Word: centralization
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...factor that is a concern to many Micronesians. They worry that the initiative might cast their country as some sort of zoo: a place for travelers to gawk at a culture locked in the past. And just how landowners will react to having rules imposed on them by the central government remains to be seen. "Ownership here is very, very tight," says John Haglelgam, who served as President of F.S.M. from 1987 to 1991 and is now a history professor at the College of Micronesia. "The world park goes to the core of the land-ownership system...
...sees the embargo as outdated and insulting, considering the other nations currently subject to an E.U. arms ban are all pariah states - Congo, North Korea, Iran, Burma, Somalia, Sudan and Zimbabwe. (A similar E.U. embargo against Uzbekistan was lifted in October, despite continuing concerns about human rights in the Central Asian nation...
...important as her age. As a vigorous 50-year-old replacing her political mentor, 69-year-old President Oscar Arias, the center-right Chinchilla (pronounced cheen-chee-ya) is ushering in a new generation of leadership at a moment when Costa Rica's stature as the Switzerland of Central America is in decline. Its democracy remains the region's strongest, but it has been rocked in recent years by a spate of high-level government corruption scandals, a spike in drug-trafficking violence and a widening gap between rich and poor. Costa Rica's image as Central America's moral...
Costa Rica has always been a progressive beacon on Central America's benighted street: the reliable democracy that makes a point of eschewing a military so it can spend more on schoolteachers. But until the Feb. 7 presidential election, it had yet to select a female head of state, something its two less-developed neighbors, Nicaragua and Panama, did long ago. Now a new President-elect, Laura Chinchilla, has finally struck a blow for Ticas, female Costa Ricans...
That's as important to Central America as it is to Costa Rica, which has long given the isthmus a model to emulate - something it still urgently needs. Central America may no longer be fighting the civil wars that ravaged it in the 1980s, but its problems are nonetheless mountainous and pose policy headaches for Washington in areas like the drug war, free trade and illegal immigration. The region's homicide rates, for example, are among the world's highest, as are its illiteracy and malnutrition indexes. Rule of law, as the Honduras debacle demonstrated, remains largely dysfunctional...