Word: ironical
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...When Camara first took power, Guineans seemed willing to give him a chance to lead. He filled a vacuum following the death of the unpopular and corrupt President Lansana Conte, who had ruled with an iron fist for 24 years. For months, Guineans were treated to the spectacle of Camara grilling former government figures on TV, exposing their corruption and mocking their venality. Conte's son and brother-in-law both confessed to being involved in the trans-shipment of cocaine from South America to Europe. Most significantly, Camara also promised to hold democratic elections within a year...
...preparations for those elections. Then came the bloodshed at the stadium. And in October, the junta announced a massive deal with a group called the China Investment Fund (CIF), which promised to fund $7 to $9 billion worth of infrastructure projects in Guinea in exchange for bauxite and iron mining concessions. (Guinea has some of the world's largest bauxite deposits.) Idrissa Cherif, Camara's spokesman, says the first batch of Chinese money has now arrived and will be spent on "electricity, water, roads and the like." (See life on the Streets of Guinea-Bissau...
...combat the slaughter, Thailand has unleashed a massive surge, sending nearly 70,000 security forces into a region populated by 1.7 million people. But the authorities have also encouraged local residents to arm themselves and form militias with fanciful names like the Iron Ladies, the Night Butterflies and the Eyes of a Pineapple. Around 100,000 civilians are now members of such armed groups, and they either receive free guns from the military or can buy them at deeply subsidized rates. The majority of militia members come from Buddhist ranks because the government feels they are most vulnerable to attack...
...With the violence showing no signs of dissipating, Buddhist civilian militias patrol potentially dangerous street junctions or congregate in temple grounds where they peer through monsoon downpours with shotguns at the ready. One morning at the temple of Chang Hai Tok village in Pattani province, a batch of Iron Ladies, outfitted all in black, runs through military exercises. Surveying the training from behind a trio of Buddha statues, 60-year-old abbot Pracharoonkittisophano shrugs his shoulders when asked whether women twirling rifles, along with a shooting range behind his sleeping quarters, elicits any spiritual discomfort. "Guns are normal things...
...Wall Came Down" focused strictly on the fall of the wall, as though that were the fulcrum of the collapse of the Iron Curtain. Reagan's insistence on putting short-range nuclear weapons in Europe, against all foreign-affairs wisdom, broke the will of the Soviets for a renewed arms race and--more than anything else--brought down the wall...