Word: central
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...more clout than the average elder boomer pushed out for a younger employee. Conan - simply by having wanted forever to host The Tonight Show - is something of a throwback. The very idea of caring about big-network late shows is retro, now that Comedy Central has so much buzz. Conan's comic style also owes heavily to his elder, and now competitor, the 62-year-old Letterman...
Conan's sensibility is less newsy and more surreal, scatological and self-referential. And he has a big self-deprecating streak: on his second show, he had a cash-strapped NBC send him on a wardrobe-shopping spree on Rodeo Road (not Drive) in South Central, where he bought a cornrow wig and a belt buckle that reads BITCH...
...terror now surrounds that theater of operations the Obama administration terms "Af-Pak," the post-Soviet 'Stans to the north present their own strategic quagmire. The tactical support of governments in the region is becoming increasingly vital for U.S. plans to bring stability to Afghanistan. Central Asian countries also sit atop a significant chunk of the world's untapped oil and natural gas reserves, assets that are eyed covetously by both neighboring Russia and China, as well as the West. Yet the region - dominated by corrupt and repressive regimes - is itself precariously poised, home to its own native Islamist insurgencies...
...Still, Central Asia exists on the periphery for most policy makers in the U.S. When not the illusory realm of Borat or an exotic waypoint of horse markets and mutton skewers, the region has been cast off as a dysfunctional Russian annex, easily manipulated by a Kremlin that still views these young republics as satellite states. From Ashgabat to Astana, the ruling elites are all holdovers from the Soviet era, and sometimes more fluent in Russian than their national tongues. "Their regimes operate," says Eric McGlinchey, a Central Asia specialist and professor of politics and government at George Mason University...
...Tajikistan. China has also become the single largest investor in Afghanistan, building roads through Kabul and setting up a massive $3 billion copper mine. In 2001, China formed the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), a geo-political grouping aimed at improving economic and political relations with Russia and other Central Asian nations - as well as a vehicle for Beijing to quash support for separatists in its restive Xinjiang province, whose Muslim Uighurs share ethnic ties with Central Asia's Turkic populations. The SCO also declared in 2005 that there must be a timeline for withdrawing all U.S. military bases in Central...