Word: regional
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Arabian Peninsula and home to 23.8 million people - compared with 28.7 million in geographically much larger Saudi Arabia - Yemen is one of the poorest countries in the Middle East. It came into being when North and South Yemen merged in 1990. Long a source of jihadis, the region sent hundreds of fighters to the war against the Soviets in Afghanistan and - to judge by the number of captured, killed and identified insurgents in Iraq - continues to be one of the biggest suppliers of fighters to regional conflicts. It is common knowledge in the tearooms of the Yemeni capital of Sana...
Meanwhile, the Sana'a government is in the middle of another ferocious war, against its Houthi minority, Yemeni followers of the Zaydi sect of Shi'ite Islam. That introduces the shadow - both real and imagined - of the primary Shi'a power in the region, Iran, which is happy to take credit even if its actual influence may still be negligible. When Iran is mentioned, however, both the U.S. and Saudi Arabia, the predominant Sunni power in the region, start quaking. And al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, no friend to any of the parties, is happy to sow destabilization...
...there's no preservation, no one to look after the site," says Dr. Nasim Khan, professor of archaeology at the University of Peshawar. "The local people are damaging the site because of illegal diggings." In Swat, the Taliban have long attempted to destroy the Buddhist heritage of the region. In October 2007, as militants cemented their hold on the former tourist area, the Taliban dynamited the face of the Jehanabad Buddha into oblivion. The 23-foot-high carving of the seated Buddha, dating from the 7th century, is regarded as the second most important Gandhara monument after the Taliban-eradicated...
...clashing rhetoric is a symptom of Latin America's ongoing culture wars. For a long time, a virtual feudal domain of conservative Roman Catholicism, the region has also spawned some of the most influential leftist movements on the planet - and ideas that are now in a contest with the Church for dominion over Latin America. The leftist Democratic Revolution Party or PRD has controlled Mexico City since 1997, and passed a wave of other reforms, making the capital into what advocates say is a beacon of social progressiveness. The changes have been possible because of Mexico's federal system, which...
Traffic jams are infuriating wherever you are, but in the Netherlands, they are the source of particular angst. Not only is the densely populated country home to Europe's most congested metropolitan region - the area called the Randstad that incorporates Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Utrecht and The Hague - but many Dutch people live below sea level, making them more than a little nervous about carbon emissions, global warming and the possibility that their country could soon be underwater...