Word: guineas
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...When young Guinean military officers seized power after Guinea's president Lansana Conté died on Monday aged 74, people lined the streets of Conakry, the capital, to cheer them on. A little-known army captain, Moussa Camara, declared himself the country's new leader, as well as the head of a group of 26 officers and six civilians who go by the name the National Council for Democracy and Development. Conté, who was buried on Friday, was a heavy smoker and a diabetic, and had groomed no successor. The Parliament's speaker Aboubacar Sompare - who by law should...
...military vehicles rolled through the capital of your country during the chaotic days following the president's death, and soldiers brandished weapons and declared themselves the new government, you might assume there would be widespread panic. But if you live in the mineral-rich West African nation of Guinea, that assumption would be wrong...
...Leaving aside whether Camara's promises can be trusted - Conté himself seized power days after Guinea's first president Sekou Toure died and then ruled with an iron fist for 24 years - Guineans' enthusiastic welcome of the new junta is a measure of how desperate they are for change. Guinea has half the world's reserves of bauxite - vital in the production of aluminium - as well as gold, diamonds and hardwoods. Yet the average Guinean earns just $91 a month. Civil servants last year joined in food riots because their salaries were no longer enough...
...Then there is the problem of rampant corruption, which has allowed top officials to earn fortunes. Transparency International's latest corruption index places Guinea 173 out of 180 countries. Guineans have to bribe officials in order to receive water, electricity, and basic health care, the group said. With policing and the court system in a shambles, Guinea has also become a major hub for Latin American cocaine traffickers, who increasingly use West Africa as the conduit to the lucrative cocaine market in nearby Europe. When TIME visited neighboring Guinea Bissau in 2007, several Colombian cocaine traffickers were operating there...
...that paragraph as much a chore to read as it was to write? Any comedy with 11 major actors - not including Sandler's wife Jackie and daughter Sadie, the inevitable turn by Rob Schneider (another Sandler familiar, John Turturro, sat this one out) and a goggle-eyed guinea pig named Bugsy - is either (a) brilliantly dense in the Preston Sturges tradition or (b) just an overcongested mess. Go with...