While the action the United States would seek against North Korea was still being debated, one senior official said that Mr. Bush and his aides would ask Russia and China to exercise some "direct leverage" against North Korea by restricting trade.
As the senior Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee, which handles taxes and Social Security, Mr. Baucus is in a position to exercise some serious leverage in defense of his party's core beliefs -- especially protecting the interests of the poor and middle class.
"Now is the time to exercise some of that leverage by publicly putting Maliki on notice".
Nevertheless, there is a fear among many experts that, without a code, the funds may use their investments to try to exercise political leverage.
Yet there was no immediate indication that Western powers could exercise much leverage over Russia if it chose to ignore their warnings.
Furthermore, as a practical matter it is at the local level where commercial interests exercise maximum leverage, often to the detriment of the public lands.
And if Putin decides he does not want to exercise his leverage over Assad, the optimism that greeted the start of the talks last week will quickly fade.
"The Johnson case gives them more leverage in these kinds of cases, and I'm not surprised that they are willing to exercise that leverage," said Victor A. Kovner, who was the city's corporation counsel in the early 1990s.
The former executive, Steven C. Jacobs, charged, among other things, that he had been pressured to exercise improper leverage against government officials in Macau, and that the company had turned a blind eye to Chinese organized crime figures operating in its casinos.
It could exercise subtler leverage as well: by making small shifts in the pace and the menu of its purchases, China arguably helped persuade the U.S. Treasury to recapitalize Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, the wounded housing agencies, instead of letting them fail.
