- World Report 2024: Angola (hrw.org)
Angolan state security forces were implicated in serious human rights abuses, including more than a dozen extrajudicial executions and other unlawful killings, excessive use of force against peaceful protesters, and arbitrary detentions. Authorities continued to forcibly evict people and conduct demolitions without the necessary procedural guarantees or the provision of alternative adequate housing or adequate compensation for those evicted. The press was under attack on several occasions throughout the year, as authorities continued to use draconian media laws to repress and harass journalists. Freedom of association was under pressure as the government tried to pass a new nongovernmental organization (NGO) law limiting the activities of civil society groups. Women and girls, particularly street traders and migrants, continued to suffer abuses by security forces. In August, Angola assumed the one-year rotating presidency of the Southern African Development Community (SADC) regional body.
- Forks — Thumbnail History (historylink.org)
Forks, a small town in the northwest corner of the Olympic Peninsula in an area called the West End, is one of three incorporated cities in Clallam County. It sits within traditional Quileute Indian land on a large prairie surrounded by forestland, an hour’s drive west from its largest neighbor, Port Angeles. Non-Indian settlers arrived in the late 1870s, and the town grew slowly from a remote collection of farming homesteads into a booming timber town by the 1970s, given its proximity to thousands of acres of colossal old growth forests nurtured by the area’s average rainfall of 120-plus inches a year. Timber-harvest decline and controversy over protection of wildlife habitat deeply affected the town during the 1980s and 1990s, causing anger and high unemployment. The town’s makeup has shifted from its Scandinavian-settler origins, and it has the highest Hispanic population in the Clallam County in 2007. Forks is surrounded by land zoned as commercial forest, and timber remains a large industry. Government, education, and health care are also large employers, and the town attracts tourists by taking advantage of its logging history and its proximity to rain forests, rivers, and ocean beaches.
- Angola - The World Factbook (cia.gov)
Bantu-speaking people settled in the area now called Angola in 6th century A.D.; by the 10th century various Bantu groups had established kingdoms, of which Kongo became the most powerful. From the late-14th to the mid-19th century, a Kingdom of Kongo stretched across central Africa from present-day northern Angola into the current Congo republics.
- Angola (Wikipedia)
Angola, officially the Republic of Angola, is a country on the west-central coast of Southern Africa. It is the second-largest Lusophone (Portuguese-speaking) country in both total area and population and is the seventh-largest country in Africa. It is bordered by Namibia to the south, the Democratic Republic of the Congo to the north, Zambia to the east, and the Atlantic Ocean to the west. Angola has an exclave province, the province of Cabinda, that borders the Republic of the Congo and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The capital and most populous city is Luanda.
