Word: closers
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...care as the top five issues most Indonesians care about, SBY is the only candidate regularly polling above or near 50%, the threshold necessary to win in one voting round. Still, some polls - and it is difficult to know which surveys are unbiased and reliable - show the race getting closer. Failure to reach that will send the top two vote getters to a second round in September, something the incumbent and front runner would probably like to avoid. "The question now is whether it is better for SBY to win with a slight margin in one round or a stronger...
...most modern democratic standards, Silvio Berlusconi's wild 15-year political ride would seem closer than ever to crashing. The 72-year-old Italian Prime Minister is facing a swirl of questions linked to his personal life, including the latest allegations that a high-paid escort stayed with him at his Rome residence the night of Nov. 4 as results were coming in of Barack Obama's election victory. But as damning as the news may appear, it is still too early to predict the demise of the billionaire TV tycoon, who rose to power in 1994 with an often...
...attending his new one. North Korea's nuclear test on May 25 threatened to undo everything Hill had worked on as point man for the U.S. in the six-party talks with Pyongyang. But as the new U.S. ambassador to Iraq, he was focused that evening on bad news closer to his home: a roadside bomb in Fallujah had killed a senior State Department official working on Iraq's reconstruction and two others. Hill had given a speech earlier in the day about American sacrifices on foreign soil; here was proof that such sacrifices were far from over...
...early goals, for example, was to coax Iraqi politicians into agreeing on a "hydrocarbon law": a framework both for sharing oil and gas revenues among Iraq's ethnic groups and for allowing easy foreign investment. But Arabs and Kurds are no closer than ever to an agreement on revenue-sharing, and pushing too hard could lead to armed conflict between them. Hill has had to back off. "I arrived here and realized that, actually, people aren't really working on the hydrocarbon law," he says. The risk is that without a new legal framework for the oil and gas industry...
...Lawrence Freedman, a professor of war studies at King's College London, says such rhetoric from Iran may force Obama to move closer to the European leaders in toughening his public stance on Iran. "It will become more likely that the U.S. and Europe will find a consensus if the Iranian regime becomes more oppressive, or as their pronunciations of Western interference become more extreme. You can't give credence to those accusations, and you'll need strong rebuttals from both European and American leaders." (See what Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's win means for other world leaders...