Word: nationes
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...glitter and glam of the Barbie gathering at the Marriot Wardman Hotel may have seemed out of touch with the nation's economic woes, but "the Barbie market is very, very strong," says Sandi Holder, owner of the world's sole Barbie-only museum, located in Union City, Calif. And she should know: her biennial Barbie auction did well this year, despite the economy. Holder, who gave up her career as a pediatric intensive-care nurse in order to pursue her Barbie passion, even takes the cake with a world record: in 2004 she auctioned...
...Minister Vladimir Putin, routinely calling for an independent legislature, a free press and free elections, and a crackdown on corruption. Improving his image has been the Moscow tabloid he co-owns, Novaya Gazetta, which is known for publishing stories on the war in Chechnya, bribe-seeking officials and the nation's abysmal public services. Anna Politkovskaya, a journalist famous for her dispatches from Chechnya, was one of the paper's star reporters before being shot to death in 2006, presumably for writing the wrong story. (Read: "A Russian Reporter's Murder: Will a Retrial Bring Justice...
...confined in a prison five time zones east of Moscow, is testament to what happens to oligarchs who don't play by the rules. The former head of Yukos was on the verge of forming a partnership with Exxon-Mobil, and had called for a more open and democratic nation - both big no-nos in Putin's Russia - before he was arrested...
...barrel-chested rugby fan, Rajapaksa, 63, will need that common touch to bring Sri Lanka to a true and lasting peace between the island nation's Sinhalese majority (which is mostly Buddhist) and Tamil minority (mostly Hindu). The civil war began in earnest in July 1983, after nearly 3,000 Tamils were killed in several days of systematic anti-Tamil violence. It was the low point of what Sri Lanka's Tamils felt had been decades of official discrimination and military repression in Tamil-majority areas in the north and east. The LTTE took up arms in the name...
...livelihoods some 300,000 Tamils in the north, a major chunk of the population of that region, who fled the fighting only to be detained in overcrowded internment camps. Without that crucial first step toward peace, Sri Lanka's alienated Tamils may never feel truly part of the nation. "If that does not happen, we are in a downward spiral in every way," says Vasudeva Nanayakkara, a Sri Lankan politician who has known Rajapaksa for more than 40 years as a friend and frequent ally in Parliament. "The way in which the state treats the victims of the conflict - that...