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from BBC News (UK)
The rules about who gets to be a prince and also be referred to as his royal highness (HRH) come from a letter patent issued by King George V in November 1917. ... In the 1917 letter, George V declared that the great-grandchildren of the monarch would no longer be princes or princesses, except for the eldest son of the eldest son of the Prince of Wales. In our current situation, that means that Prince George, the eldest son of Prince William, automatically became a prince, but not Archie, even though they are both great-grandsons of the Queen. ... According to the 1917 letter, Archie is entitled to become a prince - but not yet. The children of Harry and Meghan, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, would have to wait until Prince Charles, the heir to the throne, became king, at which point they would be the grandchildren of the monarch and hence entitled to be princes or princesses.
Queen Elizabeth II has been the UK's head of state since 1952 when her father King George VI died. She has ruled for longer than any other British monarch. She is also the head of state for 15 other Commonwealth countries. The 94-year-old monarch and her husband, the Duke of Edinburgh (Prince Philip), who is 99, have four children, eight grandchildren, and nine great-grandchildren.
from CommonDreams
LEFT BIAS, HIGH, U.S. based progressive news website
Shortly after a slate of insurgent progressives endorsed by the Las Vegas Democratic Socialists of America pulled off a clean sweep in Nevada State Democratic Party elections over the weekend, the party's executive director notified newly elected chair Judith Whitmer that the entire staff, as well as every consultant, was quitting. ,,, "What they just didn't expect is that we got better and better at organizing and out-organizing them at every turn," said Judith Whitmer, newly elected chair of the Nevada Democratic Party.
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from Competitive Enterprise Institute
According to Britain’s Daily Telegraph, the grave of Adam Smith in his home city of Edinburgh has been included in a citywide review as being a site linked to “historic racial injustice.” The Telegraph summarizes: His inclusion is justified with a comment claiming he “argued that slavery was ubiquitous and inevitable but that it was not as profitable as free labour”, according to documents seen by the Telegraph. Smith’s gravestone and his statue on the Royal Mile will now be considered by the council’s “Slavery and Colonialism Legacy Review Group” led activist Sir Geoff Palmer, which will report on how memorials linked to “oppression” can be “re-configured”. The Edinburgh review must have been superficial. If they had read his works they must somehow have missed the many condemnations of the institution of slavery and the sympathy with which he viewed the enslaved.
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from DW News (Deutsche Welle)
Broadcasting & Media Production Company in Bonn, Germany
Russia and China are reaching for the moon, with plans to construct a "complex of experimental research facilities" there as they strive to expand their presence in space.
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from HISTORY
The period from the late 1800s to the early 1900s saw a surge of new technology and inventions that led to dramatic changes in the economy and how people lived and worked in Europe, Great Britain and especially the United States. Here are eight significant inventions from the Second Industrial Revolution: The Air Brake; The Light Bulb; Petroleum Refining; The QWERTY Typewriter Keyboard; The Skyscraper; The Tractor; The Safety Razor; The Wireless.
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from Hoover Institution
Nonprofit Organization in Stanford, California
Human Rights & Diplomacy: “Give Us Something To Aspire To!”
The gap between aspiration and achievement in human rights promotion is a long-standing feature of U.S. foreign policy. We Foreign Service Officers learn early that, however genuine our intentions, there are natural limits to what is achievable. Competing security and commercial interests may lessen Washington´s zeal for confrontation. A host country may be impervious to our approaches. Fortunately, human rights advocacy is not an all-or-nothing proposition. Policymakers and diplomats merely need to learn the terrain and identify achievable victories. We must also question: Which rights are most fruitful to raise? Which diplomatic tools can succeed? Which partners best complement our efforts? Above all, which changes can we make in our own democracy to present a model worth emulating?
Partner Or Pariah? Saudi Arabia, The Biden Administration, And Human Rights
The Biden administration has set for itself an ambitious human rights agenda. “When I am president, human rights will be at the core of U.S. foreign policy,” then candidate Joe Biden told the New York Times in February 2020, citing “China’s deepening authoritarianism” and “the unconscionable detention of over a million Uighurs in western China.” His statement recalled the famous line of Jimmy Carter’s inaugural address that “our commitment to human rights must be absolute.” Carter had given unprecedented priority to the issue of human rights in the conduct of foreign policy. Biden seemed poised to follow in his path. Unfortunately for the rulers in Riyadh, Biden’s focus on human rights is not merely about China. It also stems from concerns with Saudi Arabia, together with the Trump administration’s perceived willingness to condone Saudi excesses.
It has been a tough few months for human rights in Iran. Wrestler Navid Afkari and laborer Mostafa Salehi were executed in quick succession for participating in public protests against the Islamic Republic. Dissident journalist Ruhollah Zam was, in an elaborate plot hatched by the Revolutionary Guards, lured to Baghdad from his home in France and abducted to Tehran. After a brief show trial, in December Zam was hanged. In February, prisoner of conscience Behnam Mahjoubi was denied medical treatment and killed under torture. Add to this list, just in the past six months, a number of Baluchi and Arab-Iranians have been executed as part of a campaign to sow fear among the country’s ethnic minorities. Biden has made human rights a prime consideration in shaping his foreign policy towards Turkey and Saudi Arabia. When it comes to Iran, however, he seems to be intent on simply undoing some of the effective policies put into place by the previous administration. Certainly, the new team has shown little indication that the Iranian popular campaign for freedom or the country’s abysmal human rights record is to be at all relevant in its overall strategy toward the country.
The Islamic Republic of Iran remains one of the world’s worst human right abusers: it has the highest executions per capita; it constantly crushes peaceful assembly and freedom of expression; and it harshly persecutes human rights defenders and civil society activists. From the perspective of the Iranian regime, what the West defines as Iran’s “human rights” problem is actually a deadly serious political problem. It is about safeguarding the inviolability of Iran’s theocratic and authoritarian political system by denying civil and political freedom to its subjects. Yet, despite the regime’s appalling record of human rights abuses, the free world, of which the US claims moral leadership, has repeatedly failed to stand up to it. For in the US policy calculation, human rights in Iran must always give way to issues of higher order, such as Iran’s nuclear file.
The idea of “Human Rights” is modern. Humanity’s history only recently has recognized the need for such a category, and a concomitant need to explain what the category covers and where it comes from. Through most of the twentieth century, and now in the twenty-first to a considerable extent, there has been a structural dichotomy between those regimes, the largely autocratic kind, who declare human rights to be material in content: food, clothing, and shelter, and open societies which, while agreeing to material needs, have given most political weight to ideals of freedom and justice. All through the Cold War decades the centralized, one-party regimes of “The East” stressed material necessities while “The West” valorized political considerations. That dichotomy no longer prevails, but the concept and its practices as actually carried out have shown “human rights” as continuing to evolve ever more into “an American thing.”
As a young man, Egypt’s legendary playwright, Tawfiq Al Hakim had worked as an assistant to the Attorney General in the Egyptian countryside. There he would witness firsthand the dismal state of the country’s fellahin and the grave injustices Egypt’s rural population lived under. The experience would leave a profound impact on the young author and would shape his views of Egypt’s ills and the necessity for social change that became evident in his literary works. Most importantly, however, it was Al Hakim’s brief legal career that would produce one of his most brilliant works; Diary of a Country Prosecutor. Published in 1937, the novel achieved wide success and was translated into many languages, including English in 1947 by none other than the future Israeli Foreign Minister, Abba Eban. In this novel, describing life in the Egyptian countryside, his main character, modeled on the playwright himself, speaks for Al Hakim when he says “I realized that human life has no value in Egypt; for those who are supposed to care about it care very little.”
In April 2020, the US Department of State decided to support the opening of a dialogue between the Kurdish National Council (KNC), an umbrella organization of Syrian-Kurdish political parties close to the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) of Massoud Barzani, and the Democratic Unity Party (PYD), the Syrian branch of the PKK (Kurdistan Worker’s Party). At the end of May, the PYD founded the "Kurdish National Unity Parties", a coalition of 25 political groups, and in June, the talks between the Kurdish Unity Parties and the KNC began in earnest. The aim of these negotiations was, and still is, to reach a compromise regarding the political future of the Syrian Kurds’ autonomous administration thus far solely controlled by the PYD.
America’s violent protests in the summer of 2020 have impacted how the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) re-calculates the geopolitical power balance and strategic risk of a head-on confrontation between it and the presumably weakened United States, and enlivened the communist government’s ideological impulses against the international capitalist system.
Deterrence is a tricky business because it all occurs in the minds of adversaries, forming fears that inhibit action. In 1977, while working in South Korea in a last-minute attempt to find quick ways of improving the country’s remarkably retrograde ground forces (President Jimmy Carter wanted to withdraw U.S. troops quickly, as Presidential Review Memorandum #13 prescribed), I kept wondering why North Korea had made no attempt to exploit the Fall of Saigon opportunity of April 30, 1975. After all, that ignominious day of desperate last-minute evacuations of American lieges and of many more abandonments, was not the result of some tactical error but rather the ineluctable consequence of the Congressional decision to abandon South Vietnam to its enemies, which in turn reflected the opinions of a majority of Americans at large no longer willing to accept Vietnam’s frustrations, and indeed unwilling to fight any land war in Asia. Well, South Korea was part of Asia, and its North Korean enemy seemed very eager to attack it. Indeed, back on January 21, 1968 North Korean commandos had penetrated right into the grounds of the Presidential palace in Seoul.
George Floyd’s death on May 25, 2020 at the hands of a Minneapolis police officer triggered allegations that his fate exposed a much broader problem of racism in American law enforcement and American society more generally. As this interpretation spread across old and new media, protests and riots erupted across the urban landscape, spearheaded by the movement Black Lives Matter. The violence and looting, which in some cities went on for several months, cost the nation an estimated $1 billion in damages.
An American foreign policy that includes the promotion of human rights as one of its missions can draw on a tradition rooted in the Declaration of Independence. The assertion of universal equality and the designation of unalienable rights, "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness," have shaped American political culture. That the reality of American life has never fully realized these ideals and at times failed them egregiously, notably in the institution of slavery, does not negate the validity of the ideals themselves.
If the Biden Administration lives up to its campaign promises and early governing pronouncements, human rights will play a larger role in its foreign policy than in that of the Trump Administration. This isn’t necessarily good news. Such a prominent focus on human rights in U.S. diplomacy is far more likely to underscore Washington’s hypocrisy—or worse yet do real damage to American interests abroad. Recall the last time a U.S. administration pressed hard for human rights in the Mideast under President Jimmy Carter. The result was the overthrow of the Shah of Iran, undeniably a despot, but it is impossible to argue Iranians’ lives have been any better over the past four decades of rule by an intolerant and cruel Islamic theocracy. And, without doubt, U.S. interests in the region have suffered.
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from The Spokesman-Review
Newspaper in Spokane, Washington
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When Iosia Faletogo was killed by a Seattle police officer Dec. 31, 2018, after fleeing from a traffic stop, protesters took to the streets of downtown Seattle. The Seattle Times reported demonstrators chanted the 36-year-old Samoan man’s last words, “I’m not reaching,” referencing a nearby handgun. Immediately after that utterance, Officer Jared Keller shot Faletogo in the head, killing him. A September 2019 investigation by the Office of Police Accountability found the shooting was justified. On Dec. 15, a year and three months after that report’s publication, the Spokane Police Department swore Keller in, to the horror of Boots Faletogo, Iosia Faletogo’s sister-in-law and a longtime Spokane resident who now works on the Coeur d’Alene reservation and lives in Rockford, Washington. Thursday, Iosia Faletogo’s mother, as the executor of his estate, filed a wrongful death lawsuit against Keller, the city of Seattle and another officer involved in the traffic stop, Garret Hay.
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from Yahoo News
LEFT-CENTER BIAS, HIGH, news website owned by Verizon Media
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Of the many shocking statements made by the Duke and Duchess of Sussex in their full-scale assault on the monarchy during their two-hour interview with Oprah Winfrey, the most peculiar was surely Meghan’s claim to know nothing about the British monarchy when she first met Harry. She was so incurious that she didn’t bother to read a volume of history or biography. She said she didn’t even do an internet search to learn the basics. Her knowledge of the Royal Family, she said, was based only on what Harry “was sharing with me.” Astonishingly, as a graduate of well-regarded Northwestern University, she said her sense of Royal life was based on “fairytales.”
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