Venezuela's president, Hugo Chávez (front page, May 20), sounds just like an American president: interfering in the internal affairs of neighboring countries, targeting foreign aid to win influence, setting up trading blocs, broadcasting propaganda.
For the moment, Mr. Obama seemed content to let the debate play out in hopes of using the possibility of an aid cutoff to influence the situation without actually pulling the trigger yet.
Examples of propaganda of the deed would include staging an atomic "test" or the public torture of a criminal for its presumable deterrent effect on others, or giving foreign "economic aid" primarily to influence the recipient's opinions or actions and without much intention of building up the recipient's economy.
More often than not, aid used to influence the security policies of foreign governments has not been subject to strict and transparent public accounting.
Computational approaches involving finite element (FE) modeling may aid to determine their influence.
In addition, a majority of clinicians said that the EMR-based decision aid did not help them to influence patients' expectations regarding antibiotics.
But the security forces routinely inflate casualty numbers; the FARC, whose numbers tend to be less inaccurate, claimed to have killed 76 soldiers and police and captured 28 more.Even so, after two years of heavy defeats for the armed forces, the recent fighting suggests that American aid is starting to influence the battlefield.
Too little was done, they said, to address China's energy and environmental policies, or its expansion of influence in Southeast Asia, South Asia and Africa, where China has invested heavily and used billions of dollars in aid to advance its political influence.
These flows are changing the business of aid, undermining attempts by Western countries to improve their programmes and encouraging recipients to play donors off against each other.The use of aid to win friends and influence people is not new.
The Obama administration wants to rank colleges by tuition, graduation rates, debt and earnings of graduates, and use the rankings to influence federal financial aid to students.
