Word: french
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...With ornate geometrical tattoos covering his body, Tim is not the kind of guy you'd expect to wax poetically about a 19th century French painter. But then Hiva Oa is not your run-of-the-mill tourist island. With just 2,000 lucky inhabitants and one hotel, it's a place where the sight of a boy washing his horse in the surf on an empty black-sand beach, or copra drying in someone's front yard, is common. Hiva Oa is the second largest island in the Marquesas, a distinct group of 14 isles within French Polynesia, located...
...back of the museum is a reconstruction of the Maison du Jouir, complete with a reproduction of Gauguin's elaborate front-door frame that reads in French: "Be mysterious ... Be loving and you will be happy." A wax figure of the artist with palette eerily stands at one end of the house...
...first time Bongo had been exposed. In 1999, an investigation by the U.S. Senate into Citibank estimated that the Gabonese President held $130 million in the bank's personal accounts, money the Senate report said was "sourced in the public finances of Gabon." Earlier last decade, a French inquiry into the state-owned oil firm Elf-Aquitaine named Bongo as the beneficiary of millions of dollars in slush funds. (See pictures of the global financial crisis...
...Bongo was far from the only postcolonial African head of state to take his country's riches as a personal reward for the burdens of office. The French-property portfolios of two others - Denis Sassou-Nguesso of Congo Brazzaville and Teodoro Obiang of Equatorial Guinea - are also under investigation, and the French have made inquiries into the assets of Jose Eduardo dos Santos of Angola and Blaise Compaoré of Burkina Faso. Like Bongo, all have denied any wrongdoing. But Bongo was one of the greediest and, coming to power at 31 in 1967, just seven years after Gabon...
...themselves on the food thrown out for being past its sell-by date. Bongo, meanwhile, could be seen overhead twice a day, flying the few kilometers in the presidential helicopter from his presidential mansion to his office, then back again in the evening. (Read "The Enrichment of Africa's French Allies...