Word: standoff
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...gulf between the positions of the U.S. and North Korea - and the importance of the banking sanctions and other issues extraneous to the nuclear standoff - vastly complicates the art of the deal in Beijing. But the fact that both parties are at the table suggests that neither has a good alternative to the search for a compromise: China, North Korea's key patron, has left Pyongyang in no doubt that its own economic interests and those of its most benign neighbors demand that it take the path toward denuclearization and easing tensions with the U.S. At the same time, with...
...time not too long ago that such a deal could perhaps have been enough to assuage Hizballah's concerns that Siniora and his government are American puppets who are intent on disarming the Shi'ite militia and reshaping the Middle East in Israel's favor. But the standoff between the Hizballah-led opposition, and the government has lately become so raw, and so personal, that it is hard to imagine anything resembling unity returning to Lebanon anytime soon...
...lead Hizballah - and Iran would want a return on the hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of rockets and funds for social and military spending it has invested in Hizballah over a quarter century. While the U.S. remains committed for now to a diplomatic solution to the nuclear standoff, the Israeli leadership has little faith that the Iranians will back down. And with Israelis having been told by their leaders that the Iranian nuclear program constitutes a grave and immediate existential danger to the Jewish State, the domestic pressure on Israel to act may be growing...
...arrangement that means while the E.U. considers all Cypriots its citizens, it only recognizes the government in the south, so its laws do not apply in the north. Efforts since then by the E.U. to ease trade and travel restrictions on the north have borne little fruit. Now the standoff between the two sides of a U.N. buffer zone is threatening to derail crucial talks on Turkish accession to the Union. A report this week by the European Commission is expected to be sharply negative about Turkey's membership prospects, partly because Turkey has not agreed to open its ports...
...parties could be North Korea's chief reason to resume the negotiations. Despite U.N. sanctions, South Korea, which favors engagement with the North, has been slow to reduce aid and trade with Pyongyang, while the South Korean public is just as likely to blame President Bush for the nuclear standoff as it is Kim Jong Il. Even after the test, China and South Korea still fear a collapsing North Korea more than they do a nuclear one, while Japan and the U.S. would like nothing more than to see Kim gone. Russia, for its part, sometimes appears content to just...