Word: downplay
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...which village elders and religious leaders gather to consult in times of national crisis. Though the Afghan leader, who joined the Communist Party in 1965, has never been notably religious, he opened all his speeches with the Islamic preamble, "In the name of Allah, the beneficent and merciful . . ." To downplay his connections to Moscow, he dropped the red star from the national emblem and said it would no longer be necessary to address him as comrade. He even insisted, "We do not want to build a Communist society, and we are not a Communist Party...
...would tend to downplay facist tendencies in American skinheads," Whelan says. The prejudice that exists among the skinheads "is a different way of expressing a feeling they inherited from their parents, because many of the people from Charlestown and South Boston basically are racists," he adds...
...offer was a stunning reversal for the Sandinistas, who for years have dismissed the contras as "U.S. puppets" and rejected talks of any kind with rebel leaders. Ortega tried to downplay the shift by emphasizing that his proposal does not extend to political negotiations. Cease-fire talks, he said, will "unmask those who say they want peace but in reality want war." The concessions coincided with the first deadline of the peace plan championed by President Oscar Arias Sanchez of Costa Rica and signed last August by five Central American Presidents. While the Reagan Administration countered Ortega's offer with...
Haig staffers are also trying to downplay the former general's image as a war-monger. "We have had 12 generals who became president, but none in war-time because they have all seen it first-hand," Joseph said. They have spent more than $24,000 on the N.H. campaign...
...stuff of flickering newsreels, replay themselves in 1989? Could it possibly happen again in this day and age? Almost no one seemed to think so only a few years ago, when the initial comparisons between the go-go decades of the 1920s and 1980s tended to downplay the possibility that the "Roaring Eighties" might lead to disaster. But now the confidence is not quite so strong. Some economists see a frightening number of current parallels with the 1920s. Moreover, those similarities are compounded by unprecedented new debt burdens and serious questions about the financial system's stability. While the probability...