He noted its steady increases in drug cultivation, the widening influence of rebels and its general potential to destabilize the region, given Colombia's position between the Panama Canal and Venezuela, the largest foreign supplier of oil to the United States.
Seeking a strategy that skirts the widening influence of Wal-Mart Stores in the grocery business, Albertsons said yesterday that it would spend $2.47 billion to buy the New England-based Shaw's chain of supermarkets from its British parent, J Sainsbury.
I've already documented how it's a moral imperative to export modern fuels to a mostly poor world (here, here), and oil and gas exports also lower the widening influence of OPEC and Russia.
But now, the company's widening influence is coming under scrutiny by federal prosecutors, who are examining the relationship between Dandong's wealthy and connected chairman, Wang Wenliang, and Gov. Terry McAuliffe of Virginia, a Democrat who was elected in 2013.
The abruptness of the termination, even if temporary, also suggested that the Russians, eager to show widening influence in the Middle East, had seriously misread how a public announcement of their use of the Hamadan base in western Iran would reverberate among Iranians.
Or, it may simply reflect the Patriot movement's widening influence on conservative politics and across the spectrum of groups on the radical right.
Much of the funding for Qaradawi's Qatar-based media enterprises comes from Sunni nations uneasy over Iran's widening influence in the Persian Gulf.
Less impressed by her wardrobe than by her infectious mix of ebullience and propriety, Seventh Avenue designers as diverse as Vera Wang, Tory Burch, Peter Som and Tommy Hilfiger have acknowledged her widening influence.
Many of these went on to write for the newly established weekly, New Society, an intellectual home that came ready-furnished as a result of Colin's widening influence at this time.
Kashmiri youth, including those involved in both violent and non-violent anti-India protests, contend today with uneven globalisation, Indian mass media, online connectivity, modern education, and at the same time, continuing militarisation and surveillance, social insulation, alienation, and the widening sphere of influence of orthodox Islam.
Rob Reich, a political-science professor at Stanford University, told me that the widening wealth gap could be influencing where donors give.
