Word: pretext
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...news Monday morning was horrific--and unhelpful. Two grenades had been tossed into an Israeli bus station at rush hour, wounding 64 people. A Hamas activist was caught at the scene. Arafat condemned the terror, but the Americans feared that if Netanyahu wanted a pretext to leave, he had found it. Instead Bibi declared a suspension of the talks (soon quietly relaxed) except on security matters, and proposed a detour--a quickie deal on troops and security, to be followed by new talks in two to four weeks...
Those actions gave UPN president Dean Valentine a pretext for wrapping himself in the banner of artistic freedom, as any savvy television executive would do if one of his shows came under fire. "If I was a creative person in Hollywood, I would be packing up my bags and heading for Nevada," Valentine declared. "In a city that has a host of social problems, including crime and poverty, potholes and a broken-down transit system, one would think the vast power of the city council could be put to better use than analyzing UPN's Monday-night schedule." Still...
...Democrats can make the case that Tripp helped engineer the key obstruction-of-justice charge now leveled against the President--that the job hunt was a setup devised by her--it goes to the heart of the case against Clinton. Since the apparent obstruction was Starr's pretext for investigating the entire affair, the Clintonites say, the basis for the probe was fundamentally illegitimate. The new details, says presidential counselor Doug Sosnik, "only reinforce that this is a 10-month overhyped case highlighted by groundless charges of obstruction of justice." That has long been the White House line...
...roundup of what a Tanzanian police spokesman called "dubious characters" may even be motivated by the government's concern too nip in the bud any signs of Islamic militancy. "It appears the Tanzanians have had these people under surveillance for some time and are using the bombing as a pretext to arrest them," says TIME reporter Clive Mutiso. A Tanzanian official's statement that "we cannot say we have got somebody who is really responsible" but "we think we are doing well" underlines the grounds for skepticism. U.S. investigators continue to probe for the forensic evidence crucial to establishing...
...asking me over to her house to study. She was asking me over as a pretext," Pereira says. "I said no--I thought it was too risqu?...