Region

“Democracy is a contract with the voters: “if elected I will try to enact my program.” That traitor to democracy, Obama, with a rhetoric of change, attracted the underprivileged–blacks, reds, Hispanics, women, youth, workers, and betrayed them all; but not his benefactor Goldman Sachs, favoring bailing them out way above stimulus.”

On Sunday, the first ever Jewish ceremony confirming a same-sex marriage was held in the synagogue of the Liberale Joodse Gemeente (Liberal Jewish Community) in Amsterdam.
As of this week, Jewish same-sex couples can have their relationships confirmed in one of the community’s ten synagogues in a ceremony called Brit Ahava, a covenant of love.

Echo from the recent past: a letter from Humanist Association of Hong Kong that appeared in the *South China Morning Post* regarding Iran was posted on the same newspaper’s website 16 January 2011 as a side-post to the issue of sanctions against Iran for its nuclear weapons programme. As chairman of the Association I re-iterate, what programme?

Foreign diplomats will tour a plant where Iran is enriching uranium in defiance of UN sanctions, after Tehran declared it will push ahead with the controversial work “very strongly.”
The Islamic republic open two of its atomic sites to the diplomats in a rare move to garner support for its contentious atomic drive ahead of key talks with six world powers in Istanbul next week.

U.S. Vice President Biden has reaffirmed a U.S. pledge to withdraw U.S. troops from Iraq by the end of the year. Biden met top officials in Baghdad for the first time since Iraqi lawmakers agreed on a new government last year. Biden says he told the Iraqi government the U.S. is committed to meeting a status of forces agreement that calls for a full U.S. withdrawal this year.

Thousands of people have taken themselves to the streets of the Tunisian capital of Tunis today in order to demand the resignation President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali. Nationwide protests have erupted over the past month against unemployment, police brutality and government repression under Ben Ali’s twenty three years rule.

Pinagpalang Kamay Association or PKAI is an NGO formed by Ms. Mina Tecson to aid two communities in need, one a poverty-stricken community in Payatas on the outskirts of Quezon City, and the other a home for abandoned physically and mentally ill children residing at Cottolengo Filipino, Montalban Rizal, quite nearby. I toured both in December 2010.

President Barack Obama signed a slew of bills into law during the lame-duck session of Congress, and was dubbed the “Comeback Kid” amid a flurry of fawning press reports.
In the hail of this surprise bipartisanship, though, the one issue over which Democrats and Republicans always agree, war, was completely ignored.

*Has the target to promote peace and non-violence ‘gone to the dogs’ I was thinking on entering the Sunday-noisy Krispy Creme café situated in up-market Bonifacio High Street at Global City, Taguig, Manila. I was to meet Patricia Carrascoso of Pets for Peace & the Labrador Retriever Owner’s Club. I was in for an awakening!*

It is a quite cold winter morning in Bihar’s Beur Central Jail, India. The jail inmates – all criminals including murderers, kidnappers and petty thieves – are ready to begin their task for the day: to learn English. The authorities decided that it’s time they brought about a positive change in the lives of the prisoners.