Word: pact
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...quiet family matter. Owing to the couple's wealth and status (his father is a dairy tycoon, his mother a society columnist), the details are splashed all over their hometown San Francisco newspapers. Not long after, his mother tries to enlist her 11-year-old son in a suicide pact. With preternatural calm, the boy resists. The incident, however, does not leave him unharmed. With both parents too self-absorbed to offer stability or guidance, Wilsey, an editor at the literary journal McSweeney's, careens among boarding and reform schools, a journey he recounts with clear-eyed, wry and poignant...
...speech in Latvia’s capital, Riga, on Saturday, Bush expressed regret for America’s complicity in the 1945 Yalta pact that divided Europe into spheres of influence between the Western allies and the Soviet Union. The president even went so far as to compare the deal, struck by Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Josef Stalin, to the appeasement of Adolf Hitler by western governments before the World War II, and to the 1939 Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact...
...while pregnant with her son Danny, Kumin recalls, “I made a pact with myself that if I didn’t sell any [poetry] before I had this child, I would give it up.” Three months before Danny’s birth, The Christian Science Monitor accepted a four-line ditty by Kumin—a perhaps-inauspicious beginning to what would become an illustrious professional career...
...lives, largely because Stalin's purges had destroyed the Red Army's officer class before the war started. Until June 1941, Germany and Soviet Russia were allies, and Moscow had seized the Baltic states as part of a carve-up of Eastern Europe provided for by the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Even the massive German invasion seemed, paradoxically, to promise an end to Stalin's dictatorship. Russians began to hope that victory over Hitler would bring a political thaw at home after the brutality of the 1930s. They were quickly disillusioned. With victory, repression returned. Hundreds of thousands of returning pows...
...foreign policy issue could be reached, the survey indicated considerable skepticism about whether it would work: 66% do not believe the Soviets can be trusted to keep their end of the bargain, and a surprising 28% think the U.S. is similarly unlikely to honor the fine print of a pact...