Word: guinea
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...etat, replaced democratically elected President Ahmed Tejan Kabbah with Major Johnny Paul Koroma, and soon allied themselves with R.U.F., the rebel movement that had waged a civil war earlier in the 1990s. Koroma was quickly isolated by some of Sierra Leone's West African neighbors, such as Nigeria and Guinea, which wanted to see Kabbah restored. Last February an ECOMOG military force pushed the junta from power, driving the rebels out of the capital, and Kabbah reassumed his office. ECOMOG hoped that once the rebels had been removed, they would scatter and disappear into neighboring countries such as Liberia, becoming...
...ground. When she hesitated, a boy in the rebel army slashed her neck with a machete. When she fell, a soldier put her wrist on a rock and cut off her hand. "They left me there," she told interviewers. "I walked 11 days to Forekonia [on the Guinea border], and I had to bury my own hand." The amputations are a common form of terror. Young rebels blithely ask victims if they want "long sleeves or short sleeves"--amputation at the wrists or elbows...
Much of this public fervor looks comically ill informed in hindsight. In the U.S. and Britain, fairs and exhibitions regularly featured exhibits illustrating Mendelian laws of inheritance, often in the form of black-and-white guinea pigs stuffed and mounted to demonstrate the heritability of fur color. Kevles quotes from a chart accompanying such a display: "Unfit human traits such as feeblemindedness, epilepsy, criminality, insanity, alcoholism, pauperism and many others run in families and are inherited in exactly the same way as color in guinea pigs...
...world pondered Gates and assumed he must be a great thinker. During World War II, Cargo Cults flourished on New Guinea and Melanesia: people who had never seen an airplane pondered incoming U.S. aircraft and assumed they must be divine. Technology is confusing, and these were reasonable guesses under the circumstances. In 1995 Gates published a book (co-authored with Nathan Myhrvold and Peter Rinearson) called The Road Ahead. Peering far into the future, he glimpsed a technology-rich dreamworld where you will be able to "watch Gone With the Wind," he wrote, "with your own face and voice replacing...
...just a guinea pig," Davis said...