But last week, the dispute burst through the traditional facade of diplomatic niceties and revealed sentiments far different, and potentially more fateful, than the internecine squabbles of the cold war.
More fateful still were their activities in Prague and Brussels.
But now I'm hearing more and more about an even more fateful year.
Yet the next man or woman in the seat will have to grapple with questions of funding, governance and technology, which will prove more fateful still.
The paleontologists who announced the discovery yesterday said the fossil animals, named Eosimias for "dawn monkey," were the best evidence yet for fixing the time and place of one of the more fateful branchings in evolution.
The one-one count is another of Dykstra's baseball metaphors for life, meant to illustrate that some moments, and the choices they bring, are more fateful than others (i.e., the next pitch makes all the difference), or, in this case, that circumstances set in motion during the early stages of development are difficult to overcome later on.
He follows airline pilots into their cockpits, secretaries to their cubicles, frequent fliers to their window seats, and then traces the longer, even more fateful journeys of certain fiery Middle Eastern clerics from their jail cells in Egypt to their new American mosques.
This reminds boys of being naked, and then they think of sex" has incurred the wrath of feminist groups and that "Democratic Sarah Palin" moniker is sounding ever more fateful.
CURRENT contract negotiations between the Major League Players Associationn, big league baseball and club owners have suddenly been eclipsed by an even more fateful event: a threatened mass walkout by baseball fans across the nation.
Still more fateful was what was to come.
