Word: nigeria
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...When Nigeria chooses a President this weekend, Olusegun Obasanjo will likely win a second term, despite a lackluster first. Of the 19 other candidates, only Muhammadu Buhari, like Obasanjo an ex-military ruler, poses a real threat. But who wins may matter less than how this vote happens. Neither candidate has done much on the campaign trail to bridge the religious and regional divides that split Nigeria's 120 million people...
What began as a trickle in the 1980s, with the arrival of occasional foreign stars like Hakeem Olajuwon (Nigeria) and the late Drazen Petrovic (Croatia), has turned into a flood. This season a record 65 players from 34 countries and territories outside the U.S. are suiting up, accounting for 16% of the league's rosters, compared with only 6% a decade ago. A third of the 18 players chosen for the All-Star Weekend's Rookie-Sophomore game came from overseas, among them standouts like San Antonio Spurs guard Tony Parker (France), Denver Nuggets forward Nene Hilario (Brazil) and Orlando...
...basketball is a relatively cheap game and easy to start playing. It requires only a ball and a makeshift hoop hung on a tree or the side of a house. In Mexico, there is scarcely a town that doesn't have at least one court, and even in impoverished Nigeria, many homes have a rim at the back, sometimes fashioned out of a bent tire iron. Basketball is the most popular school sport in China, where an estimated 250 million players shoot the ball with an NBA-influenced aggressiveness and flash that were seldom seen just a few years...
Prohibitive laws plague most developing nations in both rural and urban areas, usually requiring 10-25 years of bureaucratic hassles to obtain property rights. In advanced nations this takes only weeks. Huge underground economies persist from Mexico to Russia, Manila to Cairo, and Haiti to Nigeria...
...ASSASSINATED. HARRY MARSHALL, founding member of Nigeria's main opposition party the All Nigeria Peoples Party; in Abuja, Nigeria. Marshall was shot dead by unidentified gunmen outside his home in what police believe was a political killing in the run-up to Nigeria's elections in April, the first to be organized by a civilian government in more than 20 years...