Word: minuet
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...tiff began with a minuet over which man would pay the first high- profile private visit to China since the massacre outside Tiananmen Square. Kissinger had planned to address a Beijing conference on foreign investment in October. But he called off the trip in September after the Wall Street Journal published an account of his business deals, which include a $75 million partnership called China Ventures. Three weeks later, Nixon began his excursion to Beijing. After he arrived, an aide released a background paper pointing out that Nixon had no Chinese business interests. Though the document named no names, some...
That tidy explanation smacks of comforting hindsight. The decisive events were far more complex: both Shultz and Arafat finally acted only under tremendous pressure from other nations. "He was sweating blood," said a Swedish diplomat who dealt with Arafat as the delicate backstage minuet was played out. The P.L.O. leader had the recalcitrant radicals in his organization pulling him back from the edge. Pushing him forward were Egypt and Jordan, as well as the Soviet Union, which "landed on Arafat like a ton of bricks," according to a Washington source. Reversing past policy, the Kremlin urged Arafat to seek talks...
...shopping, the eastern "City of Angels" has already begun to eclipse Hong Kong and Singapore as the bargain basement of the East, its low prices beaten even lower in a minuet of smiles and shrugs and bartered murmurings of "Mai pen rai," or "Never mind." Temptations are ubiquitous. Stalls line the main streets of the city from morning to midnight, hawking $10 "Rolexes," 80 cents pirated cassettes, silk ties and suitcases and noodles; river markets assemble impromptu on the canals at dawn; and 40 shiny department stores sell everything from computerized horoscopes to tiger cubs. In Bangkok, moreover, high standards...
...coordinator. "It keeps the carnage down." Most campaign spending experts, such as Herbert Alexander of the University of Southern California, would like to see the state caps eliminated. "They're ridiculously low," he says, "and they lead to subterfuge." All too often, in fact, the result is an amoral minuet in which the end (the White House) justifies all sorts of quasi-legal chicanery. "There is retail chiseling, like renting a car in Massachusetts and driving it to New Hampshire," explains a top Republican campaign staffer. "And then there is wholesale blowing off of the limits -- spend...
...dustup" with Iran, another demonstration of U.S. determination to protect shipping in the gulf. "We have told them that if they shoot at us, we shoot back," he said. "It's perfectly consistent with the rules of engagement." But with the U.S. and Iran embraced in an increasingly deadly minuet, the Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini's fanatical regime seems determined to ignore American rules and warnings...