Crossword-Solution: REPUBLIC 8 letters, 40 clues 🏆 scrabble score: 14

The US has diplomatic relations with 151 of the 159 UN members--the exceptions are Angola, Belorussia (Byelorussia; constituent republic of the Soviet Union), Cambodia, Cuba, Iran, Vietnam, Ukraine (constituent republic of the Soviet Union) and, obviously, the US itself.

From the loftiest point of its roof, during precisely three and a half hours of each forenoon, floats or droops, in breeze or calm, the banner of the republic; but with the thirteen stripes turned vertically, instead of horizontally, and thus indicating that a civil, and not a military, post of Uncle Sam’s government is here established.

Although agriculture has been almost all in private hands, farms have been small and inefficient, and the republic traditionally has been a net importer of food.

You know as well as I do, citoyenne, that once they are over here, those French _émigrés_ try to rouse public feeling against the Republic.

But the recent dramatic events in the closing months of 1989 in Poland, the U.S.S.R., Hungary, the East German Democratic Republic, Czechoslovakia and finally Romania have proved that the last choice would have been an unwise one if the Greeks had also opted for Communism.