Word: refrain
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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According to various accounts of the White House meeting, Obama was gentle but firm in rejecting requests to refrain from publicly expressing his differences with Israel's leaders. When it was suggested by one participant in the meeting that the past eight years had demonstrated that the best chance for peace came when there was no daylight between the U.S. and Israeli positions, Obama pushed back, noting that the close ties between the Bush Administration and the governments of Ariel Sharon and Ehud Olmert had in fact produced no significant progress toward peace. (See pictures of 60 years of Israel...
...decide what comes next. You get to choose where change will take us," he said in Moscow. "In places like Ghana, young people make up over half of the population," Obama said on his African stop. "The world will be what you make of it." The same refrain was repeated in Cairo and is a feature of his rhetoric elsewhere. As politics, addressing the youth is a well-worn trope. But for Obama it points to a bigger hope: that the change he speaks about will ultimately be generational, and therefore more lasting...
...health reform. The poll also found that 75% believe an independent commission should determine what medical services are covered among the basic benefits offered under health reform. (Congress is also considering giving that power to the Health and Human Services Secretary.) Said NWLC vice president Judy Waxman: "Congress should refrain from practicing medicine and instead let medical professionals determine what health-care services will be included in a benefits package...
...during his first presidency won the 1987 Nobel Peace Prize for helping end Central America's rash of bloody civil wars - will now mediate the Honduran standoff. Clinton, who said both Zelaya and provisional Honduran leader Roberto Micheletti had agreed to Arias' involvement, called on "all parties to refrain from acts of violence" - on Sunday a teenaged Zelaya backer was shot dead by soldiers - "and to seek a peaceful, constitutional and lasting solution." Zelaya and Micheletti say they'll meet together with Arias on Thursday in San Jose, Costa Rica...
...Rumsfeld has tended, even in retrospect, to write off much of the criticism of his style as a function of the mission he was asked to do. "Change is hard" has remained a frequent refrain of his. Chosen to lead the Defense Department as the agent of change, Rumsfeld said he expected that he would come under attack. "People in uniform resisted, and people in civilian clothes resisted; the Congress resisted," he recounted in an interview. "They don't call it the Iron Triangle for nothing, between the permanent bureaucracy and the defense contractors and the Congress. They're permanent...