Word: gabon
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Port Gentil is no ordinary town. That much is clear from the moment you touch down in the small coastal city in the West African nation of Gabon. Next to the airport exit, a gaggle of shrieking, minimally dressed women dance to loud rock on the terrace of a bar called Le Aero Club. "Come fly me!" one shouts down. Instead, I accept a taxi driver's offer of a ride into town - a 10-minute drive that costs $30. We drive past another bar, A Qui La Tour? - which roughly translates as "Whose round is it?" although the driver...
...medium-sized house touching $6,000 a month, it's still comfortably in the top 10. The reason? Port Gentil is a ville petrolier, an oil town that has drawn rig workers and executives from places as far away as Texas, Aberdeen and Caracas to earn fortunes pumping Gabon's oil reserves - and spend it like there's no tomorrow...
...pinned down by artillery fire. On Tuesday morning, according to Reuters, automatic weapons fire ripped through the city and at least two government tanks headed towards the main area of fighting. The United Nations says it is flying in 400 extra Dutch and German peacekeepers on standby in nearby Gabon. They will join the 17,000 U.N. peacekeeping troops dotted around the vast central African nation. Diplomats from the U.N., South Africa and elsewhere are now scrambling to end the fighting before it spreads...
These days there are other wildcatters running tiny public companies investing in places like Peru and the Caspian Sea, but no one else is negotiating with sovereign governments for million-acre leases on Van Dyke's scale. On a trip to Libreville, Gabon Van Dyke shook hands with President Omar Bongo, in power since 1967 and one of the most entrenched rulers in the world. Van Dyke has signed similar leases for the right to look for oil with the leaders of Morocco, the Ivory Coast, Equatorial Guinea, Ghana and Madagascar...
...assess suggestions by Cheney's office that Iraq had tried to buy uranium yellowcake from Niger, Libby asked Undersecretary of State Marc Grossman to go digging for more information on the mission. It was not an idle inquiry: the 2002 trip, taken by a former U.S. ambassador to Gabon, Joseph Wilson, had turned up no evidence that Iraq sought the uranium ore for its nuclear weapons program, as Cheney's office had suggested. And although Wilson reported his findings to the CIA, the claim about the African yellowcake kept popping up in Administration speeches in the weeks leading...