Word: calmness
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...Sunni triangle, the Kurdish Peshmerga in the north, the Shi'ite Badr Brigade in the south. This would be dreadful long-term policy, an open invitation to civil war. But would the Bush Administration oppose it? Possibly not, on recent evidence, especially if it produced the appearance of calm by November (as it already has in Fallujah). Several Kerry aides said they thought it was possible that some American troops would be coming home this fall...
...presence. For many of the insurgent groups fighting the Americans right now may be seen as a means to expand their influence in a post-occupation Iraq. That may be why some Iraqi Governing Council members are furious over the deal made by the U.S. to restore calm to Fallujah by essentially handing control of the town to a military force intimately associated with the insurgents on the understanding that this force would prevent attacks on U.S. forces. Plainly, the new Fallujah force has no intention of disarming the insurgents, some of whom are now in its ranks...
...abolish the office of the chairman and the post of chief operating officer. Both had been created by predecessor Thomas Middelhoff in an attempt to consolidate power at the firm. "Thielen came in and said, 'Decentralize,'" says a senior Bertelsmann official. "More than anything, that restored calm." Thielen, a 24-year company veteran who also runs a small sausage factory in Saarland and a dental lab on the side, won a power struggle with the chairman of the company's supervisory board over plans to merge Bertelsmann's music division and Sony--and in January had his contract extended...
When Jean-Rene Fourtou took over as chief executive of Vivendi Universal on July 3, 2002, he says, he planned to carry out "a calm diagnosis" of the company's many problems. Instead, he was plunged into a maelstrom. Two days after his appointment, Moody's threatened to reduce Vivendi's credit rating to junk status and thus seriously imperil its finances. Fourtou's predecessor, the celebrity CEO Jean-Marie Messier, had leveraged Vivendi to the bursting point. His legacy included opaque accounts, a huge pile of debt--$34.5 billion, of which $5.5 billion had to be repaid within nine...
Fourtou, a connoisseur of Bordeaux wine, was in his early 60s and cruising comfortably toward retirement after 16 years as head of the pharmaceutical firm Rhone-Poulenc, now part of Aventis. But the Vivendi board was desperate to find a respected executive to calm the company. Fourtou, who is 64, initially resisted but has since performed brilliantly. He has sold off about $12 billion in assets--not including Universal--and reshaped Vivendi around its telecommunications, music and French TV businesses. Those pieces don't make a great strategic fit, his critics point out, but Vivendi is a far more manageable...