Armed thugs rule the streets, especially in the pitch-black nights.
Evgeny Morozov, born in thug-ruled Belarus, isn't entirely wrong when he warns of deluded optimism and the danger of the Net as a tool of surveillance and oppression.
The demands that Bush made on the Taliban thugs who rule Afghanistan are almost certain to be rejected.
No less heroic is Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, the Nobel Peace Prize winner long kept under house arrest by the military thugs who rule Myanmar, as Burma is now called.
Harding meets and describes a dauntless group of human rights activists, lawyers and journalists who, being Russian, are not covered by the thugs' unwritten rule that irritating foreigners can be bullied but not killed.
In Afghanistan, however, arming local militias means, by definition, placing guns in the hands of some of the country's most ruthless thugs, who rule their territory with impunity.
This followed a winter in which its campaign became more grotesque and severe than ever, when the group attempted to govern towns under a thug-like Sharia rule, meting out harsh punishments.
"We want to be like everyone else: work, have jobs with value, be governed by intelligent people rather than illiterate thugs, live under the rule of law," Davorin says.
One might call it "The Rule of the Thug".
On this album the Timbaland role is split capably between longtime Bad Boy behind-the-scenes force Mario Winans and Channel 7 (formerly 7 Aurelius), largely missing in action since helping perfect the thug-love duet with Ja Rule and Ashanti.
