Word: parliament
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Ames scandal catches Yeltsin at a particularly fragile time in his ) presidency. Faced with continued opposition from ultranationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky and his conservative and communist followers in parliament, Yeltsin has been forced to retreat from the grand promises of reform he made to Clinton in January. Last week the parliament voted overwhelmingly to grant amnesty to Ruslan Khasbulatov and Alexander Rutskoi, two leaders of the failed 1993 uprising against Yeltsin's government, as well as to the men who plotted the aborted 1991 coup against Mikhail Gorbachev. Though Yeltsin's aides insisted that the parliament had overstepped its authority, hard...
...Russian equivalent of the U.S. National Security Agency. An additional 8,000 troops have joined Yeltsin's Presidential Guard, similar to the American Secret Service. Domestic investigations originally went to a new Ministry of Security, but Yeltsin was apparently uncertain of its loyalties during his struggle with parliament last year. He disbanded the ministry in December and replaced it with a Russian FBI equivalent, the Federal Counterintelligence Service, a 75,000-person agency that will be in charge of internal security...
Last week, the government announced a bill in Parliament which would outlaw foreign words. The proposed law, which would effectively complete previous partial regulations, would ban the use of foreign words in public announcements, work contracts, advertising, and on radio and television. Sanctions for breaking the law would include fines and possible prison sentences...
...Culture Minister Jacques Toubon plans to defend the new language bill in Parliament. According to Minister Toubon, "the government is turning the policy of French language into a national cause." Like a good French deconstructionist, Minister Toubon takes language very seriously: "A foreign language...often becomes a tool of domination, uniformization, a factor of social exclusion...
...elections on April 26, 27 and 28. But the A.N.C. wants to win really big and capture at least 67% of the 22.4 million eligible voters in the nation of 38 million people. That way the ^ A.N.C. would take 328 seats, or two-thirds of the 490-seat bicameral Parliament -- enough to write and ratify the permanent constitution all by itself...