Word: confab
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...Europe sat on the sidelines. Instead of a foreign policy triumph, 2010 began with an unseemly squabble over whether or not to bail out Greece, whose debt has dragged down Europe's currency. At the same time, U.S. President Barack Obama announced he would be skipping an E.U.-U.S. confab in Spain in May, frustrated, it appeared, with the endless summitry that goes with accommodating the E.U. Little wonder that Europe finds itself in one of its periodic bouts of angst-ridden self-doubt. And little wonder that the rest of the world is asking questions: What does Europe stand...
...inaugural trip to Asia as U.S. President will be that of a soft-spoken general who happens to represent one of the world's most repressive regimes. Obama's planned joint appearance on Nov. 15 with Burmese Prime Minister Thein Sein, at an Association of Southeast Asian Nations' confab on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum in Singapore, will mark the first time since the era of Lyndon B. Johnson that an American President has spent any face-time with a member of the Burmese junta that has ruled since...
...years, the U.S. response to the junta's ironfisted rule has been an arsenal of economic sanctions. But Webb's confab with junta head General Than Shwe, though not an official visit, may signal a shift in U.S. policy. Earlier this year, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton acknowledged that U.S. sanctions have done nothing to moderate the junta's behavior, in part because nations like China and India have poured investment into Burma. After his mission, Webb told reporters, "Isolation is only preventing [Burma] from developing economically and politically...
...confab, which occurred in the recently constructed Burmese administrative capital of Naypyidaw, marked a momentous juncture in U.S.-Burma affairs. For more than a decade, Washington has maintained a virtual blackout on Burma relations, declining to assign an ambassador to the country and promoting a policy of economic isolation to keep its leaders from benefitting from trade ties. The Senator's visit could signal a softening of American strategy toward what has long been considered by the U.S. as a rogue state...
...Economics Humor Session is the AEA conference's first attempt to inject a little levity into an annual confab that noneconomists might charitably describe as dry. "You can count on one hand all the funny economists in the world," says R. Preston McAfee, a California Institute of Technology economics professor and Yahoo! research fellow who presided over the evening. But despite their rarity, some of these academics have attracted wide followings--admittedly, among those who can laugh at supply-demand curves. Yoram Bauman, a professor at the University of Washington, bills himself as the World's First and Only Stand...