Word: coups
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...DIED. Alfredo Stroessner, 93, canny and cruel dictator of Paraguay from 1954 to 1989 who brought relative stability and economic growth to the South American country-which had seen six Presidents toppled from 1948 to 1954-before being ousted in a 1989 coup and exiled; in Brasília. The macho general, who flashed his name in neon across the country and famously sheltered Nazis including Josef Mengele, solidified and maintained his control by rigging elections, torturing and murdering perceived enemies, and turning his country into a smuggling capital (the "price of peace," he once said). By the 1980s...
...large degree by leftovers from the corrupt political class that once had a lock on power, they tried and failed to wrest power from Chavez with a coup d'etat in 2002 and a nationwide oil strike that paralyzed the country later that year. They only seemed to deepen their hole when they lost a 2004 referendum to oust Chavez and then boycotted parliamentary elections last year - a blunder that allowed Chavez allies to take 100% control of Venezuela's National Assembly and strengthened his seeming omnipotence. Since then, divisive infighting has been the opposition's norm...
...results. Still, with 55 percent of Venezuelans expecting to vote for Chavez, many pro and anti-Chavez Venezuelans alike take it for granted that he will win another six years in power. But then again, this is a country that over the last four years has seen a failed coup d'etat, two-month oil strikes and a referendum on the president's rule. In other words, in the Venezuela of Hugo Chavez, anything can happen...
Getting Gen. John Abizaid, the Pentagon's top Middle East commander, to admit at a Thursday hearing that it's possible Iraq "could move toward a civil war" wasn't the only coup Senate Democrats scored. The same day they also managed to plant another political time bomb, which could explode in the next three or four months over George Bush's conduct of the war, by winning approval for a new National Intelligence Estimate focusing on Iraq's growing sectarian violence...
...makes a doll out of tar to ensnare his nemesis Br'er Rabbit. The Oxford American Dictionary defines tar baby much like Romney used it, "a difficult problem, that is only aggravated by attempts to solve it." But the term also has had racial implications. In his book Coup, John Updike says of a white woman who prefers the company of black men, "some questing chromosome within holds her sexually fast to the tar baby." The Oxford English Dictionary (but not the print version of its American counterpart) says that tar baby is a derogatory term used for "a black...