Word: patchworks
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...refugee crisis comes as the Burmese military regime is tightening its grip on the country ahead of the nationwide election it has announced for next year. Since taking power in 1962, the exclusively ethnic Burman, or Burmese, junta has largely tamed an unruly patchwork of 100-plus ethnic groups, in part by signing cease-fire accords and granting certain minorities a modicum of regional autonomy. But with the upcoming election, ethnic groups with standing armies - such as the Kokang, the Kachin, the Karen and the Wa - have been given until October by the junta to refashion themselves as a centrally...
...beauty of the policy is that it's neither liberal nor conservative, just deeply pragmatic--the most American ideology of all. You do whatever works, throw ideas at the problem and see what sticks. Look at our history, and the not-quite-rational patchwork of minimal solutions has a decent track record. If Cash for Clunkers is really all it takes to get us up and moving again, that $3 billion will look like the smartest money Washington spent all year...
...needs—from restaurants, supermarkets, and karaoke bars, to medical, legal, insurance and real estate services—are readily available in one’s mother tongue. Major cities such as New York and Los Angeles are as much or more about a polyglot patchwork of such self-contained ethnic communities as they are about anything that could be called a dominant culture. Indeed, even whatever could loosely be called a “dominant culture” derived from white Anglo-Saxon Protestants, is like the croutons in a soup whose broth and flavor come from African...
...legislative language in meetings with White House health officials, including Nancy-Ann DeParle, Obama's health-reform czar. The nurse-practitioners lobby is hoping such federal recognition of the central role the profession can play in a revamped health system will exert pressure on states to ease restrictions. A patchwork of state laws now dictates how much freedom nurse practitioners have, ranging from states like Alabama, where nurse practitioners can work only under the supervision of a physician, to Oregon, where nurse practitioners are permitted to run their own private practices...
Instead of relying on brute force, McChrystal has to find more subtle ways of dealing with an Afghan insurgency that grows out of a patchwork of motivations based on tribal allegiances, Islamic fundamentalism and the strategies of warlords eager to keep what has been theirs for generations. "I am not sure," McChrystal says, "there are two different people out there with the same reason for the fight." He has to untangle the various threads in this skein and then determine what action - economic development, strong government, death - works best in each case. (Read "Why the Pentagon Axed Its Afghanistan Warlord...