Word: blocs
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...however, is a sort of Cold War reprise vexing the start of Latin America's 21st century. The Chávez-led, anti-U.S. group came to power because Washington-backed capitalist reforms so often simply widened the region's epic gap between rich and poor. But the bloc's socialist ideology, which critics say is a throwback to the authoritarian leftism of a bygone era, has élites across Latin America spooked in ways their parents and grandparents were when Fidel Castro still had influence in the hemisphere...
Peterson led a six-week campaign on behalf of Agriculture Committee Democrats and some fiscally conservative, so-called Blue Dog Democrats - a bloc of 45 votes - against two provisions in the bill. Ending a turf war, Waxman - whose committee has jurisdiction over the Environmental Protection Agency - allowed the Agriculture Department, not the EPA, to oversee a potentially lucrative program to create technology to save energy for farmers (Peterson allowed that the Obama Administration could weigh in on the EPA's role in the issue, if any). And Waxman agreed to bar the EPA for five years from calculating how much...
...Most famous was the demise of the Eastern Bloc and then the Soviet Union itself, which came on the heels of years of sustained U.S.-led international pressure. Another example is South Korea, where energetic bipartisan U.S. pressure peaked in 1987 when U.S. ambassador Jim Lilley hand delivered a letter from President Reagan urging against a crackdown on protesters. The advice was heeded. Two weeks later the protesters' demands were met, and Korean democracy was born...
Some Western analysts see the SCO's rise as a rival bloc to NATO, though these fears are, in the present climate, likely overblown. Beijing and Moscow regard each other with equal measures of warmth and distrust. The Central Asian countries tagging along are also keen to pit the Chinese and Russians against each other in a global scramble for the vast reserves of natural resources lurking beneath the region's rolling steppe and in the Caspian Sea. Still, in the U.N. Security Council, China and Russia have presented something of a united front when it comes to Iran. Their...
...action, four liberals who are sympathetic to it, and Anthony Kennedy, who is skeptical of racial classifications but reluctant to strike all of them down, in the middle. On most cases, Sotomayor can be expected to assume David Souter's current spot as the fourth member of the liberal bloc...