Word: westernness
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Gudermes is muddy and miserable and seems half-empty. As in Grozny, some residents are holed up in apartment blocks that look to Western eyes as if they have been rendered uninhabitable by artillery fire. The city has no lights, no gas, no work. As our convoy drives up to the Gudermes administrative office with its fake Greek columns, we are met by a crowd of local citizens. We assume they have been bused in to voice their support and enthusiasm for the Russian presence. In fact, they have come to complain. Russian troops--in particular the special assignment police...
...there was a time--hundreds of years, actually--when our species counted and spoke but had no concept of zero. Seife and Kaplan both trace the history of naught, from its inception in Babylon around 300 B.C. through Athens, India and Europe later in the Middle Ages. It took Western mathematicians so long to accept zero because of their reluctance to treat nothing as something. Zero was equated with the abyss, the void, the unknown--all psychologically unpleasant subjects. No one wants to be a zero...
When the European Union proposed a plan to isolate and weaken Serbian strongman SLOBODAN MILOSEVIC by delivering heating oil directly to towns run by his opponents, U.S. diplomats were skeptical. They said the oil--which Serbia badly needs this winter because of the Western embargo--would either fail to reach its recipients or end up in Milosevic's hands...
While Moscow insists that no more than 1,000 civilians remain with the estimated 5,000 Chechen fighters in Grozny, Chechen officials claim the number of civilians is closer to 50,000. Western human rights monitors in the region warned over the weekend that civilians in Grozny face starvation, and were unable to flee because of the constant bombardment. Whether or not a humanitarian catastrophe unfolds in Grozny, the siege of the city may be a sign of a new type of warfare. "This isn't really country against country," says TIME U.N. correspondent William Dowell. "It's Russia fighting...
...which made me especially sad that the administration of Amherst Regional High School in western Massachusetts decided to cancel a scheduled production of "West Side Story" after a group of concerned Puerto Rican students and parents submitted a petition saying that the musical promotes stereotypes and is racist...