Word: voted
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Former Vice President Laura Chinchilla won a Feb. 7 vote to become the first woman elected to lead Costa Rica. A protégé of the outgoing President, Nobel Peace Prize winner Oscar Arias, Chinchilla is expected to continue Arias' economic policies and his efforts as peace broker in the region. A social conservative, Chinchilla opposes gay marriage and abortion and has promised to combat the country's increasing crime rate...
...country's Feb. 7 presidential election, former Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych defeated sitting Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko by 3.5 percentage points. Though the vote received high marks from international election monitors, Tymoshenko refused to concede and signaled that she may ask for a recount. Tymoshenko may be hoping for a repeat of the Orange Revolution that followed the 2004 presidential election; that uprising ousted Yanukovych after he was accused of electoral fraud. Any election appeals must be lodged by Feb. 17, when Kiev will declare the results official...
...While Washington could cut individual deals with the banking centers of Belgium, the Netherlands and Switzerland to gain access to their data, officials say a better tactic may be to try an assuage European Parliament concerns over data-protection standards and put the proposal before the body for another vote...
...least required U.S. authorities to abide by several European demands on data protection and improved oversight. Yet despite their pressure - and last-minute pleas by such high-ranking U.S. officials as Vice President Joe Biden, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner - the European Parliament voted down the measure on Feb. 11 by a hefty margin of 378-196. After the vote, the Obama Administration called it "a setback for U.S.-E.U. counter-terror cooperation." (See who's who in Barack Obama's White House...
Perhaps the biggest message from the vote is that European governments will now have to adapt to working with an increasingly emboldened Parliament. Thomas Klau, who heads the Paris office of the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR), says that while Parliament members were sincere in their concerns over civil liberties, some were perhaps also a little over-excited to exercise their new authority. "The institutional landscape has changed," he says. "This is an early affirmation of the European Parliament's increased powers and self-confidence in the wake of the Lisbon Treaty. And it now has political ambition...