Word: watchdogging
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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After decades in the Senate (where he was no slouch at snagging funds for his home state of Delaware), Biden knew his way around a rotten pork barrel. So he set up an in-house watchdog group, with a team that would grow to eight and a charge to keep the spending clean, quick and defensible. Economists will tell you that the most important part of a stimulus is getting the money into the economy fast, where it can replace lost consumer and business spending and keep people employed. But Biden's team knew that it's just as important...
...units among the Basij were trained for state control purposes. In 1999 they appeared prominently as shock troops in quelling urban dissent after student demonstrations that initially sought greater freedom for the press. "Increasingly, Sepah used the Basij as a force for indoctrination and in the role of a watchdog group on campuses, factories and even tribal units," says Frederic Wehrey, adjunct senior policy analyst at the Rand Corp., who has done several joint studies on the Sepah. "The aim was to militarize civil society to prevent currents that the Islamic republic is opposed...
...greeted with skepticism by many in the West. After all, it was Ayatullah Khamenei, who holds the ultimate authority in the theocratic nation, who rushed to embrace incumbent President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as the victor long before the ballots were counted. But his order to the Guardian Council, the powerful watchdog of the Iranian constitution, to start an investigation may not be as cynical as it appears. (Read a story about how Khamenei is the power behind Ahmadinejad...
...investigation, carried out by a French magistrate responding to a lawsuit filed by the anticorruption watchdog Transparency International, has established that the Bongo family owns at least 33 luxury properties in France worth a total of $190 million, including a Paris villa bought in 2007 for $26 million and a Paris mansion bought the same year for a further $25 million. That last pile was officially bought by Bongo's two children, Omar Denis and Yacine Queenie, who were 13 and 16 at the time. The family, through Bongo, consistently denied corruption, although not that they owned the properties...
Shamanov's promotion may also cause trouble on Russia's foreign relations front. A year after Medvedev made his speech promising greater respect for the rule of law, a report by human-rights watchdog Amnesty International said that in Russia "impunity prevails" for human-rights violations by the government. Russia may have gained a hardened combat soldier as the leader of its élite forces, but it's losing international faith in Medvedev's reforms...