Word: oiled
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Whether she is at work or at home, Abiola's thoughts are always with Nigeria. For all but 10 of the 38 years since the nation gained independence from Britain, the country has been under military rule. And despite Nigeria's oil wealth, most of the citizens remain in poverty. By the estimates of a 1991 government audit, $12 billion in oil revenues is simply unaccounted for--probably doled out to military leaders and elites. For his part, Abacha routinely imprisoned or executed his political opposition, including the writer and minority-rights activist Ken Saro-Wiwa, who was hanged...
...young activist realizes that her homeland, with over 250 ethnic groups and historical tensions stretching back centuries, is largely a victim of internal strife. But Abiola criticizes the U.S. government and international corporations that have continued their oil operations for failing to speak strongly against human-rights abuses. "The U.S. has always made vague statements about wanting democracy in Nigeria," she says. "But what does that mean? At the very least, the U.S. government has to demand the release of the political prisoners." Foremost among them, of course, is her father. She hasn't seen him in nearly four years...
...over Billings (pop. 91,000), the scrappy hub city of the northwestern Great Plains, home to oil refineries, regional medical centers and countless smoke-filled fistfight barrooms where cowboys from Wyoming to South Dakota come for some urban R. and R., people are losing everything to crank--their families, their jobs, their homes, their bank accounts and, perhaps irretrievably, their minds. The potent, man-made stimulant--invented 80 years ago in Japan, issued to soldiers in World War II, prescribed to chunky housewives in the '50s, known to '60s hippies as speed and now sometimes passed out to antsy third...
...later, so young Samuel Clemens is stuck with writing about the Mississippi. There is only the most tenuous and delightful of connections with another kid, in Defiance, Ohio, a century later. This fellow, named Tommy Thompson, is an inspired, perhaps even crazed, tinkerer. He conceives that used frying oil could power engines and rigs a car that actually burns the stuff. He's set for a run across the continent, except that car, driver and passengers drip with sticky oil, and smell like the rear of a trashburger shop. Back to the drawing board...
DIED. GENERAL SANI ABACHA, 54, Nigerian dictator who wrested power in a 1993 coup and maintained his grip on Africa's most populous and oil-rich nation by canceling free elections and silencing critics through imprisonment or execution; from an apparent heart attack; in Abuja, Nigeria. Perhaps Abacha's most notorious act as President was hanging the playwright and environmentalist Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight associates accused of treason...