Word: eras
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Dmitrievsky and others are seeking to protect and reclaim freedoms won in the final years of the Soviet Union, when Mikhail Gorbachev introduced his policy of glasnost, or greater openness. Later, in the immediate post-Soviet era, Boris Yeltsin presided over a scrappy, imperfect democratic flowering. Activists say that, since he took office in 2000, Putin has tried to bottle up the explosion of interest in human rights, free speech and democratic accountability that took place in the 1990s. Says Vladimir Ryzhkov, one of the few remaining independents in parliament: "The regime has achieved a state of total manipulation...
...requires all nongovernmental organizations (ngos) to reregister with the state and submit detailed plans about their activities; a second revises an earlier law that attempts to control political extremism. (Both were used against Dmitrievsky.) Putin has said that the extremism law will improve Russian security in an era of terrorism, while Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov asserts that the ngo legislation is actually less restrictive than similar laws in France, Finland and Israel. Foreign groups such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch that have reregistered say the process is cumbersome and bureaucratic, though so far only three foreign ngos have...
...flurry of conspiracy theories, including speculation among defenders of the government that the poisoning was arranged by Russian émigrés or Western intelligence agencies to discredit Moscow. But for many Russian élites, the whole macabre spectacle has heightened anxieties about the Putin government's backsliding into communist-era intrigue and repression. "People who question the policies of our government are increasingly targeted. People who work for human rights are increasingly under attack," says Alexeyeva. "And even people who support this work are potentially in danger of being singled out by the government. So are we in Russia...
...still a thug at heart, that he hasn't changed a bit. The album's Who's Who of producers, including Dr. Dre and Kanye West, normally could be relied on to spice up the duller patches, but the riffs sound either recycled or, more disturbingly, like Herb Alpert--era smooth jazz. (Not a positive trend for this or any other genre.) Jay-Z may yet have more to say, but he doesn't say it here...
...Buzkashi is the best way to understand Afghanistan in this new era," Whitney Azoy, author of Buzkashi: Game and Power in Afghanistan, told me. "It's all about unbridled competition for power, and the fact that no one can hold it for very long. Individuals rather than institutions are still the prime movers, and here individuals constantly shift sides and make new alliances...