Word: humanity
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Over soy lattes and buttery-soft muffins, I sat down in a coffee shop a few weeks ago with one of Washington's savviest Asia activists. Through endless networking and tireless advocacy, she has helped keep Burma's human-rights abuses on Washington's radar, even though the country has little strategic significance to the U.S. During the George W. Bush Administration, she exuded confidence. Now she's anxious. Barack Obama's government has taken a close interest in Burma, but not the sort she wants. On a trip to Asia in February, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told...
...Obama Administration is fielding fire, too, ironically from groups on the left. Burma is one particularly sore point; another is Clinton's comment that pressing Beijing on human rights "can't interfere" with policy on a number of global crises, like climate change, where cooperation with China is vital. This appears to be part of the Administration's strategy to emphasize rights where it can make real progress, and not just for rhetoric. But in the past, activists say, they expected new Presidents to talk tough on rights first and then, if necessary, throttle back. Obama, they complain, has sold...
...torture. I don't pretend to understand the merits of techniques for extracting intelligence from prisoners. But as a veteran, I believe that al-Qaeda operatives are not garden-variety prisoners who would respond to persuasion; they have proved to be hate-filled extremists who place no value on human life, including the lives of their own people. Baer suggests they would give false information under torture to "stop the pain" whereas persuasive techniques would encourage them to tell the truth. That doesn't make sense to me. I don't like torture either, but if it proves to obtain...
...Zimbabwe Independent editors, Vincent Kahiya and Constantine Chimakure, were arrested for publishing a story the government said was "materially false and meant to make the public develop hatred towards the police." The paper had written a story revealing names of police officers who had allegedly tortured human-rights activists in jail. "It seems there is still a long way to go insofar as human-rights issues are concerned," says Leonard Makombe, a political commentator. "That might strangle the government, as it depends on Western aid for survival. That aid can only come if human-rights violations and media freedom...
...Bykivnya forest, a mass grave near Kiev where the bodies of an estimated 100,000 victims of the NKVD, the forerunner of the KGB, were dumped between 1937 and 1941. In the speech, he equated the Soviet Union with Nazi Germany: "They are comparable in their hatred towards human beings. They are identical in the unprecedented scale of their mass killings...