Word: slovakia
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...vulnerable to Moscow's shifting moods. That was the case in January, when Russia tried to settle a payment dispute with Ukraine, its main transit country, by turning off the taps. In the three weeks it took to get the gas flowing again, Bulgaria's reserves ran out, Slovakia was forced to declare a state of emergency, and countries as distant as Germany and the Czech Republic were affected...
...only about 10% of the E.U.'s gas demand. By contrast, Russia exports 140 billion cu m of gas to the E.U. every year. But Nabucco could break Russia's stranglehold over countries that are most dependent on its gas and most vulnerable during winter cutoffs, such as Bulgaria, Slovakia and Romania. That dependence has also long undermined the E.U.'s efforts to create a common market for European energy, with transparent pricing and a single negotiating stance with suppliers like Russia...
...turnout also helped extremist, single-issue parties and oddball candidates seize seats. In the Netherlands, the Freedom Party, headed by anti-Islam campaigner Geert Wilders, came second to the ruling Christian Democrats with 17%, pushing the Labour Party into third place. Anti-Gypsy extremists in Hungary and Slovakia won seats. In Austria, two far-right parties earned 18%, while Finland's anti-immigrant True Finns won 10% of the vote. And Britain's UKIP, who won 13 of the 72 British seats despite having no members in the 646-member House of Commons, will be joined by two European Parliament...
...society as technologically far along as the U.S., we do a surprisingly poor job of looking after our tiniest members. About 99% of all births in the U.S. take place in hospitals, yet we rank 29th in the world in infant mortality - below Hungary and tied with Slovakia and Poland - with 6.71 deaths per 1,000 live births. That compares to a rate of about 3.5 deaths per 1,000 live births in Far Eastern and Scandinavian countries such as Singapore, Japan, Norway and Sweden. (See TIME's photos of spiritual healing around the world...
...while Romania and Bulgaria followed in 2007. The enlargement process encouraged a wrenching industrial overhaul of those nations, based on the privatization and liberalization that was set as part of the price for E.U. membership, and in doing so shepherded their makeovers from stodgy Soviet vassals into economic dynamos. Slovakia and the Baltic states saw growth rates as high as 7-10% in their best years. And in Poland, the unemployment rate dropped from 19% to 9.5%; in Lithuania, it plummeted from...