Word: blocs
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...strained relationship between America and the United Nations. On May 4, America was voted off the UN Commission on Human Rights, leaving it without a seat for the first time since the commission’s founding by Eleanor Roosevelt in 1947. The move, coordinated by a French-led bloc, has left the commission with such human-rights luminaries as Pakistan, Sierra Leone and Sudan, the last of which is known for widespread slavery. And yesterday, the House voted to suspend American payments of belated UN dues. The Bush administration should move to end this comedy of errors before...
...thousands of demonstrators hurled missiles at police and tore down segments of a concrete and chain-link fence surrounding the conference venue, where leaders from 34 North, Central and South American nations later met. Opponents of a key Summit proposal to create the world's biggest trading bloc say the agreement would empower multinationals at the expense of human rights and the environment. The plan would create a Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) by the end of 2005, stretching from Canada to Chile and covering 800 million people - but excluding Cuba...
...Geneva agreement temporarily divided the country into northern and southern zones for purposes of demobilization, pending nationwide elections for an independent government. But with the Cold War in full swing, the U.S. was furious at the French for setting up a Southeast Asian "domino" to fall to the communist bloc, and set about reversing the decision. And they found a willing partner in the Bao Dai government, later led by Ngo Dien Diem, which had been set up by the French in the late '40s as a palatable alternative to Ho Chi Minh, and which wanted no part in national...
...Brazilian president Henrique Cardoso wasn't standing anywhere near Bush at that moment. Brazil, to put it simply, is the head of the skeptics. Mercosur, the South American trading bloc, isn't as thorough a free-trade area as NAFTA, and is beset with internal squabbles. But they have their pride. When Brazil hears Bush talk about three competing world trade zones, it wonders whether South America wouldn't be better off as a fourth leg - doing, as it is now, a nice little business with Europe as well as North America - rather than living in the NAFTA shadow...
...like that one. Chile is just one of several associate Mercosur members that are tilting toward the NAFTA model. Fears of Mercosur's demise are probably exaggerated, but Alberto Pfeifer, executive director of the Latin American Business Council, which is based in São Paulo, agrees that the bloc is at a crossroads. "If it stays as it is now, an incomplete customs union, it will, I would not say perish, but it will be attacked by the ongoing FTAA negotiations...