March 10, 2010 :: J.E. Robertson :: No Comment Yet
On the second morning of the 54th Commission on the Status of Women, Gender Links and the African Woman and Child Feature Service —through the Gender and Media Diversity Centre— hosted a roundtable dialogue involving Marren Akatsa-Bukachi of the Eastern African Sub-regional Support Initiative for the Advancement of Women (EASSI), Francisco Cos-Montiel of the International Development Research Centre (IDRC), Revai Makanje of Hivos, Norah Matovu-Winyi of the African Women’s Development and Communication Network, and Jennifer Lewis of Gender Links as facilitator, with Mwendabai Yeta Mkhize and myself providing event support and reporting.
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September 22, 2009 :: J.E. Robertson :: No Comment Yet
The UN General Assembly, which brings together every head of government in the world, to offer their country’s position on issues, their country’s demands regarding trade and conflict negotiations, their country’s hopes for a more harmonious world, this year truly grapples with issues of global consensus. Economic recovery, for many parts of the world, will require an unprecedented expansion of women’s rights and sustained attention to responsible environmental stewardship.
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May 9, 2009 :: staff :: No Comment Yet
In 1860, Abraham Lincoln faced the challenge of proving himself worthy of national leadership, with only 2 years experience in the House of Representatives, 11 years prior to his candidacy. He arranged to deliver a major policy address in New York City. The topic was daunting: he would make the argument in favor of federal control of slavery in the territories which might become new states. Southern states where slavery was not only legal but was the structural basis for their economic culture, were opposed to such a policy, believing it would lead to the powerful and populous northern states forcing Congress to ban slavery throughout the US. [transcript follows comment...]
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January 16, 2009 :: staff :: Comments Off
Minutes after the pilot of US Airways flight 1549 reported a “double bird strike”, he landed the Airbus A320 passenger jet on the Hudson River, at about 3:30 pm yesterday. Reports suggest the plane hit a flock of Canada geese shortly after takeoff from New York’s La Guardia airport, with both engines being knocked out. All 155 people on board survived the water landing.
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January 4, 2009 :: J.E. Robertson :: One Comment
Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton will have to vacate her seat in the United States Senate when she becomes Secretary of State, and speculation has been rife for weeks about who will fill that seat. Long seen as the top choice, both with the public and among party insiders, Caroline Kennedy, daughter of Pres. John F. Kennedy, will be the likely choice of Gov. Paterson of New York.
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January 4, 2009 :: Webb Tisch :: Comments Off
Israel has launched a ground invasion of the Gaza Strip, the Palestinian territory it formerly occupied and which is now under the control of the Hamas militant group’s political faction. Hamas seized control of Gaza in an armed coup against the ruling Fatah movement, which retains control of the West Bank. Israel’s ground assault, which includes columns of tanks and air support from helicopter gunships, comes after 8 days of airstrikes that targeted a number of top Hamas figures, and left over 430 Palestinians dead.
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August 5, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: Comments Off
New York is a place where everything is just a little off kilter, pushed and angled by unwavering momentum, but there is flow and the hope of flow working in the depths of personal metaphysical craft, there is the dewy first light of possibility and the wisdom of the tempest-tossed, if —as Kipling says it— “you can meet triumph and disaster and treat those two impostors just the same”.
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July 1, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: Comments Off
The historic and landscape canvases of J.M.W. Turner have invaded the Metropolitan Museum of Art with a bath of vibrant color and the artist’s characteristic ability to paint the energy of forces converging in space and time. The exhibit is more than a mere retrospective; it will deliver to many visitors their first real taste of the pioneering British painter’s ambitious experiments with light, scale and texture, and it illustrates how his work informs many of the innovations that would later come in imrpessionist and avant-garde movements.
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June 8, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: Comments Off
Top aides to Hillary Rodham Clinton’s presidential campaign began telling the press that she intended to officially concede defeat, withdraw from the campaign and endorse Sen. Barack Obama, of Illinois, as the Democratic party’s nominee, as early as the morning after the final primary votes. She scheduled a farewell gathering for campaign staffers and supporters on Friday, the date pushed back to allow more people to attend. And on Saturday, she followed through and gave a rousing speech to supporters, officially endorsing Obama and calling on her supporters to follow suit.
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March 10, 2008 :: admin :: Comments Off
A new study has found that selective seratonin re-uptake inhibitors (SSRI, or anti-depressants), sex-hormones, painkillers and anti-biotics in significant quantities in the drinking water of 24 out of 28 major metropolitan areas in the United States. Though the term “trace amounts” appears multiple times in today’s reporting of the findings, that term does not necessarily [...]
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February 18, 2008 :: admin :: Comments Off
The Democratic party is again facing questions about its handling of the primary process in some precincts in New York City, where initial “unofficial” tallies reported zero votes for Sen. Barack Obama, of Illinois, rival of local junior senator Hillary Rodham Clinton for the party’s presidential nomination. The undercounts occurred in precincts bordering on precincts [...]
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February 6, 2008 :: admin :: 2 Comments
The figures from the biggest day of primary voting in US history are coming in, and reveal a lot of interesting detail about the make-up of the campaigns. Sen. John McCain was the day’s big winner, though he did not win enough delegates to seal the nomination. McCain, still struggling to convince many conservative Republicans, [...]
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February 5, 2008 :: admin :: 4 Comments
The biggest prize in the Super Tuesday 24-state primary vote today will be California, with more than 36 million inhabitants, the most populous state in the nation. Observers expect Clinton and Obama to nearly split the delegates available, which amount to more than 50% of the total. The Republican contest could be close to being [...]
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January 10, 2008 :: admin :: Comments Off
Across the United States, problems are being discovered with what are supposed to be the state of the art in balloting technology: digital touchscreen voting machines. Security questions were raised initially when the machines were widely distributed, by a handful of companies, with no hard-copy record of voters’ intent, which led to a nationwide movement [...]
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January 10, 2008 :: admin :: Comments Off
Across the United States, problems are being discovered with what are supposed to be the state of the art in balloting technology: digital touchscreen voting machines. Security questions were raised initially when the machines were widely distributed, by a handful of companies, with no hard-copy record of voters’ intent, which led to a nationwide movement [...]
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January 7, 2008 :: jr3o :: Comments Off
While speculation is widespread that the purpose of the Oklahoma meetings, involving 17 former and current politicians and public servants, is to announce the candidacy of New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg, an independent, for the presidency, the groups says it only wants to lay out a series of principles of bipartisanship in government, which they hope presidential candidates will adopt. The mass media rumor mill is suggesting the group will propose Bloomberg as an independent candidate for the presidency, with fmr. Democratic senator Sam Nunn as his running mate.
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September 26, 2007 :: admin :: Comments Off
Former US pres. Bill Clinton’s Global Initiative (CGI) holds a major international stakeholders’ and donors’ conference each year in conjunction with the UN’s General Assembly, in New York City. This year’s convention brings together 1,300 delegates from 72 countries. 52 active or former heads of state are participating, in only the 3rd year [...]
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May 25, 2006 :: J.E. Robertson :: 3 Comments
Is the United States an “English-speaking nation”, or a place where all cultures are welcome to converge, mix and evolve? To answer this question, we must consider that there is a natural human tendency to fear what is perceived as the definite and invasive “other”, that which is different and which we feel can be categorized in a way that fits our worries.
The push to establish a single national language can only be sustained on the basis of a number of false premises. We will explore seven such lies and misperceptions here, all of a particular sort, having to do with a way of rationalizing one’s aversion to difference or to change. And, in each case, it is fairly easy to illustrate how the lie works against the interests of both a democratic society and American tradition itself.
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December 20, 2004 :: J.E. Robertson :: One Comment
A great and resonant thinker dies, and a great and resonant newspaper publishes an obituary dismissing his work as destructive and “abstruse”. It is an unjustifiable communicative travesty. When Jacques Derrida passed away, in October of this year, the New York Times wrote that his work was an attempt to undermine Western culture.
The obituary was full of factual errors and infected with a hard-line bias against complex and rigorous thought… the facile and mistaken point of view that to distinguish between meaning and truth is to call for nihilist or morally bankrupt agendas in thought and politics… it failed to look at the work itself or the man himself and instead paraphrased poorly wrought critiques and conceptual gossip to try to discredit a monumental life of study in Western philosophy.
That complex and rigorous thought, involved in much of postmodern theory, which characterized Derrida’s research and theory, has proven vital to extending human understanding in disciplines as diverse as science, literature and policy. The Times obituary railed against this level of self-conscious complexity, accusing Derrida of questioning the very right of Western thought to exist at all. It is as if the goal were to declare, against all evidence, that we are not living at this moment, after what has been seen and done, as if nothing had been learned from political history, as if the 21st Century did not exist… because postmodern is not a philosophy, it is an era, and one not easily defined.
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February 10, 2003 :: J.E. Robertson :: Comments Off
It was the last night of the year, and we were visiting the belly of the whale: old shimmering Menäting, the Island Place. We sought the center of a culture of collective insight, a distillation of plunder and purchase, lend and lease, ache and expansion. The Metropolitan Museum of Art: temporary exhibit: Richard Avedon, Portraits (in black and white): floating above Fifth Avenue: visions out of time: an artful pillage of posture and concealment. It was a display of selfhood in multiple manifestation… an array of recorded vessels of suffering, suffrage, denial, awareness, harbors for history.
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