Word: pulling
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Lebanon wasn't supposed to turn out this way. In March of last year, President George W. Bush was hailing Lebanon as a shining beacon of his Administration's "democracy agenda" for the Middle East. Close to 1 million Lebanese had flooded into Beirut to demand that Syria pull its troops out of Lebanon and end its 29-year domination of the country. The U.S. State Department coined the protests the Cedar Revolution, a more folksy title than the Lebanese term, Independence Intifadeh, which smacked of radicalism. But with six ministers having resigned since Nov. 11, sectarian tensions rising...
...payback time. Lebanese officials, along with Israeli military sources and Western diplomats, say that while Syrian President Bashar Assad may be willing to help pull the Bush Administration out of the Iraqi quicksand, he hopes to exact concessions that would allow him to treat Lebanon, where the Syrian regime has vast financial interests, as his private turf. And according to these same sources, he is unnerved by a U.N.-sponsored inquiry that implicates top Syrian officials in the February 2005 car bombing that killed former Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri and 22 others. Assad is hoping that the international probe will...
...Bush has never had to pull off a U-turn like the one he is contemplating now: to give up on his dream of turning Babylon into an oasis of freedom and democracy and instead begin a staged withdrawal from Iraq, rewrite the mission of the 150,000 U.S. troops there as they begin to draw down, and launch a diplomatic Olympics across the Middle East and between Israel and the Palestinians. Even calling all that a reversal is a misnomer; it would be more like a personality transplant...
...from the commission's own title, The Way Forward--New Approach. Among people who have known Bush for decades, there is almost as much certainty that he needs to disengage from Iraq as there are doubts about whether he has the wiring and instincts--much less the desire--to pull it off. "He is not stupid," says a commission source. "But he is stubborn. And he is very dug in. It takes a big person to find a way to walk back from some of this and embrace reality...
...rattle, two waterproof books and a doll contained BPA, which is prohibited by the city at any level. Although the products comply with U.S. law, some toymakers, including Goldberger Doll, are cutting out phthalates. Richard Woo, owner of a local store called Citikids, estimates that he might have to pull a third of his items off the shelves. Next month manufacturers will go to court to block the new law. Whatever the ruling, parents will be left wondering how safe their children's toys really...