In an unusually blunt letter, Mr. Barco said: "The agreement was not extended due to the lack of political willingness on the part of the United States."

Mr. Tenet responded with a blunt letter that objected to "the tone and content" of the report, and called some of its conclusions "frankly absurd."

For those reasons President Bush wrote an unusually blunt letter to Mr. Milosevic on Christmas Day, 1992, about Kosovo.

In town, Sarah discovers that Lavinia has become disliked by some because of her blunt letters to the local newspaper editors about a growing practice of witchcraft in the area.

Last month, he fired off a blunt letter to Congress warning that the new rules would have to be delayed unless the money came through.

Today, in a blunt letter to the Senate Commerce Committee, agency officials warned that the rollbacks could be delayed until October and perhaps later than that.

In a surprisingly blunt letter released today, Mike Moore, director general of the organization, said the preparations for the meeting in Seattle were caught in a "vicious circle."

Robert DeStefano, a school board member in Liberty, N.Y., sent a blunt letter to the department, with a copy to Ms. Nupp.

Brookner also includes the uncharacteristically blunt letters that he writes and then destroys, in which he analyzes both of their characters unsparingly.

Cronin received copies of the scripts, and he wrote a blunt letter to the series' script editor in 1964, expressing his dissatisfaction with the progression of the show.