Word: kinsmen
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...Venice Beach, California, where Sellars lives when he isn't setting Don Giovanni in Spanish Harlem, putting King Lear in a Lincoln Continental or deconstructing other classic plays and operas. Shylock, along with the play's other Jews, is black. Antonio, the merchant of the title, and his kinsmen are Latinos. Portia, the wealthy maiden being wooed by Antonio's friend Bassanio, is Asian. But the racial shuffling is just one of Sellars' liberties. The stage is furnished with little but office furniture, while video screens simulcast the actors in close-up during their monologues (and, in between, display seemingly...
...hardest fact, the one that matters most, is that the outnumbered, outgunned, predominantly Muslim Bosnian government has lost the war. Rebel Serbs and Croats, with overwhelming support from their kinsmen in the former republics of Yugoslavia, have together swallowed 90% of Bosnia's territory. The Serb militia is pounding on the gates of Sarajevo, and they are about to fly open. If nothing is done to police the Serb triumph and Muslim defeat, a final, horrifying bloodbath could sweep over the Bosnian capital and other Muslim enclaves. That fear spurred negotiators in Geneva and the Clinton Administration in Washington last...
...there widespread agreement on how much to give. West Germans were shocked at the $100 billion annual tab for integrating their 16 million formerly communist kinsmen; even though eastern Germany can plug into a ready- made legal and commercial system, economic parity could take 20 years. A comparable effort for the former Soviet republics would cost $1.8 trillion a year...
...notion that Russia has a mission to protect these kinsmen is by no means confined to Reds, Browns or crazies. It is a mainstream sentiment and a powerful force in the deliberations of this week's Congress. The U.S., the West Europeans and the United Nations must use their own considerable influence with the newly independent states to protect the rights of the Russian minorities there. Otherwise, Russia may take matters into its own heavy hands. If so, the world would surely suspend whatever help it is giving to any government in Moscow, which would only deepen the crisis...
That message would have intensified fears that resurgent Russian imperialism would fill the vacuum left by the collapse of Soviet power. Under the pretext of "protecting" their ethnic kinsmen, some Russian nationalists might try to seize other republics' territory. Vladimir Zhirinovsky, the head of the spectacularly misnamed Liberal Democratic Party, has even made claims against Poland and Finland on the grounds that they once belonged to the Czars. You're not likely to dismiss Zhirinovsky as a nut case if you're a Pole, a Finn -- or one of the 6 million Russians who voted for him in the republic...