Word: vacuumers
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Yousuf Raza Gilani is the Prime Minister of Pakistan and as such is visiting the U.S. this week. He came to the role via tragedy, elevated from the vacuum created by the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, the former Prime Minister to whom he had long been loyal. Despite Gilani's title, however, it is Bhutto's widower, the controversial Asif Ali Zardari, who is the true power behind Bhutto's People's Party and who has made the bulk of the decisions from his heavily guarded home in a leafy Islamabad neighborhood. Zardari is not shy about his influence, using...
...violent. In much of the center and the north of the country, communities have benefited from small amounts of investment in development, health and education, but their contact with civil servants is minimal, and people remain very poor. In the south and the east, along the Pakistani border, the vacuum of government has become an opportunity for gangsters and the Taliban. These are the areas where almost all the world's opium is produced and where Western forces are fighting a costly counterinsurgency campaign...
...might not allow us to build an Afghan nation. It would involve a very long-term policy of containment and management, and it may never lead to a clear victory or exit. But unlike abandoning Afghanistan entirely, as we did in 1990, it would not leave a vacuum filled by dangerous neighbors. And unlike a policy of troop increases, this strategy would be less costly, more popular with voters, more sustainable in the long term, less of a distraction from other global priorities and less likely to alienate Afghan nationalists and undermine the Afghan state...
...warned that the indictment risks prolonging, even exacerbating, the conflict in Sudan, which has already cost 200,000 lives and displaced 2.5 million people. Speaking for the African Union, Tanzanian Foreign Minister Bernard Membe told Agence France-Presse that if Al-Bashir is arrested, Sudan will face "a power vacuum . . . that risks military coups and widespread anarchy reminiscent of . . . Iraq...
...suffer a millennium of "Satanic chastisement" - but on the plus side, the raptured supposedly leave their clothes behind. "Just think of it," Kutner writes. "Any clothing item you want, direct to you by Heavenly consignment." And if that's not enough, worldwide annihilation will lead to a power vacuum you can fill with the government of your choice - like Kutner's Femocracy, led by the Gal-Pal-iament, "a semi-secret body of whispered caucuses and innuendoes, whose members are not formally voted in or out, but somehow just know...