Word: standoff
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...time it chooses presents sharp dilemmas for its neighbors and allies. In New Delhi, the government of Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi has come under pressure from conservative politicians to start building nuclear weapons. Relations between the longtime rivals on the subcontinent are already tense. Last week, following an angry standoff involving some 370,000 Indian and Pakistani troops that began in January, the two nations' forces began withdrawing from the Rajasthan sector of the border, continuing a pullback agreement worked out late last month. But the incident has left both sides edgy...
...Iraqis have died since Jan. 9, when Iranian Revolutionary Guards attacked Iraqi defenses along the Shatt al Arab, a broad waterway that forms the southern frontier of the warring nations, and advanced on Basra some ten miles away. The stakes in the fighting, which has settled into a ferocious standoff a few miles outside the city, could not be higher: an Iranian victory would demoralize the Iraqis and could topple Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, whom Iranian Leader Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini has vowed to crush. The global importance of the war was shown anew last week when the U.S. aircraft carrier...
...arrest warrant against Marcinkus could lead to a complex standoff between the Vatican and the Italian government. Italian officials cannot enter the Vatican to serve the arrest warrant, much less retrieve their man. Since the Lateran Treaty of 1929, Italy has recognized the 108.7-acre Vatican as a sovereign state. No extradition treaty, however, exists between the two. In 1982, shortly after the Italian Justice Ministry sent Marcinkus a "judicial warning" announcing that he and his two subordinates were under investigation, the Archbishop moved inside Vatican walls. Today he lives simply in a Vatican apartment...
...over a decade, current problems merely confirm long-held doubts. Says Georgia Democrat Sam Nunn, the incoming chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee: "For most of the aircraft's useful life, it will not be able to penetrate (Soviet airspace) and will be a standoff carrier of cruise missiles and conventional bombs." The U.S., concludes Nunn, "could have built that kind of system much cheaper than we have built...
...younger ones ignored him. He might have been a stuffed animal leashed to a parking meter. The human parallel was too disturbing for Bundy to dwell on it." But dwell on it he does: "Impersonally appraised, in terms of survival the two of them were pretty much at a standoff: the dog was better fleshed out, but Bundy was the heartier eater...