Word: pretexts
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...personality can be imputed but never proved." You'd think Schickel was talking about a mollusk. By claiming that such intelligence can only be "imputed," he showed his ignorance of the complex creatures that surround us. This is an old, mechanistic view of animal intelligence that provides a pretext for cruelty. MARC SMITH Peterborough...
...their own and threatened to boycott the Beijing talks if Bolton was a delegate. Still, Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage announced Tuesday that Bolton would not, in fact, be sent to the talks. The last thing Washington wants to do is give the notoriously fickle North Koreans a pretext for staying away...
Using a specific issue as pretext for a general protest is a classic Chinese political tactic. The 1989 protests that led to the Tiananmen massacre began with a memorial gathering for Hu Yaobang, the disgraced Chinese Communist Party General Secretary. Last week's huge march in Hong Kong against new antisubversion laws (known as Article 23) fit the pattern--with crowds estimated at 500,000, it was the largest pro-democracy protest in China since 1989--as does a rally planned for this week at the city's Legislative Council offices. "It's not just about Article 23," notes Allen...
...intentions, however, are not clear. The movement also wants to avoid being blamed by Palestinians and other Arabs for the collapse of a peace initiative, so they may play along in the belief that Abbas is bound to fail and that the Israelis will, sooner or later, provide a pretext to resume terror strikes - although statements from Hamas leaders following the Aqaba summit defiantly rejected any notion of a cease-fire. Abbas is also making clear to the Israelis and Americans that he can't act against terrorism while Israeli troops continue to conduct raids inside PA territory, and that...
...Kurdish areas of the country. In the days after U.S. forces captured Saddam's powerbase in Tikrit, a dozen Turkish Special Forces troops were dispatched south from Turkey. Their target: the northern oil city of Kirkuk, now controlled by the U.S. 173rd Airborne Division's 3rd Brigade. Using the pretext of accompanying humanitarian aid the elite soldiers passed through the northern city of Arbil on Tuesday. They wore civilian clothes, their vehicles lagging behind a legitimate aid convoy. They'd hoped to pass unnoticed. But at a checkpoint on the outskirts of Kirkuk they ran into trouble. "We were waiting...