Word: nation
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...vote in the U.N.'s 185-member General Assembly, joining the company of such scofflaws as Somalia, Iraq and Sierra Leone. American delinquency has sullied the U.S.'s prestige at the U.N., and may be gnawing away at American credibility overseas. How, foreign-policy types worry, can a nation lead if it won't even pay its bills? Late last week congressional Republicans remained deadlocked with the Administration over the arrears. Under one proposal, Congress would release enough money to allow the U.S. to retain its seat in the General Assembly. The nation's Security Council slot...
...President to have strong convictions about where he wants to take the country. The spirit he invokes is that of Ronald Reagan, who, as Ted Kennedy once noted, could forget your name but always remembered his goals. But 1999 is not 1979, Bush's critics reply: the nation is not shuddering through a cold war or a crisis of confidence that demands a grand vision and buoyant spirit. The job, with the times, has changed, so that on any given morning, a President may have to wrestle with Mexico, Medicaid and Microsoft. Reagan could afford to be more full...
Abdi, 43, has had the most difficult time. In 1993, he spent eight months in solitary confinement for criticizing the clerics' failure to abide by democratic practices set down by the nation's 1979 constitution. Yet he has remained a leading strategist in Khatami's new Participation Party and is one of the architects of Iranian detente with the West. In 1998, ignoring the howls of the hard-liners, Abdi traveled to Paris and met with former hostage Barry Rosen, achieving a reconciliation of sorts. A sign of Abdi's influence: last summer's student riots began with a protest...
...even before we get there, the nation's biggest shopkeeper will be less able to stick to its preferred role as an agnostic buyer for the masses. There's a world full of outraged parents, students, environmentalists, activists, politicians and stockholders complaining with equal fervor about the silly and the serious. Says Glass: "The public in general becomes a little harder to serve all the time. But you have to respond to that." In other words, Wal-Mart is no longer a free agent...
Then there was Omar Bongo, another former client, who has been the President of the oil-rich West African nation of Gabon since 1967. When Citi belatedly got around to working up his customer profile, officials were at a loss to explain the origin of more than $100 million held in Bongo's accounts. Then a helpful Bongo subordinate told the bank that the President regularly receives 8.5% of the country's budget as an allowance. Bank officials accepted this explanation, although no such provision existed in Gabon's budget...