Word: centralization
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...film's Elliot (Comedy Central's Demetri Martin) is a New York City decorator who's come back to his Catskills home to help his parents manage their decrepit motel, which is facing bankruptcy in the early summer of '69. His parents (Brit theatrical lights Henry Goodman and Imelda Staunton) are as eager for him to stay there forever as he is determined to leave. But when he reads that the Woodstock festival planned for that August has been denied a permit in a nearby town, he calls the promoters and invites them to White Lake and its neighboring town...
...environmental struggle, there are lots of places to choose from. You could drop in on Changqing, in northwestern Shaanxi province, where on Aug. 17 hundreds of people stormed a smelting plant blamed for toxic emissions that left more than 850 children with lead poisoning. Or there's Wenping, in central Hunan province, where days later 1,300 children were found to have been sickened by pollution from a manganese factory...
...charges of spreading poison.") During his visit, too, Blair met with Premier Wen Jiabao and the chief engineer of the nation's efforts to develop environmentally friendly technology, Vice Premier Li Keqiang. He came away struck by the leadership's willingness to acknowledge the country's pollution woes. The central government has made the environment a key part of its next five-year economic plan, says Blair. "The environment is not a separate chapter," he insists. "It's the core narrative...
...absurdity of holding an election in an impoverished country with a central government that barely governs and a guerrilla insurgency that has threatened to kill anyone caught voting is illustrative of our current Afghan dilemma. We have been prodding the Afghans to run, from Kabul, a country that has always been governed from the bottom up, valley by valley, tribe by tribe. Karzai has many attributes, but a desire to provide effective governance is off his radar screen. He is good at the traditional form of Afghan politics, creating alliances among tribal and ethnic factions. The money distributed...
...invaded with cause: the Taliban government was providing safe havens for al-Qaeda, from which the Sept. 11 attacks were launched. Having routed the existing Afghan government, we had a responsibility to restore order. We have bungled that responsibility for eight years, attempting a Western version of order: central governance, the appearance of democracy - but largely ignoring traditional Afghan ways of social organization. The national-security challenge still exists, although its locus has shifted across the border to Pakistan...