Word: spain
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...picked up much of the power that the Communist Party dropped a decade ago. Boris Berezovsky, the billionaire business tycoon, is in self-imposed exile, while his close associate Nikolai Glushkov, former vice president of Aeroflot, is being interrogated in Lefortovo prison. Media mogul Vladimir Gusinsky was arrested in Spain on demands from Moscow. The Spanish government's decision on his extradition to Russia is pending...
...proceedings against him as nothing more than a political witch hunt. The spectacle of Gusinsky being sent home in handcuffs by Spanish law enforcement officers will undermine his claims to martyrdom - at least in the court of Russian public opinion. But then the converse may also be true: If Spain's courts fail to find merit in the case brought by Russia, it may actually help Gusinsky paint himself as the victim of political machinations...
...mogul's lawyers are confident they can beat the rap when the extradition hearing goes before the high court in Madrid. Spain, they point out, has no extradition treaty with Russia. Then again, the fact that Gusinsky was held in a nighttime swoop on his villa rather than when he passed through immigration suggests that his arrest was not simply triggered by the presence of his name in Interpol's computers. Some political commentators in Russia have even begun speculating darkly over what political favor Madrid might receive in exchange for arresting Putin's least-loved oligarch...
...reactions of the various players. The smaller eastern European states that have been waiting on the doorstep are thrilled - their European "citizenship" will be granted on an equal footing with current members (Poland, for example, managed to win agreement that it would have the same number of votes as Spain, based on the equivalence in population size), and the summit also indicated that the door will be open to some of them as early as 2003. Among the current member states, some of the smaller nations were happy at holding back the designs on greater power of some...
...reached the height of blasphemy in 1961 when he returned to Spain to make "Viridiana," a film that was instantly repudiated by the Franco government - right after it had won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival. A biting social satire about a novice (Silvia Pinal) who visits her lecherous uncle's estate before taking her final vows, the film is rife with blasphemous images: a cross that doubles as a pocketknife, a cross of thorns being tossed on a blazing fire, a group of mangy beggars assembling into a "Last Supper" tableau vivant. The Spanish government banned...