Word: czeched
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Eased Entry. The U.S. Visa Waiver Program has been extended to visitors from the Czech Republic, Estonia, Latvia, Slovakia, Lithuania, Hungary, Malta and South Korea - travelers from those countries are no longer required to apply for tourist visas before entering the U.S., and may stay up to 90 days...
...There was one key setback for Russia, though: The NATO communiqué endorsed U.S. deployment of its anti-missile system on Czech and Polish soil. Moscow views such deployments as a direct strategic challenge, and has vowed to counter them by deploying new missiles of its own near Poland. Although the Russian position enjoys some sympathy in Western Europe - France's President Nicolas Sarkozy only last month complained the U.S. missile defense system would "bring nothing to security" but would "complicate things" with Russia - there was no sign of that view in the final text agreed by NATO foreign ministers...
...with the Dalai Lama recently - as British premier Gordon Brown did in May, and German Chancellor Angela Merkel did in August. Beijing also has little to say about E.U. officials who will speak with the Dalai Lama during his tour of Europe this month - including officials from the Czech Republic, which assumes the E.U.'s rotating presidency from France in January. So why the exceptionally rough treatment for Sarkozy and France, which China is now threatening with possible diplomatic and trade retaliation...
...Solidarity movement was in the throes of an internal power struggle between radicals and moderates, with Moscow watching closely, having reinforced the Soviet troop contingent stationed in Poland. The Soviets had previously sent troops to crush a popular rebellion in Hungary in 1956, and to brutally destroy a reformist Czech communist regime in 1968, and Jaruzelski was acutely aware of the danger that Poland could suffer a similar fate. Martial law was "a dramatically difficult decision," but it "saved Poland from a looming catastrophe," according to Jaruzelski...
...much for the courtship. The intimidation of Europe's East - the Baltics, Poland, Ukraine, the Czech Republic - is also doing fine. Ukraine and the Baltics, after all, were once part of the Soviet Union, and the others were satrapies until the Berlin Wall came down in 1989. Never mind that all of them, with the exception of Ukraine, are now firmly embedded in E.U. and NATO; for Russia they are either the "near abroad" or what the tsars used to call Russia's "sphere of influence...