Word: formality
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Western policies. Belarus, by contrast, has been seen as Moscow's closest ally - so close, in fact, that in 1997, its President, Alexander Lukashenko, signed a pact with Russia that envisaged eventually replacing the Belarusan ruble with the Russian one and suggested a constitutional change that could allow the formal inclusion of Belarus in the Russian Federation. A decade later, both countries say they still intend to implement the agreement, but the dying days of 2006 saw their once cordial relations deteriorate into a battle of brinkmanship. Moscow warned it would turn off gas supplies unless Belarus agreed to hike...
...pressure Lukashenko to agree to make the Russian ruble the sole currency of Belarus. More importantly, Putin wants Lukashenko to stop dragging his feet on establishing the "Allied State of Russia and Belarus" - proclaimed in 1997 - and to sign the Constitutional Act in 2007 that could lead to the formal inclusion of Belarus into the Russian Federation. That would make Putin the first reunifier of the Slavic lands lost by the previous leaders in Moscow, Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin. Annexing Belarus would also create a new legal option for Putin to stay on in the Kremlin, should...
...MacFarland understood immediately the sway Sheik Abdul Sittar holds in Ramadi when he met the tribal leader for the first time in August. "The walls were just lined with guys in the sheik robes," MacFarland says, describing the scene at Sittar's compound when he arrived for a formal meeting with the sheik shortly after assuming command in the area. Among Sittar's guests that day were local police officials who often fail to turn up for meetings called by the governor of Anbar Province, Maamoun Sami Rashid al-Awani. And there were other prominent local leaders sometimes difficult...
...American pilots of the private jet whose wings clipped a Brazilian airliner at 37,000 feet last September, causing the death of all 154 people on board, have finally been charged by Brazilian authorities. They are the only people to face formal accusations in the case. But the Federal Police's decision to charge them with "endangering a vessel or aircraft," a crime roughly equivalent to involuntary manslaughter, wasn't serious enough to keep them in the country, and many see it as much an indictment of their nationality as of their role in the crash. Moreover, critics argue that...
...their passports so they could not leave the country. But after they had been cooped for two months in a Rio hotel, a judge earlier this month issued a habeus corpus order to return their confiscated passports. Before they could get on a plane home, however, police rushed to formally charge them - even before a formal inquiry report was completed. The best reason they could find was, in Craesmeyer?s words, that the pilots "didn't see that the transponder wasn't working and didn't take any action...