Word: russia
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Dates: during 2010-2019
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...Russia has made an unofficial New Year's resolution: this year, it's time to cut down on the booze. On Jan. 1, the Kremlin adopted new minimum-price standards for vodka that will nearly double the cost of a half-liter bottle of the national spirit, from $1.69 to $3. The move, part of President Dmitri Medvedev's anti-alcoholism campaign, is designed to curb Russians' excessive drinking. With a per capita alcohol consumption twice as high as that of the U.S. and an active underground market for homemade alcohol (known as samogon), Russians aren't about to give...
...teetotaling Bolsheviks ran low on funds, they rethought their stance; by 1925 vodka was back on the shelves of state-run dispensaries. In World War II, every Russian soldier at the front was given a daily ration of vodka - roughly a shot's worth - and by the 1950s Russia had fallen completely off the wagon. In 1958, the communist youth organization Komsomol Pravda complained that members of its national soccer team were so drunk they couldn't score a goal from five yards away...
...Europe's dirty secret that the list of nuclear-capable countries extends beyond those that have built their own weapons - Britain, France and Russia. The truth is that Belgium, Germany, Italy and the Netherlands store nuclear bombs on their air-force bases and have planes capable of delivering them. There are an estimated 200 B-61 thermonuclear-gravity bombs scattered across these four countries. Under a NATO agreement struck during the Cold War, the bombs, which are owned by the U.S., can be transferred to the control of a host nation's air force in time of conflict. Twenty years...
Recent U.S.-Russia bilateral negotiations to reduce long-range weapons did not cover B-61s in Europe. Obama's ongoing "nuclear posture review" and NATO's review of its strategic concept may call for an end to nuclear burden-sharing. But if the issue is not addressed soon, countries may take their own steps to get rid of the weapons. In 2001, when the Greek air force ordered a new fighter jet, it chose a model that could not carry the B-61, forcing the U.S. to withdraw its weapons there. The U.S. still keeps weapons in Turkey, but some...
...Russia: The Obama Administration promised to hit the reset button in relations with Moscow, hoping that by addressing Russian concerns on the stationing of U.S. missile defense assets in Eastern Europe it could coax Russia on board with U.S. efforts to pressure Iran. But while the Administration berates the Russians for being locked into a Cold War mind-set, the Russians say the same about the U.S. policy of maintaining the NATO alliance (constructed especially to contain the Soviet Union) and extending it to Russia's borders by seeking to draw in the likes of Georgia and Ukraine. Those policies...