Word: ruler
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...back to their old tricks. Do not be fooled by those pictures of Hamid Karzai posing with George Bush and Tony Blair. Everyone in Afghanistan knows that real power resides with people like Rashid Dostum, the ethnic Uzbek warlord who controls Mazar-i-Sharif; Ishmael Khan, ruler of Herat and recipient of Iranian tanks and money; and the exiled Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a religious fanatic who currently resides in Iran but who is rumored to be staging a comeback...
None of this is to say the nuns weren't capable of abuse in their own way. They could be cruelly punishing in the classroom, wielding a mean ruler, taping a mouth shut--although they were generally punished harshly for such aberrations. Priests, guilty of far worse transgressions, were handled with kid gloves. The all-male power structure of the church employed the worst tactics of its secular counterparts: silencing victims, covering up crimes, shifting bad priests around like fungible account executives. Think if Father John Geoghan had been Sister Johanna Geoghan. Would she have been recycled from parish...
...should be harshly punished for selling to minors, demand proof of age and prohibit vending machine sales. But state governments are not making serious efforts to implement these changes because to do so would mean losing future tax revenue crucial to finance state programs. Even the nineteenth-century French ruler Napoleon III, who was urged to ban tobacco, once remarked, “This vice brings in 100 million francs in taxes every year. I will certainly forbid it at once—as soon as you can name a virtue that brings in as much revenue...
Crown Prince Abdullah Bin Abdul Aziz Al Saud has rounded up a few brothers, sons and friends for a weekend game of lawn bowling. Wearing a Bedouin robe and an incongruous pair of striped Adidas running shoes, the ruler--in fact if not in name--of Saudi Arabia hurls a ball down the turf and coaches a TIME correspondent in the finer points of the sport. "Be careful of the topography," he warns, using his palm to illustrate the hazards. "Even a slight grade can send the ball off course...
Saudis nonetheless regard Abdullah, an energetic man despite his considerable girth, as a dedicated, in-touch ruler. Each day he rises around noon, a common practice among Saudis, who often prefer to work in the cooler nights. Abdullah greets visiting dignitaries, emissaries and ordinary citizens until his 7 p.m. meal, naps until midnight and then puts in another day's work until dawn prayers. Though a devout Muslim, if he's a zealot about anything it's TV news: his office has a bank of 33 television sets so he can monitor all the available satellite channels at once...