Word: blocs
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Czech Republic is one of four E.U. countries - out of 27 - that are yet to finish ratifying a treaty that would allow the enlarged bloc to reform its institutions. The goal of the Lisbon Treaty, which the E.U. has been working on since its failed attempt to pass a constitution in 2005, is to boost the E.U.'s influence on the world stage by making it more effective. (Read "Czech Government's Collapse Hits...
...Czech post-communist politics who had served as finance minister and prime minister before becoming president in 2003. He was re-elected to the five-year office last year. The Czech president is no stranger to controversy. A dogged critic of all things E.U., Klaus most recently likened the bloc to the Soviet Union. He is also a rare yet prominent global warming doubter - he does not believe that climate change is caused by man and has called costly measures to curb it a waste. (See pictures of Victory Day in Russia...
Women, however, are not a solid ideological bloc. Reformist women like Ebtekar and Sadr stand in almost direct opposition to would-be presidential candidates like Bayat who, despite her outspokenness, espouses a different vision of women's rights. A representative in Iran's majlis (or legislature), she and her female colleagues reinstituted gender segregation in the seating of the parliament. They worked to reverse efforts by female reformist MPs in the previous session to join the U.N.'s Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW). Such membership would have obliged the Iranian government to abolish...
...Israeli journalists who attended the press briefing described the two men as "grim and formal," as if they had both come away from the session with a newfound wariness of each other, like circling prizefighters. Obama wants to rally Arab nations to create a bloc against Iran's nuclear ambitions, and he thinks that the only way to bring the Arabs on board is to achieve headway on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Netanyahu wants Iran defanged, but the hawkish Premier doesn't see the linkup or why he needs to make concessions to the Palestinians, especially ones that might jeopardize...
There's no doubt this public spending produced some results. The U.S. semiconductor firm AMD, for example, was planning to build a new plant in Ireland. In 1995, however, it switched to the Dresden area - once a high-tech region for the whole Soviet bloc - where it now employs about 2,000 people. Similarly, on the edge of Halle's Neustadt, in a brand-new technology center built on the site of the former Soviet army base, Katja Heppe pulls the claws of a snow crab out of a plastic bag. She's 29, a biotechnology researcher who specializes...