Word: lands
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...nation a half-century ago, they carried not only their personal hopes and fears but the aspirations of a continent. As the first colony in sub-Saharan Africa to break away from its foreign master in the post-1945 era of independence, Ghana became the symbol of a land throwing off its shackles, the first breeze in what British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan would later dub "the wind of change." "The independence of Ghana is meaningless unless it is linked up with the total liberation of the African continent," said Nkrumah that night...
...Holy Land, it's inevitable that religious belief, as well as anger, would give hip-hop a special twist. A 30-year-old Miami native who recently moved to Israel, Jew Da Maccabi found rap before religion, but he's now putting his religion into his rap. He dons the black garb and practices the habits of an ultra-orthodox Jew, with a few hip-hop accessories such as a Yankees baseball cap instead of a broad-brimmed black hat. "After I became religious, I remembered what my rabbi said: 'Take what you did before, and flip it to holiness...
...oddest-looking suborbital ride, however, is by John Carmack, who is building podlike contraptions that sometimes land on all fours. Sometimes not. The Pixel, made for one, is a platform atop four tanks of fuel (liquid oxygen and ethanol). He's not strapping anyone in yet, right? "Funny you should say that," he says, picking up a motorcycle saddle at his Armadillo Aerospace shop one evening. "It goes on top of the electronic box over here. We did a parking-lot flight a couple of years ago and roughed up one of our earlier vehicles." Not to worry, he says...
...with the most secretive business plan is Amazon boss Bezos, who launched his Seattle-based Blue Origin in 2000 and started buying up a huge swath of land in West Texas near Van Horn, arousing the suspicions of locals. Bezos plans to build a spaceport and aerospace testing center at the desert site but is taking it "slow and steady." (His company motto is Gradatim ferociter, which roughly translated means "Step by step, fiercely.") It's unclear how much funding Bezos, 43, is putting into the venture, but he has been doing it the NASA way, spending huge amounts...
...that you would know it looking at his house. Agha lives in a graveyard. Land is at such a premium in Kabul these days that the dead compete with the living for space. A massive influx of refugees returning from exile following the Taliban's retreat has forced the near deserted neighborhoods fringing an old cemetery to squeeze between its graves. Agha's factory is his living room, where he has put his two wives and 11 children to work, cutting, shaping and gluing the intricate tissue-paper mosaics that make his kites stand out for their beauty and superior...