While their growing eminence may or may not presage a new era of European dominance, their swelling popularity reveals the power of their thumb-twitching pastime — and how eager golf fans are for vivid personalities.
A Tory win might presage moves towards the harsher US economic and political model, outside the EU, possibly outside the current UK because Scotland would then go its own way.
In July, Mr Immelt said that he would reorganise GE Capital's 26 financial businesses into four big units, which seemed to presage bloodletting.
But it may presage a longer slowdown.
Takashi Koyari had been expected to win handily, but a former lawmaker from the opposition Democratic Party of Japan, Taizo Mikazuki, narrowly defeated him.The LDP's defeat may presage further headaches for Mr Abe.
The somewhat manufactured quality of this year's political tantrum over oil may presage big changes to come.
The bigger question in the minds of Gazans and Israelis was whether the lull, the longest since the war began, could presage the start of deeper negotiations.The Al-Badia coffee shop on Gaza City's main street has lifted its shutters to sell its beans, but not yet to reopen its upstairs café for the well-to-do.
Unusually warm waters off the coast of Peru.These hot seas presage the arrival of El Niño, the name given to the exceptionally warm and long-lived ocean currents that lap the coast of Peru and Ecuador every two to seven years.
One possibility is that his isolation could presage a resumption of fighting between Turks and Kurds.One of Mr Ocalan's lawyers says that he and his colleagues have been denied access to the Kurdish leader since November 27th, the day before Turkey's new government, led by the conservative Justice and Development party, won the parliamentary vote of confidence that secured its place in power.
MIGHT the mental meanderings of bookworms presage who will be the next American president?
The bombing of a petrol station close to Damascus by one of Mr Assad's aircraft on January 2nd, killing dozens of civilians, and the firing of ballistic missiles at rebel-held towns presage a host of horrors ahead.With little sign of a shift in policy by outsiders or insiders, a bloody stalemate looks set to persist.
