Word: agreement
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...like the U.S. - historically, the biggest carbon emitters - and big developing nations like China, set to become the major carbon emitters. The U.S. under President George W. Bush in particular has insisted that since developing nations will be responsible for the vast majority of future carbon emissions, no climate agreement can work without mandatory action from poorer countries. Developing nations insist that rich nations need to go first, hence the standoff that has largely frozen international action on climate change for the past several years...
...timetable for a U.S. withdrawal of forces. "Today, we are looking at the necessity of terminating the foreign presence on Iraqi lands and restoring full sovereignty," al-Maliki said during a meeting with several Arab ambassadors in the United Arab Emirates. "The current trend is to reach an agreement on a memorandum of understanding either of the departure of the forces or a memorandum of understanding to put a timetable on their withdrawal." The announcement raised eyebrows among security planners and analysts around the world. Was it posturing? Or was al-Maliki diverging from his American ally? Or both...
...Maliki made the announcement amid widespread opposition among the Iraqi government to U.S. demands put forward during ongoing negotiations over the more formal Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA). The SOFA would create a legal framework for a long-term U.S. troop presence in the country after the U.N. mandate expires in December. The sudden mention of a timetable - a concept aggressively supported by al-Maliki's rivals in the Sadrist movement - may have come as a shock to Washington...
...Maliki may indeed be showing his true colors. Last month Iraq's speaker of Parliament, Mahmoud al-Mashhadanni, predicted this shift in the government's negotiating stance with the U.S. "[Maliki's] Shi'ite coalition is publicly with the [SOFA] agreement but secretly against it," says al-Mashhadanni. "They came to power because of an agreement with the multinational forces, and they [have to] thank them for that. But the [long-term] presence of the multinational force will affect their [popular, nationalist] position." (Al-Mashhadanni's own party, the Sunni Tawafuq bloc, has the reverse problem; according to al-Mashhadanni...
...Moscow lobbed this latest verbal missile toward Washington after Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and her Czech counterpart, Karel Schwarzenberg, signed an agreement in Prague for the radar's move, designed to warn of missiles headed toward Europe from Iran. "We face with the Iranians, and so do our allies and friends, a growing missile threat that is growing ever longer and ever deeper and where the Iranian appetite for nuclear technology to this point is still unchecked," Rice said after inking the pact. "It's hard for me to believe that an American president is not going to want...