Word: albania
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They claimed it was a language problem. If so, members of Albania's national soccer team and its accompanying under-21 team seemed to have confused the word duty-free with "all free" during a recent three-hour stopover at London's Heathrow Airport. The party of 37 loaded up with $3,400 worth of goods at a duty-free shop, then left without paying...
...Continent's poorest and most backward country, Albania is a wedge of Balkan territory on the southern Adriatic coast between Yugoslavia and Greece. An agrarian land where workers earn an average wage of $85 a month, the country is as rigid economically as it is politically. Albania even broke relations with the Soviet Union in 1961 and China in 1978 after those powers experimented with early liberalization programs. Since he succeeded the late dictator Enver Hohxa in 1985, President Ramiz Alia, 65, has only gradually modified the most egregious of his predecessor's restrictive policies...
...been abolished in 1966, and put an Alia aide in charge of it. Suspected criminals were granted the right to an attorney from the time of arrest, and the number of capital offenses was reduced from 34 to eleven. Says Nicholas Pano, an Albanian specialist at Western Illinois University: "Albania is serious about shedding its Stalinist heritage...
Behind the announcement of domestic reforms is President Alia's desire to re-establish Albania's long-dormant relations with most of the outside world. Deputy Prime Minister Manush Myftiu told last week's legislative session, for example, that the government wants to join the 35-nation Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe. Before it could have done that, however, it had to endorse some of CSCE's basic human-rights requirements, including freedom of travel and other civil rights guarantees. Even the United Nations is looking anew at Albania: Secretary-General Javier Perez de Cuellar made his first...
Authoritarian regimes in Africa begin to give way to multiparty systems. -- Albania eases its Stalinist grip. -- A Soviet Communist Party official reflects on nationalism's silver lining...