Word: consortium
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...from the capital Islamabad, to prove to his people, and the world, that he still has the support of a large section of the country's population. Today's rally was expected to attract many more participants than yesterday's protest in Islamabad that was organized by a consortium of opposition parties and attended by several thousand. However turnout at yesterday's event would have been much higher, some attendees argue, if more than 100 opposition organizers hadn't been preemptively detained and kept under house arrest in the days preceding the protest...
What a difference four years make. In 2003, Airbus outsold its archrival Boeing for the first time, sparking a mood of triumphalism for those who saw the four-nation consortium as a model of European industrial cooperation. Today Airbus workers are demonstrating, and financial losses are mounting as a result of disastrous snafus that have delayed its flagship new plane. Cooperation? Major private shareholders of parent company EADS can't dump their shares fast enough. And to complicate matters, jousting among its government shareholders--exacerbated by the French presidential elections--is casting doubt on a restructuring plan that includes...
Airbus' ability to climb out of the crisis has been severely restricted by its cumbersome and intensely political management structure. The French, German, Spanish and British consortium is backed by billions of dollars in taxpayers' money. But it's a nightmare of corporate governance because management and blue-collar jobs have traditionally been divvied up among its various state and private owners. Horse trading trumps efficiency, so many operations are needlessly duplicated. The wiring muddles behind nearly $3 billion in cost overruns are a classic example: plants in Toulouse and Hamburg wired different parts of the A380 in different ways...
Another problem is national politics. Early last year, Argentina's government terminated a contract with a Suez-led consortium that was providing water services to Buenos Aires. The company also lost its contract to provide water to El Alto and La Paz, Bolivia, after massive protests beginning in 2003 over limited access for poor families. The leader of those protests, Abel Mamani, is the Minister of Water in the government of Evo Morales...
...problem with such a plan is that Iran might use both the knowledge and the enriched uranium from consortium plants to pursue a secret bomb-making program. That is why any such outcome should be accompanied by other safeguards: involvement by the international consortium in all Iranian nuclear facilities rather than just the enrichment sites, an agreement that there can be snap intrusive inspections of any facility, a verifiable cap on Iran's production of enriched uranium and a requirement that no facilities be hidden or buried...