Word: easterns
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...First created during the Mataram kingdom in the 17th century, batik has been historically appreciated throughout the Indonesian archipelago, but especially by the people of central and eastern Java, where the technique of wax-resist dyeing originated. In recent decades, though, batik has gone into crisis: handworked cloth simply cannot compete in price with mass-produced printed textiles. Changes in the manufacture of batik - with several assembly-line workers now robotically completing individual stages that were once handled by a single highly skilled artisan - have also diminished the cloth's allure. Government support has become essential to the industry...
...foreigners, it's different. The American West is a fantasyland, a place of endless plains, quaint towns and tough men settling scores. Akira Kurosawa transposed the genre's tropes to medieval Japan, then saw his Eastern westerns remade in Hollywood (The Seven Samurai as The Magnificent Seven) and Europe (Yojimbo as Leone's Fistful of Dollars). Leone followed up with For a Few Dollars More--surely the most honest title ever given a sequel--and the spaghetti western craze was born. Django, director Sergio Corbucci's bleak riff on Fistful, with its hero lugging a coffin that has a machine...
...handful of bands, with names like Soap Kills and the New Government, have tried to put this tiny country on the music map for something other than sexy Arab pop divas. They've been part of a creative subculture of artists, architects and designers who have tried to reconcile Eastern with Western cultural forms, as well as tradition with modernity...
...AIDS policy and Tibet, gives a quiet smile when reminded of the promises that the Olympics would advance the cause of human rights. Hu still gets a police escort when he goes outside, though the only visible guard on his fourth-story walk-up apartment in Beijing's eastern suburbs asks politely for accreditation, laboriously records the details, then waves visitors in with a smile. That smiling face, Hu says, is the one that Beijing is presenting to the outside world. But within China, he says, conditions are worse than ever. "It's a policy of 'soft to the outside...
...explaining to do. Vladimir Putin's Russia has been busy of late, reviving old sorties into international airspace, testing powerful new weaponry, and allegedly dropping a missile or two on the Western-leaning country of Georgia. The tension over a U.S. missile shield program based in Eastern Europe also promises to continue. For Peskov, the contentiousness lies in the West's inability to accept Russia's new strength. "It's always better to keep your competition down. The whole global affair is a competition," he said. "It has to be a fair competition. And Russia is ready to take part...