Word: pretext
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...improvement in atmosphere, can be important. Now that the two smiling leaders have displayed so publicly their determination to pursue arms control, it is harder to imagine their more hard-line advisers' scuttling the process. Just as Reagan has his hawks who would like to see SDI provide a pretext for abandoning past agreements and blocking new ones, Gorbachev likewise is faced with comrades who want to hold even partial progress on arms control hostage to massive American concessions on SDI. As a result of what happened last week in Geneva--however modest that result may be in substance--those...
...when the contra campaign finally petered out, the Sandinistas would probably have accumulated an arsenal of East bloc arms far beyond even what they have now; they would have succeeded in militarizing the society even further, perversely helped by the pretext of the civil war; and they would have built up an even greater grudge against Tío Sam, hence an even greater incentive to go to work on their rather fragile neighbors...
...neighborhood of Jerusalem. The scandal has divided the Church - which owns some of the most important Christian shrines in Israel - between a few loyalist bishops and a rebel group led by Eirinaios' former right-hand man, Bishop Aristarchos of Constantini, which wants Eirinaios out. It has also provided a pretext for local Palestinian adherents to try to wrest control of the Orthodox Church from its Greek hierarchy. At an extraordinary crisis meeting in Istanbul last week, world Orthodox leaders voted to sever ties with Eirinaios, paving the way for the election of a new Patriarch in Jerusalem. But Eirinaios...
...judgment inflamed nationalists, who fear and repudiate Kurdish militants as a threat to the unity of the Turkish Republic. Talat Salk, who prosecuted Ocalan in 1999, warned that a retrial would have "huge reverberations" and play directly into the hands of Kurdish "terrorists" by providing them with a pretext to hold demonstrations in major cities. Nationalist politician Devlet Bahceli said the trial would be like a "time bomb" that ignited simmering ethnic tensions. But the decision also pits those who want to Westernize the country's judicial and political systems to speed E.U. accession against Turkish nationalists, many of whose...
...Last Friday, Chancellor Gerhard Schröder himself joined the apocalyptic debate by calling on his ministers to examine whether hedge funds should be subject to tougher regulation. The remarks are striking, given that the same government authorized hedge funds to operate in Germany only last year. The immediate pretext for Schröder's change of heart was last week's ouster of Werner G. Seifert, the long-serving chief executive of the German stock exchange. The rebellion that ejected Seifert was led by The Children's Investment Fund (TCI), a British hedge fund. Angered by Seifert's costly...