Tony Blair wants to hand the European Union radical new powers in his last act as Prime Minister, it emerged today. The Prime Minister has welcomed controversial plans to bring back the troubled EU constitution by the back door – totally bypassing the need for public referendums on sweeping new powers for Brussels. German chancellor Angela Merkel has suggested ditching the name ‘constitution’ from the title and instead calling it an ‘amending treatyÓ – to avoid having to seek the approval of voters. French and Dutch voters rejected the original plan – which would hand Brussels the power to represent individual countries at the UN and change national laws – two years ago. The British people will see right through any shabby stitch-up. Shadow Foreign Secretary William Hague Britain’s voting rights would be reduced by a third under the scheme and our hard-won veto on European directives would be torn up. Britain could also lose the right to impose quotas on immigration. Shadow Foreign Secretary William Hague said: ‘If Tony Blair thinks he can hoodwink the British people by smuggling in the rejected EU consitution under another name, he had better think […]
In Turkey, the military and the government are engaged in an all-out struggle for power. The country is deeply divided, and decidedly unstable. Turkish writer Ahmet Altan describes his country’s paradoxes and warns of the potentially dire consequences. Turkey is moving toward a great — and possibly final — settling of accounts. But it is not the feared divisions of race or religion which are at play here. The country is crippled by a more fundamental and dangerous divide. The ‘cultural divide’ reigning throughout the Republican years has become very deep indeed. The future of Turkey is in the balance: Secularists and Islamicists are battling for influence in Asia Minor. Currently in Turkey, there is, on the one hand, a great mass of people who leave their shoes at the door before entering the house; whose women cover their heads; whose men go out in the street in pajamas; whose teenage boys frequent coffeehouses while girls live under a completely repressive rule; people whose homes are lit with cheap florescent bulbs; who enjoy a type of music somewhere between folk and arabesque; who have perhaps never read a book, never danced, never been to a restaurant as […]
JERUSALEM — With the two Palestinian territories increasingly isolated from each other by a week of brutal warfare between rival factions, Israel and the United States seem agreed on a policy to treat them as separate entities to support Fatah in the West Bank and squeeze Hamas in the Gaza Strip. The idea is to concentrate Western efforts and money on the occupied West Bank, which Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and his Fatah faction control, in an effort to make it the shining model of a new Palestine that will somehow bring Gaza, and the radical Islamic group Hamas, to terms. As Ehud Olmert, the Israeli prime minister, who arrives in the United States on Sunday to meet with American officials, said, a Fatah government, shorn of Hamas, ‘can be a new opening.’ After the failure of the Palestinian unity government, Mr. Olmert said in an interview with The New York Times, ‘I suggest we look at things in a much more realistic manner and with less self-deceit.’ But like all seemingly elegant solutions in this region, this one has many pitfalls. It is entirely unclear whether Hamas would sit still during such an effort, whether […]
Mowaffaq Alami, 35, lives in an apartment in Gaza City with his wife Suha, his son Ismail, two, and his 16-month-old daughter Maya. He has a degree in sociology and psychology from Bethlehem University and runs the Gaza office of One Voice, an initiative that works to support a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Sunday We spent the night at my mother-in-law’s eating dinner. We left around midnight and it was already clear on the street that something was going to happen. Militants were moving all around our area, which is called al-Nasser. My mother-in-law lives in an apartment about 100 metres away in a compound of 10 high-rise buildings. There are about 30 families living here, as well as a Fatah spokesman called Maher Miqdad. He’s been wanted by Hamas since they won elections last year and there’s always trouble there. Monday By morning no one was allowed to move on the streets. It was very dangerous. We could hear Kalashnikovs, rockets, bombs, all kinds of weapons. When we spoke to my mother-in-law, we could hear the fighting. Maher Miqdad’s people were in his apartment, and Hamas men were on the roof of two […]
Commencement weekend is hard to plan at the University of California, Los Angeles. The university now has so many separate identity-group graduations that scheduling them not to conflict with one another is a challenge. The women’s studies graduation and the Chicana/Chicano studies graduation are both set for 10 AM Saturday. The broader Hispanic graduation, ‘Raza,’ is in near-conflict with the black graduation, which starts just an hour later. Planning was easier before a new crop of ethnic groups pushed for inclusion. Students of Asian heritage were once content with the Asian-Pacific Islanders ceremony. But now there are separate Filipino and Vietnamese commencements, and some talk of a Cambodian one in the future. Years ago, UCLA sponsored an Iranian graduation, but the school’s commencement office couldn’t tell me if the event was still around. The entire Middle East may yet be a fertile source for UCLA commencements. Not all ethnic and racial graduations are well attended. The 2003 figures at UCLA showed that while 300 of 855 Hispanic students attended, only 170 out of 1,874 Asian-Americans did. Some students are presumably eligible for four or five graduations. A gay student with a Native American father and a Filipino […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
