Word: standoff
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...rigidly centralized economy, a one-party political system and a suppression of personal freedoms. People are electing their representatives for the first time. They are reading independent newspapers and starting their own businesses. They are even tearing down the fences that have kept the world in an armed standoff for almost two generations. With help from the rest of the world, these freedoms could be savored long after the problems they may cause are relegated to a historical footnote...
...dispute was kindled by just one U.S. company's frustration with a protected market niche in Japan, but the issue nearly triggered a major trade confrontation between the two countries. Last week Japan defused the standoff by agreeing to remove barriers to foreign products in the lucrative Tokyo-area market for mobile-telephone and two-way-radio services. Said U.S. Trade Representative Carla Hills, who negotiated the pact: "The measures should provide immediate improvements for U.S. companies in these two high-growth segments of the Japanese telecommunications market...
Last week's Act II, although no less intense, was a more intimate and beclouded production. The capital returned to a semblance of normality, even though some 250,000 troops were poised on the city's outskirts or headed for Beijing. The army, however, maintained an uneasy standoff with a reduced cadre of student protesters. The real drama took place in a walled enclave in the western hills outside Beijing, where members of the innermost circle of China's Communist Party met to resolve a bitter power struggle that had the capital aswirl with unfounded rumors and unanswered questions...
Both inside and outside the U.S. Supreme Court last week, the endless argument over abortion came to a critical confrontation. Outside there was a | raucous standoff on the courthouse steps and plaza, where some 200 demonstrators, pro and con, sang, chanted and shouted. Inside, where the noise could not penetrate, the nine Justices were assembled to hear arguments in William L. Webster v. Reproductive Health Services, a case that could leave in tatters the pivotal Roe v. Wade decision that legalized abortion in 1973. In both places many of the issues were the same. But inside, though the language...
That leaves Sandra Day O'Connor, the first woman to serve on the court, at the pivotal point of a 4-to-4 standoff. Though also a Reagan appointee, O'Connor has indicated that she would not reverse Roe entirely. But she has been strongly willing in the past to give states greater latitude to limit the availability of abortion, and limits are something that pro-choice forces fear almost as much as a reversal. Axing Roe would instantly bring home to millions of American women what they had lost. Whittling it away step by step, case by case could...