Word: blocs
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...sleep, surf and have sex, wearing basically no more raiment in one endeavor than another. The scene of this wait was the Non Nuoc Hotel, which offered the same amenities (dim corridors, rough toilet paper) that you get in what used to be called the Soviet bloc. The Vietnamese smiled charmingly throughout, and soon enough the boards arrived and the games commenced. There was something squirrelly about the event -- an American flag snapping above terrain that has been under a U.S. trade embargo since 1975 -- but then squirrelly is a feeling Vietnam gives you these days. Out yonder...
...also spell the end of the entire party. Thailand's constitution mandates that a political party can be dissolved if one of its executives is found guilty of a crime. House speaker Yongyut was the PPP's deputy leader, and therefore the party - itself a proxy for another political bloc that had been forcibly dissolved earlier - could be extinct within a matter of weeks...
...secretly against it," says al-Mashhadanni. "They came to power because of an agreement with the multinational forces, and they [have to] thank them for that. But the [long-term] presence of the multinational force will affect their [popular, nationalist] position." (Al-Mashhadanni's own party, the Sunni Tawafuq bloc, has the reverse problem; according to al-Mashhadanni, it secretly wants a long-term SOFA agreement - to balance Shi'ite power with a mediating U.S. presence - but has to publicly oppose it because of his party's platform against the presence of foreign troops in Iraq...
...claim to be disgusted with Mugabe should announce that they bilaterally recognize the validity of the March 29 first-round election results, which showed the opposition winning 48% to 43%, though the margin was almost surely larger. The countries which do would make up the new "March 29 bloc" within the U.N. and would declare Morgan Tsvangirai the new President of Zimbabwe. They would then announce that Mugabe and the 130 leading cronies who have already been sanctioned by the West will not be permitted entry to their airports...
...There are 47 million Catholic voters, and while they are too numerous and varied to speak of as a monolithic Catholic bloc, they have long been a kind of holy grail for presidential candidates. The winner of eight out of the past nine elections has captured a majority of Catholic votes (they voted for Al Gore in 2000), and there are large Catholic concentrations in key states like Florida, Ohio and New Mexico...