Word: states
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...with potential online clients, told the San Francisco Chronicle that offers to swap personal information for virtual cash are designed to reach the young because they're less likely to have a credit card. But they often have cell phones, usually on their parents' plans. Indeed, while Facebook rules state that users must be at least 13, FarmVille seems to be aimed at a youthful crowd, at least by its marketing pitch: "Howdy Ya'll! Come on down to the Farm today and play with your friends...
Given that many Iranian politicians and citizens have criticized the state-run media for a lack of fair and balanced coverage, the fact that most domestic news outlets reported at all on the opposition protests was striking. Instead of denying the existence of an opposition in Iran, pro-government news organizations now use the more savvy method of spin - questioning the motives, members and supporters of the "Green Movement." (Read about "Death to America" Day and how Iran trained its young to protest...
China claims the region where Tawang sits and the area surrounding it as a southern extension of Tibet, which Beijing rules; India has long maintained that the land, which comprises its northeastern state of Arunachal Pradesh, is an inalienable part of its territory. Tensions over the border dispute have flared recently, raising the specter of a budding rivalry between the two Asian giants who fought a brief, wintry war in 1962. Reports of troop buildups and border incursions have increased. A visit to the state by Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in mid-October to campaign in local elections...
...facts on the ground, experts say, do not fully support Beijing's claim. "China is trying to impose this idea of a coherent nation-state," says Gray Tuttle, professor of Tibetan studies at Columbia University in New York. "But it is basing its claim on a premodern cultural world where there was nothing like a modern state." Not only was Chinese control over Tibet thin until the 1950s, but Tibetan rule over Tawang was nominal as well. Beyond the appointment of certain abbots in monasteries and the occasional payment of taxes to Lhasa, the people living there...
Still, as New Delhi asserts its sovereignty over Arunachal Pradesh, many locals complain of poor governance. Like other parts of India's periphery, development has been woeful: roads in the rugged terrain are poor and in many places nonexistent, the school system is dysfunctional, and some state officials are corrupt. The Indian military often monopolizes the region's functioning infrastructure for its own deployment and strategic ends, leaving the Monpa again sandwiched on the edge of latter-day empires...