Saturday, October 20, 2012

the government eased

 

Some have drawn parallels between Say’s case and that of the
 
Russian band Pussy Riot who staged an impromptu punk
 
performance at Moscow’s main cathedral in February in
 
protest against President Vladimir Putin and the Russian
 
Orthodox Church hierarchy. The three women were convicted of
 
hooliganism motivated by religious hatred, but they insist
 
that their protest was political in nature and not an attack
 
on religion.
 
Turkey has a history of persecuting its artists and writers,
 
and the European Union has long encouraged the nation to
 
improve freedom of speech if it wants to become a member of
 
the bloc one day.
 
In a report on Turkey’s progress toward membership issued
 
last week, the EU criticized Turkey for “recurring
 
infringements of the right to liberty and security and to a
 
fair trial, as well as of the freedom of expression.” It
 
said restrictions on media freedoms and an increasing number
 
of court cases against writers and journalists remained
 
“serious issues.”
 
Turkey’s Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk has been prosecuted for
 
his comments about the mass killings of Armenians under a law
 
that made it a crime to insult the Turkish identity before
 
the government eased that law in an amendment in 2008. In
 
2007, ethnic Armenian journalist Hrant Dink, who received
 
death threats because of his comments about the killings of
 
Armenians by Turks in 1915, was shot dead outside his office
 


Thursday, October 18, 2012

Government Appointments Project

Not even Republicans disputed that Obama's debate performance
was much improved from the listless showing two weeks earlier
that helped spark a rise in the polls for Romney. But the
first post-debate polls were divided, some saying Romney won,
others finding Obama did.
The two rivals meet one more time, next Monday in Florida.
Democrats rebutted Romney's memory of the binders he received
as the newly elected governor of Massachusetts in 2002.
On a conference call arranged by the Democratic National
Committee, a former executive director of the Massachusetts
Government Appointments Project said the group provided the
resumes of women qualified for appointment unprompted. "To be
perfectly clear, Mitt Romney did not request" them, said
Jesse Mermell.
Vice-President Joe Biden, campaigning in battleground
Colorado, mocked Romney on the same topic but in terms more
pungent than Obama's. "What I can't understand is how he's
gotten into this sort of 1950s time warp in terms of women,"
Biden said. "The idea he had to go and ask where a qualified
woman was. He just should have come to my house. He didn't
need a binder."
Romney quickly countered with a combination testimonial and
fundraising appeal from Kerry Healey, who was his lieutenant
governor in Massachusetts. She said he had named numerous
women to his administration, adding, "He sought out our
counsel, and he listened to our advice. We didn't always
agree, but we were always respected."
Obama wore a pink wristband to show support for Breast Cancer
Awareness Month as he campaigned in Iowa and then Ohio, and
reminded his audience that the first legislation he signed
after becoming president made it easier for women to take pay
grievances to court.

Wednesday, October 17, 2012

Ma Ying-jeou

michael kors iphone wristlet

The Middle East is already intolerably hot, yet global warming seems to be on the minds of many countries in the region. Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Yemen, Syria, Libya, Jordan, and, of course, Iran are all pursuing, planning, or exploring their first nuclear power reactors. Just last week, the United Arab Emirates announced that it would go ahead with a civilian nuclear program, making it the first Gulf state to do so. Other states now considering their nuclear options range from Venezuela to Belarus to Indonesia. In justifying their programs to the world, "they've all jumped on the 'nuclear is clean and green' bandwagon," according to Sharon Squassoni of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
For example, Taiwan's president-elect, Ma Ying-jeou, has called for expanding the island's nuclear capacity to help combat climate change. Thailand announced last summer that it would build its first reactor and hopes to ultimately produce 25 percent of the country's electricity from nuclear power. "Without nuclear, you couldn't reduce greenhouse gases," said Energy Minister Piyasvasti Amranand.
Some of this greenery seems sincere. South Africa, for example, which gave up its nuclear weapons program in the early 1990s, has strict anti-pollution regulations that have driven up the cost of coal, making its nuclear expansion sensible. Indeed, although the continent uses little energy, Africa as a whole has taken an intense interest in nuclear power because of its fear of global-warming-induced desertification.