But now, somehow the murder of Israelis has become unmentionable, under the flimsy excuse that it would inject politics into the pristine Olympics.
The Vatican's centuries-old secrecy over the way it handles its money will no longer be an excuse to avoid its obligations under international and Italian criminal law to combat money-laundering operations by third parties, says the BBC's David Willey in Rome.
And, though Mr Kadyrov's killing gives Mr Putin an excuse to bring Chechnya back under direct Kremlin control, as some Russian politicians have been demanding, this would not be an attractive option given that all attempts to impose Moscow's will on the unruly Chechens have failed.
But oh, the things she's seen on my end: the excuse-making, the nightgown under the trench coat to drive the car pool, the panic every time I see a gray hair--and that's just the small stuff.
Not to excuse the decades of cruelty and backwardness under the Burmese junta, but maybe Myanmar, as its officials want it to be called, is just one more fractious place where seemingly only a strongman can keep the lid on.
Mugabe's government says it has the situation under control, blaming the crisis on Western powers seeking an excuse for military intervention.
Yet Iran is under UN-led sanctions and many worried that Mr Ahmadinejad was preparing an excuse for Iran to do the 20% enriching itself another step to a nuclear break-out capacity.
But I cannot excuse that failure and even if I could (which, under present electoral circumstances, after a few drinks I really probably could), I cannot reward the Republican Party for putting itself in a situation where the only viable general election candidate it was able to field had to proceed from a position of a lack of integrity.
The government would accuse Labour of opportunism but Messrs Cameron, Osborne and Hague - who served their apprenticeships under John Major - will remember that Labour's resolutely pro-European leader John Smith found an excuse to vote with the Eurosceptics over the Maastricht Treaty, producing chaos and division in the government.
Under the hard-line leadership of Ljube Boskovski, Macedonia's interior ministry would almost certainly relish the excuse to settle scores with local Albanians, armed and otherwise.
If this is indeed why the topic is so under-blogged, it may well be an unmovable reality of blogging, but it is a pretty poor excuse and we should be challenging each other to do better.
应用推荐