Word: blocs
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...also chaired by the indefatigable Strong). That event, which launched thousands of grass-roots conservation groups around the world and spawned environmental agencies and ministries in more than 115 nations, was held in the shadow of the cold war, when the planet was divided into rival East and West blocs and preoccupied with the perils of the nuclear arms race. With the collapse of the East bloc and the thawing of the cold war, a fundamental shift in the global axis of power has occurred. Today the more meaningful division -- especially on environmental issues -- is not between East and West...
...global pollution. Many of the developing countries of the South, for their part, are consuming irreplaceable global resources -- eating the world's seed corn, as it were -- to provide for their exploding populations. And both groups have as an object lesson the now bankrupt countries of the East bloc, whose singularly inefficient path to industrialization has produced some of the worst environmental disasters the world has ever seen...
...countries of the former East bloc have been largely sidelined. Not only are they torn by civil strife, but they are also confronted with hundreds of desperate environmental crises, ranging from an outbreak of malignant tumors in the heavily contaminated Silesia region of southwest Poland to a rash of lung, skin and eye disorders among Bulgarian children who live near chemical plants on the Danube River. Eastern Europe's governments, barely able to keep their economies moving, have little money to clean up pollution. In presummit negotiations the main role of what used to be called the second world...
...which have fallen into near total disuse in the U.S. Outside the U.S., capital punishment in the 1990s is usually associated with underdevelopment or lack of democracy, usually both. The death penalty no longer exists in any European Community country. Most of the nations of the former Soviet bloc have abolished it, and the rest are considering doing so. Of the 2,086 executions Amnesty International tracked in 1991, 1,859 took place in two countries: China and Iran...
...district in the county seat of Gadsden. Eight months later, the four white holdovers rammed through a resolution that abolished individual commissioners' spending authority over road projects in favor of a common fund to be governed by the entire commission. Since the four white holdover commissioners voted as a bloc, Presley, a 67-year-old retired school administrator, discovered that he had no say over the largest item in the county budget. He had become a second- class commissioner...