Global News Journal
Beyond the World news headlines
Argentine president’s gender card wears thin
Since she became Argentina’s first elected female president at the end of 2007, Cristina Fernandez has often complained that things are tougher for her because she is a woman.
Some analysts and historians say that while women in power do face sexism, Fernandez’s frequent playing of the gender card can be detrimental because it emphasizes a perceived position of weakness.
Only a few months after taking office, Fernandez got into a messy conflict with farmers over taxes, which did lasting damage to her approval ratings.
“It is harder because I’m a woman,” Fernandez said frequently during the farm dispute, which persists more than a year after it began.
In one speech, she said she had committed two sins that explained the ferocity of the attacks against her and her government: first, winning office with lots of votes and second, being a woman.
Since her party was defeated in a June midterm election, the president has kept using the gender issue as sort of a safe-conduct pass.
Last Friday, when she arrived half an hour late to a South American summit in Asuncion, Paraguay, she complained that the media unfairly pick on her when she is late.
from India Insight:
India’s nuclear submarine dream, still miles to go
The unveiling of India's top secret nuclear-powered submarine, three decades after it was conceived, has been greeted with much tub-thumping.
Even for a nation hungry for success and even more than that, global recognition, some of the adulation seems excessive and perhaps premature as many are starting to point out.
INS Arihant, or destroyer of enemies, has just made contact with water, as it were, with the navy flooding the dry dock at last weekend's launch in the southern port city of Visakhapatnam. It has to be tested in the harbour, then out at sea. The nuclear reactor, the heart of the new technology, has yet to be fitted. Perhaps a bigger moment will be when that reactor goes critical.
"The Arihant is far from reaching operational status, as it currently is little more than floating hull," as this piece in defence professionals says.
To say that the launch by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh completes the third element in India's nuclear triad based on missiles, aircraft and underwater strike capability is jumping several years ahead.
As former navy commander Premvir Das notes, an underwater vertical launch system is about the most sophisticated and complex weapons and it is not going to happen any time soon.
One assumes that India understands that submarines operate in the most corrosive, and abundant naturally occurring electrolyte on the planet. Surely they understand the impact this issue has upon nuclear systems, and the incredibly expensive maintenance, and preservation related personnel training required to mitigate it. Further, India will need a trained and effective Security Force prepared to take any and all measure to prevent the the theft of it’s state secrets. As the nuclear genie crawls slowly out of his lamp, India is perhaps one of the few nations that just might, just maybe, act responsively and maturely with this horrendous weapon.
One dent at a time, Turkey’s nation-state edifice erodes
“Happy is he who calls himself a Turk.”
One of the first things that catches your attention when you drive out of the airport of Diyarbakir, the largest city in Turkey’s mainly Kurdish southeast, is Mustafa Kemal Ataturk’s famous phrase engraved on mountain slopes in big white letters.
Bent on building a secular and modern Turkey after World War One, Ataturk carved a united Turkish nation out of the disparate ethnic and religious groups that inhabited the old Ottoman empire — sometimes by forced “Turkification” as was the case with ethnic Kurds.
That once-monolithic nation state is slowly being dented as pluralism becomes an acceptable fact of life in Turkish society.
Turkey’s announcement this week that it is preparing a “democratic opening” for Kurds has raised hopes the EU candidate country might launch bold reforms to end a conflict that has killed 40,000 people and brought pain to many more.
Cynics have been quick to point out the plan, which might include political, cultural and economic measures, is timed to pre-empt a “road map” that jailed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) leader Abdullah Ocalan has said he will announce on Aug. 15.
But regardless of its timing, there is no doubt that Turkey is changing.
Given the separation that exists in ethnic identity, the effectiveness of these initiatives should be considered. Turkey spends millions of dollars every year to lobby in the US against the idea of the Armenian genocide, it is a crime to insult Turkishness-which limits freedom of speech. Are these initiatives really going to get at the root at the ethnic tensions that exist in Turkey?
from Pakistan: Now or Never?:
Manmohan Singh’s Pakistan gamble
Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has staked his political reputation on talks with Pakistan, earning in equal measure both praise and contempt from a domestic audience still burned by last November's attack on Mumbai by Pakistan-based militants.
"I sincerely believe it is our obligation to keep the channels of communication open," he said in a debate in parliament on Wednesday. "Unless we talk directly to Pakistan we will have to rely on a third party to do so... Unless you want to go to war with Pakistan, there is no way, but to go step-by-step... dialogue and engagement are the best way forward," Singh said.
That may sound like fairly anodyne stuff. But to recap, Singh signed a joint statement with Pakistan Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani at a meeting in Sharm el-Sheikh in Egypt this month in which both ordered their foreign secretaries -- their top diplomats -- to hold more talks to improve relations. Singh however also said the formal peace process -- the so-called composite dialogue -- could not be resumed until Pakistan took more action against those who organised the Mumbai attack.
The outcome was pretty much what was expected from the talks in Egypt, effectively forming a stepping stone between an ice-breaking meeting between Singh and Pakistan President Asif Ali Zardari on the sidelines of a regional summit in Yekaterinburg in Russia in June and the next international forum where senior politicians from both countries will be present -- September's U.N. General Assembly (though Singh is not personally expected to attend.)
But what has outraged the political opposition in India, along with large sections of the media, has been the specific wording of the joint statement.
The first allegedly offending reference is contained in the part of the statement which summarises what each prime minister said during their talks: "Prime Minister Gilani mentioned that Pakistan has some information on threats in Baluchistan and other areas." Outsiders may find this hard to follow but the mention of the "B" word has been portrayed as Indian capitulation to Pakistani accusations that it supports a separatist movement in the Pakistani province of Baluchistan, an allegation India denies.
The second allegedly offending reference is as follows: "Both prime ministers recognise that dialogue is the only way forward. Action on terrorism should not be linked to the Composite Dialogue process and these should not be bracketed."
How far would Obama have made it in Germany?
What would have happened to Barack Obama if he had been born in Germany?
I had the chance to pose that question to a charismatic young German political leader who is sometimes likened by his supporters to the American President.
Greens party co-chairman Cem Oezdemir, the son of Turkish immigrants, became the first person from an ethnic minority elected to lead a major German party last year — a slogan at the time was “Yes, we Cem“. What might sound rather unspectacular in many industrial countries was actually an epic change in Germany, which until only a decade ago was loath to even acknowledge it was a country of “immigrants” (preferring to call its 7 million foreigners “guest workers”).
So what would have happened to Obama if he had grown up in Germany, a country of 82 million that has 15 million residents with an “immigrant background”?
“I think nowadays Obama would have had great chances for a political career in Germany and pretty much every country in the European Union,” said Oezdemir, a 43-year-old who trained as a teacher before ending up getting picked by the Greens for a seat in parliament in 1994.
Clearly, the tacit message from Oezdemir was that this would not have been the case a decade ago before the country’s archaic citizenship laws were modernised — thanks in part to the efforts of the Greens in power as junior coalition partners with the Social Democrats from 1998 to 2005 — and Germany started to treat its immigrant community as equals rather than “guests” expected to return to their country of origin at some point.
“I’m sure Obama would have ended up in the Greens party if he had grown up in Germany,” added Oezdemir. “And if he were with us here in the Greens I’d be delighted to give him my job as co-chair of the Greens.”
Austria’s Graf gets grief over “united Tyrol”
Breaking into the summer holiday lull, Austrian politics has gotten into a lather over a far-right populist’s call for a referendum on whether a mainly German-speaking region of northern Italy should rejoin Austria.
No matter how far-fetched, his proposal raised a hue and cry by challenging the taboo of old unreconstructed nationalism in a country restlessly determined to live down its Nazi past.
South Tyrol – Alto Adige in Italian – is an autonomous, Alpine province of Italy bordering Austria. It was annexed by Italy from defeated Austria-Hungary at the end of World War One.
Italy granted increasing self-government to South Tyrol in the decades after World War Two, defusing separatist unrest by Austro-German speakers. It is now among Italy’s richest regions, with an open border to Austria thanks to EU integration.
But Martin Graf, a rightist deputy speaker of Austria’s parliament, declared on Sunday that South Tyrol was actually “part of overall Tyrol”, and only “currently” within Italy.
The universal right of self-determination should apply for all “the German people” in Europe - just as those in old Communist East Germany got their wish to merge into one Germany at the end of the Cold War in 1990. “It’s time to ask the people if there should be one Tyrol,” Graf said.
Graf owes his parliamentary post due to the fact that his far-right Freedom Party replaced the Greens as Austria’s No. 3 party in last year’s parliamentary election.
And as you do, you go back and check your facts! The current Prime Minister in Bulgaria is Boyko Metodiev Borisov, a former body guard for Simeon Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, and in 2005 a candidate for the National Movement Simeon II party although his new party is called Citizens for European Development of Bulgaria. I’m sure it’s all kosher and doesn’t indicate the European Monarchs are trying to regain their former glory!
UPDATE-De facto Honduran leader asks God to enlighten critics
TEGUCIGALPA - Shortly after we wrote about the “Day of Prayer” in Honduras today, the de facto president, Roberto Micheletti, made a live appearance on state television to lead the people in prayer.
He thanked Christians, both Catholic and Evangelical, for their support.
“I ask for forgiveness from those who for one reason or another do not agree with us, and I ask God to show them the light so they realize it is more important to live in peace,” Micheletti said.
“I am here not because men put me here, I am here because God put me here,” he said.
“I want the best for my country,” Micheletti said. “I believe that up to this moment, I have no reason to be humbled before any man, but before God permanently, because I have acted correctly in my life.”
I have spent some time studying in Honduras, and now work for a justice organization based there. We have recently put up a website that is following this political crisis. It provides a detailed timeline of events leading up to the coup and since the coup. It also has numerous links to quality articles that represent all opinions. I think you will find it helpful in making sense of what is really going on in Honduras.
Check it out at http://www.ajs-us.org/honduras_political _crisis.htm
How do you solve a political crisis? Hondurans try prayer
TEGUCIGALPA – A month after a coup that has plunged Honduras into its worst political crisis in decades, the country’s de facto rulers declared Tuesday an official Day of Prayer for peace.
State television has been playing announcements for days with the slogan “Let us all pray for our Honduras.”
Facing international condemnation of a June 28 coup that has led to a freeze on multinational lending and threats of wider sanctions, Honduras, one of the poorest countries in Latin America, needs all the help it can get.
“We ask God to save Honduras for us. We pray to God for all who are suffering in this crisis, and we pray to God to punish the wicked,” a priest saying Mass at the main Catholic cathedral in Tegucigalpa said.
He did not say who he thought should be punished but the leaders of the Catholic Church have criticized exiled President Manuel Zelaya and backed the interim government, headed by Roberto Micheletti.
But at least one of his congregation was praying for the return of the ousted president, a cowboy-hat wearing logging magnate known as Mel, who was toppled after allying himself with the socialist president of Venezuela, Hugo Chavez.
We are the soldiers of God and only we are the ones who will have to defeat these mafia guys who´ve had had control over honduras for decades and now that a man brave enough to not submit himself to the orders of these criminals, these mafia guys are willing to kill to keep control of our country, please God don´t let these cowards get away with this, because I know that I rather die than to let these thugs continue to commit terror acts on our national soil.
U.S. border agents under fire as Mexican smugglers fight back
Gunmen shot and killed U.S. Border Patrol agent Robert Rosas in California near the U.S.-Mexico border fence on July 23, the first such fatal shooting in more than a decade. In rugged desert where people smugglers and drug traffickers roam, Rosas was tracking a suspicious group of people near the rural town of Campo, about 60 miles (97 kms) east of San Diego.
After radioing for backup, he got out of his vehicle and started to follow members of the group as it split up. He was attacked, robbed of his weapon and shot several times in the head and abdomen.
Mexican police have rounded up five suspects believed to be coyotes, or people smugglers, and drug gang members, although the FBI, which is heading the investigation, considers the case unsolved.
While it unfolds, the probe into the murder of 30 year-old Rosas, father of two small children and whose memorial service is on Friday, is a test for U.S.-Mexican cooperation. Both countries are at pains to show a unified alliance in the drug war, underscored again by U.S. drug czar Gil Kerlikowske’s visit to Mexico this week.
But Rosas’ murder is also a warning that Mexican organized crime is increasingly undaunted by U.S. law enforcement. In Mexico, well-armed drug cartels take on the army at will. Mexico’s escalating drug war has killed some 12,800 people since late 2006, when President Felipe Calderon launched his army-backed crackdown on cartels.
It’s funny that “Automatic Weapons” freely available in US gun Shops shows up in this article. First a foreign national cannot lawfully purchase a fire arm at a licenced gun shop. Second the only “automatic Weapons” that a Us Citizen can lawfully buy without a very expensive and highly restricted license, are semi automatic fire arms. Ie, fire one round with each pull of the trigger. Let’s put the blame were it belongs, how about the f-ed up Justice Department that put two BP agents in federal prison for doing their job? maybe that’s why the BP is such a push over for these corupt Mexican Federali Drug dealers? You want to know where they get their weapons? US governnt sells them to Mexico and the Mexican government IS A DRUG CARTEL! Their drug war is not to stamp out drugs, just competition. Screw Iraq and Afghanistan, lets watch our own borders for a change.
Dont worry, we have the same thing with Obama, exept hes a man.