Word: diplomatized
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Lately, just about everything the Germans do seems to cause annoyance. When Kohl urged that German be elevated to the status of a working language in the E.C., alongside English and French, a senior British diplomat sniffed, "It was a bit presumptuous of them to demand everything at once." Countered Kohl, who speaks neither English nor French: "Whether one likes to hear it or not, it ((German)) is now the most widely spoken language in the E.C." While that may be a slight exaggeration, what the Germans call their Sprachraum (linguistic space) does include more than 100 million people...
Israel and the U.S. have long been on a collision course over loan guarantees to help resettle Jews from the former Soviet Union. Last week the crunch finally came, sinking any chance of obtaining the guarantees anytime soon and pushing the two countries' ties into what one U.S. diplomat calls "the roughest patch I've seen...
...agent." But in the wake of ousting dissident turned despot Zviad Gamsakhurdia in January, Tbilisi leaders took a more benign view of the onetime Georgian Communist Party boss and last week appointed him to chair the new State Council, effectively giving Shevardnadze stewardship of his mountainous homeland. The veteran diplomat now faces pressing tasks: staving off economic collapse, healing the divisions created by months of civil strife and ending the isolation into which Georgia was pushed during Gamsakhurdia's flirtation with dictatorship...
...would be utterly unforgivable for future generations if, by failing to spend a few tens of billions of dollars in aid over the next few years, suddenly defense spending in the West would start climbing again to meet a renewed threat from Russia," says a senior Western diplomat in Moscow. Of course, Russia is not the West's to win or lose, any more than China was 40 years ago when the question "Who lost China?" was used as a political bludgeon. Nevertheless, most experts argue that the right kinds of aid can make a significant difference to the outcome...
Even less hopeful was the action of a senior Syrian diplomat at the February 1991 meeting of the United Nations Human Rights Commission in Geneva. He advised others to get a copy of the book at the top of his recommended reading list, The Matzah of Zion, an updated version of the infamous Damascus Blood Libel of 1840, which accused 16 Jews of murdering a Catholic priest and his servant in order to use their blood to bake Passover matzah. At least the issue of Syrian Jews is surfacing in the corridors of international meetings...