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(03/11/15 11:21pm)
Last week, the Supreme Court of the United States heard oral arguments for King v. Burwell, the second major legal challenge in four years to the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, better known as Obamacare.
Regardless of what the justices decide on the case, the Supreme Court’s re-examination of President Obama’s signature legislative achievement has put the issue of health care reform front and center in the political arena yet again.
As a Canadian, following the debate on health care reform that President Obama began in 2009, which has subsequently continued as Obamacare’s provisions gradually came into effect, has given me fascinating insights into the political system and political culture of your country.
During this debate, politicians and pundits, both for and against Obamacare, have often used the Canadian health care system as an example to advance their argument. However, many of their examples of how well or how badly our health-care system works are misconceptions or exaggerations at best and simply downright false at worst. I’d like to clarify and explain exactly how our health-care system functions.
For starters, the Canadian health care system is a universal single-payer system in which the government pays for basic medically necessary services for all citizens and permanent residents. However, it is not quite the kind of “socialized medicine” as many Americans believe it to be.
Although its framework was initially designed by the federal government, Canadian Medicare is administered and partly funded through taxation by each separate province, our equivalence of your states. These provincial programs must meet a set of federal standards mandated by the Canada Health Act of 1984; namely, that the programs be publically administered, universal, comprehensive and portable within the country, along with a few other very broad guidelines. Provincial programs that do not meet these standards will not receive federal funding, called the Canada Health Transfer.
Within the provinces, the respective Ministries of Health act as the insurance agency in administering care. This means that most doctors are not public employees, (unless they are working in public hospitals,) but rather, private practitioners who bill the government for services they provide to patients, at rates that are negotiated between medical associations and the government.
All you have to do as a patient at a doctor’s office is give them your government-issued health insurance card, no co-pay needed. The fact that all financial settlement is streamlined between the government and the doctor leads to significantly lower administrative costs than those in the United States.
Unlike many other advanced economies with universal health care, however, most provincial programs in Canada do not have universal pharmacare or services beyond the medically necessary services provided by a doctor. This means that most Canadians have to pay out-of-pocket or with private insurance, usually provided through their employer like it is here in the United States, for services such as prescription medicine, eyeglasses, eye exams, dental cleanings, and braces. In fact, almost 30% of all health-care costs in Canada are paid for by private sources.
For example, when my mother got surgery a year and a half ago, her government insurance covered all of the costs associated with her surgery and subsequent stay in a quad room, from the drugs to the meals. The private insurance she had under my dad’s employer plan upgraded her to a semi-private one. Ultimately, my dad decided to pay an extra $50 per day out of his pocket so she could stay in a private room.
Had my family relied solely on the government’s “socialized medicine”, my mom would have been fine and we wouldn’t have had to pay a penny for her surgery. But we still had the choice to purchase the extra, better care for my mom’s stay in the hospital. To me, this is the perfect compromise to ensure a basic social safety net for all our citizens while maintaining some freedom of choice over the quality of care.
Finally, the most often heard criticism against the Canadian health-care system is how long we have to wait to see the doctor, a specialist or for a medically necessary procedure. Many Canadians also recognize this as one of the main flaws of our system. However, American critics vastly exaggerate the extent of the problem.
Although waits for some procedures are indeed long in some areas of the country, wait times have been improving over the last decade, at least where I live in Ontario, thanks to legislation in 2005 setting benchmarks for different procedures.
Right now, the estimated average wait time to see a specialist in Canada is just over four weeks. Wait times for surgeries vary, but my mom only had to wait a mere three weeks for hers. As for primary physician care, when I was home in February and needed a sinus infection checked out on a Saturday afternoon, I drove 5 minutes to the nearest walk-in clinic and waited 20 minutes before I went into the doctor’s office.
In sum, we have a system that, in general, works for most Canadians. No Canadian dies or has to declare bankruptcy because they can’t afford health care. No Canadian feels so tied down to their job because they would lose all health care coverage if they moved. Growing up in Canada, I never worried about getting sick or anyone in my family getting sick.
But I will be the first to admit that Canada is not the perfect health-care utopia that many American liberals would like to claim it to be. At the same time, it is not the crude and inefficient bureaucratic nightmare that American conservatives think it is either.
For us, living in a country often so culturally, politically and economically overshadowed by our good neighbours to the south, universal health care (not quite socialized medicine!) has become a marker of our national identity, of that which makes us different from you Americans.
And just as having a strong safety net for health care has now been ingrained in our political and national culture (our governing Conservative Party is committed to maintaining the current universal system), your country’s culture of individual responsibility, particularly for one’s own well-being, may just explain why our kind of universal system will always remain a pipe dream in the United States.
(02/26/15 1:53am)
Over the last few months, thanks to the Supreme Court declining to take up the marriage equality petitions before it in October, a tidal wave of judicial decisions in favor of marriage equality has swept across the nation’s courts, expanding the number of states where same-sex marriage is legal to 37.
More than 70 percent of Americans now live in a state where same-sex marriage is legal. Poll after poll conducted in recent months continue to show a solid majority of Americans, including an overwhelming 80 percent of those under 30, in support of marriage equality.
This torrid pace of progress, combined with a likely Supreme Court ruling establishing a national constitutional right to same-sex marriage this June, has led some people to declare victory in the civil rights movement of our generation.
It is true that the rapidly evolving attitude around marriage equality over the last two decades is without precedent in the history of American society.
Twenty years ago, just a quarter of Americans supported the legalization of same-sex marriage and a Democratic president signed into law, with wide bipartisan support from Congress, a bill that pre-emptively prohibited federal benefits from being conferred upon same-sex married couples. Today, support for marriage equality has more than doubled and that law, better known as DOMA, has been declared unconstitutional.
By every measure, the LGBT community has won the battle for marriage equality. But even as we celebrate all this progress, I am wary of what will happen after this June, after marriage equality becomes the law of the land, after the dust has settled on all the exciting legal battles and after the big name lawyers have moved on to the next big case.
Yes, it is a wonderful thing and a giant step forward that every American will be able to join in the sacred union with whomever they love and receive the benefits and bear the burdens of that contract. But just as the movement for equality between the races lags on decades after the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, the movement for LGBT equality is about so much more than winning the legal fight on same-sex marriage.
It is about protecting LGBT teens from discrimination and bullying in their schools and their homes. Today, LGBT youths are four times more likely to attempt suicide and as much as 40 percent of homeless youths identity as LGBT. Marriage means little to you if you’ve just been kicked out of your house or are harassed by your peers for being different.
It is about protecting LGBT workers from discrimination at their workplace. Today, employers can fire workers based on their sexual orientation in 29 states and based on their gender identity in 35. Marriage means little to you if you’re struggling to feed yourself because your homophobic boss just gave you a pink slip.
It is about protecting the right of a loved one to visit their same-sex partner in the hospital when he or she is sick, for same-sex couples to jointly adopt children and start a normal family together and for crimes committed against someone’s sexual orientation or gender identity to be prosecuted exactly as they are: hate crimes. It is about addressing a new HIV crisis in the LGBT community, one that has caused the infection rate among young gay and bisexual men to rise 22 percent between 2008 and 2010 and disproportionately affects African-Americans and Latinos.
Without all these civil protections from discrimination and more concentrated efforts to alleviate the real, substantive plight of LGBT life in America, life as an LGBT individual will still lack the full dignity it deserves, for the right to marry is nothing but an empty shell if that is where progress stops.
Marriage equality has galvanized the nation because it is a straightforward issue and has a clear finish line. That finish line is now in sight but let’s not delude ourselves in the excitement of the moment and declare the battle over. Breaking down all these remaining legal and social barriers will require just as much energy, patience, and willpower as has been put into the battle for marriage equality, if not more.
As the great Winston Churchill once said: “Now, this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”
(10/29/14 6:00pm)
I was sitting in Wilson Café last Wednesday, preparing for a job interview with a friend, when my phone buzzed with a New York Times Breaking News update.
“Gunfire Reported in Canada’s Parliament,” it read.
It was a headline that no Canadian thought they would ever see. In disbelief, I opened my laptop, went on the CBC News website, and followed the tragedy as it unfolded throughout the day.
Shortly before 10 a.m. on that tragic day, a mentally unstable Quebec man with Islamic extremist sympathies shot and killed, with a rifle, an unarmed soldier standing on ceremonial guard at the National War Memorial in Ottawa. He then drove his car towards the Parliament complex, located less than half a mile away, and barged through the central doors of the main Parliament building. Once inside, he was pursued by police and parliamentary security personnel down the Hall of Honour, a central passageway leading to the Library of Parliament in the back of the building. He was eventually subdued just outside the Library, after the House of Commons Sergeant-at-Arms, a man with a largely ceremonial role, fatally shot him.
In the aftermath of the attacks, I have thought a lot about what this attack reveals about the differences between Canada and the United States. Firstly, our Parliament, unlike the U.S. Capitol, is so open that its main doors (through which the attacker entered) do not have metal detectors. Its front lawn, on a beautiful sunny day, is filled with picnic-goers, Frisbee-throwers, and even yoga practitioners. Although we have seen political violence in our nation’s history before, most notably during the October Crisis of 1970, Canadians viewed this attack as a strike against that very openness of our political institutions and the freedoms we enjoy.
However, we Canadians were more shocked that this kind of gun violence could happen in our country. Mass shootings and lone wolf terrorists are things we associate with the United States. To give you some perspective, the city of Ottawa has a population of 885,000. The murder of the soldier at the National War Memorial was just the city’s fifth homicide of the year. Indianapolis, Ind., with a comparable population of approximately 840,000, has already seen 115 murders this year. In 2007, the rate of death by firearm in Canada was 0.51 per 100,000 residents. In that same year, the American rate of death by firearm was six times higher, at 2.91 per 100,000.
While guns and gun control are a politically charged topic, especially in big cities like Toronto, we do not have a constitutional right to bear arms, nor a potent gun lobby like the NRA. I think the relationship between our low violent crime rate and our robust and sensible gun laws is more than a coincidence but as a student of political science, I am also aware that the differences between the gun laws of our two countries are a matter of deeply rooted political culture. We never had a revolution to throw off our colonial masters. We never had a need to keep guns in our house because we were afraid of tyranny. And we never had the kind of mistrust and skepticism in government that you Americans do.
Finally, I would be remiss to finish this op-ed without addressing the difference in the way our and your media networks covered the attacks last week. In the aftermath of the attack, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) provided calm, fact-based, and reliable reporting, led by the most familiar journalistic face in Canada, Peter Mansbridge. The American channels, especially in cable news, sensationalized the attack with their shouting anchormen, flashy breaking news banners, and the plopping of the Anderson Cooper news team in downtown Ottawa hours after the shooting. As Canadians, we are proud that good journalism still prevails in Canada and that quality of journalism was especially on display during the crisis on our publically-funded national network.
Perhaps we were too naïve as Canadians to think that this kind of thing would never happen in our country. After all, we are a staunch ally of the United States and usually stand side-by-side with you in major foreign policy decisions. We were with you in Afghanistan for more than 10 years before ending our combat mission in 2011. Our current government is a stronger supporter of the U.S.-led operations against ISIS. We have had close calls before with terrorist plots and given what has happened in Madrid, London, and Oslo in the last decade, we were maybe overdue for something like this.
No doubt, the attack on Parliament has changed Canada in many ways. As the country heals from this national tragedy, we will have to have a conversation about the balance between our freedom and our security, the state of Canadian multiculturalism, and even issues of mental health. I hope that we will find a Canadian answer to the tough questions, one that allows us to remain, as our national anthem says, “the true north strong and free.”
Artwork by GLORIA BRECK
(12/05/13 2:48am)
A series of eight tiny, uninhabited islands in the East China Sea has been the source of rising political tensions between China and Japan in recent months. Known to the Chinese as Diaoyu and the Japanese as Senkaku, the islands have been administratively controlled by Japan since the late 19th century, except during the post-World War II American administration over Japan. China has claimed sovereignty over the islands since the Treaty of San Francisco was signed in 1945. China bases it claim on historical control over the islands that dates back to the 14th century.
Last week, the dispute over the sovereignty of the Senkaku Islands escalated once again with the unilateral announcement of an Air Defense Identification Zone (ADIZ) by China. An Air Defense Identification Zone is a defined airspace in which incoming aircrafts to a country must identify themselves over radio to that country’s authorities. Countries with long maritime borders commonly use these zones to protect their national security interests.
The ADIZ set up by China last week includes a large portion of the East China Sea that overlaps with ADIZs of both South Korea and Japan. It also covers the airspace above the Senkaku Islands. In addition to requiring aircrafts bound for its national airspace to identify themselves, China has also demanded that any aircrafts flying through its ADIZ to do the same. China has said that it will enforce the zone with military defense measures.
The announcement of an East China Sea ADIZ infuriated both Japan and South Korea, who perceive the move as part of a long-term strategy of the Chinese to extend its sovereignty claims. In a statement from the Pentagon last Monday, a US Department of Defense spokesperson said that the United States Air Force would not obey the identification requirement. Those words were backed by action a day later when two American B-52 bombers flew through the ADIZ for what the Pentagon claimed to be a pre-planned military exercise. The jets did not encounter any reactions from the Chinese during their flight.
Later in the week, both South Korea and Japan also flew their own military aircrafts through the Chinese ADIZ without notifying Beijing authorities. Similar to the American flights, the Japanese and Korean planes ran into no troubles from the Chinese. China responded later in the week by saying that they had monitored these aircrafts. The Chinese military also sent planes to the zone for a show of force that it described as a harmless air patrol.
On Friday, the United States cautioned American commercial airlines to acquiesce to China’s demands for identification and flight plans of aircrafts passing through its ADIZ. At the same time, the United States government emphasized that this word of caution was for the sole purpose of passenger safety and did not represent general American acquiescence to China’s actions.
In response to the threats of non-compliance from its neighbors, China has pointed out that such identification zones are commonplace, even among countries in the area. Indeed, Japan’s own ADIZ extends as close to China as 100 miles in some places.
The rising of political tensions between China and Japan comes at a time when leaders of both countries have taken a more nationalistic stance in recent months. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, elected in Sept. 2012, is seeking to amend the Japanese Constitution to make Japan less dependent on the United States for defense, while President Xi Jinping, who took over as Chinese Community Party leader in Nov. 2012, has sought to rally the Chinese people around a spirit of “national renewal.”
(11/20/13 10:09pm)
The German newsmagazine Focus has reported that the art collection of Cornelius Gurlitt, an 80-year old German man whose collection of 1406 artworks was seized by German authorities in his Munich apartment in Feb. 2012, was found to include several previously unknown works by famous artists including Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Marc Chagall, Max Liebermann, Edvard Munch, Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Paul Gauguin. The collective value of the discovered works has been estimated to be at least €1 billion.
The story of Cornelius Gurlitt’s hidden collection began in pre-WWII Nazi Germany. Cornelius’ father Hildebrand Gurlitt was an art dealer and museum director on friendly terms with many modern artists of the day. After being fired from a curatorial position in Hamburg in 1933, the elder Gurlitt was one of four men asked by Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels to help sell the thousands of artworks the Nazis had confiscated from museums and labeled “degenerate” to overseas buyers. The Nazis organized the Degenerate Art Exhibition in 1937 to showcase the kind of art they claimed to have corrupting effects on the German people. Among the elder Gurlitt’s trading collection of nearly 1500 works are also believed to be many that the Nazis confiscated from Jewish families in the lead up to and during World War II.
Near the end of World War II, Gurlitt and his family fled to the castle of a friend. As Allied Forces marched across Germany and defeated the Third Reich, they detained and interrogated the elder Gurlitt. He told members of the Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives unit of the American military that most of his collection had been destroyed in the bombing of Dresden and he did not participate in the confiscation or trading of illegally stolen artworks.
The Allied troops released him, satisfied that Gurlitt’s collection was rightfully owned personal property. The elder Gurlitt died in 1956 from a car crash. Meanwhile, his son, Cornelius, lived quietly in Salzburg, Austria. After the deceased Gurlitt’s wife died in 1967, Cornelius moved into his mother’s apartment in Munich — the same one where the massive collection was uncovered early last year.
What led authorities to the Munich apartment was almost sheer serendipity. Travelling from Germany to Switzerland by train in late 2010, Cornelius Gurlitt was found carrying €9000 in cash, all in crisp new €500 bills. More than a year of investigations later, authorities raided Gurlitt’s Munich apartment and found a massive collection of artworks hidden behind curtains and canned food in the guest room. The authorities carted the works away to a storage facility in the city of Garching where they sought to trace their provenance.
In an interview with the German newsmagazine Der Spiegel, Gurlitt maintained that he had not broken any laws and that the seized works are his rightful personal property. He expressed dismay at the media circus that has intruded his reclusive lifestyle after Focus broke the story back in early November.
“There is nothing more I have loved more in my life than my pictures,” Gurlitt told Der Spiegel, adding that the loss of his collection has been more devastating than the loss of his mother and his sister.
Gurlitt sold some of the works in his collection over the years to help pay for living expenses and medical treatment. In the fall of 2011, he put Max Beckmann’s “Lion Tamer” up for sale at an auction house in Cologne. It sold for €725,000. Gurlitt and the Jewish heirs with claim to the work settled for a 55-45 split on the sale.
(11/14/13 12:17am)
Last Friday, Super Typhoon Haiyan, the strongest tropical cyclone ever to make landfall, cut a path of destruction through the archipelagic nation of the Philippines.
With sustained winds of 195 miles per hour, Haiyan, known in the Philippines as Yolanda, first slammed into Guiuan, a city of 50,000 in the province of Eastern Samar, located in the central eastern part of the country. Haiyan broke the windspeed record that previously belonged to Hurricane Camille, which hit Mississippi in 1969 with winds of up to 190 miles per hour. By comparison, Hurricane Katrina had sustained winds of 125 miles an hour when it slammed into Louisiana and Superstorm Sandy brought winds of 90 miles per hour when it made landfall in New Jersey.
Throughout the day on Friday, Typhoon Haiyan made landfall half a dozen times on different islands in the country. It exited the archipelago into the South China Sea late Friday and continued on a northwesterly path toward Vietnam. By late Sunday, after skirting the Chinese island of Hainan, Haiyan made landfall in northern Vietnam, bringing winds of only 90 miles per hour.
Initial estimates put the death toll in the Philippines as high as 10,000. Many seaside towns such as Tacloban, a city of 220,000 in Leyte province, lay almost completely in ruin. Dead bodies were strewn over local streets, ships were tossed ashore and vehicles were overturned while a massive storm surge inundated the city. Tacloban Airport, which lies on a strip of land jutting into the ocean, reported floodwaters of up to 13 feet. The Governor of Leyte said that there could be as many as 10,000 dead in Tacloban alone, most of whom drowned or were buried under collapsed buildings.
The Filipino government has been leading a major relief effort in the storm’s aftermath. Relief supplies such as food, water and clothing are being shipped via military planes to aid an estimated half a million people left homeless by the storm. The Filipino Red Cross and the UN Disaster Assessment team also arrived in the region over the weekend.
“The last time I saw something of this scale was in the aftermath of the [2004] Indian Ocean Tsunami,” said Sebastian Rhodes Stampa, the head of the UN team.
The Interior Secretary of the Philippines flew over the region to survey the damage. He told the media that no structures had been left standing from the shoreline to three-quarters of a mile inland.
The islands hardest hit by the storm have also been left without water, power or systems of communication. There have also been reported instances of looting, prompting the government to deploy extra police forces to keep order. Many roads leading to inland communities are washed out, complicating relief efforts as rescue teams struggled to reach more remote regions on the islands.
U.S. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel directed Pacific Command to help coordinate relief efforts with the Filipino government and to provide equipment to help deliver relief supplies. The Canadian government has pledged $5 million in humanitarian relief, and the European Commission has also indicated that they are ready to assist.
The Philippines is no stranger to major natural disasters: in 1991, a massive volcanic eruption at Mount Pinatubo lowered global temperatures by an average of 0.5 degrees Celsius, and that same year, Typhoon Thelma killed 5,100 people in the central Philippines. If the death toll for Haiyan is indeed as high as estimated, it will become the deadliest natural disaster in the country’s history.
(11/06/13 10:11pm)
Mayor Rob Ford of Toronto, the largest city in Canada and fourth-largest in North America, found himself fighting for his political life last week after the Toronto Police recovered a video that allegedly showed the mayor smoking crack cocaine.
Ford was elected mayor of Toronto in October 2010 on a populist conservative platform to “stop the gravy train” at City Hall and keep taxes low. He draws his support primarily from suburban homeowners. Since his appointment, Ford has been caught up in a litany of scandals including a voting in a conflict-of-interest case that almost cost him the mayor’s seat, several instances of public intoxication and reading documents while driving on a freeway.
Back in May, the Toronto Star, Canada’s largest daily newspaper, and U.S. website Gawker simultaneously reported on the existence of a video in which Mayor Ford appears to be smoking crack cocaine and using racist and homophobic language. Reporters from the two media sources viewed the video from a man’s cellphone in a parking lot. The video was reportedly taken at a house on Windsor Road in the city’s west-end. Also published was a photograph of the mayor with several young men taken in front of the Windsor Road house. One of the men in the photo had been gunned down outside a downtown nightclub in late March.
In a press conference held one week after the story broke, Ford vehemently denied any allegations of wrongdoing.
“I do not use crack cocaine, nor am I an addict of crack cocaine,” he said at the press conference.
Ford resisted calls for his resignation and blamed the left-leaning Toronto Star for “questionable reporting” and trying to sabotage his conservative agenda.
The mayor also fired his Chief of Staff Mark Towhey after the story initially broke. Towhey supposedly advised Ford to take a leave of absence to deal with his personal issues. A string of high-level staffers, including the mayor’s press secretary, special assistant for communications, policy advisor and executive assistant, followed Towhey’s trail out the door
In June, the Toronto Police conducted several drug raids, including one at the house on Windsor Road where the photo of the mayor was taken. The raids resulted in arrests of a man who tried to sell the crack video to reporters for $200,000 and two other men who appeared with Ford in the photograph on Windsor Road.
Last Thursday, the Ontario Superior Court released a heavily censored 474-page police report of the surveillance operation. The report contained details of a massive police surveillance operation over the summer on Ford and a close associate, Alexandro Lisi. Using helicopters, cameras and unmarked police cars, the Toronto Police captured many meetings between Ford and Lisi, including one in which they exchanged an unknown package at a gas station. The report also revealed a flurry of cellphone conversations between Ford and Lisi after the crack story broke in May and between Lisi and several of the men arrested in the June drug raids. Lisi was arrested on charges of extortion in relation to the video last Thursday.
On the day of the release of the police report, Toronto Police Chief Bill Blair announced in a press conference that police were able to retrieve the deleted video off a computer hard drive. He confirmed that the contents of the video were “consistent” with media reports. Ford remained defiant and emphatically refused to step down, despite calls for his resignation from several city councilors and all four Toronto daily newspapers, including two that usually support the mayor’s policies.
(10/31/13 12:11am)
The firestorm of controversy set off by Edward Snowden several months ago over the surveillance operations of the National Security Agency (NSA) re-erupted last week when media sources in Germany and France reported intrusive NSA surveillance against America’s closest European allies.
Le Monde, a leading French newspaper, reported pervasive NSA surveillance operations against French citizens and diplomats while Der Spiegl, a German publication, claimed that the NSA had been monitoring Chancellor Angela Merkel’s cellphone communications for some time.
These allegations shook the trans-Atlantic diplomatic community. Chancellor Merkel, known to be an avid user of her mobile phone, called the White House to express her anger. President Obama assured her that the United States is not spying and will not spy on her, without explicitly acknowledging any possibly related events that occurred in the past.
This is not the first time a world leader has expressed anger at the NSA’s surveillance operations. Last month, President Dilma Rousseff of Brazil postponed a state visit to Washington after discovering that the NSA had spied on her, her advisors and state-owned oil enterprise Petrobras.
While the diplomatic tensions between the U.S. and countries like Brazil and Russia caused by Snowden’s revelations are serious, the latest reports of the NSA operations in Europe are eroding trust between decades-old allies. Chancellor Merkel and French President François Hollande both called NSA actions “unacceptable” and “out of control.”
Meeting face-to-face at a European Union (E.U.) summit in Brussels last week, the two leaders demanded talks with the U.S. over rules of intelligence gathering and security service behavior. Lower level officials from both Germany and France were planning to visit Washington this week to discuss the issue with American counterparts. Merkel and Hollande demanded action from the U.S. on reining in its surveillance programs by the end of the year. According to various media reports, Chancellor Merkel is just one of 35 world leaders whose lines of communication had been compromised by NSA operations.
Other leaders at the E.U. summit supported taking action at a supra-national level to combat “out of control” spying, though it was unclear what those actions would entail. In the United Nations, German and Brazilian diplomats are also working to draft a resolution calling for rights of Internet privacy. Though non-binding and general in nature, the resolution is targeted towards the United States.
Great Britain has been caught awkwardly in the crossfire between the United States and the rest of the E.U. in the controversy over surveillance programs. Though technically a member of the European Union, Great Britain participates in an intelligence-sharing group between of the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. These five nations have agreed not to spy on each other in exchange for the open flow of intelligence information. In addition, Great Britain’s equivalent of the NSA, the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) is also alleged to participate in a pervasive surveillance program.
The allegation of NSA spying hits especially close to home for Germany. For several decades, Big Brother-style monitoring of German citizens was the norm under the Nazi regime and later, the East German Stasi. Chancellor Merkel is herself a native of East Germany.
This diplomatic rift between the U.S. and its European allies comes just as negotiations have begun on a trans-Atlantic free trade agreement. The breakdown of trust between the two sides is anticipated to have an impact on the pace and terms of those talks.
(10/17/13 12:39am)
As per annual tradition, various Swedish and Norwegian academies and committees awarded the Nobel Prizes last week in the fields of medicine, physics, chemistry, literature, peace and economics.
The first category of prizes to be awarded was Medicine. Last Monday, the Karolinska Institute bestowed that honor on three Americans – Randy Schekman, Thomas Südhof, and James Rothman – for their research into molecular transportation systems within cells. The three scientists, working out of UC-Berkeley, Stanford and Yale, respectively, each made discoveries that contributed to the understanding of how vesicles containing molecules within cells are moved to the right places at the right time.
On Tuesday Oct. 8, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences gave the Nobel Prize in Physics to Peter Higgs and François Englert, two scientists who have worked for almost half a century on finding the Higgs boson. The particle, named after Peter Higgs, helps complete physicists’ understanding of the Standard Model, which has been instrumental in explaining the apparent order of the universe. Known by many outside the science community as the “God particle” for its centrality to our understanding of the universe, the Higgs boson was finally discovered earlier this year by the Large Hadron Collider, a massive particle accelerator straddling the French-Swiss border.
The Nobel Prize for Chemistry was awarded the following day to a group of three American scientists who worked with computer programs to study complex chemical systems and reactions that are difficult to observe in traditional lab experiments. The three scientists – Martin Karplus of Harvard, Michael Levitt of Stanford, and Arieh Warshel of USC – began working together in the early 1970’s to harness the power of computer programs in simulating chemical behavior and incorporating quantum mechanics.
The Swedish Academy announced Alice Munro, a prolific short-story writer from Canada, as the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature on Thursday. At age 82, Alice Munro published her 14th — and what she has hinted may be her last — collection of stories last year, after 45 years of writing. Her stories are well-known in contemporary literary circles for themes of rural life, feminism, and human nature. Munro is just the 13th woman in the century-long history of the Nobel to win the prize for Literature.
By far the most prestigious of the Nobels, the Peace Prize was awarded by the Norwegian Nobel Committee last Friday to the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons for their work in helping eradicate “unconventional weapons” around the world. The organization sent inspectors to sites of chemical attacks in Syria earlier this year. This choice surprised many people as the organization works in relative obscurity. The organization has been operating since 1997, when the Chemical Weapons Convention was signed by most nations of the world. This is the second consecutive year that the Peace Prize has been awarded to an organization after the European Union won it in 2012. Prior to the announcement, Malala Yousefzai, the 16-year-old Pakistani girl shot by the Taliban after speaking out for girls education, was the media favorite to win.
The last set of Nobels was awarded for Economics to Eugene Fama and Lars Peter Hansen of the University of Chicago, and Robert Shiller of Yale. The three Americans were honored for their theories on asset prices in markets, including comparing price movements in the short-run and long-run. Though they did not collaborate, the three economists collectively concluded that rational and irrational factors both affect markets.
(10/10/13 12:36am)
While Syrian president Bashar al-Assad’s use of chemical weapons in August shocked the world and provoked outrage of various degrees from Western powers, an overlooked consequence of the 30-month long civil war has been the refugee crisis that has spilled over into Jordan, Lebanon, Turkey, Iraq, and even Egypt, with whom Syria does not share a border.
Approximately two million Syrian refugees are registered as such in those countries, but the true number of displaced persons could be much higher, especially in Jordan, where hundreds of thousands more Syrians are thought to have crossed the border illegally.
Many Jordanians are becoming increasing wary of the flood of refugees into their country. A country of 6 million, Jordan has absorbed at least 600,000 displaced Syrians, if not many more. The Jordanian Minister for Planning and International Cooperation compared the situation to the United States having to take in the entire population of Canada.
A refugee influx of such magnitude could have significantly disruptive effects on the demographic balance in the country. Jordan’s government has already had to make significant concessions during the early months of the Arab Spring, and many government officials and Jordanians fear that the Syrian refugee crisis could threaten the country politically, economically, and socially.
Jordan has had a history of receiving refugees from its neighbors in that tumultuous region. In the twenty years after the partition of the Palestinian territories, millions of Palestinians flooded into Jordan. Most have settled in the country permanently and have been given full citizenship rights. Today, just under 2 million Palestinian refugees living in Jordan are UN-registered.
What’s more, the hundreds of thousands of refugees who came in through Jordan’s northeast border with Iraq in the last two decades remain in the country, and thousands of Lebanese seeking to flee the country during skirmishes with Israel over the last few decades have also sought Jordan as a refuge. With this historical context in mind, Jordanians are understandably afraid that the newest wave of Syrian refugees will settle within their borders for the foreseeable future, if not permanently. Aside from demographic consequences, Jordan is spending $1 billion annually to accommodate the Syrian refugees.
For now, most of the Syrian refugees are living in organized camps in the northern part of Jordan. Zaatari, a camp of 140,000, was set up over a year ago and is continuing to grow, creeping closer to the nearby town of Mafraq. Many low-skilled Jordanians express frustration at losing jobs to Syrian refugees who are willing to work longer and for less pay. Registered Syrian refugees also receive humanitarian aid from the United Nations while Jordanians no better off financially do not. Jordanian schools in the area have also had to absorb an influx of Syrian children, many of whom suffer from psychological trauma from the war or have never attended school back in their home country. Municipal services such as garbage collection and sewage maintenance in Mafraq have also been overwhelmed.
In the Zaatari camp itself, already Jordan’s fourth-largest “city”, signs of long-term settlement have begun to surface. One family built a swimming pool and another built a tiered fountain in their backyards. Shops set up on the commercial strip in Zaatari, nicknamed the Champs-Elysees, are being constructed from corrugated metals and concrete now, a change from the tents set up before.
Due to Zaatari’s continued growth, a second camp named Azraq is being constructed nearby. At capacity, Azraq will hold approximately 130,000 refugees.
(10/03/13 12:38am)
After 34 years of diplomatic tensions between the U.S. and Iran, the presidents of the two countries made direct contact with one another last Friday for the first time since 1979. President Barack Obama placed a telephone call to Iranian president Hassan Rouhani as Rouhani was heading to Kennedy Airport in New York, after spending a week at the United Nations.
The call, which occurred around 2:30 p.m., lasted 15 minutes. Iranian officials requested the phone call, and the White House, encouraged by recent public statements from the moderate Rouhani, readily obliged. This call marked the first conversation between the two countries since the removal of the Shah of Iran from power in the Iranian Revolution of 1979 and the ensuing hostage crisis.
Earlier in the week, both leaders delivered remarks to the United Nations General Assembly in which both leaders expressed a conciliatory tone and a willingness to work together to solve Iran’s nuclear issue. Both were expected to attend a luncheon on Tuesday where a potentially historic handshake between the two could have taken place; however, President Rouhani skipped out on the event at the last minute. Iranian officials claimed that a meeting between the two leaders at this point would have been premature and would have caused complications with conservative hard-liners back in Iran. On Thursday, Secretary of State John Kerry and his Iranian counterpart, Mohammed Javad Zarif, had a meeting that was described to be productive.
According to an American official who was on the Sept. 26 call, the two presidents spoke about the nuclear issue, with Obama acknowledging Iran’s right to peaceful nuclear energy but demanding a halt to any enrichment of weapons-grade uranium. Obama also pressed Rouhani on the detainment of two Americans in Iran. The two ended the call by exchanging farewells in the other’s native tongue.
Rouhani returned to Tehran on Saturday morning to a crowd of mostly jubilant supporters. However, as Rouhani waved to the crowd through the sunroof of his car, a small group of hardline protestors began pelting the vehicle with eggs and one shoe.
“Our people are awake, death to America!” chanted the protestors, suggesting an unwillingness among Iran’s hardline factions to improve relations with the U.S. after decades of hostility.
While he was in New York, Rouhani and the Iranian delegation struck a moderate and cooperative tone with the rest of the world leaders. He expressed a general desire to reach a settlement on the nuclear issue and wipe away the sanctions that have severely affected the country’s economy and the lives of daily Iranians. Rouhani’s position is reportedly backed by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Supreme Leader of Iran who has the final say in all political matters. Though no proposals were presented at the U.N. by either side on the nuclear issue, talks will continue between Iran and six Western powers. The parties are to meet again at a summit in Geneva in mid-October.
President Obama, speaking from the White House after Friday’s phone call, tried to assure Israel that diplomacy from Iran does not mean the U.S. will abandon Israel’s security or interests. Israel and other U.S.-allied Arab countries in the Middle East are wary of Iran’s sincerity and the potential geopolitical consequences of normalized relations between Iran and the U.S.
(09/26/13 1:09am)
On Saturday, Sept. 21, the Islamist terrorist organization Al-Shabaab attacked an upscale shopping mall in the northwestern part of Nairobi, the capital of Kenya, killing at least 60 people and wounding more than 175. As the siege continued into its third day on Monday, Kenyan security forces were continuing to search for as many as a dozen attackers hidden inside the mall and to rescue a handful of shoppers taken as hostages.
The attack began around noon on Saturday as two groups of masked gunmen stormed two different entrances to Westgate Mall. Eyewitnesses say the attack began with the gunmen tossing grenades. After the initial blasts of the grenades caused panic in the mall, the terrorists proceeded to shoot shoppers with AK-47s and G-3s while warning Muslims to flee.
Kenyan soldiers sealed off the mall right away and began evacuation operations while the gunmen continued to roam around the mall. Soldiers rescued as many as 1000 shoppers in the hours immediately after the attack. Throughout Saturday evening, security forces rescued small groups of people hidden in various places in the mall. As dawn broke on Sunday, several shoppers escaped to safety on their own.
Security forces began a final assault to clear the mall late Sunday evening, with an aim to bring an end to the crisis overnight. However, as the hours ticked away on Monday, exchanges of gunfire and explosions continued. On Monday afternoon, thick smoke rose out of the mall, reportedly from a fire set by the surviving gunmen. The clearing operation left several Kenyan soldiers injured. Some intelligence sources reported that three of the soldiers had died in the gunfight. At least two of the gunmen inside the mall are also reported to be dead.
Kenyan authorities have increased security measures across the country, especially at ports of entry and exit as some eyewitnesses said that a few of the terrorists may have escaped the mall in the pandemonium ensuing the attacks. The police have arrested at least ten persons of interest for initial questioning.
President Uhuru Kenyatta addressed the nation on Sunday, putting the tragedy in remarkably personal terms. He told the country that his nephew and his nephew’s fiancée had both perished in the attacks. Kenyatta also called patience and understanding as the siege continued.
In a show of incredible political unity in a country that has been characterized by intense and at times, violent political divides, opposition leader Raila Odinga stood by Kenyatta’s side on Sunday, urging the Kenyan people to “come together … to help each other.”
At press time, the deaths of several foreign nationals had already been confirmed by their respective embassies. Among these are up to six British nationals, two French women, two Canadians, two Indians, and one each from the Netherlands, South Korea, and South Africa. No Americans were reported to be among the dead, though several had been injured. Also among the dead were popular radio host Ruhila Adatia-Sood and renowned Ghanaian poet and professor Kofi Awoonor.
Al-Shabaab claimed responsibility for the attacks. The Somalia-based terrorist group is loyal to al-Qaeda and has said that they were avenging for Kenyan-led and African Union-backed peacekeeping operations in Somalia. Al-Shabaab has vowed to bring violence to Kenya as long as the Kenyan military remains in Somalia.
(09/19/13 12:27am)
On Sunday, Sept. 15, thousands of protestors, supporting the main opposition party in Cambodia marched through the streets of Phnom Penh, the country’s capital city, in a continued call for an investigation into the July 28 parliamentary elections, which they claim was fraught with irregularities.
The results of those elections propelled Prime Minister Hun Sen to another five-year term in office. Sen has been serving as the leader of the Cambodian government for all but five years since January 1985. However, Prime Minister Sen’s Cambodian People’s Party (CPP) won just 68 seats, down from 90 in the previous parliament. It was enough for a majority in the 123-seat National Assembly.
Meanwhile, the Cambodian National Rescue Party (CNRP), the main opposition to Sen’s CPP, nearly doubled their size in parliament, winning 55 seats. The CNRP’s strong showing was a sign of increased frustration with the Prime Minister Sen’s rule, long perceived to be authoritarian despite strong economic results in recent years.
The CNRP, led by Sam Rainsy, disputed the validity of those results even before voting began, accusing the regime of colluding with National Election Commission in fixing the election. Among the many concerns of the opposition were that over a million voters were potentially eliminated from the polls, the hopping of voters from polling place to polling place carrying fake identity certificates, and the fact that the indelible ink marking the fingers of those who have already voted could be washed off with lime juice or bleach.
In Sunday’s demonstration, about 20,000 supporters of the opposition gathered in Freedom Park and marched through the streets despite orders from the government not to do so. The marches were largely peaceful, though a group of about 200 protestors broke away from the main rally and clashed with the police. Water cannons and smoke grenades were used by authorities to break up this group and protestors defended themselves by throwing shoes, rocks, and other small objects. Opposition leader Sam Rainsy intervened himself to stop the violent protestors and herd them back to Freedom Park.
“Their ballots were stolen, and they are asking for justice,” said Rainsy at the demonstration.
The day before the demonstration, Sam Rainsy and Prime Minister Hun Sen met face to face for the first time in years, at the behest of the country’s King. The 30-minute meeting was supposed to help the two sides resolve the disputes peacefully but no breakthroughs were made. The two were slated to meet once again this past Monday, on Sept. 9.
Two days before the demonstration, homemade bombs were found near the parliament building in Phnom Penh and grenades near Freedom Park, where the demonstrators gathered on Sunday. Against this backdrop of increasing tensions, many are fearful that the police could crackdown at the order of the government.
The new parliamentary session is slated to begin on Sept. 23. The King has urged all legislators to attend after the CNRP vowed to boycott the opening session. Last Friday, Sept. 13, the Constitutional Council also ruled that all allegations of fraud in the elections have been investigated and resolved. No new probes were therefore necessary.
The Sen regime has built a reputation on its no-compromise style of governance and few observers expect the Prime Minister to compromise this time.
(09/12/13 12:42am)
The 2012 U.S. presidential election began almost immediately after President of the United States Barack Obama was sworn into office in 2009. Down under in Australia, voters went to the polls on last Saturday, Sept. 7, barely a month after Parliament was dissolved and campaigning began.
Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, who had led the country since the end of June after ousting Julia Gillard for the leadership of the Labour Party (and in turn, the country) in an internal vote, fell short of winning a third consecutive mandate for Labour.
Tony Abbott, leader of Liberal-National Coalition, a group of center-right parties, surged to victory on widespread frustration with the Labour Party, which had been in power since 2007.
In the 150-member House of Representatives, the Abbott-led coalition won a total of 86 seats, well over the 75 needed for a majority. Rudd’s Labour Party slipped to 57 seats, their worst showing since the 1996 federal election.
Prior to the election, the two major parties essentially split the seats evenly in the House. Labour held 72 seats while the Liberal-National Coalition held 73. However, the Labour Party stayed in power after the 2010 election through an agreement of support by one Green Party member of Parliament and three other independent members, giving them a 76-member voting bloc in the 150-member House.
In 2010, then-deputy Labour leader Julia Gillard had herself ousted then-Prime Minister Kevin Rudd. Rudd returned the favor in June of this year, riding on Labour desperation to be spared from disastrous defeat in the impending elections. Gillard had become deeply unpopular with the public for instituting a carbon tax in 2011 to maintain the support of the Green Party, despite publicly promising not to do so in the 2010 election campaign.
In the end, Rudd’s leadership was not enough to overcome the public’s perception that the entire Labour Party was more interested in their own internal factional struggles than working for the Australian people. The Labour Party lost 15 seats and carried barely one-third of the popular vote nationwide, despite the strength of the Australian economy amidst global challenges.
In the Australian Senate, 40 of the 76 seats were up for election as well. Since ballots for those elections are cast through a complicated proportional representation system involving the single transferable vote, results were not yet available immediately after the polls closed. It could take days to determine the make up of that chamber and many expect neither party to win a strong mandate, though an informal Labour-Green coalition will control the Senate until at least 2014. Typically, a potpourri of smaller parties advantaged by proportional representation hold the balance of power in the Senate.
The makeup of the Senate could cause problems for Prime Minister-designate Abbott’s more ambitious agenda items. During the campaign, Abbott vowed to repeal the carbon and mining taxes instituted by the Gillard government, get rid of the $30 billion budget deficit, aggressively turn back boats carrying asylum seekers headed for Australia, buy boats from Indonesian asylum smugglers, and institute a generous paid-parental leave program that would give mothers six months worth of their full salary at up to $150,000 per year. Abbott has also said he would like to be known as “the infrastructure Prime Minister.”
Prime Minister-elect Abbott has led the Liberal-National coalition since December 2009. He is a former Rhodes Scholar who also spent time in a Roman Catholic seminary. He is 55 years old and was first elected to the Australian House of Representatives in 1994.
(05/08/13 8:45pm)
The bloody civil war in Syria, which began more than two years ago at the height of the Arab Spring, continues to escalate as more disturbing mass killings and evidence of chemical weapons-use have surfaced in the last few weeks.
On April 23, Israeli intelligence officials claimed that they had found evidence that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s forces used chemical weapons in an attack in March. The claims came a week after Britain and France raised suspicions about the use of chemical weapons and in a letter urged the United Nations to conduct a thorough investigation.
The United States was initially hesitant to echo Israel’s claims, calling for more careful investigation that might reveal more conclusive evidence. However, two days later, the White House wrote to leaders in Congress saying that American intelligence officials concluded “with varying degrees of confidence” the use of sarin on a small scale by Syrian government forces. Senator Dianne Feinstein of California said that those intelligence claims had been based on soil samples in the ground and blood samples from victims.
The evidence of chemical warfare is significant because of two statements made by President Obama over the last year. Last summer, Obama warned that any use of chemical weapons by Assad would be a “red line” for escalation of U.S. involvement. While visiting Israel in March of this year, he reiterated his statement, calling the use of chemical weapons “a game changer” in the Syrian conflict.
So far, the White House has not said what action it might take if more conclusive evidence of chemical weapon use is presented. Many experts say that the President is caught in the bind of sticking to his word while being reluctant to mire the U.S. with another conflict in the Middle East. Last Friday, President Obama said he “[does] not foresee a scenario in which … American boots on the ground in Syria would be good for America or be good for Syria.”
While the U.S. has so far been reluctant to discuss military action in Syria, the country’s neighbor, Israel, has been proactive in preparing to defend itself against any threats to its security. Last Thursday, Israeli planes struck a shipment of missiles en route from Iran to Hezbollah. The shipment was being stored in a warehouse at Damascus’ airport. This follows an Israeli airstrike in January that hit a convoy similarly delivering arms to Hezbollah. The United States believes Israel used Lebanese airspace to launch the air-to-ground missiles.
On Saturday, another series of airstrikes engulfed the Syrian government’s military research and defense facilities in flames. The compound lying on the outskirts of Damascus was struck in the pre-dawn hours. So far, Israel has not claimed responsibility for the strikes. Syrian Foreign Minister has already called the attack “a declaration of war” by Israel.
In recent days, sectarian violence between government Alawite forces and Sunni Syrians has left hundreds dead. Late last week, many Sunni families fled Banias and Baida, two towns where especially cruel massacres had taken place. Government troops torched houses and stabbed and shot civilians in the streets.
Thus far, the Syrian civil war has claimed over 70,000 lives. It has also displaced millions of people in the country, with over one million refugees spilling across borders into Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey.
(05/01/13 2:34pm)
Bangladesh is a country prone to natural disasters. Due to its location on a low-lying delta, Bangladesh sees more than its share of hurricanes and floods. However, last Wednesday, April 24, the country saw one of its worst man-made disasters. The collapse of an eight-story shoddy garment factory in suburban Dhaka, the capital city, killed over 375 workers. More than 500 people were still unaccounted for at the end of the past weekend.
The collapse happened while the factory was in operation Wednesday morning. While it is unclear how many workers were in the building at the time, the factory houses 3,122 employees. Despite the high death toll, rescuers, working day and night through heat, humidity and the occasional thunderstorm, pulled out dozens of survivors as late as Saturday and Sunday.
The rescuers drilled 25 narrow holes in the rubble to reach survivors. They formed a human chain to remove debris from the building. Any dead bodies discovered were brought to a nearby high school, where families waited anxiously for news of their loved ones. Victims who could not be immediately rescued received water bottles, food and even oxygen cylinders.
As the days dragged on and the probability of finding survivors dwindled to zero, rescuers began using heavier equipment to more quickly clean up the rubble. The use of heavy equipment was met with resistance from family members of missing workers, who protested for a longer rescue operation.
On Tuesday, large cracks and missing concrete appeared in the structure of the building and local police ordered an evacuation. A bank and some shops on the ground floor complied. The garment factories in the upper floors ignored the order after the building’s owner Mohammed Sohel Rana guaranteed the safety of the structure despite the top three floors of the building having been built illegally.
Rana ran away from authorities after the collapse. He was arrested near the Indian border in West Bengal state on Saturday. Authorities also arrested three other owners of two factories operating in the building. In addition, two government engineers, Imtemam Hossain and Alam Ali, who were involved in approving the building’s construction, have also been detained.
The Bengali government has responded swiftly to the tragedy, promising to bring building owners to justice, a call echoed by demonstrators in the streets of Dhaka.
“It is not an accident, it is a killing incident,” said Information Minister Hasanul Haq Inu. “All, including owners and administrative officials concerned, must be put on the dock for the killing of people.”
Bangladesh’s Secretary for Housing and Public Works pledged to set up a government agency to monitor building code and safety compliances.
The garment and textile industry is a backbone of the Bengali economy. Third in the world after that of China and Italy, the industry brings in $20 billion per year. Working conditions are poor for workers and wages are low. Most of the products from Bengali factories eventually make their way to stores in western countries. So far, only Primark has said that it was receiving products from a factory in the collapsed building.
Frequent disasters in Bangladesh like this one have drawn attention to the plight and vulnerability of factory workers and the gross negligence of safety regulations. In November 2012, a fire in a factory claimed 112 lives. Also in suburban Dhaka, a building collapse in 2005 killed over 70 people.
(04/24/13 4:31pm)
On Sunday, April 14, Venezuelans went to the polls to elect a successor to long-time President Huge Chavez, who died on March 5 of this year after a long battle with cancer. Chavez’s Vice President Nicolas Maduro, who had been serving as acting president since Chavez’s death, narrowly won the election over Governor Henrique Capriles of Miranda.
Maduro, Chavez’s chosen successor who has pledged to continue the Chavista revolution, captured 50.8 percent of the popular vote while Capriles, a young popular center-right governor, captured 49 percent. This difference of 275,000 votes out of 15 million cast between the two candidates was surprisingly small. Many observers had expected Maduro to ride the catharsis of Chavez’s death easily to victory, especially since Chavez himself had defeated Capriles handily in the October 2012 election.
Soon after the narrow Maduro victory was announced, protestors from the opposition took to the streets. Capriles called for a complete recount of the ballots cast, claiming irregularities such as problematic machines and questionable voter rolls. Supporters of Capriles banged on pots and pans as they marched through the streets while supporters of Maduro set off fireworks in celebration.
Some opposition protestors clashed with police earlier in the week. Unrest from the protests have killed eight and injured dozens. Each side is blaming the other for the violence. Capriles cancelled a protest march last Wednesday, asking supporters not to play into “the government’s game.” Meanwhile, Maduro said that “fascist” Capriles was “responsible for the dead we are mourning.” Maduro also blamed the U.S. State Department for organizing and financing the post-election ruckus. The State Department, after the close vote, echoed Capriles’s call for a full recount and said it would not recognize the results until after the recount was complete.
The National Electoral Council agreed last Thursday to a full audit of the ballots cast. They will inspect all voting machines and cross-reference the electronic ballots with paper registration rolls. While this falls short of the recount demanded by Capriles, the opposition is hoping the voting fraud that they are convinced took place can be discovered through the auditing process, which could take up to a month.
Despite the start of the audit, Maduro was inaugurated as president last Friday at the National Assembly Building. Several foreign governments sent representatives to the ceremony. Those present included President Dilma Rousseff of Brazil, Raul Castro of Cuba and Mahmoud Ahmedinejad of Iran.
“I call the country to a revolution of socialist efficiency, to fight red tape, corruption, laziness, to fight backwardness, the culture of lethargy,” Maduro said in his inaugural address. “We’ll turn these six years into a miracle of economic prosperity. […] We will guarantee peace in this country.”
Maduro’s speech was interrupted by a man in the crowd who rushed the stage and pushed the new president away from the microphone. Security officials quickly tackled the man before he was able to shout anything of substance into the microphone.
Regardless of what the audit yields, Maduro’s thin victory shows that Chavez’s popularity has not automatically transferred to his successor. Besides stiff political opposition, Maduro is facing a myriad of challenges. The Venezuelan economy is forecasted to shrink this year. The government is perceived as corrupt. The inflation rate is now at 27 percent.
(04/17/13 4:16pm)
Last week, both France and Uruguay moved one step closer to legalizing marriage equality. The two countries will become the 12th and 13th in the world to grant the right for two people to marry regardless of gender.
The French Senate passed a bill last Friday to legalize same-sex marriage. The lower chamber of parliament, the National Assembly, passed legislation on the issue back in February. The Senate made several small changes to the bill, and both houses will now work to reconcile those differences before the bill becomes law.
During last year’s presidential campaign, Socialist Party candidate and current president Francois Hollande pledged to make same-sex marriage a reality in France. As of 1999, both gay and straight couples can enter into civil unions. Such unions do not grant all rights of marriage, however, most notably the right to adopt.
As in many countries around the world, the gay marriage debate in France has been contentious. Supporters and opponents of the bill have been extremely vocal in the last few months. In January, each side held massive rallies that drew hundreds of thousands into the streets.
Justice Minister Christine Taubira highlighted the emotional side of the issue when speaking with Senators after the bill was passed.
“These are children [of same-sex couples] that scrape their knees, eat too much candy, don’t like broccoli, drive you crazy … we protect them,” said Taubira.
In Uruguay, the lower house of Congress passed a bill to legalize gay marriage, with a strong majority of 71 of 92 members voting in favor. This vote all but guaranteed marriage equality in the country, as the Senate passed the bill a week earlier by a vote of 23-8. It now awaits the signature of President Jose Mujica, who has vowed to make marriage equality a reality in the country. Uruguay will become the second Latin American nation to legalize same-sex marriage after Argentina.
Similar to the 2010 debate on same-sex marriage in Argentina, as well as the current debate in France, the Roman Catholic Church in Uruguay spearheaded opposition efforts for the measure. The Church sought to protect what they view as a millennia-old traditional institution.
“Why make relative or devalue an institution that is already so injured, like the family, introducing deep modifications that are going to confuse more than clarify?” wrote Pablo Galimberti, bishop of Salto, on the website of the Uruguayan Bishops Council.
President Mujica responded to the Church, arguing that the legalization of same-sex marriages would only affect civil marriages. Uruguay already permits same-sex couples to adopt and enter into civil unions. Interestingly, the same-sex marriage bill also raised the age of consent in the country to 16. Currently, the age of consent in Uruguay is 12 and 14, for women and men, respectively.
Uruguay’s move towards marriage equality has been part of a progressive trend across the Americas in recent years. In 2009, same-sex marriage was legalized in Mexico City. In Brazil, several state courts established same-sex marriage rights in 2011. In the United States, nine states and the District of Columbia permit same sex marriages. In 2005, Canada became the first country in the Americas to legalize same-sex marriage.
Back across the Atlantic, Britain’s House of Commons passed a marriage equality bill in early February by a margin of 400-175. Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron has been an outspoken supporter of marriage equality. The bill is awaiting a Third Reading in the House and approval from the House of Lords and the Queen, all of which are anticipated to transpire this summer.
(04/10/13 4:19pm)
Over the past few weeks, tensions on the Korean Peninsula have risen to levels not seen in years, perhaps decades. The latest escalation in militaristic rhetoric and conflict preparation began soon after North Korea conducted a nuclear test on Feb. 12. That underground test, North Korea’s third in less than a decade, was seen as a sign of the country’s continued defiance of international condemnation. If the test succeeded in “miniaturizing” a nuclear device for missile deployment, which is not likely but possible, the test would mark a turning point in North Korea’s nuclear program.
The United Nations Security Council vehemently opposed North Korea’s actions and approved tough sanctions on March 7, affecting banking, trade, travel and the import of luxury goods. Unlike previous sanctions, this latest response gained unanimous council approval, with China voting in the affirmative to condemn the actions of North Korea’s regime, which it has strongly supported for decades with public rhetoric and food and fuel aid. Many national security experts say that this is a sign that China’s patience with North Korea’s defiant acts is wearing thin.
Following the approval of new sanctions and the start of joint Korean-American military exercises in the region, North Korea promptly declared null the armistice agreement between the North and the South that has kept peace on the peninsula since the end of hostilities in the Korean War in 1953. At a border outpost in the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ), North Korea has turned off the phone that provides a direct line of communication between the two sides. In 2003 and 2009, the North also declared invalid the armistice in response to military exercises.
Just prior to the Security Council vote, North Korea also threatened preemptive nuclear strikes against the United States. Most experts agree that the North does not yet have the capability to deliver nuclear warheads with Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs). It is more likely that the North has the ability to strike South Korea, Japan and even American bases in Guam with mid-range missiles. Even so, the security alliance between the U.S. and both South Korea and Japan would obligate an American response to any aggression from the North. There are 28,500 American soldiers stationed in South Korea alone.
Last week, North Korea barred hundreds of South Korean employees from entering the Kaesong joint industrial complex, one of the few areas of cooperation between the two sides that also employs 50,000 North Korean workers. Furthermore, the North Koreans said they would be restarting nuclear operations at its Yongbyon complex, which was shut down in 2007 as part of the aid-for-disarmament negotiations known as Six Party Talks. At the end of the week, North Korea informed diplomatic missions in Pyongyang, including that of Russia, that it could no longer guarantee their safety and security.
The United States has responded by deploying anti-missile defense systems to Guam. It has also postponed an ICBM missile test to avoid escalating tensions. The U.S. commander in South Korea has canceled a trip to Washington to monitor the situation on the peninsula.
Although the escalation in rhetoric and war preparations is grave and serious, many experts believe that Kim Jong-Un is simply trying to consolidate power within the hawkish military and bolster his domestic legitimacy. Some argue that North Korea’s actions are all too familiar and it does not have the capability or will to follow through.
(03/20/13 4:35pm)
At 2:07 p.m. EST last Wednesday, March 13, white smoke billowed out of the chimney of the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican, signaling to the thousands of Catholics gathered in St. Peter’s Square and to the world that the College of Cardinals had elected the 266th Supreme Pontiff of the Catholic Church.
The historic papal conclave, convened quickly after the unexpected resignation of Pope Benedict XVI in February, began a day earlier, on March 12, with no conclusive results. On the fifth ballot of the conclave in late Wednesday afternoon, Cardinal and Archbishop of Buenos Aires Jorge Mario Bergoglio received the two-thirds majority vote needed to win.
French Cardinal Jean-Louis Tauran announced his name more than an hour after the white smoke first appeared. Shortly thereafter, Cardinal Bergoglio, who chose for himself the papal name Francis, stepped out onto the balcony of St. Peter’s Basilica to greet the crowd gathered below, which had grown sizably after the white smoke appeared.
“You all know that the duty of the Conclave was to give a bishop to Rome,” Pope Francis began. “It seems that my brother Cardinals have come almost to the ends of the Earth to get him.”
As widely speculated prior to the conclave, Pope Francis’ election marked a number of historic firsts. He is the first pope from the Americas and the Southern Hemisphere. He is the first from outside Europe since Gregory III reigned in the mid-eighth century. Bergoglio is also the first Jesuit elected to the papacy. In addition, his choice of the name Francis was a previously unused name since Pope Lando in the early 10th century.
Bergoglio’s election came as a surprise both for its speed and its result. With no clear frontrunner at the start of the conclave, the voting was expected to last much longer than the 2005 conclave, during which Cardinal Ratzinger was the obvious choice to succeed Pope John Paul II. Instead, it only took one more ballot than the 2005 conclave for Bergoglio to cross the two-thirds threshold. It has been widely reported that Bergoglio won as many as 40 votes at one point in the 2005 conclave as runner-up to Ratzinger.
Despite his strong showing in 2005, Bergoglio was hardly mentioned as a contender this time around. In the days leading up to last week’s conclave, Cardinals Odilo Scherer of Brazil and Angelo Scola of Italy were considered the top candidates. To put Bergoglio’s election in perspective, his odds of winning ranged between 25:1 and 150:1 on various betting websites.
Bergoglio was born in 1936 in Buenos Aires to Italian immigrants. He is just two years younger than Pope Benedict XVI at the time of his election. Despite earning a chemistry degree in the late 1950’s, Bergoglio embarked on the path to priesthood. He served as Argentina’s Jesuit provincial in the 1970’s. His actions in that post have been subject to controversy as some have accused him of turning a blind eye to the Dirty War kidnappings of two Jesuit priests by the military dictatorship at the time.
Nonetheless, Bergoglio became the Archbishop of Buenos Aires in 1998 before being elevated to the College of Cardinals in 2001. Bergoglio’s doctrinal views are staunchly conservative, putting him at odds with the social liberalism of current Argentine President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner.
Yet, Bergoglio is loved by many for his humble lifestyle. As archbishop, he refused to live lavishly and instead cooked his own meals and took the bus to work. Bergoglio is also known for his passion for social justice and support for the poor. In his first statement to the press last Saturday, the new pope explained that he chose the name Francis in honor of St. Francis of Assisi, a “man of poverty” and “a man of peace.”