Word: earlier
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...Earlier this year, the Tajik military launched the Poppy-2009 operation, which the government says is aimed at combating the smuggling of drugs from Afghanistan across Tajikistan's porous, mountainous borders into the Rasht Valley and Badakhshan regions. Some believe that Poppy-2009 is actually a front for operations against Tajik opposition leaders. The government has publicly denied the charge, but observers say that if Dushanbe is indeed trying to put down suspected opposition forces under the cover of an anti-drug-smuggling operation, it only confirms that Central Asian militants are leaving Afghanistan and returning home, since many...
...Nevertheless, it has also been Sufism's fate to fall afoul of more narrow-minded dogmas - even during an earlier golden age. The tomb of Sarmad the Armenian, a storied Sufi saint, sits close to Delhi's Great Mosque. Sarmad looked for unity within Muslim and Hindu theology, and famously walked the streets of Lahore and Delhi naked, denouncing corrupt nobles and clerics. In 1661, he was arrested for heresy and beheaded under the orders of the Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb, a ruler admired now by Pakistani hard-liners for his championing of an orthodox Islam and the destruction of hundreds...
...different. At the top levels of the ruling Communist Party, power is balanced almost evenly between Hu's supporters and their main opponents, the "princelings," a lose amalgamation of the offspring and relatives of former senior party officials. Signs of a power struggle were already evident to some scholars earlier this year, when several senior party officials in Guangdong province and the port city of Tianjin were arrested for corruption. "Corruption arrests are tools [party members] use to launch attacks against each other," says Victor Shih, who teaches political science at Northwestern University and has written a book...
...salvage the CPA, the two sides agreed to ask the Permanent Court of Arbitration, essentially a stop of last resort for disagreements that can't be solved elsewhere, to determine if the earlier ruling on Abyei's boundaries was correct. Making its ruling on Wednesday, the court issued a 286-page document that, while heavy on legalistic language justifying its decision to redraw Abyei's borders, seemed to be a fairly straightforward political compromise...
...more glaring given the initial assumptions, in both Brussels and Sofia, that E.U. accession would lock in the reform process, pulling Bulgaria into the European mainstream. But the country is still plagued by corruption, gangland violence and feeble law enforcement. The system's failings were all too visible earlier this month, when two men indicted for running a criminal mob involved in racketeering and extortion were freed on bail to run as candidates in the parliamentary elections...