Word: easterns
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...criminal activity in the last 20 years? Two key factors are at play. The first is globalization - the liberalization of financial and commodity markets that has created huge new opportunities for the world's most adventurous entrepreneurs. The second is the fall of communism. When the communist regimes in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union imploded, they left a power vacuum that was filled by a swath of failing states that stretched from the Balkans across Eastern Europe, the Caucasus and Central Asia as far as the Chinese border...
Violent and frightening they may have been, but these groups were also essential to ensuring that the free-market economy took root. With the police and courts in free fall, it was protection rackets that guaranteed that contracts entered into by the new entrepreneurs of Eastern Europe would be honored. "If it wasn't for the mafia in Russia and elsewhere in the early 1990s, nothing would have moved, nothing would have happened," said Gary Busch, an American businessman who worked in Russia during the turbulent 1990s. "They were essential for the free market." The gangs of Sofia, Moscow...
...these sundry violations - of any democratic sensibility or common sense - are not simply side effects of a resurgent Russian authoritarianism. They're indicators, Lucas argues, of a more threatening development: the re-emergence of the battle for Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, the Baltics - the whole former Soviet space. While Europe sleeps, he suggests, Moscow's secret police are infiltrating foreign governments, establishing a transcontinental energy monopoly and exploiting divisions between Paris, Berlin, Warsaw and Tallinn. Exacerbating all of the above is the fact that no one is doing much to counter this angry, revanchist Russia...
...over the world to go for a jog followed by a few beers. It calls itself "a drinking club with a running problem." But in Beijing two weeks ago, the Hash House Harriers ran into a more serious problem. After a five-mile jaunt through a bar district in eastern Beijing, seven runners were detained by police on suspicion that they were involved in a terrorist plot. "We did not imagine that, of all the things that could happen, we'd get arrested for running," says one participant...
...Ataturk. In his separation of mosque and state, they finally found freedom from discrimination. But that eroded under subsequent governments, often violently. As recently as 1993, a group of 33 prominent Alevi poets, writers and musicians were burned to death by a fundamentalist Sunni mob in a hotel in eastern Turkey...