Word: himalayan
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Nepal, Himalayan kingdom, home to Mount Everest, backpacker heaven, is a nation in crisis. A country of around 25 million people, Nepal used to have three centers of power: the King, the political parties, and a rebel Maoist army holed up in the mountains. Now there's a fourth: an angry population fed up with the other three and determined to strip all power from a monarchy that has reigned for more than two centuries. Gyanendra is supposed to be only a constitutional ruler. He inherited the throne when his nephew, Crown Prince Dipendra, shot dead King Birendra and eight...
After a fortnight of defying the mass pro-democracy protests that have roiled his country, Nepal's King Gyanendra on Friday finally gave in: In a somber television address to the nation, he promised to restore democracy to this picturesque Himalayan nation, and agreed to hand over executive power to a prime minister picked by the pro-democracy coalition...
...development very simply: it was not, and would never become, Nepal. "Women who will have sex with anyone. Pot, marijuana. People sleeping in the street"-I can still remember a Bhutanese official's voice shaking as he described the "low-class" foreigners his nation had watched streaming into its Himalayan neighbor. Nepalmed by what had come in through its open doors, a Kathmandu that had, up till 1955, barely seen a road was cluttered with Nirvana Tours agencies, 50-cents-a-night flophouses and restaurants promiscuously serving "lasagna, tacos, chow mein, borscht and mousaka a La Greece...
...almost as if the two remote and transporting Himalayan kingdoms have been playing out a fairy tale in which one woman opens her doors to everyone and the other lives like a nun inside a convent. King Gyanendra of Nepal and his Maoist enemies now seem to believe that what Nepalis most need is an infusion of discipline and authority. The people of Bhutan, meanwhile, peer shyly out at a world that fascinates them, in part, through its very chaos. And even as the people of Nepal loudly protest their King's taking of all power into his own hands...
Jigme Singye Wangchuck is the man who would rather not be king. When he ascended the throne as Bhutan's absolute monarch in 1974, Wangchuck was the closest thing to God in his tiny, closed Himalayan kingdom of half a million people. His reign has been a benevolent one. Rather than oppose modernization only to be run over by it, the King championed various reforms, such as allowing in foreign tourists, television and the Internet, while limiting their impact in order to preserve the country's values and traditions. Mindful of some pernicious side effects of economic growth, he introduced...