Word: standoff
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Switzerland - the land of chocolate, watches and neutrality - isn't known for flexing its muscles in a heated standoff with another country. But now it finds itself pitted against the U.S. in a David and Goliath-style imbroglio that could damage diplomatic and economic relations between the two for years to come. On one side, the U.S. Department of Justice is accusing Swiss banking giant UBS of helping wealthy Americans hide billions of dollars from the tax man and insisting that the bank reveal their identities. On the other, the Swiss government is threatening to step in to protect...
Since the earliest days of his Administration, President Barack Obama has sought to engage Iran's leaders in the search for diplomatic solutions to the standoff over Tehran's nuclear program and other points of conflict. But in the days since protests exploded in the streets following the re-election of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, many U.S. observers have suggested that prospects for engagement and reconciliation have dimmed...
...more salient than the women's-dress issue is the manipulation of Sherbini as a symbol of Islam in a perceived standoff between the Muslim world and the West. "She is a martyr of Islam, and justice will be served on the day of judgment," wrote one man on the wall of another Facebook group, Marwa El-Sherbini "Muslim Martyr." Even Iran, Egypt's traditional adversary, has joined the fray, holding a symbolic funeral for Sherbini in Tehran on Friday and summoning the German ambassador to the Foreign Ministry to hear Iran's formal protest over the attack...
...After huddling with Zelaya, Clinton announced a new plan that reaches back to an old one: Costa Rican President Oscar Arias - who 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...
...share of future emissions reductions. But fast-growing developing nations like China, which has already passed the U.S. as the world's top carbon emitter, will be responsible for the majority of future emissions, so any global treaty that completely exempted them would be worthless. That debate - or standoff, really - has all but paralyzed global climate-change negotiations over the past several years. (See pictures of Beijing's attempt to clean...