Showing posts with label Ireland. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Ireland. Show all posts
Friday, September 6, 2019
Thursday, June 13, 2019
Ignorant Donald Trump Remarks In Ireland Force Irish PM's Clarification | Rachel Maddow | MSNBC
Rachel Maddow reports on Donald Trump's heedless reference to an Irish border wall in a press conference with Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar, a cringe-worthy low point in an already careening circus of pratfalls and embarrassments in Trump's latest
Tuesday, January 29, 2019
Bernie Sanders | The Bad News Is That We Have a President Who Is a Fraud, a Pathological Liar and a Racist.
 29 January 19 AM It's Live on the HomePage Now: Reader Supported News Sure, I'll make a donation!
Bernie Sanders | The Bad News Is That We Have a President Who Is a Fraud, a Pathological Liar and a Racist.
 Bernie Sanders, Reader Supported News Sanders writes: "The good news is that the American people are standing up, fighting back and are demanding fundamental changes in our economic and political system." READ MORE  The Proud Boys are a neo-fascist group that glorifies violence against opponents, particularly on the left. (photo: Emily Molli/Getty Images)
How the Proud Boys Became Roger Stone's Personal Army
Kelly Weill, The Daily Beast Excerpt: "The dirty trickster started his initiation last year. Now the 'Western chauvinist' group has his back against Mueller and the media." READ MORE  Michael Cohen, center, President Donald Trump's former personal lawyer, leaves federal court after pleading guilty to charges related to lying to congress in New York on November 29, 2018. (photo: Justin Lane/EPA)
Michael Cohen Taps New Lawyers and Agrees to Another Closed-Door Congressional Appearance
Matt Zapotosky, The Washington Post Zapotosky writes: "Michael Cohen, Donald Trump's fixer turned vocal adversary, has swapped out his attorneys, one of his representatives said Monday, asserting that Cohen wanted new representation as he navigates testifying in various congressional inquiries." READ MORE  Due to overcrowding, more than 22,000 students in Fairfax county receive their education in cheaply constructed plywood trailers. (photo: Mike Elk/Guardian UK)
Virginia Students Learn in Trailers While State Offers Amazon Huge Tax Breaks
Mike Elk, Guardian UK Elk writes: "Inspired by a wave of #RedforEd strikes that have swept the nation, teachers in Virginia, who make $9,000 less than the national average, are calling on Northam to nix the tax cuts and instead invest the money into eliminating trailer parks outside of so many of Virginia's schools." READ MORE  'We're back in hushed tones,' Erin Darcy, an abortion rights activist, said at her home near Galway, Ireland. (photo: Mary Turner/NYT)
Abortion, Newly Legal in Ireland, Faces Old Roadblocks
Ceylan Yeginsu, The New York Times Yeginsu writes: "As Irish women are now discovering, the mere passage of a law cannot wipe away deeply held beliefs. Women seeking abortions are finding they must still contend with a deeply ingrained opposition that is hobbling the government's efforts to make safe and efficient abortion services readily available." READ MORE  Representative Ro Khanna. (photo: Jeff Malet/Newscom/ZUMA Press)
Regime Change Is Not the Answer: Rep. Ro Khanna Speaks Out Against US-Backed Coup in Venezuela
Democracy Now! Excerpt: "It's as if we never learned our lesson. We should have learned by now that the effort for regime change doesn't work and that we never plan for whether it's going to be successful and what comes next. This was the mistake we made in Syria." READ MORE  It's unclear how many golf balls are lost globally every year, but one estimate suggests the annual figure could be as high as 300 million in the United States alone. (photo: Matthew Savoca)
Dalmeet Singh Chawla, Medium
Chawla writes: "Alex Weber is no ordinary 18-year-old. Since spring 2016, she's collected around 50,000 golf balls from the oceans surrounding Carmel Bay in California." READ MORE |
Saturday, July 14, 2018
FOCUS: Bill McKibben | Irish Parliament Makes History With Vote to Divest Country Fully From Fossil Fuels
CLICK HERE FOR MORE!
FOCUS: Bill McKibben | Irish Parliament Makes History With Vote to Divest Country Fully From Fossil Fuels
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Thursday, March 14, 2013
Mary Robinson: Bearing Witness And Giving Voice
Mary Robinson has long been a hero of mine, changing the Theocracy in which she grew up both from the inside and the outside.
Her fascinating interview and recitation of significant changes brought about under her tutelage reminds of the costs of Theocracy.
Many in this country wrongly believe that their particular religious beliefs must be intertwined with our governance.
As Mary Robinson highlights, when religion becomes entangled, time stands still, government ceases to progress or recognize the need for change.
Our wise Founding Fathers studied the Theocracies in Europe and assured us of Separation with good cause. While they assured a 'christian' nation with a small 'c' based on Christian values, they recognized the flaws and threats. Thus, the US evolved as a wondrous melting pot that struggles to adjust, but lacks the imposition of Church imposed laws.
Who can imagine: divorce prohibitions: illegality of contraception? women lacking standing in courts of law? and much else.
Wikipedia explains Theocracy and various forms of Government
This highlights why Public Broadcasting is important.
Thursday, March 14, 2013
Mary Robinson: Bearing Witness And Giving Voice
In her career as a lawyer and a lawmaker, Mary Robinson has tried to advance the cause of human rights, especially for women.
Growing up Catholic in Ireland she became a lawyer so she could fight for a woman’s right to – among other things – have access to contraceptives, because they were illegal to buy or sell at time.
She was eventually elected to the Irish Senate and served very symbolically as Ireland’s first woman president.
After stepping down from the presidency, Robinson was the United Nations High Commissioner For Human Rights. Today she heads the Mary Robinson Foundation – Climate Justice.
Robinson writes about all of that in her new book “Everybody Matters: My Life Giving Voice” (see excerpt below). Here & Now’s Robin Young spoke to her recently at a Harvard Bookstore event at First Parish Church in Cambridge, Mass.
Robin took this cell phone video at the event:
Book Excerpt: ‘Everybody Matters’
By: Mary Robinson
Chapter 14
Throughout my time in office I had to think constantly about how a small and underfunded office could make an impact on advancing human rights and holding governments to account where there was wide- scale impunity. I realised that I could play a significant role by being close to the victims, bringing out their accounts, which was why so much of my time as high commissioner was spent travelling to many of the most troubled regions of the planet, where people’s rights were being violated and they longed for somebody to alert the world to what was happening to them.
In all, I made 115 trips to more than seventy countries during five years, almost always with the idea of helping to amplify the voices of victims, helping them to feel that somebody was listening. It brought home to me the power of the act of bearing witness. This was something I had en- countered when I visited Somalia as president of Ireland. The act of witnessing is neither easy nor as forthcoming as might be expected. We turn away so often. I did not want to let that happen. Even though I held a UN title, I had nothing tangible to offer victims who were expressing their direct witness of torture, how their families had been killed, how they had been deprived of their land, their homes. They needed our action, not our tears; our practical, downright, problem-solving help, and not our wordless horror. Yet I felt that to listen, bear witness, and respect the humanity of those I was listening to, and report back to a jaded world, was a start. I wanted to nurture a sense that the United Nations understood that these voices mattered.
There are some visits that stay in my mind because they illustrate perfectly the different facets of the work my colleagues and I were doing, and the kind of human rights violations we were dealing with.
In early 1999, world attention focused on the conflict in Kosovo, and the huge exodus of refugees driven out to different countries, especially Albania. In May the Swiss government put at my disposal a small plane to visit countries of the region and draw attention to the plight of victims and to the human rights violations being perpetrated by Serbian forces. Over a few days, we travelled to Albania, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and into Serbia itself by road from Zagreb. My two most vivid memories involve Kosovar refugees in Tirana, Albania, and ordinary Serbian civilians in Niš, who had just endured NATO cluster bombing of their housing estate.
Visiting the makeshift camp in Tirana, crowded with Kosovar refugees still traumatised after fleeing violence and savagery by Serbian forces in Kosovo, I listened to some of the worst stories while sitting in small tents that housed about fifteen people, seeing the fear still in the eyes of the children. My human rights officers were compiling initial evidence from witnesses that could be helpful to the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in the event that leaders such as Slobodan Milošević were indicted. At one stage a colleague suggested I come to a field behind the tents where a teacher was instructing a class. We watched as the children, sitting on the grass, repeated the teacher’s words; they had no pens or paper. When she finished, we were introduced. She spoke good English, had been a teacher in Pristina, and had volunteered to teach the children in the camp. “This is what I do; it helps me to cope.” She brought me to meet her elderly parents, sharing a tent with two other families, and described their escape from their home in Pristina, how they had watched it burn as they drove away.
The following day, my colleagues and I were in Belgrade meeting the foreign minister and other officials to raise serious concerns about human rights. President Milošević refused to meet me, perhaps because, a few days before, I had met with the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, Louise Arbour, in Sarajevo. Milošević may have feared that Arbour had given me an indictment to serve on him. Indeed, within a matter of weeks, and despite political pressure from some sources, an indictment for his arrest was issued. Though, as we now know, tracking him down took years.
My colleagues were keen that I travel to the city of Niš to meet the mayor, who had, at great personal risk, been in contact with our office to report human rights violations. With a Serbian military escort, we set off by road, a journey of about two hours. We saw flashes of bombing in the distance. Shortly afterwards our small convoy was stopped and we were informed that NATO forces had just bombed part of Niš. I feared we would have to abandon the visit. We waited, and then suddenly we were rushed at some speed to a suburb, where we saw the immediate aftermath of the cluster bombs NATO planes had dropped. No one in that suburb had been killed, but several people were injured; a man invited me into his room in a high-rise block of flats that had suffered a direct hit and showed me a live, unexploded cluster bomb on the window ledge. As I came back down I was told the mayor had arrived, and we had a brief, tense meeting, where he quickly updated me and then left; he was clearly worried about being seen with me.
Our convoy returned to Belgrade before nightfall. There had been much emphasis by NATO forces on how targeted bombing was, hitting only military targets. I had seen for myself that this was not always the case.
http://hereandnow.wbur.org/2013/03/14/mary-robinson-ireland
Her fascinating interview and recitation of significant changes brought about under her tutelage reminds of the costs of Theocracy.
Many in this country wrongly believe that their particular religious beliefs must be intertwined with our governance.
As Mary Robinson highlights, when religion becomes entangled, time stands still, government ceases to progress or recognize the need for change.
Our wise Founding Fathers studied the Theocracies in Europe and assured us of Separation with good cause. While they assured a 'christian' nation with a small 'c' based on Christian values, they recognized the flaws and threats. Thus, the US evolved as a wondrous melting pot that struggles to adjust, but lacks the imposition of Church imposed laws.
Who can imagine: divorce prohibitions: illegality of contraception? women lacking standing in courts of law? and much else.
Wikipedia explains Theocracy and various forms of Government
This highlights why Public Broadcasting is important.
Thursday, March 14, 2013
Mary Robinson: Bearing Witness And Giving Voice
Former Irish President Mary Robinson answers reporters’ questions in Seoul, South Korea, following a trip to North Korea in April 2011. (Lee Jin-man/AP)
Growing up Catholic in Ireland she became a lawyer so she could fight for a woman’s right to – among other things – have access to contraceptives, because they were illegal to buy or sell at time.
She was eventually elected to the Irish Senate and served very symbolically as Ireland’s first woman president.
After stepping down from the presidency, Robinson was the United Nations High Commissioner For Human Rights. Today she heads the Mary Robinson Foundation – Climate Justice.
Robinson writes about all of that in her new book “Everybody Matters: My Life Giving Voice” (see excerpt below). Here & Now’s Robin Young spoke to her recently at a Harvard Bookstore event at First Parish Church in Cambridge, Mass.
Robin took this cell phone video at the event:
Book Excerpt: ‘Everybody Matters’
By: Mary Robinson
Chapter 14
They are begging us, you see, in their wordless way,
To do something, to speak on their behalf
Or at least not to close the door again.
To do something, to speak on their behalf
Or at least not to close the door again.
—Derek Mahon, “A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford”
Throughout my time in office I had to think constantly about how a small and underfunded office could make an impact on advancing human rights and holding governments to account where there was wide- scale impunity. I realised that I could play a significant role by being close to the victims, bringing out their accounts, which was why so much of my time as high commissioner was spent travelling to many of the most troubled regions of the planet, where people’s rights were being violated and they longed for somebody to alert the world to what was happening to them.
In all, I made 115 trips to more than seventy countries during five years, almost always with the idea of helping to amplify the voices of victims, helping them to feel that somebody was listening. It brought home to me the power of the act of bearing witness. This was something I had en- countered when I visited Somalia as president of Ireland. The act of witnessing is neither easy nor as forthcoming as might be expected. We turn away so often. I did not want to let that happen. Even though I held a UN title, I had nothing tangible to offer victims who were expressing their direct witness of torture, how their families had been killed, how they had been deprived of their land, their homes. They needed our action, not our tears; our practical, downright, problem-solving help, and not our wordless horror. Yet I felt that to listen, bear witness, and respect the humanity of those I was listening to, and report back to a jaded world, was a start. I wanted to nurture a sense that the United Nations understood that these voices mattered.
There are some visits that stay in my mind because they illustrate perfectly the different facets of the work my colleagues and I were doing, and the kind of human rights violations we were dealing with.
In early 1999, world attention focused on the conflict in Kosovo, and the huge exodus of refugees driven out to different countries, especially Albania. In May the Swiss government put at my disposal a small plane to visit countries of the region and draw attention to the plight of victims and to the human rights violations being perpetrated by Serbian forces. Over a few days, we travelled to Albania, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and into Serbia itself by road from Zagreb. My two most vivid memories involve Kosovar refugees in Tirana, Albania, and ordinary Serbian civilians in Niš, who had just endured NATO cluster bombing of their housing estate.
Visiting the makeshift camp in Tirana, crowded with Kosovar refugees still traumatised after fleeing violence and savagery by Serbian forces in Kosovo, I listened to some of the worst stories while sitting in small tents that housed about fifteen people, seeing the fear still in the eyes of the children. My human rights officers were compiling initial evidence from witnesses that could be helpful to the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in the event that leaders such as Slobodan Milošević were indicted. At one stage a colleague suggested I come to a field behind the tents where a teacher was instructing a class. We watched as the children, sitting on the grass, repeated the teacher’s words; they had no pens or paper. When she finished, we were introduced. She spoke good English, had been a teacher in Pristina, and had volunteered to teach the children in the camp. “This is what I do; it helps me to cope.” She brought me to meet her elderly parents, sharing a tent with two other families, and described their escape from their home in Pristina, how they had watched it burn as they drove away.
The following day, my colleagues and I were in Belgrade meeting the foreign minister and other officials to raise serious concerns about human rights. President Milošević refused to meet me, perhaps because, a few days before, I had met with the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, Louise Arbour, in Sarajevo. Milošević may have feared that Arbour had given me an indictment to serve on him. Indeed, within a matter of weeks, and despite political pressure from some sources, an indictment for his arrest was issued. Though, as we now know, tracking him down took years.
My colleagues were keen that I travel to the city of Niš to meet the mayor, who had, at great personal risk, been in contact with our office to report human rights violations. With a Serbian military escort, we set off by road, a journey of about two hours. We saw flashes of bombing in the distance. Shortly afterwards our small convoy was stopped and we were informed that NATO forces had just bombed part of Niš. I feared we would have to abandon the visit. We waited, and then suddenly we were rushed at some speed to a suburb, where we saw the immediate aftermath of the cluster bombs NATO planes had dropped. No one in that suburb had been killed, but several people were injured; a man invited me into his room in a high-rise block of flats that had suffered a direct hit and showed me a live, unexploded cluster bomb on the window ledge. As I came back down I was told the mayor had arrived, and we had a brief, tense meeting, where he quickly updated me and then left; he was clearly worried about being seen with me.
Our convoy returned to Belgrade before nightfall. There had been much emphasis by NATO forces on how targeted bombing was, hitting only military targets. I had seen for myself that this was not always the case.
http://hereandnow.wbur.org/2013/03/14/mary-robinson-ireland
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