Word: centralization
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...keep GDP from contracting. The nation's prime minister says GDP will grow 8% this year, which seems nearly impossible. But if the government does have to offer financial support to the banks and industry, it will certainly come with some strings attached and may even cause the central government to take larger shares in businesses that it had planed to privatize...
...after just 66 countries out of 195 ratified its founding statute - and Russia, China and the U.S. have still not done so. Its ad hoc predecessors may have prosecuted leaders from around the globe, but so far the ICC has only indicted Africans: in the Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Sudan and Uganda. "That," says African Union chairman, Jean Ping, "is a problem...
...cloudless sky down Crawford's main street, pulling at the Texan and American flags in front of the Red Bull souvenir shop. The only sound on this placid afternoon is the tinkling of wind chimes. It wasn't always so quiet in this tiny rural community of 730 in central Texas where former President George W. Bush has maintained a ranch since 1999. Four years ago, there were some who wondered if the noise would ever stop. The President's five-week summer vacation at his ranch brought the turmoil over the Iraq war into every corner of Crawford...
...qualities that helped eastern Europeans survive more than four decades of communist rule was a keen sense of irony. The sentiment was on show even as the old system of central control began to unravel and democracy and capitalism rushed in. The summer and fall of 1989 were full of passionate protestors and revolutionary honesty. But the millions of people who ripped open the Iron Curtain generally did so with an eyebrow cocked at what was replacing their decayed regimes. In the street markets of Warsaw and Prague in those early years of freedom, the symbols of communism - badges, pins...
...past few months, though, Kapitalizm's jaws have snapped shut. The global credit crunch has hit the economies of Eastern Europe hard. In Hungary and Latvia the International Monetary Fund has stepped in with emergency aid. (Latvia's government collapsed anyway.) Currencies have crashed, leading the European Central Bank to help Hungarians and Poles keep paying their foreign currency-denominated mortgages by pumping in euros. The fear now is that the region's banks could collapse, especially if Western banks yank credit lines to eastern subsidiaries. Such a move would be counterproductive. Western banks, particularly in places such as Austria...