Word: vastness
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...Free craftsmen, not convicts, sculpted the celebrated terracotta warriors and horses guarding Qin Shihuangdi's vast underground necropolis. But as Barbieri-Low debunks, they were not the master artists they are sometimes trumpeted to be. Many were just journeymen, working on component parts upon which they inscribed their names not as Monet-like signatures but as part of quality-control procedures. The names worked as premodern barcodes. Shoddy platters, censers, stone carvings and so on could be traced back to the workshop that produced them, and the artisans could be punished accordingly. The inscriptions also worked as brands, and forgeries...
...violent, political infighting. Many of the country's leaders, in exile in Portugal or Mozambique during Indonesia's occupation, have aggravated the situation by failing to connect with the majority of their compatriots. Senior government officials live lives of relative luxury, in stark contrast to the lot of the vast majority of East Timorese. (Because Dili is a small town, it's not uncommon to see such officials dining in trendy Portuguese cafés situated near the poor and homeless squatting in tents.) Portuguese is the official language of the government, which means that most East Timorese, who speak...
...Serb, I empathize with my compatriots' anger and frustration over losing Kosovo. But as a reporter who witnessed the atrocities against ethnic Albanians in the '90s, I can understand that the vast majority of them would under no circumstances accept living under Serbian patronage, even though Milosevic is dead and Serbia is now a democracy. And as for setting a precedent, I don't think that Kosovo's independence would have much effect on the rest of the world - and frankly, I don't really care...
Lacking the vast charisma that enabled his brother to hold on to power for nearly a half-century, Raśl can go one of two ways to establish his legitimacy: he can return to his hard-line roots and use his security forces to crack down on dissent, or he can earn the affection of his beleaguered people by further loosening the economic and political screws--a path that may be easier to take if Washington drops the embargo. "If we don't," says Jake Colvin, director of the Washington-based USA*Engage, an arm of the National Foreign Trade Council...
...Europe's grip on Interpol's leadership. Noble came with one driving mission: to shake the organization out of its somnolence and put it to work on major crimes. By then, 186 countries were members of Interpol, but it still lacked the operational focus to put this vast network to effective use. Noble, now 51, says he was astonished at how marginal Interpol had become in fighting international crime. In the past, he says, "there was a clear policy decision not to get involved in operational matters...