Word: corruption
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...government isn't easy. In a society such as Britain, where politics is a contact sport, every crunching tackle covered by a breathless and indefatigable national media, the bonds between the public and their elected leaders inevitably fray over time. But connecting with voters who believe politicians to be corrupt, venal and self-obsessed is an even taller order. And that is now Labour's task. The party has endured a long, slow decline, but its current crisis was triggered by one of the greatest press exposés of the modern age. It started when a former soldier...
...challenged by his opponents, but he had muddied his greatest vulnerability - the stagflating Iranian economy. The real jaw dropper, however, was Ahmadinejad's willingness to attack in the most personal terms. He attacked Mousavi for being supported by former President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, whom he flatly called corrupt (a widespread belief among reformers and conservatives alike); he attacked Mousavi's wife Zahra Rahnavard, a famous artist and activist, for allegedly getting into college without taking the entrance exam; he attacked Karroubi for taking money from a convicted scam artist...
...only was a questionable election result likely to prompt street protests and provide ammunition to hawks in the West, it also affirmed a challenge to much of the Islamic Revolution's established political class. Ahmadinejad branded the entire revolutionary establishment as feckless and corrupt, prompting appeals to Khamenei from former President Hashemi Rafsanjani, head of the Assembly of Experts, who was one of Ahmadinejad's chief targets. But he and others got little sympathy for their complaints that the president's attacks undermined the legitimacy of the revolution itself. Some tartly pointed out that since Khamenei himself was president from...
...Cultural Revolution, unleashed a campaign of terror carried out by poorer young people against what he decried as the more liberal, "bourgeois" elements of the communist party, so does Ahmadinejad claim to be waging a class war, with the backing of the poor and the security forces, against a corrupt political elite brought to power by the revolution. And he clearly has Khamenei's backing...
...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 vulnerable to domestic upheaval. "There is the possibility for really unpredictable change," says Jeffrey Mankoff, a fellow for Russian studies at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. And it's change few Central Asia...