Word: sofia
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Gorbachev meanwhile journeyed to Sofia, Bulgaria, for a minisummit of his own with the U.S.S.R.'s six Warsaw Pact allies. Though there are serious continuing strains within that alliance (see WORLD), the Soviet chief had no difficulty pulling the East European leaders into line behind Moscow's effort to keep the summit pinpointed on arms control, and in particular on the Soviet attempt at a diplomatic zapping of Star Wars...
Disarray, disability and a death in the Kremlin had forced postponement of the Warsaw Pact's biennial summit meeting for nearly a year. So by the time convoys of ZIL and Chaika limousines were finally streaking through the yellow brick streets of Sofia, the capital of Bulgaria, the meeting last week was embarrassingly overdue. The Political Consultative Committee, made up of Communist Party leaders from Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, Poland, Rumania and the Soviet Union, had been expected to gather in January. But Mikhail Gorbachev's predecessor, Konstantin Chernenko, was too ill to travel then, and indeed died only...
...President Todor Zhivkov, 74, was the oldest), he was clearly first among equals in a group that exists largely to endorse Moscow's foreign policy and buffer the Soviet Union's western flank. The military bands and effusive bear hugs, however, could not mask the fact that the Sofia summit resulted in little more than Kremlin posturing in advance of Gorbachev's November meeting with Ronald Reagan in Geneva. A 15-page declaration blamed the U.S. for aggravating the arms race and piously declared that since its founding in 1955 as a counterforce to NATO, the Warsaw Pact "has been...
Soviet and East European news media had hinted that the Sofia meeting would produce new arms-control proposals. In the end it served up warmed-over Soviet initiatives, some already rejected by the West. The notion of declaring a nuclear-free Balkan zone was endorsed, along with a similar proposal for Northern Europe. With an eye to the likely deployment of U.S. cruise missiles in Belgium and the Netherlands, the document also suggested that the U.S. and the Soviet Union refrain from stationing nuclear weapons in nations that do not already have them and put a lid on existing nuclear...
...this kind of reasoning is all very male. How many female directors are known for running projects into the ground due to arrogant self-confidence? Oh wait, American female directors hardly exist, for reasons having a lot to do with the above maledom. We’ll always have Sofia Coppola, but though a promising filmmaker, she has obviously been helped in no small amount by being the daughter of the reigning king of brilliantly self-destructive, over-the-top masculinity...