J. M. Verville

Not without strings attached, of course:

The Burmese government will hold the country’s first elections in 20 years on Nov. 7 despite growing international criticism.

The elections, announced Friday, will be the final element in Senior Gen. Than Shwe’s seven-step program to establish “discipline-flourishing democracy.” Opponents have criticized the constitutional framework behind the elections, which guarantees the military a quarter of the seats in parliament, as well as its mechanics, which have barred opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi from running. The 65-year-old Nobel Peace Prize laureate is under house arrest in Rangoon, the former Burmese capital.

About 40 parties have registered, but at least seven are thought to be proxies of the military. The National League for Democracy, Suu Kyi’s party, is not participating. The party won a landslide victory in 1990 elections, but the ruling junta refused to recognize the results. To run, the NLD would have had to expel Suu Kyi.

Washington Post

It is only natural for those who have power to desire to hang on to it and to set it up in such a fashion as this is to be expected; their loss of power will be slow and gradual, bare concessions and acknowledgments to the protests of the people. It might just be enough to keep the people happy and it might be the beginning of their long, arduous trek to freedom.

Although it is a mockery of what democracy is at least one can say that it is an attempt.

North Korea never gets tired of looking foolish:

North Korea has demanded $65 trillion as compensation from the United States for six decades of hostilities it is accused of perpetrating on the communist country.

The compensation amount was calculated on the basis of the number of North Korean civilian casualties during the 1950-53 Korean War and other losses related to the conflict.

This is the second similar demand made by the reclusive East Asian nation in three years.

Pyongyang’s compensation claim was made in the official Korean Central News Agency report published Thursday on the eve of the 60th anniversary of the outbreak of the war.

Free Republic

On June 25th, 1950, North Korea invaded South Korea in the early morning hours on a Sunday with knowledge that this would be a time that soldiers present would be fewest. This came after they refused to agree to UN sanctioned elections.

… And who owes who what?

This is rather… Interesting:

OAKLAND, Calif. — Hundreds of protesters condemning Israel’s recent raid on an international flotilla bound for Gaza are picketing at the Port of Oakland, where an Israeli ship is due to arrive.

The demonstrators gathered Sunday to prevent the incoming ship from being unloaded. The dock’s day shift of longshoremen agreed to not cross the picket line.

Meanwhile Sunday, Israel said it will immediately allow all goods into Gaza except weapons and items deemed to have a military use under its decision to ease its three-year-old blockade of the Palestinian territory.

San Francisco Chronicle

I think they are overlooking a high profile change that has just occurred that is italicized;  Israel is immediately allowing all goods into Gaza except weapons.

This sort of protest is coming after the fact, to say the least, and is more symbolic of opposition to Israel than anything else.

A good move — I was unaware that this stuff would have ever been shown in any place outside of there.  I cannot imagine French housewives getting excited that their child will consume any of the following:

The French broadcasting regulator is banning television produced by Gaza’s Hamas regime on the grounds it incites hatred.

With the sound turned down, one children’s show on Al-Aqsa Television looks like a new take on Bugs Bunny, but Assoud the rabbit is far less benign than his carrot-chomping colleague.

Last year the show’s Islamist producers in Gaza killed him off on the set as the victim of an Israeli bombing.

The rabbit’s dying words were a message to Palestinian children to glorify his death as a martyr.

“Tell the children Assoud has died, as a hero, a martyr,” he said.

Stories like this - with their messages of martyrdom and death - are commonplace on Al-Aqsa Television, which is owned by Hamas.

They are made attractive to children with the use of characters like Assoud or Farfour, a Mickey Mouse lookalike, who also died when Israeli soldiers apparently beat him to death.

In another show last year, several children watch a video re-enactment of the real life death of their mother in a suicide bombing.

As the mother prepares the bomb, her daughter sings, “Mummy, what are you carrying in your arms instead of me, a toy or a present for me?”

ABC

I do not know how people can ever sympathize with a regime that essentially shows programming to children which condones suicide bombing and glorifies martyrdom. Above this, it is always hinting at the notion of the regal idea of going and dying as victims fo the Israelis.

It is pure propaganda aimed at continuing hatred.  Palestine is trying to corrupt the minds of innocents with this sort of garbage.

This has become really an obvious need as society is rapidly ageing and the socialized system cannot take care of everyone forever.

As the ages we live to increase we naturally must raise the retirement age — this is not a big surprise. It should come as a surprise to nobody. People just do not have kids like they used to and we do not get enough tax payers.

PARIS, June 16 (Reuters) - France’s government announced on Wednesday it would raise the retirement age and increase taxes for top earners in a long-awaited reform aimed at balancing the heavily indebted pensions system by 2018.

Under the plan, which is likely to meet trade union resistance, the minimum retirement age will be lifted gradually to 62 in 2018 from 60, and levies on capital gains, stock options and other investment income will all shift higher.

“There is no magic trick when it comes to pensions,” Labour Minister Eric Woerth told reporters, unveiling proposals drawn up after three months of consultations with sceptical unions.

“We cannot ignore the fact that the French population is ageing. We have to confront this fact. Our European partners have done this by working longer. We cannot avoid joining this movement,” he said.

President Nicolas Sarkozy hopes the reform will convince investors he is serious about cleaning up state finances, which are set to register record deficit and debt levels in 2010, and enable France to cling to its prized AAA sovereign debt rating.

Even with the proposed change, France will still have one of the earliest legal retirement ages in the developed world. Germany plans to raise its retirement age to 67, while Britain and Italy are standardising at 65.

Reuters

This is pretty hilarious — North Korea does not even know how to make their fans appear as normal human beings as a group. I suspected this farce of fandom would occur before the report ever came out — I cannot imagine North Korea doing anything that is normal.

(I bet all of the male politburo members pee sitting down).

Reporting from Johannesburg, South Africa —

The North Koreans are back in the World Cup after a 44-year absence. But some may wonder why they bothered to come.

The Brazilians, who play in the tournament every four years, have more than 500 journalists following them here. The North Koreans, in only their second World Cup, brought two photographers, two TV reporters and one writer.

In the U.S., where soccer is still considered a minor sport, more than 136,000 World Cup tickets were sold. In North Korea, where the team is making history, the national soccer federation distributed 1,400 tickets.

In South Africa, a soccer game is a thinly disguised reason to sing, dance, scream and blow on a vuvuzela for hours. The North Korean fans handpicked to attend their country’s World Cup opener Tuesday displayed all the joy and spontaneity of accountants attending a seminar.

That the game — played in a wind chill of 24 degrees — ended in a 2-1 victory for Brazil was predictable. That several hundred North Korean fans were on hand to watch it was not.

China’s state-run news agency has reported that North Korea had offered tickets to sporting officials and tour agencies in China, which does not have a team here. Chinese journalists in South Africa had adopted the North Koreans as their own and, the news agency reported, about 1,000 Chinese dancers and musicians were recruited to cheer for the North Koreans.

But shortly before Tuesday’s game started, a five-row block of seats on the second level at Ellis Park Stadium filled up with more than 40 men and a woman, all dressed in identical red shirts, jackets and scarves, wearing identical red caps and waving small North Korean flags. Across the way there was another similarly sized red dot of fans in grandstands that were otherwise filled with the green and yellow of Brazil.

Kim Yong Chon, 43, one of the North Korean fans, said the group, which numbered 300, was not Chinese, but he admitted they had been carefully recruited by the North Korean government to make the trip. Speaking through an interpreter, he said the group had left Pyongyang, North Korea’s capital, and traveled through Beijing the same day and they would stay in South Africa as long as their team does.

They sang the North Korean national anthem loudly but sat passively, almost expressionless, through most of the game, with one man sucking on a beer. They spoke only infrequently to one another — Chon said they didn’t know one another before coming to South Africa — and mainly reacted to the action on the field only when directed to do so by a man who stood before them like an orchestra conductor.

LA Times

In some odd way it brightens my day to hear about the dysfunctional North Korea who cannot even properly enjoy themselves. It makes my struggles seem all the less of a burden.

Another moment in the ongoing North Korea saga — if the UNSC issues a resolution against North Korea there might be military action, they claim, and furthermore speak about the South Korean investigation as illegitimate:

UNITED NATIONS: Rejecting the findings of a South Korean ship sinking investigation, a top North Korean diplomat said that his country should be allowed to send a probe-team to South Korea and also warned of initiating military action if the Security Council passed a resolution against it.

Results of an investigation by South Korea made public in May, revealed that its Cheonan naval ship was torpedoed by its neighbour North Korea.

On Monday, a South Korean delegation of civilian investigators and military personnel met with Security Council for the first time to discuss their findings involving the torpedoing of its ship.

Speaking one day after the presentation, Sin Son Ho, North Korea’s envoy to the UN, described the findings of the “unilateral” investigation as “totally fabricated”.

“The South Korean side has so far refused to accept our proposal but brought the case to the Security Council with its unilateral fabricated investigations results,” Sin told reporters.

Times Of India

Of course, a threat from North Korea is about as good as a promise from North Korea. I think that there will likely be no military action but it is also important to recognize that North Korea is transitioning its government and is dealing with a more conservative, less weak South Korean leader.

This is all probably not going to come to any notable meltdown but this can serve to illustrate more and more the sort of country we are dealing with…

A nation who threatens violence when disputing a report that it was violent. Some real geniuses north of the 38th, they are.

This is some pretty stunning news that could bode well for a country that has been suffering for far too long. This could be the answer to a lot of problems if the Afghan government properly utilizes this:

The previously unknown deposits — including huge veins of iron, copper, cobalt, gold and critical industrial metals like lithium — are so big and include so many minerals that are essential to modern industry that Afghanistan could eventually be transformed into one of the most important mining centers in the world, the United States officials believe.

An internal Pentagon memo, for example, states that Afghanistan could become the “Saudi Arabia of lithium,” a key raw material in the manufacture of batteries for laptops and Blackberrys.

The vast scale of Afghanistan’s mineral wealth was discovered by a small team of Pentagon officials and American geologists. The Afghan government and President Hamid Karzai were recently briefed, American officials said.

NY Times

The government needs to take measures to insure that this isn’t just something that international corporations jump on and exploit with no positive effects for the people of Afghanistan.

Hopefully, this will be turned into what is needed to boost their economic productivity and turn it into a capable nation.

I admire the Pope’s stance. Middle Eastern Christians are being largely overlooked — I am not sure as to why. Probably because the sporadic violence that occurs is what the media would term ‘Arab on Arab’ crime and thus not as consequential to Westerners because at the end of the day if there are no dead Westerners most people shrug.

The persecution of Christians within the Islamic world is something worth noting — it is also something that indicates the current political and cultural immaturity of the ME as a whole to still persecute blatantly based on these lines.

It is because of things like this that I become more skeptical of whether or not democracy can work in the ME. Sometimes, if the people really do get what they want, it means misery for the minority.

Someone once said: Democracy is two wolves and a sheep deciding what is for dinner.

NICOSIA, Cyprus – The Vatican said Sunday that the international community is ignoring the plight of Christians in the Middle East, and that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the war in Iraq and political instability in Lebanon have forced thousands to flee the region.

A working paper released during Pope Benedict XVI’s pilgrimage to Cyprus to prepare for a crisis summit of Middle East bishops in Rome in October also cites the “extremist current” unleashed by the rise of “political Islam” as a threat to Christians.

The paper said that the line between religion and politics is blurred in Muslim countries, “relegating Christians to the precarious position of being considered non-citizens, despite the fact that they were citizens of their countries long before the rise of Islam.”

Yahoo

Just to give you a taste of how great the hatred of Egypt is towards Israel, and perhaps more than this the greater Arab attitude towards Israelis:

A court in Cairo has upheld a ruling urging the government to consider stripping of their citizenship Egyptian men who are married to Israeli women.

The ruling requires officials to send all such cases to the cabinet, to be decided on an individual basis.

The interior ministry had appealed againt the original ruling, made by a lower court last year.

The new decision is seen as a sign of negative feeling towards Israel in Egypt, despite a 1979 peace treaty.

Anti-Israeli sentiment is high in the country in the aftermath of Israeli raids on Gaza aid ships - but the long-scheduled court decision was not connected.

It calls on the cabinet to determine whether to remove the nationality of the men concerned, as well as that of their children.

The court said the government should consider whether the Israeli woman was an Arab or a Jew.

It is estimated that about 30,000 Egyptians are married to Israeli women.
‘Disloyal’

The lawyer who brought the case, Nabih el-Wahsh, said it was aimed at protecting Egyptian youth and Egypt’s national security.

He says that offspring of marriages between Egyptian men and Israeli women should not be allowed to perform military service.

There should not be a new generation “disloyal to Egypt and the Arab world”, he said.

BBC

This goes to show the depth of distrust — that even if you associate with people who are from a nation perceived as the enemy you can literally be stripped of your citizenship, something which is illegal according to the UN. The depth of hatred is profound as the ocean and more than this it shows the official, governmental endorsement of such discrimination.

Naturally, if top intelligence officials or people in sensitive positions were marrying women of rivals in the US they would be investigated. In fact, I lost my security clearance due to my longterm Chinese girlfriend in 2007-2008. Even then, many people regarded this as a big deal… But an important note: at no point did the American government contemplate stripping me of my citizenship, a basic right.

Overall, this is an extreme approach that will only lead to gross human rights violations and the feeding the flame of hatred.

Conversely: here is a list of Arab members of the Israeli Knisset:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Arab_members_of_the_Knesset