Word: branch
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With all that said, it remains a little perplexing to the international community just how willing this country is to go to war to spread liberal, democratic values and capitalism and how little it does to spread them by offering them the olive branch of free trade. Embargoes have been shown to be an utter failure in forcing the capitulation of governments...
Last month, the talk was of peace. Arnaldo Otegi, leader of Batasuna, the banned political party linked to the Basque terrorist group ETA, told a crowd of 15,000 at a velodrome in San Sebastián in the Basque Country: "[We] stand with an olive branch in our hand." Otegi, who has never condemned ETA's violence, was cheered as he declared it was time to "pluck the conflict out of the streets and bring it to the negotiating table." But this month, the news was of terror. ETA claimed responsibility for five small bombs that went...
...bare facts of Xavier's life hold few clues to his continued esteem. Unlike some of his fellow missionaries in Africa or the Americas, he discovered no new wonders of the world. None of the countries he visited was converted root and branch to Christianity. He died without ever realizing his dream of reaching mainland China. And in India, Xavier is infamous as the man who introduced the Inquisition. The visible manifestation of his legacy today is mixed; St. Francis Xavier schools and churches dot his route from southern India to Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Indonesia, Vietnam and Japan...
Goss, meanwhile, had been quietly planning his own housecleaning for a while. He had a mandate from Bush to make the CIA more aggressive and less risk averse in general, but he had special plans for the agency's storied clandestine services branch, the supersecret Directorate of Operations (D.O.), which runs covert spies and schemes all over the world. Last June, while Goss was chairman, the House Intelligence Committee wrote a report that said the D.O. was in danger of becoming "nothing more than a stilted bureaucracy incapable of even the slightest bit of success. The nimble, flexible, core mission...
...nice bill-signing ceremony in the Rose Garden, various pols (including the President) get to take credit, but nothing really changes ... except for the accretion of another sedimentary layer of semi-powerless bureaucracy. In truth, it is impossible for Congress to reorganize the inner workings of the Executive Branch without the full support of the President, and I'm not so sure George Bush really favored either one of the attempted reforms...