Word: lites
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...1940s and '50s: both arms (twice), his collarbone (three times) and 27 bones in his face. After breaking a hand during a ride, he switched to the other one and won. His celebrity expanded in the early '80s when he sparred with Billy Martin in TV ads for Miller Lite. Of his medical adventures, Shoulders said, "You just learned to heal real quick...
Since the beginning of that war, a new élite--the siloviki from the FSB (the renamed KGB) and the subservient new economic oligarchs--has come to dominate policymaking under Putin's control. This new élite embraces a strident nationalism as a substitute for communist ideology while engaging in thinly veiled acts of violence against political dissenters. Putin almost sneeringly dismissed the murder of a leading Russian journalist, Anna Politkovskaya, who exposed crimes against the Chechens. Similarly, troubling British evidence of Russian involvement in the London murder of an outspoken FSB defector produced little more than official Russian ridicule...
...consequence, two dominant moods now motivate the Kremlin élite: schadenfreude at the U.S.'s discomfort and a dangerous presumption that Russia can do what it wishes, especially in its geopolitical backyard. The first has led Moscow to take malicious slaps at America's tarnished superpower status, propelled by feel-good expectations of the U.S.'s further slide. One should not underestimate Russia's resentment over the fall of the Soviet Union (Putin has called it the greatest disaster of the 20th century) and its hope that the U.S. will suffer the same fate. Indeed, Kremlin strategists surely relish...
Angola is following a path that's painfully familiar among African oil states from Equatorial Guinea to Sudan. The pattern is this: well-connected businessmen and unscrupulous government officials grow impossibly rich, and the ruling élite uses its wealth and largesse to consolidate its own power. Much of this money is funneled into banks and assets abroad, while the majority of the population stagnates or even grows poorer...
...corruption. The government's own anticorruption watchdog, the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, estimates that between independence in 1960 and 1999, the country's rulers stole $400 billion in oil revenues - equal to all the foreign aid to Africa during the same period. And while a small élite became rich, its members fought one another for the spoils. In 47 years, Nigeria has suffered a civil war that killed a million people, 30 years of military rule and six coups. Meanwhile, two-thirds of the country's 135 million people remain in poverty, a third are illiterate...