Word: russia
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...There's a long way to go. Around one-third of South Africans still live on $2 a day or less. At the same time, Manuel has also helped transform how the rich world views the poor one. Globalization has given new status to places like Brazil, China, India, Russia and South Africa, but the institutions that manage the global economy - the U.N., the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund - still reflect the world as it was at the end of World War II. Manuel was one of the first to point this out and has consistently championed the view...
...support from reluctant allies for harsher measures should Iran fail to respond positively.) So, even as Obama courts the Iranians with talk of a new relationship, the U.S. is keeping existing sanctions in place and moving to win support for sterner measures - for example, by offering concessions to Russia on other issues in order to win its cooperation in pressuring Tehran...
Headlines blared "Russia versus NATO" in Europe and the U.S., raising the old specter of the Cold War. But the Obama Administration did not seem to be concerned. "It looked like the comments of the President of Russia were largely for domestic consumption," White House Spokesman Robert Gibbs told reporters on Tuesday. Analysts, in fact, believe that, far from picking a fight with NATO, Medvedev was using the western alliance as a weapon to prod his own military into much needed reform. (See Russia celebrating its military might, Soviet-style...
Restructuring the military has been a sensitive issue for Russia's officer corps since October, when Defense Minister Anatoly Serdyukov announced that the country's top-heavy army will be reduced, specifically cutting 200,000 of its 350,000 officers. "The structure of Russia's armed forces is totally abnormal," says Alexander Golts, an independent military analyst. "We have one officer for every two privates." The overall numbers of the armed forces will drop from 1.13 million to 1 million. The remaining soldiers, the reasoning goes, will have access to better and more up-to-date equipment. Supply and command...
...argument goes that Medvedev needed to further sugarcoat the cuts and reforms - the most dramatic in the last 40 years. "You cannot tell these officers that they will have to be cut because Russia wants to make friends with the U.S.," says Dmitri Trenin the director of the Carnegie Moscow Center. "You have to tell them they have been cut because NATO poses a serious threat, and we need to improve our armed forces to be able to protect ourselves...