Word: guianas
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Once upon a time the former colony of Dutch Guiana seemed to be an enchanted tropical paradise. Its gentle, unusually tolerant melange of Creole, Indian, Chinese and Javanese inhabitants were blessed with rich farming lands, rivers teeming with fish and one of the world's largest bauxite-producing economies. Upon Suriname's independence in 1975, the Dutch promised a generous allowance of $100 million annually for 15 years, giving the newly formed nation one of the highest per capita incomes in the developing world ($2,500). One in every three citizens owned a car; living rooms were stocked...
...charged him with fraud in connection with a $10,000 loan from the state. Barbie immediately repaid the debt, plus interest, but it did him little good. Instead of releasing him, Bolivian officials put him on a plane bound for Cayenne, the capital of French Guiana. When told he had been handed over to French authorities, the Butcher of Lyon made a gesture, as if slitting his throat...
...sounds like one of those Brechtian place names out of Mahaggony, where mysterious and sinful things occur. And its equatorial locale is primitive and threatening. Jungle encroaches almost to the doorsteps of Kourou (pop. 7,000), in French Guiana. Only a few miles offshore lies Devil's Island, once the world's most infamous penal colony, and local waters teem with piranha and alligators...
Just offshore lies Devil's Island, once the world's most dreaded penal colony. A short distance away, piranha-infested rivers course through the rain forest. Yet out of this equatorial backwater on the steamy coast of French Guiana last week roared a gleaming, cream-colored three-stage rocket emblazoned with the flags of eleven European nations. The fiery liftoff, heard for miles around, was a noisy, jubilant awakening for an independent space effort in faraway Europe...
...long Ariane rocket rose into high earth orbit, it evoked multilingual cheers from technicians at France's Guiana Space Center and from European space officials watching a huge TV monitor outside Paris ("Très jolie!" "Excellent trajectory!"). The rocket carried a European weather observatory called Meteosat 2, an Indian communications satellite and a packet of heat-measuring devices. The flawless launch marked the first time the European Space Agency (ESA) had sent major payloads into orbit with its own booster...