Word: sierras
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...International Monetary Fund (IMF). Conspicuous activism by Western politicians, philanthropists and rock stars has helped relieve the continent's debts and deliver billions in development aid. There is less war and more democracy. Peace reigns in the old battlegrounds of Angola, the Ivory Coast, Liberia, Mozambique, Rwanda and Sierra Leone. Almost all African countries have held multiparty elections in the past 15 years...
...former Liberian President Charles Taylor wasn't invited to address the alleged atrocities that engendered war crimes charges, to which Taylor has pleaded innocent. Instead, he came to talk about "conflict" or "blood" diamonds. The heart of the prosecution's case is that Taylor terrorized the people of neighboring Sierra Leone in order to appropriate its diamond wealth for his own ends. Taylor is being tried on 11 counts in a special court in The Hague, including murder, rape, mutilation, and conscripting child soldiers in neighboring Sierra Leone...
Smillie testified that Sierra Leone has far more "and better quality" diamonds than Liberia. He said that when he met with Taylor in October 2000 as part of the U.N. investigation, Taylor told him that diamonds obtained by the Sierra Leone RUF militia, which Taylor is accused of supporting, probably came through Liberia, but that the President claimed to have had "no control" over the flow of illegal gems. Smillie said Taylor also told him that that "Liberia's name was misused" by diamond-smugglers. In the late 1990s, large numbers of diamonds sold in Antwerp, Belgium, were certified...
Smillie is one of eight experts expected to testify in the coming months, along with former Taylor associates and victims of the militias Taylor allegedly funded in Sierra Leone's often gruesome 10-year civil war. Taylor, who boycotted the start of his trial in June saying it wouldn't be fair, has been receiving about 100,000 U.S. dollars a month from the court for his defense; the court, for its part, in financial straits of its own, continues to search for Taylor's suspected fortune in hopes of being reimbursed. Prosecutors have 144 witnesses lined up; half...
...Mexican public was particularly shocked by the slaying of singer Sergio Gomez, who founded his band K Paz de la Sierra while he was an immigrant in Chicago. He had scored a recent hit with Pero Te Vas a Repentir, or "But You Will Have Regrets," a love song so catchy that half the country was humming it. Gomez was abducted after a concert in his native Michoacan state, beaten and burned and then strangled with a plastic cord...