Word: formality
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Twelve Harvard students file into a room wearing jackets and ties. Aside from their formal attire and the adult setting they find themselves in, their awkward conversations and adolescent posture quickly betray them as college students. This is the beginning of “Twelve Angry Men,” directed by Julia M. Runcie ’10 and Sonia G. DeYoung ’10 and produced by Joy Ding ’10, which runs through this Friday in the Loeb Ex. The play details the deliberation of a jury that must decide the fate...
...presence of Russia's President Vladimir Putin, leader of the power against whose precursor the alliance was originally created. Moreover, Putin will follow the summit by taking its most powerful leader, President George W. Bush, back to his vacation home at the Black Sea resort of Sochi. But the formal bonhomie won't hide the escalating tension in the relationship between Washington and Moscow. President Bush on Tuesday strongly backed NATO membership bids by the former Soviet republics of Ukraine and Georgia, a move fiercely opposed by Moscow, which sees it as an effort to extend a geopolitical rival...
...America approves formal international treaties differently from almost all other countries, requiring the President and two-thirds of the Senate, but not the House, to sign off on them. Oona Hathaway, a professor at Yale Law School, surveyed countries around the world and found that only the U.S. and Tajikistan allow just one part of their legislature to approve a treaty and make it the law of the land. "Most countries make international law the same way they make domestic law," Hathaway says. The discrepancy has led American conservatives to argue that international law is anti-democratic and an abdication...
...Partly for that reason, most of America's international agreements no longer go through the cumbersome constitutional process anyway, Hathaway found. Between 5 and 20 formal treaties a year have been enacted by the Senate and the President for the last century. More often, international agreements are passed by votes in both chambers of Congress and signed by the President - like a regular law. Treaties approved that way have multiplied from 11 in 1930 to over 300 in 2006. The most famous example is NAFTA, which was passed by both chambers - including the Senate with less than two-thirds supporting...
...France's formal commitment of an additional 1,000 ground troops to Afghanistan will come during next week's NATO summit in Romania. Those new troops are to join France's current contingent of 1,600. But while those currently in Afghanistan patrol the relatively calm area in and around Kabul, most or all of the new units are expected to be sent to the south of Afghanistan, where the reformed Taliban and their allies have strengthened. Indeed, deaths among Canadian combat personnel in the area have been so high that Ottawa had threatened to pull its military from Afghanistan...