Word: bans
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...When Ban Ki Moon received word last week that North Korea might be planning to test a nuclear device, he had reason to be anxious. As South Korea's Foreign Minister, Ban is a key player in the six-party talks aimed at finding a diplomatic solution to the dispute over Pyongyang's nuclear program. A test would scuttle those talks and likely lead to a renewed U.S. push for sanctions against North Korea. And so in the middle of Chuseok, the Korean Thanksgiving, Ban, 62, was on the phone to his counterparts in Moscow, Beijing, Washington and Tokyo, building...
...With the 192-nation General Assembly likely to vote on the next head of the U.N. this week, Ban has emerged as the clear favorite to replace outgoing Secretary-General Kofi Annan. If Ban gets the job, he'll have to get used to managing crises beyond the Korean peninsula. With the world confronting threats from Darfur to Afghanistan, many people expect the Secretary-General to be a global avatar of peace, as Annan in his best moments sought to be. Just as daunting is the challenge of cleaning house at the U.N., which has been dogged for years...
...Inoffensiveness is Ban's outstanding quality. He has spent 36 years as a diplomat, almost all of them outside the spotlight. His peers praise his understated "Confucian approach," as one Chinese expert puts it, but some wonder whether Ban has the steel to play a leading role on the international stage. "This will be the first time he's ever been his own boss," says Peter Beck, the Seoul-based director of the International Crisis Group's North East Asia Project. "Can he really assert himself and stand up to governments that act contrary to the U.N.?" His allies...
...self-described "country boy," Ban was born in 1944, when South Korea was under Japanese occupation, and spent his childhood in the shadow of the Korean War. He had diplomatic postings in New Delhi and Washington, at the U.N. and in Vienna before becoming South Korea's Foreign Minister in 2004. The years abroad gave him global contacts and helped protect his reputation from the taint of South Korea's toxic political environment. "He doesn't make enemies," says Yang Sun Mook, a senior official of the country's opposition Democratic Party. "He makes friends." But Ban can also...
Hazy Parisian bistros will be passé if a proposal by a French parliamentary panel to ban smoking in enclosed public areas becomes law. Really. France would join other once smoke-filled nations like Ireland and Britain that now forbid cigarettes indoors. France's Health Ministry says 66,000 people die each year from smoking--5,000 from secondhand smoke--but 20% of the population still lights up. The ban will probably be carried out by decree so that legislators won't have to take a public position on it. But they'll be in the anti-smoking vanguard anyway...