Word: il
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...diplomatic consensus was not good going into the orchestra's adventure in the Hermit Kingdom. Except for closing a nuclear reactor at Yongbyon - a significant step, to be sure - North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il has not fulfilled any other aspect of the supposedly ground-breaking deal he signed last year. But the warmth and musical harmony of Tuesday night in Pyongyang seemed to belie that impasse. And what dramatic possibilities there might have been. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was on the same peninsula, albeit in South Korea, attending the inauguration of that country's new President. If there...
Indeed, skeptics openly wonder just who is playing whom this week. Except for closing the reactor at Yongbyon - a significant step, to be sure - Kim Jong Il has not fulfilled any other aspect of the deal he signed last year. It required him, by the end of 2007, to disclose all the details about his entire nuclear program - including what the U.S. believes was a surreptitious effort to develop the bomb by enriching uranium, a program Washington believes the North Koreans ran in addition to the plutonium reactor in Yongbyon. President's Bush's former U.N. ambassador, John Bolton...
...frigid Monday afternoon, under a fading sun and a beaming visage of Kim Il Sung, the late "Great Leader" of North Korea, the music director of the New York Philharmonic orchestra today led the largest American contingent since the end of the Korean war into Pyongyang, the capital city of the world's most isolated regime. When Lorin Maazel stepped off a chartered Asiana Airlines 747 from Beijing and shook the hand of North Korea's deputy minister of culture, Song Sok Hwan, the Gershwin offensive had begun...
...stranger venue than Pyongyang for some of the world's finest musicians to play. The buses that transported the orchestra, staff and some 80 foreign journalists (three times the number that accompanied then Secretary of State Madeline Albright for her meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong Il in late 2000) rolled past building after building that was unlit in the late afternoon gloom; pedestrians on the streets stared as the fleet of buses rolled into the heart of energy-starved Pyongyang. Every half kilometer or so along a 25-kilometer route into town, female traffic cops stood stiffly...
...epoch's streamlined aesthetic; and Piaggia's Vespa 150 GS, similar to the one ridden by Audrey Hepburn in the 1953 film Roman Holiday. Speed also played its part in the golden age of Italian cinema; witness the Lancia Spider that homegrown idol Vittorio Gassman drove in Il Sorpasso, a 1962 road movie dripping with dolce vita style...