Word: 1990s
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...third great oil boom of the past four decades. After the high prices of the 1970s, Saudi Arabia's economy went through a long-drawn-out slowdown as oil revenues plummeted for most of the 1980s. After a spike when Iraq invaded Kuwait, prices weakened again in the 1990s, even as Saudi struggled to pay off its (large) chunk of the bill for the first Gulf War. At the height of the Asian financial crisis in 1998, oil prices had fallen to just $12 a barrel. This meant that Saudi Arabia - which sells its precious black gold at a discount...
...keeping local leaders from trying to up their status by basking in his reflected glory. Rakhmon, a former cotton farm boss whose prezident.tj website features nearly a dozen pictures of him on the homepage alone, led pro-communist forces against Islamist rebels during Tajikistan's civil war in the 1990s and became leader of the nation in 1992, a year after independence. The nation's longest-serving president, Rakhmon continues to command popular support, despite his rule being plagued by rampant corruption, vote rigging and unemployment that has forced around half of the male population to leave for Russia...
...office for six years, but people still confuse him with Havel, accidentally calling him by his predecessor's name. "He will never have Havel's standing but he wants to show: 'I am here too,'" says Jan Ruml, an ex-politician who fell out with Klaus in the 1990s. "He wants to make history, [even if] negatively. He does not care." (Read "Freed from Power, Havel Mocks...
Quinn was one of more than 2,000 people to give evidence in a nine-year inquiry into child abuse at educational institutions, orphanages and hospitals run by Roman Catholic religious orders in Ireland from the 1930s to the 1990s. On Wednesday, May 20, the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse released its findings. The five-volume, 2,600-page report is a catalog of horrors, describing "endemic sexual abuse" at boys' institutions and the "daily terror" of physical abuse experienced by the estimated 30,000 Irish children who were sent to them. (See pictures of new hope for Belfast...
Child-abuse scandals involving priests are not new in Ireland. A series of high-profile pedophilia cases in the 1990s helped bring about the collapse of a government and, together with the country's economic boom, severely diminished the Church's long-held influence over Irish society. The findings of this most recent report, however, could drive that wedge deeper than ever before. "I don't see how [the religious orders] can ever recover from this," says Raftery. "Not just from the way they responded to the knowledge of abuse [but also] from their continuing cover-up of it over...