A story that has been getting a bit of play in Europe but not as much on this side of the Atlantic is the dispute over the placement of a war memorial in Estonia. In April the Estonian government removed from its capital a memorial to Soviet soldiers who fought in WW II. Estonia’s ethnic Russian minority—and Russia—were...
We had a ballot question in Philadelphia "urg[ing] the United States to make year 2007 the time to redeploy U.S. troops out of harm's way in Iraq," through the unusual mechanism of an amendment to the city's Home Rule Charter. The measure passed overwhelmingly (122,710 to 49,938). According to the Institute for Policy Studies (which has long promoted...
Extremely disturbing news out of Rwanda: a senior official with a Rwandan human-rights group has been arrested after being accused of complicity in the 1994 genocide by a local gacaca court:Francois-Xavier Byuma, vice-president of the board of the Rwandan League for the Promotion and Defence of Human Rights ["Turengere Abana"], was detained last week in Kigali and taken Wednesday to...
There is an amazing story posted over at Harvard Law School's Global Voices about how park rangers in the Congo are partnering with elementary school children in Colorado Springs, Colorado to raise money and awareness to protect endangered gorillas from poachers. The rangers blog about their experiences and the children sell pickles (50 cents each) as part of their...
President Bush has thrown down the gauntlet, announcing yesterday that he is again urging that the U.S. Senate to give its advice and consent to the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea. As Duncan noted earlier this week, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee is poised to move on this treaty, which has been awaiting ratification for over...
Excellent news for historians researching the Holocaust: the 11-nation governing body of the International Tracing Service, which oversees a massive archive of Nazi documents in Bad Arolsen, Germany, has voted to begin distributing the documents electronically to member states:The archive contains Nazi records on the arrest, transportation, incarceration, forced labor and deaths of millions of people from the year the...
At the risk of committing the post hoc fallacy, it is interesting to note that less than a week after the ICC issued its first arrest warrants related to the situation in Darfur, Rolls-Royce has announced that it will no longer do business in the Sudan:Rolls, which supplies engines to oil firms in the country, said it would "progressively withdraw"...
Richard Posner has an interesting but unconvincing post asking the question why there have been no violent, disruptive protests against the war in Iraq, as there were in 1968 over the Vietnam War. He suggests that in addition to "[t]he obvious answer that there is no longer a draft", that there are five contributing factors that explain the absence...
There is a thoughtful piece in the New Republic by David Fontana, Alex Massie, and Oliver Kamm on the legacy of Tony Blair. I think it adds some real insights on Blair's contributions that were neglected in my previous post. Here is a key excerpt: What, exactly, is Tony Blair's legacy? With Iraq at the center of the news,...
It’s been a very quiet term for the Senate on treaties. But that may be about to change. The Washington Note is reporting that President Bush will soon publicly announce his support for Senate advice and consent to U.S. accession to the 1982 UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) and the follow-on Implementation Agreement, which...
That's the bottom-line of thoughtful columns from Stuart Taylor and Karen J. Greenberg. (Hat-tips to Ken Anderson and Diane Amann respectively.) It's a harmless proposition, but it has an almost throw-away feel to it. One couldn't, I don't think, expect anything substantively interesting from such an undertaking. Bipartisan study efforts (calling Lee Hamilton!) seem invariably these...
Here's the press release from Starbucks. Starbucks had opposed Ethiopia's filing for trademark rights to three coffee names — Harar, Sidamo and Yirgacheffe — with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. In Ethiopia's corner, Arnold & Porter took the matter pro bono (anyone who thinks lawyers have gotten slick should take a look at this youTube item with partner...
