Word: refraining
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...that it had made the correct choice. Instead, the focus of intense diplomatic negotiations at the UN this week is on enlisting help to ensure the best possible outcome in the postwar. And on that score, the French have already signaled their willingness to cooperate, or at least to refrain from throwing up obstacles. President Chirac has promised that France won't veto a new Security Council resolution being pushed by the U.S. to enable a U.S.-led international security force...
...what the U.S. is doing and jettison their elected leader, Yasser Arafat, won't have helped him persuade the skeptics. At the UN, after all, Bush is even more isolated on the question of Arafat than he is on Iraq - last week's General Assembly resolution demanding that Israel refrain from acting against the Palestinian leader saw only four countries voting against: the United States, Israel, the Marshall Islands and Micronesia. And, if anything, many UN member states may be more inclined to the link Iraq and the Palestinians on the grounds that both are under occupation...
...Neither side has done much to implement the "roadmap." Instead of dismantling the militant organizations that have waged the terror war, the PA leadership brokered a truce agreement under which they would refrain from attacking Israel in exchange for prisoner releases and other concessions. Yasser Arafat remained very much in charge of the PA despite U.S. efforts to sideline him. And Israel confined itself to mostly token gestures in respect of settlement outposts, reversible military withdrawals from a couple of Palestinian areas and the release of a couple of hundred of the 6,000 Palestinian militants currently in Israeli prisons...
...regional competitor, Japan, to go nuclear, it may currently fear the chaos brought on by the collapse of Kim Jong Il's regime even more. Beijing and Seoul are looking to resolve the crisis by reviving and tightening up the 1994 agreement under which North Korea undertook to refrain from developing nuclear weapons in exchange for economic aid. But the U.S. has shown little interest in reviving a failed agreement, and is insisting that the North Koreans agree to unconditional disarmament as a precondition for further talks. Pyongyang won't drop its nuclear deterrent without security guarantees, and the standoff...
...recognized that the man they had in effect chosen to lead the Palestinians (in the hope of finally sidelining Yasser Arafat) had negligible political support among his own people, and Washington urged Sharon to take steps that would shore up Abbas's credibility among on the Palestinian street and refrain from actions that undermined...