 | US H. Res. recognizes the 1915 Armenian genocide http://www.norte-sul-este-oeste.blogspot.com/ Despite all the efforts and pressures of Mr. Bush, the White House and the Turkish Government, the U.S. House of Representatives' Foreign Affairs Committee has passed a resolution recognizing the 1915 Armenian massacre as genocide. A total of 1.5 million Armenians were killed beginning in 1915, in a systematic campaign by the collapsing Ottoman Empire, historic fact which today's Turkey keeps on denying. In 2006 Turkey severed military ties with France after its Parliament voted to make the denial of the Armenian genocide a crime, today the European Parliament plus a total of 26 countries recognize the existence of such an Armenian genocide, including Argentina, Austria, Australia, Belgium, Canada, Chile, France, Greece, Italy, Lebanon, Portugal, Poland, Russia, Sweden, Switzerland, The Netherlands, Venezuela and the Vatican. |
 | Obama takes N. Carolina, Clinton gets Indiana Hi on this Wednesday, May 7, 2008. I'm Rebecca Field in for Kristin Volk with today's UPI top news update. The battle continues between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. The Illinois senator won North Carolina and Clinton narrowly took Indiana in yesterday's primaries. Obama beat out Clinton by 14 points in North Carolina, and she took a 2 point win over him in Indiana. His win is a big one...boosting him in the delegate lead. Both candidates are now looking ahead to the primary in West Virginia next week, as well as Kentucky and Oregon on May 20. Russia's new president Dmitry Mdvedev has named his predecessor as Prime Minister. The new leader reportedly nominated former President Vladimir Putin for the job....just two hours after getting sworn in earlier today. Medvedev was inaugurated in a ceremony involving attended by government officials and ambassadors. The President vows to tackle inflation and corruption in Russia. More residents in southern Chile had to be evacuated yesterday, when lava spewed out of an erupting volcano. The Chaiten volcano came to life last Thursday for the first time in thousands of years. Remaining residents and journalists in the nearby town had to be evacuated and brought to shelter because of the dangerous lava. Already more than 4,000 have been displaced from their homes and one woman has died of a heart attack. Vice President Cheney's top aide has been subpoenaed in a torture investigation. Cheney's chief of staff David Addington has reportedly been served the paperwork by a House of Representatives committee investigating the treatment of suspected terrorists. The group is looking into the rules that the Bush administration put into place while questioning suspects following the September 11 attacks. The white house says they do not allow torture, but admits to authorizing waterboarding techniques on 3 terror suspects. That's all for now. Tune in tomorrow for another UPI update. |
 | A dilemma I don't really have an identity crisis right now (I've been told that I can be proud of being American because I am doing whatever I can to improve the situation. I'm also learning to see my Tunisian ancestry from a more positive light and overcome a few insults in my life), but my question now is where is my place in today's world. I am in a dilemma. If Gravel doesn't win in 2008, should I stay in the US and persist to fight for peace and the Ni4d by running for Congress in 2014 and 2018 and the White House in 2024 or will the US collapse before 2014 and I would have to emigrate? I sometimes wonder if I should stay in the US or if I should emigrate (one of the reasons why I am trying to learn the languages, cultures and political issues of the world), wait a few years to get another citizenship, confront the political issues of a country and make the people become the 4th check. Which country deserves my efforts? In my everyday life, people don't seem to take me seriously when I try to explain what's going on in the world and what we can do about it. That's why I feel so discouraged at times. To make matters worse, I can't find any utopia. The more I look at the world, the more I realize that the problems I am facing are global (complacency, the increase of problems in the world and the fact that the media, oligarchic representative governments and political parties are preventing people from having genuine power). Every single country has problems. I want to help the US because I have a moral urge to do so and I have a spine, but at the same time, I am scared that 2014 will be too late to change things (I have to be at least 25 years old to be in the House of Representatives). I want to be proud of being American for once. I'm tired of seeing people putting me down because of the horrible governance in the United States. Human governance is horrible in the rest of the world, but I noticed that unlike the rest of the world, American travelers who merely mention their nationality face insults from even strangers while traveling abroad because of American imperialism (actually, we need to also look for an adjective that sounds less expansionist than the word "American". How about "United Statesman"?), even though those strangers don't know the political positions of the American travelers. Like the Spaniard living under Franco or the Russian living under Stalin, I wonder if I should emigrate or not. |
 | Bush Nominates Zoellick to Head World Bank - VOA Story President Bush says he wants former U.S. trade representative Robert Zoellick to head the World Bank. VOA White House Correspondent Scott Stearns reports, Zoellick would replace Paul Wolfowitz, who steps down next month following a scandal over a pay raise for his girlfriend. President Bush says Ambassador Zoellick has all the right qualities to head the World Bank. The 53-year-old lawyer is currently a top executive at the New York investment firm Goldman Sachs. As deputy secretary of state in 2005 and 2006, Zoellick focused on ending violence in Sudan's troubled Darfur region. Zoellick was the U.S. trade representative from 2001 to 2005 and helped launch the Doha round of world trade talks. He worked on free trade agreements with Singapore, Chile, Australia, and Morocco and oversaw trade talks with five nations of Central America and the Dominican Republic, as well as Bahrain, Jordan, Vietnam, Panama, Thailand, and the Southern African Customs Union. Zoellick follows outgoing Bank chief Wolfowitz who is being forced to step down next month, two years into his five-year term. Bank employees and many European contributors complained about Wolfowitz's management style and his role in securing a sizeable pay raise for his girlfriend. Following the Wolfowitz scandal, executive directors of the Bank issued a statement saying the essential qualities of the next leader include a proven track record of leadership and political objectivity and independence. The United States is the World Bank's largest donor, and the American president has chosen its chief since the 185-member group was founded following the Second World War. European nations, in turn, choose the head of the International Monetary Fund. Zoellick's nomination must now be approved by the World Bank's 24-member board of governors. |
 | AlbaniaHumanRights #9 Human rights and democracy in Albania Human rights and democracy in Albania. hearing before the Subcommittee on International Operations and Human Rights of the Committee on International Relations, House of Representatives, One Hundred Fourth Congress, second session, July 25, 1996 /stream/humanrightsdemoc00unit/humanrightsdemoc00unit_djvu.txt to find violations of human rights more objectionable, or at least more noticeable, when they occurred in Chile and South America and when they oc- curred in Cuba, China, or even Pol Pot's Cambodia. I believe the human rights community has made some progress since then. All of us, liberals and conservatives alike, have come to recognize that bullets are just as lethal and torture just as degrad- ing when they come from people whose economic and social views are generally those that we can endorse, as well as those that we oppose. Still, it can be tempting to explain away evidence of human rights violations when they are alleged to have been perpetrated by governments we are inclined to regard as friends. |
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