Word: millennium
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Historical forces are stoking nationalism in Yugoslavia. For more than a millennium, the cultures of east and west have collided in this mountainous corner of the Balkans, and each of today's conflicts exposes layers of the past. Friction between the various republics may reflect the conflict between Roman Catholicism and Greek Orthodoxy, or Islam and Christianity, or Slav and Turk, or Slav and German. Yugoslavs do not even share an alphabet: Serbia uses Cyrillic script; Croatia and Slovenia, Roman. As the old British dictum went, Yugoslavia is a small country with big problems -- six republics, five nationalities, four languages...
Which does not mean the millennium has arrived. For one thing, an intricate verification procedure remains to be completed. Also, START in some ways seems designed to curb the arms race of the 1980s rather than the one that might occur in the '90s; it makes its greatest reductions in the numbers of ballistic-missile warheads, which have been gradually losing prominence to the newer cruise missiles as both sides modernize their nuclear arsenals. Consequently, the cut in total warheads deployed will not be 50%, as often stated, but 30% to 35%. Under some circumstances, there could be no overall...
...toll that tourists have already taken seems a compelling reason for not inviting 23 million more. Which explains why so many defenders of Venice are dead set against a plan for the city to host Expo 2000, a four-month-long world's fair celebrating the turn of the millennium...
...visitor might think -- unless he remembers where he is. This is Russia, a land of extremes, where history is the stuff of which pessimism is made and where the alternative to the millennium is the apocalypse. Part of Gorbachev's challenge is to introduce modulation into the way the Soviet Union thinks, and talks, about itself. That will be every bit as hard as putting cheese and chickens on the shelves...
...faking is nearly as old as the history of art, and for as long as there have been documents, there have been forgeries. "This is not a lie, it is indeed the truth," runs an inscription of the earliest forgery we know, a Babylonian cuneiform inscription from the 2nd millennium B.C. pretending to be one from the 3rd millennium. "He who will damage this document, let Enki fill up his canals with slime...