Expansion, for example, brings weak clubs into the league and inflates the win totals of top tier clubs (or sometimes there are just more weak clubs anyway, without expansion).

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Indeed, public figures sometimes seem not just weak but malevolent.

ECONOMIST: Bulgaria, Romania and the EU

But the episode has drawn attention to the ways in which the United States, omnipotent though it may superficially seem in the post-cold-war age, is sometimes in fact quite weak.

ECONOMIST: America the unmighty

Rising seas pose some of the biggest emerging challenges to the world, as coastal urban areas face higher water and dangerous storms, protected only by weak, sometimes crumbling 20th-century flood defenses.

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New Labour's massive majorities in 1997 and 2002 came not from focus groups and presentational brilliance but substance - from a long line of revisionism and modernisation that started in the post-war period and continued sometimes strong, often weak, until Tony Blair and Gordon Brown finally re-invented progressive politics in Britain in the mid-1990's.

BBC: Philip Gould: What 'permanent campaign'?