Word: action
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...California had 29 propositions on its ballot last year on matters ranging from limits on auto insurance to new tobacco taxes. William Zimmerman, who helps organize such voter initiatives, admits that they are not the best way to handle complex issues. But, he says, "if the alternative is no action, I'll take the flawed solution...
Third World spokesmen may simply be trying to deflect the criticism they deserve, but they have a point: the U.S.'s actions tend to undermine its words. The U.S. is the biggest culprit in the buildup of gases that threaten to disrupt the global climate. Princeton University's Center for Energy and Environmental Studies has concluded that by using existing technologies, such as more energy-efficient automobiles and manufacturing methods, the U.S. could reduce its CO2 output 40% over 40 years. That action alone would take more greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere than a total shutdown of industry...
...economic summit in Paris in July, the leaders of the seven largest industrial democracies devoted a third of their final communique to an appeal for "decisive action" to "understand and protect the earth's ecological balance." Just a month earlier, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, representing the major economic powers, had called upon "all relevant national, regional and international organizations" of its 24 member states to take a "vigilant, serious and realistic" look at "balancing long- term environmental costs and benefits against near-term economic growth...
...this increased attention to the environment as a foreign policy and national security issue, however welcome, is only a gesture in the direction of what will be necessary to avert insoluble problems in the future. "The ! most formidable obstacles to action," says Benedick, are "the entrenched economic and political interests" of the world's most advanced nations. It is in those countries, warns Sir Crispin Tickell, Britain's Ambassador to the U.N., that "the pain of adjustment will be greatest...
...President Ford in 1976. It followed the mid-1970s revelations about CIA covert attempts on the life of Fidel Castro and similar pranks, and is a distant echo of the reactions to the assassination of President Kennedy. But there is nothing in the order limiting the ban to covert action or to attempts on heads of state. It simply forbids "assassination." What is assassination? If the word just means killing someone, anyone, for political reasons, then it effectively bans the use of -- or even conspiracy to use -- lethal force. That would make America the first pacifist superpower. The whole Pentagon...