Word: azerbaijans
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...Summer Olympics, and for the finalists - Madrid, Rio de Janeiro, Chicago and Tokyo - its decision marks the culmination of a journey of more than two years. They've already weathered both regional selection competitions and IOC evaluations that weeded out three earlier candidates (sorry, Doha, Prague and Baku, Azerbaijan). But for these four cities, the final step in winning the Games is surviving an unusual voting process that in the past has produced surprising upsets - and been shaken by corruption. (See pictures of what becomes of past Olympic stadiums...
...then there's smuggling. Ahmadinejad could - perhaps easily - boost his gas supplies by cracking down on rampant smuggling. About 10.6 million gal. (40 million L) of gas are smuggled out of the country daily to neighboring countries like Azerbaijan, Afghanistan and Turkey, where it is sold at higher prices, according to Iranian officials. "In some border regions, smugglers are using underground pipelines up to the frontiers," the ministry's director of economic affairs, Mohammed Reza Farzin, told an Iranian newspaper last week, explaining the difficulties of stopping the smuggling networks. (Read "Power to Chaos - Tracking Iran's Four-Month Slide...
...summit last December that they too would cut production, the country "has repeatedly failed to do so, and the Russian government has done absolutely nothing to exert its influence" on oil companies, says Julian Lee, senior analyst at the Center for Global Energy Studies in London. (See pictures from Azerbaijan's oil boom...
...Turkey, for its part, has suspended its insistence that a solution to the enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh - over which Armenia and Azerbaijan are in dispute - precede any deal. Turks and Azeris are ethnic kin and Azeri gas and oil travels to the West via Turkey. Azerbaijan scuppered negotiations between Turkey and Armenia earlier this year by threatening to limit gas supplies if Ankara didn't demand a settlement on Nagorno-Karabakh. This time, Turkey's opposition parties are up in arms over what they say is a unilateral concession...
...Relations between the sexes, too, pose a problem. Royal told me that it is difficult to watch young men and women walk by on the street, flirting and touching each other with limbs exposed. In Azerbaijan, he said, a woman generally speaks sweetly and softly while looking only at her male partner. Royal feels that in New York he cannot express his opinions about relationships, or about religion more broadly. He believes that his English is bad enough that he could not hope to express the truths contained in the Koran, and encouraged me to read it for myself. Though...