Word: stranglehold
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...over the unwieldy Vatican bureaucracy by placing his trusted Italians in key positions and serving as the ultimate gatekeeper to the Pope, who has fewer direct meetings than his predecessor had and stays focused on his writings and continuing his work as guardian of church doctrine. "Bertone has a stranglehold over things," says the Vatican official critical of the No. 2 man. "But that may be what Pope wants...
Breaking that stranglehold will take more than just popularity and money, both of which Pacquiao has by the truckload. On March 26, upon his return from the Clottey fight, he was mobbed by media and jubilant fans at the airport, before being driven in a bulletproof Chevrolet Tahoe guarded by armed police to Sarangani. Roughly the size of Rhode Island, Sarangani (pop. 411,713) is a coastal province where people scrape a living from fishing or farming. Pacquiao grew up in the province's sleepy town of Kiamba, and with one eye on the congressional campaign built a house there...
...educated businessman from a wealthy and well-entrenched political dynasty. "Pacquiao is up for a very tough fight," says Prospero de Vera, professor of public administration at the University of the Philippines. "Sarangani is relatively poor and local politics is very traditional. The Chiongbians have had a stranglehold on power for decades." (See pictures of the rise of Manny Pacquiao...
...deliver significant gains for his years of negotiating with Israel and the U.S. has left his popularity at an all-time low. The Obama Administration has maintained its predecessor's boycott of Hamas and has declined to intervene meaningfully in the standoff in Gaza, where Israel maintains an economic stranglehold aimed at toppling Hamas. So despite his best intentions, Obama closed out 2009 in a situation not unlike that of Bush's valedictory year - pressing for talks between Israel and an increasingly marginal Abbas while wishing away the problem of Hamas. After a year of peacemaking, the Administration is more...
...Although the international community occasionally protests Gaza's ongoing tragedy, so far no real pressure has been put on Israel to loosen its stranglehold. A senior official in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's right-wing government recently confided to a U.N. colleague that Israel's goal for Gaza was "no development, no prosperity, no humanitarian crisis." The U.N. official interpreted that to mean that Israel would provide Gaza with an intravenous drip of relief to keep its 1.5 million inhabitants alive but just barely, in hopes that the people would overthrow the Hamas government they voted into power...