Remembering skateboarding’s top guns

A decade after chronicling the birth of skateboarding in Dogtown and Z-Boys , documentarian Stacy Peralta is back to look at one of the greatest periods of skateboarding popularity – the 1980s – in Bones Brigade: An Autobiography . James Croot quizzed him about the making of the film and where he sees skateboarding today

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Russia and U.S. Work Together in War on Drugs in Afghanistan

For almost a decade, Russia has stayed on the sidelines of the war in Afghanistan, in part because of its bad memories of the 1980s, when the Afghan mujahedin, with the help of Stinger missiles provided by the U.S., handed the Red Army a humiliating defeat. As Russia’s NATO envoy Dmitri Rogozin put it this week in a stroke of understatement, “We’ve been to Afghanistan, and we didn’t really like it over there.” But on Friday, Oct.

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Costa Rica’s President: It’s Not Easy Staying Green

From the ubiquitous T-shirts sporting a red-eyed tree frog clinging to an Imperial beer bottle, to the best-selling postcards featuring the flamboyant poison-dart frog holding court in the rainforest, Costa Ricans today identify with frogs the way Russians relate to bears. That’s because Costa Rica over the past generation has built a reputation as one of the world’s greenest countries

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Zhao’s memoirs revive Tiananmen

When I first saw Zhao Ziyang up close in 1987, he had just become the new party chief at the closing ceremony of a landmark Communist Party congress. Zhao seemed on top of his game: relaxed, confident and poised to break the old Communist mold. Inside the Great Hall of the People, he walked around an elongated U-shaped table, set up for a “cocktail reception” for Chinese and overseas media.

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