Word: baku
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...sphere of influence. Moscow's long-term objectives in Georgia no doubt are to install a friendly government in Tbilisi (it has tried more than once to do that since Georgian independence), keep Georgia out of NATO, stop the flow of arms into Chechnya and take control of the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil pipeline, the only important export route from the Caspian that does not pass through Russia. For it is oil that will give Russia all the more leverage over the southern tier...
...hard to say exactly when I first heard the name Bobby Fischer, but it was quite early in my life. When he was battling Boris Spassky for the world title in 1972, I was a 9-year-old club player in my native Baku in the Soviet Union. I followed the games avidly. The newspapers had extensive daily coverage of the match, although that waned as it became clear the Soviet champion was headed for defeat. Fischer's My 60 Memorable Games was one of my first chess books. (It had been translated into Russian and sold in the U.S.S.R...
...unknowns that worry regulators and experts. "Yesterday's quake showed that assumptions and suppositions that safety standards are based on are completely false," says Baku Nishio, a co-director at Citizen's Nuclear Information Center. "Japan is simply too quake-bound to operate nuclear plants." There's also uncertainty about where the next quake will strike. The Kashiwazaki facility underwent a tectonic survey last year to reevaluate the site's quake resistency and update it in accordance with new government guidelines. That survey concluded there were no active faults in the vicinity...
...rising rents and salaries. Oil becomes virtually the only game in town, and the benefit to workers is surprisingly limited, with many of the more lucrative jobs - such as rig operator and refinery manager - going to foreign experts. Hence the expat enclaves in oil towns from Port Gentil to Baku. In some cases, unemployment can actually worsen. Fueled by the new spending power of the few, the cost of living also goes up. If the government doesn't share the wealth, the higher prices mean real poverty actually rises. And in Angola there's little evidence of government sharing...
Kasparov, you might say, has been enveloped by politics all his life. Being a Soviet chess prodigy will do that for you. Born in Baku, Azerbaijan, in 1963, he started playing chess before he was 5. After his father died when he was 7, Kasparov's mother Clara--whose last name he took--shepherded his career. (She still does. When TIME interviewed Kasparov at their spacious, Soviet-era apartment in Moscow recently, it was Clara who kept an eye on the clock and reminded Kasparov of his next appointment.) As he grew up, Kasparov says, he became aware...