Word: national
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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While he will continue to govern his tumultuous nation, it is entirely unclear that Hamid Karzai is capable of presiding over a stable Afghanistan. As America determines its policy in the region moving forward, it should not be any more confident in Afghanistan’s leader than in its electoral process and should avoid depending on the country’s shaky government for support...
...Maine, where Tuesday's vote was only the equivalent of a veto and can be easily reversed by lawmakers when they next meet, and not in the rest of country, where the issue continues to roil courthouses and statehouses alike. "Ultimately, this is going to have to have a national resolution," says same-sex-marriage activist Mary Bonauto, one of the nation's top lawyers involved in the campaign to legalize gay marriage. "It's about aligning promises found in the Constitution with America's laws." A leader in Maine's campaign to uphold gay marriage, Bonauto is best known...
...other gay-marriage activists in Maine who began organizing to press for gay marriage there decided to avoid taking the issue to court. Instead, they set about electing lawmakers who were friendly to their cause two years ago, and this year successfully convinced the legislature to become the nation's first to establish gay marriage by statute, rather than by decree. "Frankly, we had heard the criticisms about going the court route, and so we said, 'Fine, we'll go to the legislature,' " says Bonauto. "And it has been an incredible campaign." (Watch a video about the gay-marriage...
...compare Iran's nuclear ambitions to a characteristic suicide mission. Why this analogy? Normally one does not compare a whole nation to an individual, but Iran, as a Shi'ite theocracy, gives the appearance of acting out of similar motives. Iran celebrates the Shi'ite community that clusters around the great martyr Hussein, son of Ali. It used this ideology as it sent tens of thousands of undertrained young volunteers to their senseless death in the war against Iraq. Would this ideology play any role if Iran felt both cornered and it also possessed nuclear weapons...
...their export subsidies rise because their markets worldwide were shriveling, and a panicky Beijing was spooked by the prospect of massive unemployment if factories shut down. "By transferring wealth from households to boost the profitability of producers, China's ability to grow consumption in line with growth of the nation's GDP is severely hampered," says Michael Pettis, a finance professor at Peking University's Guanghua School of Management. Indeed, although China is also subsidizing some consumer purchases and retail sales in China were up about 15% in the first nine months of 2009, consumption as a percentage...