Word: volta
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Upper Volta, President Maurice Yaméogo filled his Cabinet with his cousins, lavished money on high living, mansions and travel abroad. When the money ran low, he cut the salaries of his 11,000 government employees-one-third of the nation's wage earners. The result was four days of rioting two months ago, which ended only when Lieut. Colonel Sangoule Lamizane deposed Yaméogo and rescinded the pay cuts. "France gives us money, and all we do is waste it," he said...
...only a barter economy based on cows. National pride also engenders pretensions as well as problems. Impoverished Dahomey boasts a $6,000,000 Presidential residence that is larger than Buckingham Palace. Mauritania has a Directorate of Forests and Waters, though it has no forests and precious little water. Upper Volta refers to its single quarter-mile of dual highway as the Champs Elys...
...million Volta River Project will eventually turn Ghana into West Africa's major producer of electric power and irrigate 6,000 sq. mi. of new farmland. But not for many years will there be customers for all the juice it will generate. All in all, Nkrumah's reckless spending has brought Ghana as close to bankruptcy as any nation can get. Foreign currency reserves were wiped out long ago, and the nation's foreign debt now totals a staggering $1 billion, most of it in short-term loans...
...believed Inventor Bert N. Adams in 1939 when he came out of his Queens Village, L.I., kitchen with a battery that seemed to revolutionize the original electrical "pile" devised by Alessandro Volta in 1796. Inventor Adams ultimately won a U.S. patent-and then the U.S. Government itself copied and repatented his battery without paying Adams a dime. Last week the Supreme Court not only agreed that Adams' battery met the U.S. patent test of being new, useful and "nonobvious"; by a vote of 7 to 1, the court also made clear that Adams' patent had been infringed during...
...this policy, O'Brien said, is the CIA. He explained that there have recently been four successful coups in African nations, and that in three of the four cases the first act of the new government was to expel the Chinese embassy. "In the remaining case--that of Upper Volta--there was no Chinese embassy to expel," he added. While unable to implicate the CIA with any certainty, O'Brien did say that "when a government expels the Chinese embassy it doesn't do so in an inscrutable and spontaneous demonstration of Sinophobia...