Word: summer
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Target an Industry and Stimulate Demand Cash for Clunkers - the program that paid people $4,500 to turn in their old cars and buy new ones - is one of the most demonstrably successful federal efforts at stimulating the economy so far. Over the summer, General Motors and other car companies ramped up production - adding shifts and running plants on overtime - to meet the increase in demand. Now policymakers are talking about Cash for Caulkers, a program that would give homeowners an incentive to better weatherize their houses. The goal would be to create work for a construction industry that still...
...envoy Stephen Bosworth, a veteran U.S. diplomat, traveled to Pyongyang for a day and a half of talks with North Korea. But to hear experts in Washington and East Asia tell it, whatever optimism the Obama team may have carried into office in January has already dissipated. Over the summer, the North's second test of a nuclear bomb, followed by the launch of long-range missile (on the very day Obama was in Prague making a soaring speech about a world free of nuclear weapons) has seen to that. Bosworth's trip to Pyongyang, says a diplomat in East...
...Jong Il has previously declared the six-party talks "dead," saying only direct negotiation with the U.S. on a range of issues is acceptable. But pressure from China - thought to be the only country with any leverage over Pyongyang - may have produced a change of heart. Since late this summer, North Korea has taken some steps to ease ongoing tensions with South Korea; Kim personally met with former U.S. President Bill Clinton when he traveled to Pyongyang in order to free two American journalists who had managed to get themselves arrested in North Korea. If the warming trend continues, Bosworth...
...Until recently, that change looked like it might never happen. Last summer, Iraq's government hosted an auction for eight large oil and gas fields at Baghdad's high-end Al-Rashid Hotel. There, oil executives from the U.S., Europe, Russia, China and South Korea paraded on stage and dropped their bids into a sealed box, in a ceremony broadcast live on Iraqi television. It was meant to be grand theater, but proved a p.r. failure for Baghdad. Just one bid succeeded: it was submitted by a partnership between Britain's BP and China National Petroleum Corp. (CNPC) for production...
...shown some signs of a thaw, Tehran's continued defiance of world opinion on its nuclear program notwithstanding. Obama has begun the highest-level diplomatic engagement with Tehran in 30 years and refrained from calling for the overthrow of the regime, even amid mass Iranian protests last summer aimed at accomplishing exactly that. Media coverage of the diplomatic dance between Washington and Tehran focuses on Iran's nuclear program, but by pursuing a fundamentally different relationship with the Islamic Republic, the Obama Administration is also quietly conceding that Iran's militancy is different from the terrorism of al-Qaeda...