Word: standoff
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Warning. Whether the experiment would work in Italy was also uncertain; but like an untested drug on a moribund patient, it seemed no worse than the alternative. The election was another Italian standoff. The Christian Democrats, with 39% of the vote, did not emerge with sufficient strength to govern alone; the Communists, with 34%, fell short of what they needed to command a formal role in the government. The Christian Democrats were unwilling to share power formally with the Communists. They were also on warning not to by Western allies, who at an economic summit in Puerto Rico in June...
...pest control. They no longer speak of eradicating insect species: the costs both in dollars and environmental side effects are simply too great, the chances of success too small. What they are after instead is what George Georghiou of the University of California at Riverside calls a Mexican standoff, in which insect depredations could be kept small enough to be acceptable economically...
...kept from power. The Italian party-largest in the West and independently moderate under its popular leader Enrico Berlinguer (TIME cover, June 14)-so worried Western leaders that Secretary of State Henry Kissinger had repeatedly warned Italians against voting Communists into government. Last week Kissinger called the results a standoff and predicted another election within a year. The Vatican, Berlinguer's other relentless foe, was just as concerned. Pope Paul VI last week undertook the revitalization of Catholic lay organizations; their 5 million members were last used politically in the church's anti-Communist battles of the Cold...
...most powerful group, the conservative Dorotei, "owns" about 27% of the party's membership, while the leftwing, urban-based Forze Nuove has 10%. Overall, the party is divided into two roughly equal, opposing camps, one old-guard conservative and the other comparatively youthful and progressive. In this standoff situation, pivotal power is usually held by Aldo Moro's Morotei faction, which commands only 8% of the party membership but has enough swing-seat muscle to control the top government jobs...
...hazardous standoff continues there is a strong chance that the encounters between Icelandic gunboats and British frigates may cause a fatal accident. Should one Icelandic sailor die government officials warn, public opinion may demand a break with NATO Such a break would both please and enhance the political clout of the Communist-oriented "People's Alliance," which has eleven seats in Reykiavik's 1,000-year-old Parliament. It might also benefit the Soviet Union, whose trawlers, during the cod war with Britain have scrupulously observed Iceland's 200-mile fishing limit...