Word: rulers
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...strange move in a part of the world where leaders are none too shy about developing cults of personality. The late ruler of Turkmenistan, Saparmurat Niyazov - the self-titled Turkmenbashi, or Chief of all Turkmen - erected a golden statue of himself that rotated with the sun, and renamed days and months after family members. In Kazakhstan, Nursultan Nazarbayev has had not one but two museums built in his honor. During his presidency, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin was featured in children's books, his name was printed on women's underwear and portraits of him in various guises - as deep...
Remote Sir Bani Yas was once the private domain of Sheik Zayed bin Sultan al-Nahyan, ruler of Abu Dhabi and co-founder of the United Arab Emirates. He irrigated much of its barren landscape and created his very own wildlife reserve, initially for endangered regional species like the Arabian oryx and both mountain and sand gazelles, but later for many African animals, including giraffes, ostriches, elands, gemsboks, blackbucks and striped hyenas, all of which remain to this day. (See pictures of luxury private islands...
...knows this better than Mohamed Nasheed, the nation's new democratically elected President, who unseated Maumoon Abdul Gayoom, the Maldives' ruler since 1978, in a landmark election last October. In 1991, Nasheed was named an Amnesty International prisoner of conscience, a victim of repeated government crackdowns on dissidents. Though he is tight-lipped about the particulars of his own ordeal, testimony from many other detainees tells of men dunked into the sea, forced to eat glass, kept in solitary confinement or left exposed in the sun for days, or doused in molasses and tied to palm trees, at the mercy...
...consequence of the global downturn, which has hit international tourism hard. The crunch was exacerbated by profligate spending in the final years of the Gayoom regime, as it sought to cement votes with new infrastructure projects. In February, Nasheed's government moved to auction off some of the former ruler's more extravagant state possessions, including a personal yacht, a private pleasure island and a gold-plated toilet...
...timeline can be traced back to Napoleon Bonaparte, because that's how long it took him to return from exile, reinstate himself as ruler of France and wage war against the English and Prussian armies before his final defeat at the Battle of Waterloo. (It actually took 111 days, but we'll give him a mulligan.) Napoleon reclaimed power in 1815, however; Americans didn't start assessing their Presidents in 100-day increments until Franklin Delano Roosevelt came along more than a century later...