{"id":6641,"date":"2015-11-08T19:03:49","date_gmt":"2015-11-09T01:03:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/?p=6641"},"modified":"2015-11-08T19:03:49","modified_gmt":"2015-11-09T01:03:49","slug":"lunch-with-the-ft-bill-burns","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/?p=6641","title":{"rendered":"Lunch with the FT: Bill Burns"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/next.ft.com\/content\/3d4619f6-82f8-11e5-8095-ed1a37d1e096\">Gideon Rachman<\/a><\/p>\n<blockquote><p>After thousands of American diplomatic cables were leaked to the international press via WikiLeaks in 2010, Burns found himself an unexpected beneficiary. \u201cA Caucasus Wedding\u201d, a telegram he sent to the US state department in 2006 while he was ambassador to Russia, recounting a raucous three-day Dagestani wedding attended by Chechnya\u2019s president Ramzan Kadyrov, was described as a minor classic of comic writing, its tone very much not what one might expect of a diplomatic cable.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cCooks seemed to keep whole sheep and whole cows boiling in a cauldron somewhere, day and night, dumping disjointed fragments of the carcass on the tables, whenever someone entered the room,\u201d Burns noted. \u201cThe alcohol consumption before, during and after this Muslim wedding was stupendous \u2026 There was also entertainment, although Gadzi\u2019s main act, a Syrian-born singer named Avraam Russo, could not make it because he was shot a few days before the wedding.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Gideon Rachman After thousands of American diplomatic cables were leaked to the international press via WikiLeaks in 2010, Burns found himself an unexpected beneficiary. \u201cA Caucasus Wedding\u201d, a telegram he sent to the US state department in 2006 while he was ambassador to Russia, recounting a raucous three-day Dagestani wedding attended by Chechnya\u2019s president Ramzan [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6641"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6641"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6641\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6642,"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6641\/revisions\/6642"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6641"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6641"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6641"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}