Word: blocs
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...other important voting bloc is Sri Lanka's Tamil minority. With Rajapaksa and Fonseka expected to split the vote of the Sinhalese Buddhist majority, Tamils could become kingmakers. But election monitors have serious concerns about their access to the polls. There are about 170,000 recently resettled war refugees, and another 108,000 displaced people who are still held in camps. The Rajapaksa administration has repeatedly said they will all have a chance to vote, but only 35,000 of the displaced have been registered according to officials at People's Action for Free and Fair Elections, the country...
...Splitting the international community has been Iran's goal from the start, and unilateral sanctions could be fatally undermined if a bloc of countries that trade with Iran, such as China, Russia, Turkey and India, don't comply. The very fact that the U.S. and its allies are even thinking of going it alone is a sign of just how much trouble Obama's policy...
...subtle ways. Following the 2008 Russia-Georgia war, Lukashenko declined to recognize the breakaway Georgian republics of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, despite pressure from Russia to do so. Lukashenko also joined the E.U.'s Eastern Partnership initiative, created in 2008 to strengthen ties between Europe and the ex-Soviet bloc, much to Moscow's dismay. And last June, Belarus refused to attend a key security summit in Moscow after Russia slapped a ban on Belarusian dairy products. (See pictures of Russia celebrating Victory...
...Michigan's house of representatives in 2004. He built a fairly conservative record (he is Catholic and opposes abortion); his efforts to restructure the state health care system to sharply reduce costs endeared him to Michigan's business élite but infuriated unions, historically a key Democratic voting bloc. (See TIME's yearlong look at Detroit...
...denied until her 30s. She outsmarted phalanxes of gray-haired, gray-suited machine politicians to set two other precedents, becoming the first woman to occupy the Chancellery as well as its youngest incumbent. Then in September, after four tricky years helming a coalition that yoked her conservative Christian Democrat bloc with the Social Democratic Party, she won a new mandate, with center-right coalition partners of her choosing. Now, as the emboldened leader of Europe's most populous nation and most powerful economy, Merkel has the ability to make her personality and priorities count on a global stage. But what...