Word: diplomats
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...Pyongyang, only to be frustrated at every turn. Finally, in the early hours of Feb. 13, that changed. Thanks in part to the Chinese, who played the stern taskmaster during the latest round of negotiations in Beijing ("they kept us up very late," Hill later joked), the State Department diplomat was able to return to his hotel shortly before 3 a.m. with a deal in hand. Hill wasn't the only U.S. official consumed by the talks. His boss, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, called him 12 times in three days to check the progress of negotiations. "He thought...
...been the smarter option. The government has not said that his arrest will diminish the heroin trade in Afghanistan. Indeed, the war against drugs and the war against the Taliban have to be seen as a single conflict--not separate objectives. "All of a piece," says a senior Western diplomat. "You can't separate narcotics from security from governance...
...Taliban's traditional stronghold in the south--where Noorzai's tribe lives--the radical Islamic group is actively encouraging poppy cultivation on a grand scale, a dramatic shift from its days in power when its puritanical tenets forbade drugs and drug trafficking. Why the change? As a Western diplomat in Kabul puts it, "It takes money to fund an insurgency." Of the $3 billion earned last year by Afghan narcotraffickers, roughly $800 million trickles down to the Afghan farmers who grow the crop. According to a senior Western official in Kabul, a small portion of that sum is "more than...
...during a period of tension with France). President Jefferson sent a squadron to the Mediterranean, where it met with failures and successes. In 1803 the frigate Philadelphia ran aground in Tripoli harbor; America had to burn the stricken ship. On the plus side, in 1805 William Eaton, a feisty diplomat, led a force of Marines, mercenaries and Arab allies 520 miles over the Egyptian desert and captured Tripoli's second largest town (the line in the Marine Corps hymn, "to the shores of Tripoli," commemorates this exploit). Jefferson ended the war by agreeing to pay the pasha $60,000, which...
...Before we could eat, the Iranian Ambassador, Mohammed Hassan Akhtire, a confidant of Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, made a sentimental speech about the significance of the Iranian Revolution in 1979. In particular, the turbaned diplomat remembered that Syria was the only country to support the fledgling Islamic Republic, and he said that relations were growing even stronger. Syrian President Bashar Al Assad is due to visit Tehran in the near future, he announced...