Word: westernizes
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Chinese music: Puccini in the Forbidden City; Dido & Aeneas at the Beijing Concert Hall; Handl's Messiah at the Wang Fu Jing Church; Wagner's Tannhäuser at the downtown Poly Theater. People who order their tickets in advance get in; the rest get introduced to another Western tradition - scalpers, who buy in bulk and sell out fast. It's been that way every year since Long first launched the annual Beijing Music Festival (BMF) in 1998. And that, most people in the Chinese arts community believe, is nothing compared to the classical music explosion still to come...
...idea of China as the gravitational center of a globalized world is something most countries have gotten used to. But classical music hadn't seemed like it would be part of that mix, if only because Western opera and the Eastern world never made a natural fit. To outsiders, the traditional Peking opera seemed as much circus as song, with extraneous acrobatics and melodies that struck European ears as atonal and arhythmic. Western opera - with its volume and bombast - fell similarly flat in the East. But since Western ways were the planet's dominant ones, it was China that...
...Swedish and Finnish banks competed for customers in Europe's fastest growing region. Entrepreneur Lepik recalls firing off an e-mail loan application in 2006 with a "very basic" business plan, and getting approval in less than a week. Private debt across the Baltics rose from nearly zero to Western levels as consumers became hooked on credit. Home buyers and businesses took out mortgages in foreign currencies, which had the effect of worsening already severe current-account deficits. In a peculiarly Estonian twist, companies in the tech-savvy country began offering high-interest short-term loans by mobile phone. Borrowers...
That's a question being raised in other parts of Eastern Europe these days, too. By one estimate, net banking flows into the region, most of them originating in Western Europe, will fall from $219 billion in 2007 to just $74 billion next year. Sweden's Swedbank, which not long ago earned a fifth of its profits from the Baltic region, has seen its stock price halve in the past year over fears of exposure to bad loans, and on Oct. 27 it announced a $1.5 billion rights issue to bolster its finances. Two days later Austria's Erste Bank...
...maiden address to the Russian Parliament, President Dmitri Medvedev blamed the United States for Moscow's war with Georgia and for the world financial crisis. Washington, Medvedev said, was threatening Russia's security with the creation of a missile defense system and new NATO military bases around Russia's western and southern flanks. "We have gotten the clear impression that they are testing our strength," Medvedev said in his speech, which was made on the day U.S. voters elected Barack Obama president, and which at times recalled Soviet era rhetoric. (See pictures of the world reacting to Obama...