Word: communist-bloc
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...dealing with the developed West. Kapuscinski's sympathies lay with the wretched of the earth - the patient, plodding masses of countries suffused with sunshine and suffering. He began his career at a time when former colonies in Asia and Africa were gaining their independence: a big story for a communist-bloc press agency. Besides, Poland had itself been kicked around by imperial powers, so Kapuscinski knew what it was like - as he wrote in The Shadow of the Sun - "to have nothing, to wander into the unknown and wait for history to utter a kind word...
...however, has proven surprisingly resilient. A 1997 study by a South Korean think tank that compared North Korea to communist-bloc countries before they collapsed concluded the North could have suffered the same fate - in 1992. The regime "is surviving and will continue to survive for the time being," said Kim Sung Chull, one of the report's authors. One reason is that Kim is supported by an élite group of military officers, party cadres and security officials who haven't been as affected by the economic collapse as the general population and who see their fate linked...
...failing to protect the environment is ultimately more costly than preserving it. Consider the case of Eastern Europe. For decades, the communist-bloc countries stoked their industrial production without regard for the environmental consequences. Only this year was the scope of the resulting ecocatastrophe revealed to the world. Zoltan Illes, Hungary's Deputy State Secretary for Environment and Nature Protection, estimates that health problems and loss of production because of air and water pollution reduce his nation's gross domestic product more than...
...April, 1982, President Reagan issued an executive order which increased his ability to classify certain research "sensitive" to the nation's security. Administration officials have also used the Export Control Act, which authorizes restrictions on the export of "technological data" to bar foreign scientists and scholars, particularly those from Communist-bloc countries, from participating in scientific conferences and from being exposed to certain information...
...nations are not producing babies fast enough. Since 1957, writes Wattenberg in his new book The Birth Dearth (Pharos Books; $16.95), the average American woman's fertility rate has dropped from 3.77 children to 1.8 -- below the 2.1 size needed to maintain the present population level. Meanwhile, he argues, Communist-bloc nations are producing at a rate of 2.3 children per mother, while the Third World rate is rising so fast that within 50 years its population may be at least ten times that of the West...