Word: ch
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Voters on Sunday re-elected him to a second consecutive term, though under unusual conditions. Before Correa, no President elected after 1992 had managed to stay in office for a full four-year term. Like Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, Correa espouses "21st century socialism," which has put him on a confrontational course with Washington over the past few years. But even more so than Chávez, who publicly warmed to U.S. President Barack Obama at the recent Summit of the Americas in Trinidad, Correa has been effusive about the new government in Washington. Obama is a "sincere...
...Libya just before he stepped down from the presidency to become Prime Minister: that one involved an agreement to sell $2.5 billion worth of arms, while cancelling Libya's $4 billion Soviet debt. Or there was last October's agreement with Venezuela in which Medvedev gave Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez a $1.1 billion credit line so the country could add to its arsenal of Russian weapons...
Perhaps, but Vargas' lifestyle is hardly the stuff of Chávez's "21st-century socialism." In a rare interview last year, he told the Wall Street Journal, "People write stories about me saying I have a Ferrari, a plane, a yacht. But it's not true. I've got three planes, two yachts, six houses. I've been rich all my life!" In 2004, his daughter Margarita wed Luis Alfonso de Borbón, a cousin of Spain's King Juan Carlos, great-grandson of the late Spanish dictator Francisco Franco and a legitimate heir to the non-existent...
...attention was paid to the new Obama family dog and then, more appropriately, to the Bush Administration's torture policy and the probably futile attempt to prosecute those who authorized the practices. And then to a handshake and a smile that the President bestowed on the Venezuelan demagogue Hugo Chávez. These are the soap bubbles of our public life. They have become the hasty, capricious, bite-size way that we experience the world. It has made for slovenly, sandy citizenship...
...enemies, a reeling Republican Party that lurches from gimmicks to hissy fits, including frequent, unbidden appearances by such unpopular characters as Karl Rove, Dick Cheney and Newt Gingrich, whose rants about everything from Obama's decision to repudiate the torture of enemy combatants to his handshake with Chávez seem both ungracious and unhinged. "We obviously haven't found our voice yet," says Senator Lamar Alexander, one of the more thoughtful GOP leaders. "The American people sent us to the woodshed. And when you go to the woodshed, the best course of action is to sit there, be quiet...