U.N. to Hold Off on Kosovo Vote
By WARREN HOGE
UNITED NATIONS, July 20 — The European and American sponsors of a resolution that would put Kosovo on the path to independence withdrew the measure from the Security Council today in the face of a promised Russian veto and said a six-nation European group would now seek a way to settle the contentious statehood question. “We regret that it has been impossible to secure such a resolution in the United Nations Security Council,” said Jean-Marc de la Sabliere, the French ambassador. “We will therefore put on hold discussions of the resolution.” He made the announcement after a morning meeting held to test the ongoing Russian resistance to the resolution despite repeated revisions adopted in recent weeks to try to meet Moscow’s objections. Vitaly I. Churkin, the Russian ambassador, said he had told the 15 council ambassadors that Russia was not prepared to vote yes or to abstain, leaving a veto the sure response if a vote were called. . . .
More here.
Friday, July 20, 2007
Wednesday, July 18, 2007
Monday, July 9, 2007
Saturday, July 7, 2007
Earth Weekend ... 07/07/07 or 7.7.'7
This weekend featured a series of concerts to highlight global warming: Live Earth–10 concerts on seven continents to fight global warming. Hmmmm, can we have this everyday? I don't think people remember these things after the weekend ends.
Tuesday, July 3, 2007
Land of the Brave and Free ... Happy Birthday!!!
"It's not the flag, stupid!!!""Many say America is losing or searching for its soul these days. I absolutely disagree. What is currently happening to America has nothing to do with soul. It's about a nation that has been blessed too much and does not know what to do with its many 'toys'; and has instead chosen to be a spoilt brat, which does not utilize its brain and pretends like it does not have one whenever it's convenient for its fits of tantrum."
---- Luna (2007)
I hope I can be pardoned if I concentrate on my home country today on this Kosovan page. Since US is a land of lawyers, what better way to commemorate its birthday than a tale of how the law and society interwine to define American Society. Enjoy or sleep through the following:
Can a Law Change a Society?
SINCE 1954, liberal and conservative justices have disagreed about the central meaning of Brown v. Board of Education. Was the purpose of Brown to achieve a colorblind society or an integrated one? Last week, in its 5-to-4 decision declaring that public schools in Louisville and Seattle can’t take explicit account of race to achieve integration, the Supreme Court came down firmly on the side of colorblindness. Despite some important qualifications by Justice Anthony Kennedy, at least four conservative justices made clear that they believe that nearly all racial classifications are unconstitutional. The lawyers who won the Supreme Court case predicted that it would have as dramatic an effect on American society as the original Brown case did. “These are the most important decisions on the use of race since Brown v. Board of Education,” Sharon Browne, the principal lawyer for the conservative Pacific Legal Foundation, declared in a press release. “With these decisions, an estimated 1,000 school districts around the country that are sending the wrong message about race to kids will have to stop.”
But some legal scholars on both sides of the political spectrum, and of the affirmative action debate, question this assessment. They doubt that this case will transform society as dramatically as Brown did. And some of them question whether even Brown was as singularly influential in transforming society as many have claimed during the last half-century. The conventional wisdom about Brown holds that it was more responsible than anything else for the integration of schools. “Brown really did transform society by stopping de jure segregation, and without Brown, schools would look very different,” says David J. Armor, a conservative scholar at George Mason University.
But some liberal scholars have challenged that heroic assessment. In “From Jim Crow to Civil Rights,” Michael J. Klarman argues that it was a political commitment to integration in the 1960s, not the Brown decision in the 1950s, that led to meaningful integration. “Brown didn’t transform society very much, and to the extent that it did it was indirect,” says Mr. Klarman, who is a law professor at the University of Virginia. “Brown brought out the worst in White Supremacy, and Northerners were appalled by the police dogs they saw on television, and that advanced the civil rights movement.” He argues that meaningful desegregation didn’t occur until the Johnson administration’s Justice Department became committed to enforcing the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the Department of Health, Education and Welfare threatened to cut off financing to school districts that refused to integrate. Professor Klarman said he believed that just as the court couldn’t bring about integration on its own in 1954, so it won’t be able to mandate colorblindness on its own today. “Just as Brown produced massive resistance in the South and therefore had little impact on desegregation for a decade, this decision is going to be similarly inconsequential,” he says. “This affects only the tiny percentage of school districts that use race to assign students, and even in those districts, like Louisville and Seattle, it won’t be consequential because there are so many opportunities for committed school boards to circumvent it.” In his concurring opinion, Justice Kennedy invited school districts to explore “narrowly tailored” ways of pursuing their compelling interest in “avoiding racial isolation.” Some critics of government-sponsored affirmative action believe that this may allow school districts to pursue racial diversity by indirect means. “School districts are going to continue to do indirectly what they tried to do directly,” says Peter H. Schuck of Yale Law School. “They will feel the same pressures to reduce racial isolation, and they will look for proxies for race.”
Some scholars who support affirmative action also agree that public schools will use proxies for race — like neighborhoods, socioeconomic status, or single-parent households to achieve their goals. “I think what you’ll see is schools avoiding talking in racial terms, and talking in more vague terms about a diversity of backgrounds,” says David A. Strauss of the University of Chicago. “There will be another layer of bureaucracy, but I wouldn’t expect a large-scale retreat from what public schools have tried.” After Texas and California banned affirmative action in the 1990s, officials in both states guaranteed admission at the top public universities to a certain percentage of the class at every public high school, regardless of the school’s quality. Because of segregated housing patterns, this somewhat reduced the fall in the numbers of enrolled African-American and Hispanic students. “If you judge by what happened in California, you’ll see some drop in minority enrollment but not as huge a change as some people expected,” says John Yoo, a former Bush Justice Department official who teaches law at the University of California at Berkeley. “School administrators and bureaucrats are so heavily invested in the idea of diversity that they will try an amazing array of policies to get around the ban of the use of race.” Although it will be harder for public schools to resort to similar race-neutral alternatives, many legal scholars believe they will try. “It’s tougher in a public school setting, where generally applicants aren’t competing against each other on an individual basis, but that’s clearly what Justice Kennedy is inviting,” says Samuel Issacharoff, a law professor at New York University who supports affirmative action. To enforce its vision of colorblindness, Professor Klarman suggests, the Supreme Court would need to be backed by the president and Congress. But so far, that political commitment to colorblindness has not materialized. “It’s not enough for the court to announce this; to really make it stick, the president would have to cut off funding for school districts that circumvent the decision, just like the 1960s,” Professor Klarman says. “If you start threatening to throw school board members in jail, that might have an effect, but the strongest evidence that there’s not that kind of political support for colorblindness is that the military and Fortune 500 companies have said we need affirmative action to survive.”
More broadly, the effects of last week’s decision may be limited by the fact that American society is divided on just how colorblind or integrated society should be. When Brown was decided, 54 percent of the country supported the result. Today, the public appears similarly divided about the appropriate balance between colorblindness and diversity, and there are backlashes in both directions. After a Texas court banned affirmative action in 1996, the Texas Legislature tried to preserve racial diversity in the state’s public universities with race-neutral alternatives, but after the Supreme Court upheld affirmative action at the University of Michigan law school in 2003, the voters of Michigan passed an initiative banning it. “I think that there will be a King Canute quality to the decision,” Professor Strauss said, referring to the Anglo-Saxon king who ordered the sea’s waves to stop. In the end, the Supreme Court throughout its history has rarely precipitated social transformation on its own; instead it has been most effective when it acts in conjunction with the president, Congress and ultimately a majority of the country. “Brown pushed the country in a direction it was already going, and in the same sense, the large forces today are going to continue to operate regardless of what the Supreme Court just decided,” Professor Klarman said. “We’re headed toward an ambiguous place where we’re committed both to colorblindness and to diversity in public life. We might have a black president, but we’ll still have a society with very segregated neighborhoods and public schools. I don’t think the court decision will make much difference either way.”
The Stupidity of Man ...
"Suffering, poverty and torture do not breed humility and kindness ... au contraire ... they breed greed, selfishness and torturers of brethren" ---- Luna (2007)
We never seem to learn from our mistakes or sufferings ... I see these traits below ne Prishtine almost every week in the corridors of power. I guess suffering at the hands of a common foreign element makes all those suffering equal; but once that foreign element is gone, an internal element takes its place and, all of a sudden, all men and women are no longer equal amongst the "sufferees".
Kosova, my Kosova, when will our souls and spirits rise and seek true unselfish and uncorrupted Justice???
Detainees tortured in Kurdish area of Iraq, Human Rights Watch report says
YAHYA BARZANJI
Associated Press
July 3, 2007 at 7:58 AM EDT
IRBIL, Iraq — Kurdish security forces in northern Iraq — close allies of the United States — routinely torture detainees with methods including electric shock and hold them in overcrowded facilities without formal charges, a human rights group said Tuesday.
The Human Rights Watch report — based on interviews conducted from April to October 2006 with more than 150 detainees — demanded a comprehensive overhaul of detention practices in the Kurdish region and urged an independent body to investigative claims of torture.
“We are surprised that the Kurds are practising such violations after they were victims of torture during the Saddam (Hussein) era,” said Sarah Leah Whitson, Middle East director for Human Rights Watch. “We appreciate the efforts by Kurdistan government to combat terrorism and secure Kurdistan, but we see that such violations against prisoners are not a good thing,” she told a news conference in the northern Kurdish city of Irbil.
The Kurds effectively broke with Saddam's government after the 1991 Gulf War and developed a largely autonomous mini-state under the protection of U.S. warplanes.
The post-Saddam constitution consecrated the north's autonomous status, with its own security forces. It is run by the region's main political parties, the Kurdish Democratic party and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan. PUK leader Jalal Talabani is Iraq's president.
Kurdistan has largely been spared the violence that has ravaged the rest of Iraq — though Sunni insurgents have carried out several deadly attacks in the region. One of them, a suicide truck bomb attack on a Kurdish political party in May, killed more than 50 people and was blamed on al-Qaeda. Kurdish security forces also operate in areas with large Kurdish populations outside the autonomous zone, such as the cities of Mosul and Kirkuk, which have seen frequent Arab-Kurdish violence as the two communities vie for power. Kurds want to incorporate oil-rich Kirkuk into their self-governing region, a step strongly opposed by other Iraqis. The New York-based Human Rights Watch report said abuses have been committed against suspects detained by Kurdish security personnel and others taken in U.S.-Iraq raids, including suspected insurgents. The report listed Kurdish violations of both international human rights law and Iraqi codes.
“Kurdistan security forces routinely subject detainees to torture and other mistreatment,” Whitson said. In interviews the New York-based group conducted at detention facilities — described as “severely overcrowded and unhygienic” — detainees said they were beaten with metal rods and cables and subjected to electric shocks. Some detainees were kept blindfolded and handcuffed for several days at a time, the report said. Jassir Abdul-Razaq, an official in Human Rights Watch's Mideast department, said most of the detainees are Kurds, “detained for terrorist, political or religious extremism causes.” Several Islamic militant insurgent groups that have carried out attacks, including Ansar al-Islam, have a large number of Kurdish members.
The report said the “vast majority” of the hundreds of detainees held by Kurdish security forces have not been charged with a crime, allowed access to a lawyer or provided with a means of appeal. It mentions several cases where defendants remained in detention after having been acquitted or having served their terms. Whitson said the Human Rights Watch team visited 10 prisons run by Kurdish security forces in the cities of Sulaimaniyah, Irbil and Dahuk, but “there are hidden prisons that we could not visit and prisoners whom we were not able to see.” Kurdish officials denied torture was taking place when Human Rights Watch presented them its findings, but they promised to form an independent investigative committee to review the allegations, Whitson said. “We hope that the Kurdish officials will live up to their promises,” she said.
We never seem to learn from our mistakes or sufferings ... I see these traits below ne Prishtine almost every week in the corridors of power. I guess suffering at the hands of a common foreign element makes all those suffering equal; but once that foreign element is gone, an internal element takes its place and, all of a sudden, all men and women are no longer equal amongst the "sufferees".
Kosova, my Kosova, when will our souls and spirits rise and seek true unselfish and uncorrupted Justice???
Detainees tortured in Kurdish area of Iraq, Human Rights Watch report says
YAHYA BARZANJI
Associated Press
July 3, 2007 at 7:58 AM EDT
IRBIL, Iraq — Kurdish security forces in northern Iraq — close allies of the United States — routinely torture detainees with methods including electric shock and hold them in overcrowded facilities without formal charges, a human rights group said Tuesday.
The Human Rights Watch report — based on interviews conducted from April to October 2006 with more than 150 detainees — demanded a comprehensive overhaul of detention practices in the Kurdish region and urged an independent body to investigative claims of torture.
“We are surprised that the Kurds are practising such violations after they were victims of torture during the Saddam (Hussein) era,” said Sarah Leah Whitson, Middle East director for Human Rights Watch. “We appreciate the efforts by Kurdistan government to combat terrorism and secure Kurdistan, but we see that such violations against prisoners are not a good thing,” she told a news conference in the northern Kurdish city of Irbil.
The Kurds effectively broke with Saddam's government after the 1991 Gulf War and developed a largely autonomous mini-state under the protection of U.S. warplanes.
The post-Saddam constitution consecrated the north's autonomous status, with its own security forces. It is run by the region's main political parties, the Kurdish Democratic party and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan. PUK leader Jalal Talabani is Iraq's president.
Kurdistan has largely been spared the violence that has ravaged the rest of Iraq — though Sunni insurgents have carried out several deadly attacks in the region. One of them, a suicide truck bomb attack on a Kurdish political party in May, killed more than 50 people and was blamed on al-Qaeda. Kurdish security forces also operate in areas with large Kurdish populations outside the autonomous zone, such as the cities of Mosul and Kirkuk, which have seen frequent Arab-Kurdish violence as the two communities vie for power. Kurds want to incorporate oil-rich Kirkuk into their self-governing region, a step strongly opposed by other Iraqis. The New York-based Human Rights Watch report said abuses have been committed against suspects detained by Kurdish security personnel and others taken in U.S.-Iraq raids, including suspected insurgents. The report listed Kurdish violations of both international human rights law and Iraqi codes.
“Kurdistan security forces routinely subject detainees to torture and other mistreatment,” Whitson said. In interviews the New York-based group conducted at detention facilities — described as “severely overcrowded and unhygienic” — detainees said they were beaten with metal rods and cables and subjected to electric shocks. Some detainees were kept blindfolded and handcuffed for several days at a time, the report said. Jassir Abdul-Razaq, an official in Human Rights Watch's Mideast department, said most of the detainees are Kurds, “detained for terrorist, political or religious extremism causes.” Several Islamic militant insurgent groups that have carried out attacks, including Ansar al-Islam, have a large number of Kurdish members.
The report said the “vast majority” of the hundreds of detainees held by Kurdish security forces have not been charged with a crime, allowed access to a lawyer or provided with a means of appeal. It mentions several cases where defendants remained in detention after having been acquitted or having served their terms. Whitson said the Human Rights Watch team visited 10 prisons run by Kurdish security forces in the cities of Sulaimaniyah, Irbil and Dahuk, but “there are hidden prisons that we could not visit and prisoners whom we were not able to see.” Kurdish officials denied torture was taking place when Human Rights Watch presented them its findings, but they promised to form an independent investigative committee to review the allegations, Whitson said. “We hope that the Kurdish officials will live up to their promises,” she said.
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