The Bahamas
The Bahamas (Tax haven, Archipelago) | |
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Capital city | Nassau, New Providence |
Type | nation state |
Member of | Commonwealth of Nations, Organisation of American States, UN |
The Bahamas, officially the Commonwealth of The Bahamas, is a country within the Lucayan Archipelago of the West Indies in the Atlantic north of Cuba.
History
The Bahamas became a British crown colony in 1718, when the British clamped down on piracy. After the American Revolutionary War, the Crown resettled thousands of American Loyalists to the Bahamas; they took enslaved people with them and established plantations on land grants. Enslaved African people and their descendants constituted the majority of the population from this period on. The slave trade was abolished by the British in 1807; slavery in the Bahamas was abolished in 1834. Subsequently, the Bahamas became a haven for freed African slaves. Africans liberated from illegal slave ships were resettled on the islands by the Royal Navy, while some North American slaves and Seminoles escaped to the Bahamas from Florida. Bahamians were even known to recognise the freedom of enslaved people carried by the ships of other nations which reached the Bahamas.
Full-take audio surveillance
According to documents provided by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, as of 2013 the U.S. National Security Agency is secretly intercepting, recording, and archiving the audio of virtually every cell phone conversation on the sovereign island nation of the Bahamas, enabling it to covertly record and store the “full-take audio” of every mobile call made to, from and within the Bahamas – and to replay those calls for up to a month.[1]
Event
Event |
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Hurricane Katrina |
Group
Group | Description |
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Castle Bank & Trust | A notorious bank used by the CIA. |