down years ago, are thought to have attacked more than 90 ships. In a recent 48-hour period, they apprehended vessels from Greece...
...only does he cheat on his wife--prolifically--but he also hides his true identity from her and the rest of the world. Born Dick Whitman and orphaned as a boy, he went to Korea, swiped the dog tags of a fallen soldier (the real Draper), abandoned his dirt-poor relatives and rose to the heights of swellegant, three-martini Wasp success on Madison Avenue...
...shot dead in the street when she was a teenager, and another uncle died of AIDS in November. Before joining the choir in 2003, she earned just $25 a month from singing and dancing at weddings - not enough to support the three families living in her shack in the dirt-poor township of Alexandra, near Soweto. The choir, which pays members a day rate of $20 per rehearsal, seemed the answer to her prayers, until she collapsed during a performance and was diagnosed with a congenital heart defect. Today, out of hospital, solvent and dreaming of buying a house...
...past decade and a half, the frantic pace of urbanization has been the transformative engine driving this country's economy, as some 300-400 million people from dirt-poor farming regions made their way to relative prosperity in cities. Within the contours of that great migration, however, there is another one now about to take place - less visible, but arguably no less powerful. As China's major cities - there are now 49 with populations of one million or more, compared with nine in the U.S. in 2000 - become more crowded and more expensive, a phenomenon similar to the one that...