Word: powerful
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Meanwhile, Mikhail Gorbachev is confronting a political crisis as the reforms he inspired in Eastern Europe begin to haunt him at home. With Gorbachev's tacit blessing, East Germany and Czechoslovakia have joined Hungary and Poland in abolishing the Communist Party's constitutional monopoly on power. Nonetheless, the Soviet leader has always insisted that the party must retain its pre-eminence in his country if perestroika is to succeed. Last week the Lithuanian legislature defied Gorbachev's wishes and legalized rival political parties, setting the stage for other Soviet republics to do the same. This week radical delegates are expected...
...save it from extinction. With the party's upper echelon disgraced, the taut discipline snapped down below. A half million of the 2.3 million cardholders have deserted the party in recent weeks, and last week middle-ranking members joined the opposition groups in crying for the departure of the power brokers who for 41 years imposed their rule. Citizens worked with the regular People's Police to prevent the shredding and theft of incriminating documents. Airline flights to Rumania were suspended to block the removal of key documents. Police sealed the offices of party leaders and searched other party members...
...scientist believes lack of computing power -- as well as ignorance about such critical factors as the interactions between the oceans and the atmosphere, and the impact of clouds on surface temperatures -- limits the ability to predict the greenhouse effect. "It's possible that Washington will see 96 days of temperatures over 100 degrees F in the year 2010," he says, "but it's also possible that the U.S. will be economically impoverished because it unilaterally imposed draconian measures in anticipation of a greenhouse warming that never arrived...
...investing in companies that respect Mother Nature. Several mutual funds have been set up to buy shares only in corporations judged to follow the Valdez Principles, a set of guidelines for environmentally sound practices. Most important of all, Americans, like the citizens of all democracies, have the ultimate political power to enforce their will. If they are anxious to have a cleaner, safer, healthier environment for themselves and their children, they can vote for political candidates who seem to share that sense of urgency...
...technical assistance to poorer nations. In the past, development agencies have tended to promote pell-mell progress, leading many nations to conclude that environmental destruction is an integral part of economic advance. Senator Albert Gore, a Tennessee Democrat, advocates that assistance be refocused on "leapfrogging" technologies, like low-emission power plants, so that nations may better the lives of their people without repeating the mistakes of the industrial world. But to develop better technologies, says Harvard atmospheric scientist Michael McElroy, the U.S. will have to bolster its faltering science education...