Like the EU, which began life as an economic bloc designed to stop Europe's industrial powers standing on each other's toes, the GCC's purpose was to ensure that some of the world's biggest oil and gas producers did nothing to upset the balance in the region.
Chávez backed other innovative measures too such as the Bolivarian Alternative of the Americas (or ALBA) a trade bloc designed to promote complementarity and reciprocity outside of the usual corporate structures, and the Venezuelan leader even created a new common currency called the Sucre.
In October 2006, at the annual statewide meeting of the Grand Lodge in Wheeling, when his tenure was about to end, Mr. Haas presented a bloc of amendments designed to modify rules that no longer made sense (if they ever did).
Efforts to address the crisis took a major leap forward when Mrs. Merkel and Mr. Sarkozy wrote a joint letter on Thursday to the E.U. president, Herman Van Rompuy, and to the European Commission president, Jos?anuel Barroso, calling for stricter sanctions against member states that break the bloc's rules designed to protect the stability of the euro.
Ukraine's president has designed the bloc, which has been campaigning in the name of unity, to include civil activists, soldiers fighting in Donbass, oligarchs' proxies, traditional regional power brokers and former Party of Regions lawmakers.
It is worth reemphasizing that this was a retrospective study from a single epilepsy center where patients were approved for surgery based on the diagnosis that the seizure onsets were in the temporal lobe, and the en bloc surgical resection was designed to remove the focus for pathologic examination.
The United Nations, and most regional political blocs, are not designed to challenge domestic rule and perpetual rulers, as the principles of sovereignty remain a cornerstone.
The "Mad Chef" at Bloc specialises in OTT food designed not so much to be savoured as to cause a commotion.
He said: "Nato itself is the product of a strategy (the cold war strategy of containing the Soviet Bloc), and therefore was never designed to generate strategy itself".
