Hanako called his bluff.

Two year olds bluff.

Calling the Big Banks Bluff

And women grew willing to sham and to bluff.

It's a well established fact of these animals that they actually bluff. They can't actually strike, but they pretend to.

The United Kingdom launched a five year programme to remove wastes from abandoned facilities or old dumps, starting with Signy Research Station and Fossil Bluff, Alexander Island.

Diamond apparently believed his own rhetoric that he and his bank are critical to economic prosperity in the UK. The regulators called his bluff and forced him to resign.

German and European Union policymakers are calling his bluff. As a result, the two sides have become stuck in a passive aggressive standoff that has made serious negotiation impossible.

Not falling for the trick, speculators repeatedly called his bluff. Draghi, with his famous pledge to do whatever it takes to ensure the euro s survival, succeeded where Paulson did not.

The only thing is that it's liable to having its bluff called, and therefore can only work if it's credible. To make it credible, you must avenge all insults and settle all scores, which leads to the cycles of bloody vendetta.

Is this all a bluff? The world could perhaps calmly wait for an answer, but for the fact that the progress of Iran s nuclear program and the approaching end of President Bush s term might create an incalculable dynamic of its own.

All negotiations between debtors and creditors involve bluff and bluster to some extent. But Greece's maverick finance minister, Yanis Varoufakis, has taken his case boldly to the media and the public in a way that leaves little doubt as to his willingness to play hard ball.

Big banks ability to extort such an arrangement stems from an implicit threat the financial sector and with it the economy s payment system would collapse if a systemically important bank were ever pushed into insolvency. But it is time to call the bankers bluff maintaining the payment system can and should be separated from the problem of bank insolvency.

NEW YORK For years, Russian President Vladimir Putin has wielded Europe s dependence on his country s natural gas as a foreign policy weapon, without fear of the European Union calling his bluff until now. With the EU launching an antitrust case against the state controlled gas conglomerate Gazprom, Europe has sent a clear signal that Putin s brutishness is no longer as intimidating as it once was.

With little leverage, Iran s leaders would then have two options. They could follow North Korea by sacrificing economic prosperity for nuclear breakout, and hope that US and Israeli talk of all options being on the table to stop their efforts is a bluff or they could pursue economic prosperity by forgoing a nuclear weapons capacity, and hope that a Libya style revolt does not envelope the country and doom the regime to a fate like that of Qaddafi.