Word: thawed
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...thanks to the historic concert by the New York Phil, coming amid a slow-motion diplomatic thaw already underway between Pyongyang and Washington, I would finally get to see a little of the place for myself. The North Koreans, to say the least, are control freaks, and hordes of minders immediately surrounded us on the tarmac as we waited for the orchestra leader, Lorin Maazel, and his musicians to follow us down and take a "class photo" in front of a beaming mosaic of the Great Leader. The deputy minister of culture, Song Sok Hwan, stepped forward to greet Maazel...
...gone beyond prayer. The 73-year-old civil engineer has come up with a solution that won't exactly save the ancient glaciers, but it could stave off a looming irrigation crisis. Norphel has created artificial glaciers, frozen pools of glacier run-off perched above the farmers' fields, which thaw just in time for the start of growing season in April - two months before water from the distant natural glaciers is expected to arrive. The slanted pools melt into irrigation channels over the next six weeks, watering crops for villages of roughly 500 families and, as a bonus, recharging...
...measure, then, of just how eager the Turkish military is to confront the PKK that it got a jump on the spring thaw by sending a reported 10,000 Turkish troops into northern Iraq Thursday, despite the weather. Turkey's goal appears to be to pre-empt the spring build-up of PKK fighters moving from Iraq into Turkey. The Turks have advanced some six miles into Iraq and blown up a few bridges, and say they will return home to their warm bases as soon as possible...
...hosting this belligerent, anti-Annapolis conference, the Assad regime seemed to be symbolically turning its back on the U.S.-led peace effort. For over a year, Damascus had been calling for a resumption of peace negotiations with Israel, not least at the Annapolis meeting itself. But though a brief thaw in U.S.-Syrian relations ensued, the resumption of hard-line posturing seems to suggest that Syria wanted more than the Bush Administration was willing to deliver. Syria's main beef with Israel is the occupation of the Golan Heights (captured by Israel in 1967), but the Assad regime has long...
...joint exercise follows a series of smaller steps to break the ice, including a joint mountaineering expedition and joint naval exercises. In 2006, Beijing and New Delhi signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) providing for regular war games and annual defense summits. The thaw in the long-time Sino-Indian cold war began with the 1996 visit of Chinese Premier Jiang Zemin to New Delhi. Since elevating the relationship to a "strategic partnership" in 2005, the two countries have seen bilateral trade exceed $20 billion last year, and have worked together to voice common concerns in such international forums...