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the-record-columns · 5 years ago

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Nov. 27, 2019: Columns

Thanksgiving: Family and football

By KEN WELBORN

Record Publisher

Tomorrow is Thanksgiving Day, and I am fortunate enough to be going to my nephew, Matt Welborn, and his wife, Brooke's, house in Wilkesboro.

In addition to having two of the greatest kids that have ever lived, Claudia Grace and Henry, Matt and Brooke will have the kind of Thanksgiving dinner that will be a lifetime memory for all of us gathered to enjoy.�� I mean it. There have been country songs written about much lesser meals.

In addition, in their big den, a football game will be on television—after all, it is Thanksgiving Day. It won't matter much to me who is playing, but I will probably watch it for a while.

Now, this is not a sports column, but a couple of sporting events have come to mind. First, as I watched in anguish as the Carolina Panthers managed to, once again, snatch defeat from the jaws of victory on Sunday, some other things came to mind. First, the Panthers were playing the New Orleans Saints, and why was I surprised that their veteran quarterback, Drew Brees was picking the Panthers apart.

But, the other thing that always comes to mind when I thank about football, are the good old days of football, when my mind races back to the days before the merger of the AFL and the NFL in 1970. The Oakland Raiders, one of my favorite teams during the old AFL days, the days of the American Football League, then a rival to the NFL—the National Football League. The merger I mentioned earlier completed the change into just the NFL, with two conferences, the NFC and the AFC.

It goes without saying that in those days the Washington Redskins were number one in my heart, but of the others, the Raiders and their quarterback, Daryle Lamonica, were something to watch. And all this brings me to “the game,” famous or infamous, nonetheless it was the game that changed the way we have watched football in the 48 years since that fateful Sunday, Nov. 17, 1968.

The Oakland Raiders were playing their most intense rival, the New York Jets. It was being played on the Left Coast, so it didn't start around here until 4 p.m., and it was a barn burner all the way. In those days, most football games were over in two and a half hours, but this game was full of scoring, penalties, timeouts and fussing about everything under the sun, and it began to run long.

This was well before ESPN, cable TV, satellites, and the like. I was watching the game with a bunch of friends from school and it truly was a great game. With just over a minute to play in the game, the Jets kicked a field goal to take the lead at 32-29, making the eighth lead change in the game. I always thought that must be some kind of record in and of itself, but what happened next changed sports history.

After the Jets field goal, NBC broke to a commercial. About two minutes later, when the game was supposed to come back on, we were greeted with a panoramic view of what appeared to be the Swiss Alps with a cute little girl dancing by herself and turning around in circles to the symphony of music and the aforementioned view, and, before we could say, “What the...?” we realized that we were getting ready to watch Heidi.

Yes, Heidi, the heart warming children's story of young girl and her grandfather in the Alps which had been made into a TV movie for NBC which was scheduled to begin showing at 7 .pm. Well, how big a deal could it be? The Jets were up three points, and there was only a minute to play—what could happen?

Turns out that quite a bit could happen. After the Jets kicked off, Lamonica completed a short pass, then there was a penalty on the Jets, and on the next play, the pass Lamonica threw was caught and run in for a touchdown. But, there's more. On the ensuing kickoff to the Jets, they fumbled the ball near the goal line and a Raider defender scooped it up and ran it in for another touchdown. Yes. In the space of NINE of the 65 seconds that NBC denied their viewers to see at the end of the game, the Oakland Raiders scored 14 points, and the final score was 43-32 Raiders.

It was fully 20 minutes before NBC posted the score at the bottom of the screen during Heidi, but there was such an unbelievable difference between the 32-29 score we knew about with 65 seconds to play, and the 43-32 score they posted, we simply didn't believe it. Nobody scores 14 points in a minute.

But they did.

There was such an uproar about cutting the minute off the game that came to be known as “The Heidi Game,” or “The Heidi Bowl,” that, to my knowledge, no network has cut short a game since.

The irony of it all is that NBC had decided hold the Heidi movie and to let the game end naturally — but there were so many calls about when things were going to begin or end, that their switchboard crashed — and they couldn't get word to the folks in charge of scheduling.

The rest, as we like to say, is history.

My Momma’s wonderful stuffing and spending time with family in the kitchen

Willa Mae Lankford

By JERRY LANKFORD

Record Editor

My mother, Willa Mae Lankford’s stuffing was one of the best things I’ve ever eaten.

Momma, who was born in raised in Millers Creek, kind of fused my grandmothers’ — her mother, Fairie Huffman McNeil’s, and mother-in-law, Mollie Blackburn Lankford’s — recipes to create this magic. I’m sure she added her own special something to this, but I never thought to ask what that might have been.

The recipe goes something like this:

First bake a big cake of cornbread and prepare about three pounds of mashed potatoes. Let those cool as you boil about four stalks of finely chopped celery until the pieces are translucent.

You'll need a BIG bowl.

Crumble up the cornbread, and then crumble up three or four packs of either hamburger or hot dog buns. With the potatoes (taters), cornbread and crumbled buns in the bowl, add in your celery and pour in two jars of finely chopped pimento. Have three to four cans of vegetable broth open and ready.

Start mixing with your hands, adding the broth until the entire mixture has the consistency of a meatloaf. Put it all in a big pan — the big aluminum throw-away turkey pans work great, but you’d want to double them up because it is a heavy dish. Smooth it out like you would a meatloaf, and use your fingers to make gutters around the edges.

Put it in the oven at 350 for about an hour or until the top is golden brown.

It's a little different — one of those things you either love or you don't. My Momma taught me the recipe, and if I didn't fix it at Thanksgiving, my girls would have my head.

My oldest daughter, Jennifer, is an incredible dessert maker. Her specialty for Thanksgiving are her wonderful pumpkin pies. She usually has to make about a dozen of these. She also prepares other delicious things like sweet potato casseroles. She is really a great cook regardless of the fare.

Anna, who never enjoyed cooking like Jennifer and me, would set the table and slice the canned cranberry sauce. Gabriella, my youngest daughter, at some point took over the task of placing the tiny marshmallows atop the sweet potato dish.

I always cooked the meat. One year I went all out and fixed 40 pounds of it — two turkey breasts, two hams, and a five-pound meatloaf (which I cooked on the grill to save space in the already full oven). Of course there was homemade gravy, mashed potatoes, baby green peas and other vegetables.

Sometime we’d feed close to 20 people. But, that was a rare occasion.

And, the refrigerator was always overstuffed with leftovers long after the meal was over.

It was wonderful to share the kitchen with all these people that I love.

As my daughters have become grown women, they are creating their own Thanksgiving celebrations and traditions. But, that’s only good. Traditions teach our children the special meanings of the holidays. And making your own is paving future homegrown memories.

The Cradle of Jewish History

By AMBASSADOR EARL COX and KATHLEEN COX

Special to The Record

Recently, in a surprise announcement, U.S. President Donald Trump confirmed to the world what Bible believing Christians have always known - that Judea and Samaria belong to Israel. The motive behind Trump’s announcement was not simply to express a pro-Israel position. By keeping Israel secure in the Jordan Valley, in the Golan Heights and on the mountain ridges of Judea and Samaria, President Trump is strategically shoring up U.S. interests in the region. A strong Israel equals a stronger U.S. influence in the Middle East which is often violent and unpredictable. Furthermore, by bolstering Israel’s presence and position in the north, the vulnerable pro-US Hashemite kingdom in Jordan is able to rest easier at night. Israel is Jordan’s most efficient neighbor in terms of securing intelligence information which Israel uses to systematically combat anti-Israel and anti-Hashemite Palestinian terrorists operating in the West Bank (land west of the Jordan River on which the Palestinians want to establish, in part, an independent state). Without question, Israel has the most advanced intelligence apparatus in the world and they readily share information with Jordan as well as the United States and other allies.

Former supreme commander of NATO and U.S. Secretary of State, the late General Alexander Haig, once said that Israel represents the largest U.S. aircraft carrier in the Middle East without the need to have any U.S. boots on the ground. Because of this, the United States earns far more than a hundred fold on our annual investment in Israel.

Most people fail to realize that seventy percent of Jordan’s population are Palestinians whose leadership considers Jordan an artificial entity which is occupying land that belongs to the Palestinians. Deeply entrenched in Jordan is the Muslim Brotherhood which aims to replace the fragile Hashemite regime in Jordan with a Muslim caliphate. Some ISIS members consider Jordan their home. With serious internal and external threats, Jordan’s survival largely depends on Israel.

Should Israel ever retreat from the mountain ridges of Judea and Samaria, the cradle of Jewish history, the outcome would be total devastation. The region would be further destabilized by possibly opening the door for Russia and Iran to strengthen their influence and physical presence. Keeping a healthy Israeli presence on the mountain ridges of Judea and Samaria is the most effective U.S. force multiplier in the Middle East and a stabilizing force in the entire region and for this we must give thanks!

Well Done Sarah

By CARL WHITE

Life in the Carolinas

The Thanksgiving season is filled with traditions that celebrate family, food and a grateful heart.

If you close your eyes and imagine the perfect Thanksgiving gathering, chances are you will see family and friends gathered around the table with a grand meal featuring a beautifully prepared turkey or tofu turkey if you are a vegetarian. There will be a wide variety of side dishes with a generous offering of dressings and gravy.

Everyone has their favorite side dish. I posted the question to our Facebook followers. What is your favorite side dish for the Thanksgiving meal? Variations of dressing or stuffing with gravy or cranberry sauce were by far at the top of the list.

Here are a few other favorite sides, Lynn Akers likes corn casserole, Robin Brueckmann has Mennonite heritage and enjoys corn pudding and shoofly pie. Karen Goodsell enjoys her grandmother’s recipe for squash casserole. Laura Crews is crazy about roasted Brussel sprouts with lemon pepper seasoning. Ann Graves is wild about Minnesota wild rise. Terri Reid enjoys a good Waldorf salad with her turkey. Micheal Nelson likes strawberry salad. Bill Evans loves fresh turnip greens, and Vivian Hopkins likes cranberry salad. Dena Burton-Claus loves her dad’s creamy, flavorful mashed potatoes.

The last Thursday in November is our national day to gather, be grateful, eat, play and for many get ready for the excitement Black Friday. We do this every year, and in great part we have the author of Mary Had a Little Lamb to thank for the holiday tradition that brings so much joy. The story goes like this. Sarah Josepha Hale was a widowed mother of five children; she was a poet, writer, and editor.

Sarah became the literary editor of Godey’s Ladies Book, which became the most read magazine of the 19th century and it would be this platform that would give great momentum to her big project, which was to establish an annual day of Thanksgiving nationwide. On Oct. 3, 1789, President George Washington proclaimed Nov. 26, 1789, as a day of Thanksgiving for that year.

Sarah believed that America would be well served to have a set day every year to celebrate our great American festival of Thanksgiving and for many years she would write letters to political leaders including five U.S. Presidents for this cause. It would be her letter written to President Abraham Lincoln on Sept. 28, 1863, that yielded the favorable response she was seeking. On Oct. 3, 1863, President Lincoln’s Thanksgiving Proclamation was signed. There would be other Presidential Proclamations signed. However, it was this one that set the stage for many of the Thanksgiving traditions and foods we celebrate with today.

It is not in doubt that there was an event at Plymouth in 1621, where various people gathered for a meal and prayerful Thanksgiving. There are other recorded dates on which various forms of Thanksgiving were celebrated.

The story of Sarah Josepha Hale is one for which we can be thankful. Sarah married David Hale, and for nine years they dedicated two hours, a day to study, and it was during this time that Sarah would gain confidence in the power of her mind. David died of a stroke, and Sarah became a widowed mother of five. Little did Sarah know that she would make a difference in the lives of three hundred million Americans. Mary’s Little Lamb would bring joy to countless children around the world and the turkey, dressing and all the other delightful sides and other traditions would give us all something to celebrate.

In our collage, President Lincoln is portrayed by our friend Arthur Lightbody from Waxhaw, N.C. Photo credit: Titus Lightbody.

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thecosydragon · 6 years ago

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My latest blog post from the cosy dragon: Interview with Timothy Jay Smith

An Interview with Timothy Jay Smith, author of The Fourth Courier

Raised crisscrossing America pulling a small green trailer behind the family car, Timothy Jay Smith developed a ceaseless wanderlust that has taken him around the world many times. Polish cops and Greek fishermen, mercenaries and arms dealers, child prostitutes and wannabe terrorists, Indian Chiefs and Indian tailors: he hung with them all in an unparalleled international career that saw him smuggle banned plays from behind the Iron Curtain, maneuver through Occupied Territories, represent the U.S. at the highest levels of foreign governments, and stowaway aboard a “devil’s barge” for a three-days crossing from Cape Verde that landed him in an African jail.

You have a new novel coming out, The Fourth Courier, set in Poland. What’s it about?

The Fourth Courier opens in the spring of 1992, only four months after the collapse of the Soviet Union. A series of grisly murders in Warsaw suddenly becomes an international concern when radiation is detected on the third victim’s hands, raising fears that all the victims might have smuggled nuclear material out of Russia.

Poland’s new Solidarity government asks for help and the FBI sends Special Agent Jay Porter to assist in the investigation. He teams up with a gay CIA agent. When they learn that a Russian physicist who designed a portable atomic bomb is missing, the race is on to find him and the bomb before it ends up in the wrong hands.

My novels have been called literary thrillers because I use an event or threat—a thriller plot—to examine what the situation means to ordinary people. In The Fourth Courier, Jay becomes intimately involved with a Polish family, giving the reader a chance to see how the Poles coped with their collective hangover from the communist era.

How did you come up with the story for The Fourth Courier?

The Fourth Courier book goes back a long way for me. In 1989, the Berlin Wall fell and Solidarity won the first free election in Poland in over sixty years. In the same year, Mikhail Gorbachev introduced new cooperative laws in the Soviet Union, which was an area of my expertise. I was invited to the Soviet Union as a consultant, which led to my consulting throughout the former Soviet bloc, eventually living for over two years in Poland.

At the time, there was a lot of smuggling across the border between Russia and Poland, giving rise to fears that nuclear material, too, might be slipping across. While on assignment in Latvia, I met with a very unhappy decommissioned Soviet general, who completely misunderstood my purpose for being there. When an official meeting concluded, he suggested we go for a walk where we could talk without being overheard.

I followed him deep into a forest. I couldn’t imagine what he wanted. Finally we stopped, and he said, “I can get you anything you want.” I must have looked puzzled because he added, “Atomic.”

Then I understood. In an earlier conversation, there had been some passing remarks about the Soviets’ nuclear arsenal in Latvia, for which he had had some responsibility, and apparently still some access. While my real purpose for being there was to design a volunteer program for business specialists, he assumed that was a front and I was really a spy. Or perhaps he thought, I really did want to buy an atomic bomb!

Have you always been a writer?

In the sense of enjoying to write, yes. I actually wrote my first stage play in fourth grade and started a novel in sixth grade, but I didn’t become a full-time fiction writer until twenty years ago. The first half of my adult life I spent working on projects to help low income people all over the world. I always enjoyed the writing aspects of my work—reports, proposals, even two credit manuals—but I reached a point where I’d accomplished my career goals, I was only forty-six years old, and I had a story I wanted to tell.

What was the story?

For over two years, I managed the U.S. Government’s first significant project to assist Palestinians following the 1993 Oslo Accords. One thing I learned was that everyone needed to be at the negotiating table to achieve an enduring peace. So I wrote a story of reconciliation—A Vision of Angels—that weaves together the lives of four characters and their families.

If anybody had ever hoped that a book might change the world, I did. Unfortunately I didn’t manage to bring about peace in the Middle East, but I’ve continued writing nevertheless.

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The Fourth Courier has a strong sense of place. It’s obvious that you know Warsaw well. Other than living there, what special research did you do?

Warsaw is a city with a very distinctive character. It’s always atmospheric, verging on gloomy in winter, and the perfect location for a noir-ish thriller.

I had left Warsaw several years before I decided to write a novel set there, so I went back to refresh my memory. I looked at it entirely differently. What worked dramatically? Where would I set scenes in my story?

It was on that research trip when all the events along the Vistula River came together for me. There was a houseboat. There was Billy’s shack, and Billy himself whose “jaundiced features appeared pinched from a rotting apple.” There were sandbars reached by narrow concrete jetties and a derelict white building with a sign simply saying Nightclub. Fortunately, Billy’s dogs were tethered or I wouldn’t be here to answer your questions.

My main character is an FBI agent, and I didn’t know much about it. A friend, who was an assistant to Attorney General Janet Reno, arranged a private tour of the FBI’s training facility in Quantico. That was before 9/11. I don’t think that could be done now. Maybe for James Bond himself but not for a wannabe writer.

If I was going to write a novel about smuggling a portable atomic bomb, I needed to know what a bomb entailed. Weight, seize, basic design, fuel? How would a miniature bomb be detonated? So I blindly contacted the Department of Energy. I explained what I wanted and was soon connected to an atomic expert who agreed to meet with me.

We met on the weekend at a Starbucks-like coffee shop in Rockville, MD. We met in line and were already talking about atomic bombs before we ordered our coffees. He had brought basic drawings of them. He was an expert and eager to share his knowledge.

Can you imagine having that conversation in a café today, openly looking at how-to schematics for building an atomic bomb while sipping skinny lattés?

You’ve mentioned ‘scenes’ a couple of times. I know you also write screenplays. Do you find it difficult to go between the different formats or styles?

The sense of scene is crucial to my writing. It’s how I think about a story. Before I start new work, I always have the opening and closing scenes in my head, and then I ask myself what scenes do I need to get from start to finish.

I think it comes from growing up in a house where the television was never turned off. My sisters and I were even allowed to watch TV while doing homework if we kept our grades up. Sometimes I joke that canned laughter was the soundtrack of my childhood. I haven’t owned a television for many years, but growing up with it exposed me to telling stories in scenes, and it’s why my readers often say they can see my stories as they read them.

For me, it’s not difficult to go between prose and screenplays. In fact, I use the process of adapting a novel to a screenplay as an editing tool for the novel. It helps me sharpen the dialogue and tighten the story.

In your bio, you mention traveling the world to find your characters and stories, and doing things like smuggling out plays from behind the Iron Curtain. Was it all as exciting as it sounds?

It was only one play, and yes, I confess to having an exciting life. I’ve done some crazy things, too, and occasionally managed to put myself in dangerous situations. Frankly, when I recall some of the things I’ve done, I scare myself! By comparison, smuggling a play out of Czechoslovakia in 1974 seems tame. But I’ve always had a travel bug and wanted to go almost everywhere, so I took some chances, often traveled alone, and went to places where I could have been made to disappear without a trace.

It sounds like you have a whole library full of books you could write. How do you decide what story to tell and who will be your characters?

I came of age in the 1960s during the Civil Rights Movement and the anti-Vietnam War demonstrations, so I developed a strong sense of social justice. That guided my career choice more than anything, and when I quit working to write full-time, it was natural that I wanted my books to reflect my concerns. Not in a “big message” way, but more in terms of raising awareness about things that concern me.

For example, take Cooper’s Promise, my novel about a gay deserter from the war in Iraq who ends up adrift in a fictional African country. It was 2003, and in a few days, I was headed to Antwerp to research blood diamonds for a new novel. I was running errands when NPR’s Neal Conan (Talk of the Nation) came on the radio with an interview of National Geographic photographer Jodi Cobb about a project on modern-day slavery. It was the first time I heard details about human trafficking, and was so shocked by its enormity that I pulled my car off the road to listen.

I decided on the spot that I needed to find a story that touched on both blood diamonds and trafficking. When I went to Antwerp a few days later, I visited the Diamond District as planned, but also visited a safe house for women who had been rescued from traffickers.

In The Fourth Courier, you team up a white straight FBI agent with a black gay CIA agent. Even Publishers Weekly commented that it seemed like an ideal set-up for a sequel. Do you plan to write one?

Probably not. My to-be-written list is already too long.

I’m close to finishing the final edits on a book set in Greek island village, which is more of a mystery about an arsonist than a thriller. I’ve already started a new novel set in Istanbul about a young refugee who’s recruited by the CIA to go deep undercover with ISIS. I’ve never written a novel set in the States but I have the idea for one.

To date, my books have been stand-alones with totally different settings, characters, and plots. I try to write what I like to read: smart mysteries/thrillers with strong plots and colorful characters set in interesting places. I suppose like me, I want my stories to travel around and meet new people.

You’ve had gay protagonists or important characters since your first novel over twenty years ago when gay literature had not yet become mainstream. How would you say that affected your choices as a writer, or did it?

Friends warned me that I shouldn’t become known as a gay writer because it would pigeonhole me and sideline me from consideration as a serious writer. At the time, I think the general public thought gay books were all about sex and more sex. Of course, already there were many emerging gay literary writers; it was more stigma than reality.

The world of thrillers and mysteries is still largely uninhabited by gays. Hopefully I am helping to change that. I also hope that my novels expand my readers’ understanding of homosexuality in the places where I set them. In The Fourth Courier, the gay angle is key to solving the case. In my other novels, too, the plot turns on something gay, and the way it does is always something that couldn’t have happened in the same way anywhere else because of the cultural context.

What do you want your readers to take away from The Fourth Courier?

What motivated me to write The Fourth Courier was a desire to portray what happened to ordinary Polish people at an exciting albeit unsettling moment in their country’s history. I hope my readers like my characters as much as I do—at least the good guys. The people are what made Poland such a great experience.

The Fourth Courier is my thank-you note to them.

You can find out more about Tim and his novels using these links: Web page Instagram Facebook Twitter Goodreads Amazon

Photo by Michael Honegger @ https://ift.tt/2UYNZMt

from https://ift.tt/2U32rqw

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kidsviral-blog · 7 years ago

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As I Scrolled Through These Photos, My Heart Sunk More And More. But I'm Glad I Saw It.

New Post has been published on https://kidsviral.info/as-i-scrolled-through-these-photos-my-heart-sunk-more-and-more-but-im-glad-i-saw-it/

As I Scrolled Through These Photos, My Heart Sunk More And More. But I'm Glad I Saw It.

Each year, the World Press Association gathers to select a photo of the year. Countless photographers send in their work to compete for the award. Their work can range from sad to terrifying to joyful and to loving… a true embodiment of the human spirit. This list is comprised of every winner since the year 1955 and you won’t believe half of the things you are seeing. Who knew things like this were going on in the world every day…

1955: A competitor tumbles off his motorcycle during the Motorcross World Championship at the Volk Mølle race course. (By Mogens von Haven)

1956: A German World War II prisoner, released by the Soviet Union, is reunited with his daughter. The child had not seen her father since she was one-year-old. (By Helmuth Pirath)

1957: Dorothy Counts, one of the first black students to enter the newly desegregated Harry Harding High School is mocked by whites on her first day of school. (By Douglas Martin)

1958: National Football Championships between Prague and Bratislava. (By Stanislav Tereba)

1960: A right-wing student in Japan assassinates Inejiro Asanuma, Socialist Party Chairman, during his speech at the Hibiya Hall. (By Yasushi Nagao)

1962: Priest Luis Padillo offers last rites to a loyalist soldier who is mortally wounded by a sniper during military rebellion against President Bétancourt at Puerto Cabello naval base in Venezuela. (By Héctor Rondón Lovera)

1963: Buddhist monk Thich Quang Duc sets himself ablaze in protest against the persecution of Buddhists by the South Vietnamese government. (By Malcolm W. Browne)

1964: A Turkish woman mourns her dead husband, a victim of the Greek-Turkish civil war. (By Don McCullin)

1965: A mother and her children wade across a river to escape US bombing. The US Air Force had evacuated their village because it was suspected of being used as a base camp by the Vietcong. (By Kyoichi Sawada)

1966: The body of a Vietcong soldier is dragged behind an American armored vehicle en route to a burial site after fierce fighting. (By Kyoichi Sawada)

1967: The commander of an M48 tankgunner of the US 7th regiment in Vietnam’s ‘Iron Triangle’. (By Co Rentmeester)

1968: South Vietnam national police chief Nguyen Ngoc Loan executes a suspected Viet Cong member. (By Eddie Adams)

1969: A young Catholic wears a gasmask during clashes with British troops. People had been fleeing from teargas after a night of street fighting. (By Hanns-Jörg Anders)

1971: During negotiations on the safe-conduct of a group of criminals on the run, police superintendent Gross suddenly shoots down gang leader Kurt Vicenik. The gang, who had disappeared after a bank-robbery in Cologne, re-emerged near Saarbrücken, carrying a hostage with them. A chase followed and the police and the robbers met at Baltersweiler. The two other men were captured in a wild fight. The men running away from the bullets are policemen. (By Wolfgang Peter Geller)

1972: Phan Thi Kim Phuc (center) flees with other children after South Vietnamese planes mistakenly dropped napalm on South Vietnamese troops and civilians. (By Nick Ut)

1973: Democratically elected President Salvador Allende moments away from death during military coup at Moneda presidential palace in Chile. (By Orlando Lagos)

1974: The Faces of Hunger. A mother comforts her child, both victims of drought. (By Ovie Carter)

1975: A mother and her daughter are hurled off a collapsing fire-escape in an apartment house fire in Boston. (By Stanley Forman)

1976: Palestinian refugees in district La Quarantaine. (By Françoise Demulder)

1977: Police throw tear-gas at a group of chanting residents of the Modderdam squatter camp protesting against the demolition of their homes outside Cape Town. (By Leslie Hammond)

1978: A demonstrator is engulfed in flames of the molotov cocktail he was about to throw at the police during protests against the construction of the New Tokyo International Airport. The original Narita Airport plan was unveiled in 1966. To acquire the initial land, the government had to evict protesting landowners. Violent clashes between the opponents and authorities resulted in 13 deaths, including five police officers. The new airport opened in May 1978. (By Sadayuki Mikami)

1979: A Cambodian woman cradles her child while waiting for food to be distributed at a refugee camp. (By David Burnett)

1980: A starving boy and a missionary in Uganda. (By Mike Wells)

1981: Lt. Col. Antonio Tejero Molina orders everyone to remain seated and be quiet after armed Guardia Civil soldiers stormed the Assembly Hall of the Spanish Parliament. Three hundred deputies and cabinet members were in session to vote upon the succession of premier Suarez. They were released next morning after having been held hostage for almost 18 hours; the coup was a failure. (By Manuel Pérez Barriopedro)

1982: The war in Lebanon: The aftermath of the massacre of Palestinians by Christian Phalangists in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps. (By Robin Moyer)

1983: Kezban Özer (37) finds her five children buried alive after a devastating earthquake. At five o’clock in the morning she and her husband were milking the cows as their children slept. A few minutes later, 147 villages in the region were destroyed by an earthquake of magnitude 7.1 on the Richter scale; 1,336 people died. (By Mustafa Bozdemir)

1984: A child killed by the poisonous gas leak in the Union Carbide chemical plant disaster. (By Pablo Bartholomew)

1985: Omaira Sanchez (12) is trapped in the debris caused by the eruption of Nevado del Ruíz volcano. After sixty hours she eventually lost consciousness and died of a heart attack. (By Frank Fournier)

1986: Ken Meeks’ (42) skin is marked with lesions caused by Aids-related Kaposi’s Sarcoma. (By Alon Reininger)

1987: A mother clings to a riot policeman’s shield at a polling station. Her son was one of thousands of demonstrators arrested because they tried to prove that the presidential election on December 15, which was won by the government candidate, had been rigged. (By Anthony Suau)

1988: Boris Abgarzian grieves for his 17-year-old son, victim of the Armenian earthquake. (By David Turnley)

1989: A demonstrator confronts a line of People’s Liberation Army tanks during protests for democratic reform. (By Charlie Cole)

1990: Family and neighbors mourn the death of Elshani Nashim (27), killed during a protest against the Yugoslavian government’s decision to abolish the autonomy of Kosovo. (By Georges Merillon)

1991: US Sergeant Ken Kozakiewicz (23), gives vent to his grief as he learns that the body bag at his feet contains the remains of his friend Andy Alaniz. ‘Friendly fire’ claimed Alaniz’s life and injured Kozakiewicz. On the last day of the Gulf War they were taken away from the war zone by a MASH unit evacuation helicopter. (By David Turnley)

1992: A mother carries her dead child to the grave, after wrapping it in a shroud according to local custom. A bad drought coupled with the effects of civil war caused a terrible famine in Somalia which claimed the lives of between one and two million people over a period of two years, more than 200 a day in the worst affected areas. The international airlift of relief supplies which started in July was hampered by heavily armed gangs of clansmen who looted food storage centers and slowed down the distribution of the supplies by aid organizations. (By James Nachtwey)

1993: Boys raise toy guns in a gesture of defiance. The Palestinian uprising, which began in December 1987, strengthened the Arab population in their determination to fight the occupying force. In March Israel closed its border with Gaza, causing a massive rise in unemployment. With more than 800,000 people contained in the Israeli-patrolled, eight-km-wide strip of land, bloodshed increased sharply. The peace agreement signed in Washington on September 13 promised limited authority for the Gaza Strip and a withdrawal of the Israeli army. (By Larry Towell)

1994: A Hutu man at a Red Cross hospital, his face mutilated by the Hutu ‘Interahamwe’ militia, who suspected him of sympathizing with the Tutsi rebels. (By James Nachtwey)

1995: A bus on the road leading to Grozny during fighting between Chechen independence fighters and Russian troops. The civil war which erupted when President Yeltsin sent troops to the rebellious province in December 1994 was still dragging on months later. When the Chechen fighters fled Grozny, the capital, where the war had claimed a horrendous human and material toll, Russian troops pursued them into the countryside to the south and east. (By Lucian Perkins)

1996: Landmine victims in Kuito, a town where many people were killed and traumatized during the civil war. (By Francesco Zizola)

1997: A woman cries outside the Zmirli Hospital, where the dead and wounded were taken after a massacre in Bentalha. (By Hocine)

1998: A woman is comforted by relatives and friends at the funeral of her husband. The man was a soldier with the ethnic Albanian rebels of the Kosovo Liberation Army, fighting for independence from Serbia. He had been shot the previous day while on patrol. (By Dayna Smith)

1999: A man walks the streets in one of the largest gathering points for ethnic Albanian refugees fleeing violence in Kosovo. (By Claus Bjørn Larsen)

2000: The mother of a Mexican immigrant family makes piñatas to support herself and her children. The family numbers among the millions of ‘uncounted’ Americans, people who for one reason or another have been missed by the national census and so don’t exist in population records. (By Lara Jo Regan)

2001: The body of a one-year-old boy who died of dehydration is prepared for burial at Jalozai refugee camp. The child’s family, originally from North Afghanistan, had sought refuge in Pakistan from political instability and the consequences of drought. The family gave the photographer permission to attend as they washed and wrapped his body in a white funeral shroud, according to Muslim tradition. In the overcrowded Jalozai camp, 80,000 refugees from Afghanistan endured squalid conditions. (By Erik Refner)

2002: A boy holds his dead father’s trousers as he squats beside the spot where his father is to be buried, surrounded by soldiers and villagers digging graves for victims of an earthquake in Armenia. (By Eric Grigorian)

2003: An Iraqi man comforts his four-year-old son at a holding center for prisoners of war, in the base camp of the US Army 101st Airborne Division near An Najaf. The boy had become terrified when, according to orders, his father was hooded and handcuffed. A soldier later severed the plastic handcuffs so that the man could comfort his child. Hoods were placed over detainees’ heads because they were quicker to apply than blindfolds. The military said the bags were used to disorient prisoners and protect their identities. It is not known what happened to the man or the boy. (By Jean-Marc Bouju)

2004: A woman mourns a relative killed in the tsunami. On December 26, a 9.3 magnitude earthquake off the coast of Sumatra, Indonesia, triggered a series of deadly waves that traveled across the Indian Ocean, wreaking havoc in nine Asian countries, and causing fatalities as far away as Somalia and Tanzania. (By Arko Datta)

2005: The fingers of malnourished Alassa Galisou (1) are pressed against the lips of his mother Fatou Ousseini at an emergency feeding center. One of the worst droughts in recent times, together with a particularly heavy plague of locusts that had destroyed the previous year’s harvest, left millions of people severely short of food. (By Finbarr O’Reilly)

2006: Young Lebanese drive down a street in Haret Hreik, a bombed neighborhood in southern Beirut. (By Spencer Platt)

2007: A soldier of Second Platoon, Battle Company of the Second Battalion of the US 503rd Infantry Regiment sinks onto an embankment in the Restrepo bunker at the end of the day. (By Tim Hetherington)

2008: Detective Robert Kole of the Cuyahoga County Sheriff’s Office enters a home, following mortgage foreclosure and eviction. He needs to check that the owners have vacated the premises, and that no weapons have been left lying around. (By Anthony Suau)

2009: Women shout their dissent from a Tehran rooftop on 24 June, following Iran’s disputed presidential election. (By Pietro Masturzo)

2010: Bibi Aisha, an 18-year-old woman from Oruzgan province in Afghanistan, fled back to her family home from her husband’s house, complaining of violent treatment. The Taliban arrived one night, demanding Bibi be handed over to face justice. After a Taliban commander pronounced his verdict, Bibi’s brother-in-law held her down and her husband sliced off her ears and then cut off her nose. Bibi was abandoned, but later rescued by aid workers and the U.S. military. (By Jodi Bieber)

2011: A veiled woman holds a wounded relative “inside a mosque used as a field hospital by demonstrators against the rule of President Ali Abdullah Saleh, during clashes in Sanaa, Yemen. (By Samuel Aranda)

2012: A group of men carry the bodies of two dead children through a street in Gaza City. (By Paul Hansen)

To see more amazing photography, visit the World Press Association website.

Source

Read more: http://viralnova.com/world-press-photos/

#best photos of the year #photo of the year #world press photos

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trendingnewsb · 7 years ago

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The young activists you should be following for International Women’s Day

Image: Rhona Wise/AFP/Getty Images

International Women’s Day is an annual, global event that pushes for women’s rights. In today’s political climate, there’s a lot to be done in achieving equality.

Feminism isn’t all pink hats and snappy tweets — to be an intersectional feminist, you need to acknowledge the many levels of inequality that affect women worldwide.

SEE ALSO: Chloe Kim, Patty Jenkins, and more get their own Barbie dolls for International Women’s Day

From young women fighting for access to clean water to those advocating for gun control or acceptance and trans rights, here are seven young activists you should know about for International Women’s Day.

The woman tackling mental health stigma: Elyse Fox

A post shared by Elyse Fox (@elyse.fox) on Feb 26, 2018 at 10:36am PST

Elyse Fox runs Sad Girls Club, an online and in-person community dedicated to promoting mental health awareness among young women. The 27-year-old got her start on Tumblr, where she wrote about struggling with depression. She released a short documentary about her mental health called Conversations with Friends one year ago.

vimeo

After releasing Conversations with Friends, Fox received hundreds of messages from other young women struggling with mental illness. She created Sad Girls Club as a community to tackle the stigma surrounding mental illness and help other young women with access to therapy. In addition to the online platform, Sad Girls Club hosts monthly meetings in New York.

How to follow Sad Girls Club:

Here are the Instagram and Twitter accounts for Sad Girls Club. You can follow Fox on Instagram, too, at @elyse.fox.

The teenager who organized a mass student walkout in NYC: Hebh Jamal

Thank you @TeenVogue @petracollins #21under21 pic.twitter.com/jCk6SH7RyU

— Hebh Jamal (@hebh_jamal) December 15, 2017

When Hebh Jamal was 15, she was featured in a New York Times article about young people facing Islamophobia in the midst of the 2016 presidential election. After the story was published, Jamal was invited to speak at local schools, and became politically active. At 17 years old, the first generation Palestinian-American organized a mass student walk-out in New York City to protest Trump’s travel ban against majority-Muslim countries.

Since then, she’s worked extensively to organize rallies and advocate against Islamophobic agendas. Still fresh out of high school, she’s now the Director of Public Relations of Integrate NYC, an advocacy group dedicated to diversifying public schools.

She told Broadly that although she understands that her activism is interesting because of her young age, she wants to create a movement of thousands of voices, not just her own. “I want to emphasize it isn’t about one person,” she said, “Although it’s really great that I’m able to have a platform that a lot of Muslim women are not able to have I really want to use it to emphasize that it needs to be a movement.”

How to follow Jamal:

You can keep up with Jamal’s work on Twitter and Instagram.

The first transgender women’s officer in the British Labour Party: Lily Madigan

Did a tv interview for channel 4 x

A post shared by Lily Tessa Madigan (@lilytessamadigan) on Dec 6, 2017 at 12:55pm PST

At only 20 years old, Lily Madigan is the first transgender person to hold public office as a women’s officer in the British Labour Party. She came out as trans when she was 16, but her Catholic high school threatened to suspend her if she presented as a woman in class and insisted on using her male name. Madigan visited law firms in London until she found one that would represent her for free. The school eventually apologized.

She was elected in November 2017 amidst pushback from other politicians who claimed that because Madigan was assigned male at birth, she was unqualified for the position of women’s officer.

Completely false. Obviously. Women’s and trans rights will never be mutually exclusive. Get over yourselves 💁🏼‍♀️ (also stop misgendering?) Nothing like a bit of human decency 👌 https://t.co/MKjuuclowf

— Lily Madigan 🤝🌹 (@madigan_lily) March 2, 2018

Despite the transphobic tweets she’s received, she’s still determined to be the UK’s first trans member of Parliament. In a Guardian essay in remembrance of Harvey Milk, Madigan wrote: “I’m constantly attacked for running for women’s roles as a transwoman. Milk rightly spoke on ending the disenfranchisement of oppressed groups in politics, and how we can’t always be representative but we must be inclusive. To loosely paraphrase him: I fight for women because I’m one of them.”

How to follow Madigan:

You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

The student taking on the NRA: Emma Gonzalez

Image: Rhona wise/Getty Images

Emma Gonzalez survived the mass shooting at Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida, and has since become an outspoken advocate for tougher gun control in the United States. Her Feb. 17 speech in Fort Lauderdale, three days after the shooting, went viral. She called out politicians who accepted donations from the NRA, and implored her audience to contact their local representatives.

Gonzalez now has more Twitter followers than the NRA, and uses her platform to push for stronger gun control laws.

Friendly reminder that the argument to Protect Schools completely ignores Churches, Malls, Concerts, etc. that have also been host to mass shootings – we can’t build our world out of Kevlar, just remove the guns that cause the most carnage it’s so Simple

— Emma González (@Emma4Change) March 6, 2018

The high school senior also confronted NRA spokesperson Dana Loesch during a CNN Town Hall and told her, “I want you to know we will support your two children in a way that you will not.”

In an essay for Harpers’s Bazaar, Gonzalez criticized the adults who were skeptical of the teen-led movement. “We have always been told that if we see something wrong, we need to speak up; but now that we are, all we’re getting is disrespect from the people who made the rules in the first place,” she wrote, “Adults like us when we have strong test scores, but they hate us when we have strong opinions.”

How to follow Gonzalez:

You can keep up with Gonzalez’s activism on Twitter.

The woman who united Sioux youths to fight the DAPL: Jasilyn Charger

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Jasilyn Charger co-founded the One Mind Youth Movement when she was 19 years old, after a wave of young people on the Cheyenne River Sioux Reservation died by suicide. The youth group, formed with Charger’s cousin Joseph White Eyes and friend Trenton Casillas-Bakeberg, petitioned the tribal council for youth safe houses. The youth movement became politically active and also protested the Keystone XL pipeline that would cut through the Cheyenne River and the Dakota Access pipeline that would go through the neighboring Standing Rock Sioux Tribe’s land.

Charger and White Eyes formed a prayer camp in Standing Rock called “Sacred Stone.” Although it received little support from tribal elders, it became a safe haven from drugs and alcohol for native teenagers. To further raise awareness, One Mind Youth Movement ran a 500 mile relay run from North Dakota to Nebraska to deliver a letter to the Army Corps of Engineers. The letter asked the Army Corp to deny the pipeline’s access to the Mississippi River. The run involved young people from several Sioux reservations, according to the New York Times.

After the run, Charger and other members of the One Mind Youth Movement stayed at Standing Rock to continue to protest. She told Democracy Nowthat she wants more young women to get involved: “Don’t listen to the men. Don’t listen to people telling you to go away. Make that mind up for yourself.”

How to follow Charger:

Although Charger doesn’t have any public social media accounts, you can follow One Mind Youth Movement on Facebook.

The student who ran for city council: Nadya Okamoto

Happy Lunar New Year 🌸 My resolution is that this is going to be the year that I learn to fully embrace my racial and ethnic identity, something I’ve struggled with growing up. I am energized and determined to learn more about my heritage and Asian American culture, and seek out and share the stories of badass AAPI trailblazers who have paved the way for young women like me. 💪🏽

A post shared by Nadya Okamoto (@nadyaokamoto) on Feb 17, 2018 at 6:40pm PST

Nadya Okamoto made headlines last year when she ran for Cambridge City Council in Massachusetts at only 19 years old, making her the youngest candidate in the race. She ran on a platform of housing policy, focussing on the prevention of gentrification in Cambridge’s low-income neighborhoods. Although she ultimately lost the election, the Harvard College student remained active in civic engagement.

In 2014, she co-founded PERIOD, a nonprofit organization that distributes sanitary products to people in need, aiming to de-stigmatize menstruation through social and legal change. Okamoto’s family was homeless during her freshman and sophomore years of high school, and she noticed that care packages for homeless women often lacked menstrual products.

She was inspired to create PERIOD after conversations with other homeless women, who often resorted to unconventional and unsanitary methods because they couldn’t afford pads and tampons.

“It really is a huge obstacle to global development because it’s holding back more than half our population,” Okamoto told The Cut in 2016, “We say the menstrual movement is our push to make menstrual hygiene and menstruation a more open topic.”

How to follow Okamoto:

Follow Okamoto on Twitter and Instagram to keep up with her work.

The girl fighting for clean water in Flint: Mari Copeny

Soon the world will know my name, my time is now. I am not just the future but I am the present, watch me change the world. #HereWeAre pic.twitter.com/u4qVfbfgoE

— Mari Copeny (@LittleMissFlint) March 5, 2018

Amariyanna “Mari” Copeny is one of the youngest activists on Twitter. The ten year old, who posts under the handle “Little Miss Flint” with her mother’s help, has been fighting for clean water in Flint, Michigan for the past few years. Copeny has organized water drives and distributed school supplies to other children in Flint, where costly bottled water claimed many families’ budgets. She also attended the Congressional hearings on the water crisis in Washington, DC.

She became famous for her letter to then-president Barack Obama in 2016, which prompted him to visit Flint himself. “Letters from kids like you are what make me so optimistic for the future,” he wrote back.

Copeny also met President Trump, who had a part in facilitating the $100 million EPA grant to fix Flint’s infrastructure. Her reaction to meeting him was noticeably different. She later criticized Trump in a video because “He didn’t even let me ask one question.”

Little Miss Flint is all of us in 2016. pic.twitter.com/grsNmSTBnd

— Abraham White (@abwhite7) September 15, 2016

Copeny also raised $16,000 through GoFundMe to help underprivileged children in Flint see Black Panther. The campaign raised enough to buy 750 tickets and Black Panther merchandise, according to the Washington Post.

Although Flint’s lead levels are low enough for federal standards, residents say they’re still experiencing negative effects. Copeny has been running a campaign called “Don’t Forget Flint,” selling shirts to remind people that the water crisis isn’t over. Proceeds will go to the anti-bullying program TSP.

How to follow Copeny:

You can follow Copeny on Twitter, where she frequently posts with her mother’s supervision.

The young advocates fighting for equality on all fronts show just what modern feminism should look like. There’s no such thing as “too young” to be an activist.

WATCH: Vans is teaching girls in India how to skate

youtube

Read more: https://mashable.com/2018/03/08/young-activists-to-follow/

from Viral News HQ http://ift.tt/2tOQeZG via Viral News HQ

#IFTTT #Viral News HQ

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outsidespaceblog · 7 years ago

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Montréal’s Pot Luck Startup | Canada

by Charles Daly

All the Marrow

It’s Saturday night in late August, typically Montréal’s last month of t-shirt weather. I’m sitting at a picnic bench with group of young Montréalers eating Haitian food off paper plates. My portion is the envy of the table because I got a large bone in it, full of marrow, which my dinner companions are teaching me how to extract. This is my first time having goat. I probe the hollow end timidly with my plastic fork. Finally I’m told have to suck out the marrow—and don’t be shy about making noises.

Tonight is Haiti Night at the Village au Pied-du-Currant, a public space on the banks of the St. Laurence River that has been transformed over the past four summers into an ongoing multicultural festival.

The Village

Built on the gritty sand of an urban beach, the Village is a cluster of land/sea containers converted into galleries, kitchens and bars, purpose built sheds and cabanas, a scaffolding rooftop bar with a view down the river, and open spaces for eating, dancing and playing.

So far this summer the Village has hosted food festivals showcasing West African, East Asian, Mexican, and Brazilian cuisine, South American folklore for kids, movie nights, a night market, community yoga—in collaboration with Lululemon, and a “1990s Brooklyn” themed night that one local described as “the best thing I did all summer.” They finished off the season with a “punky reggae party.”

The Village is built–and rebuilt every summer–on a previously vacant and overgrown lot, separated from the banks of the river by railroad tracks that serve the port and carry functioning land/sea containers to and from cargo ships.

This is “the river” from Leonard Cohen’s “Suzanne.”

The bridge, slightly upstream is named for Jacques Cartier, the founder of Montréal, and is lit up every night this summer in celebration the 375th anniversary of his accomplishment.

Across the water, at La Ronde, an amusement hosts a summer-long international fireworks competition. The Village started as a place to catch the show for free.

The Potluck Startup

The Village and its festivals are the brainchild of La Pépinière, the nursery, a startup that works to connect communities with the city around them in under-utilized public spaces. Their approach is to provide the space and the logistics and empower the community to do the rest. Co-Founder Maxim Bragoli explains, “Most government and civic event planning starts with the funds and the logistics, put something together and hope the people respond. We start with the people.”

When I spoke with Maxim and Raphaëlle Bilodeau, Pépinière’s executive director, they both objected to the word “event.” To them, an event is a spectacle or a commercial enterprise, something that’s sold to the public from outside for a profit. Raphaëlle describes what they do as “place making.”

One place they made was a public woodworking shop at the Village. Some people used it to make toboggans. Yves Plante, a professional sailor, used the space to teach the art of boat making. He soon launched his own non-profit, Juenes Marins Urbains (young urban sailors.) Their motto: “Changing the world, one boat at a time.”

Pépenière has projects in 8 of Montréal’s 19 boroughs and they are constantly branching out. Their goal is to design a template for action that could work anywhere.

In keeping with their startup ethos, they make improvements to the village, based on feedback, with each seasonal rebuild. The brightly painted land/sea containers double as storage for the Village’s many parts in the winter.

When sourcing food, Pépinière looks for authenticity. They use their community connections to find the best food according to the community it comes from, not just what’s trendy. You know, that one Korean restaurant where they speak Hangul and serve homemade kimchi, not the other one with “dumplings” on the menu and a scorpion bowl happy-hour Thursday nights.

According to Raphaëlle, “our metric for authenticity is inclusion. It’s a public space, so we should see the public there. All types and ages. Our great fear is that this will just be a hipster thing or just attract whoever.”

Haiti night is a success, if the dance floor is anything to go by. You see a mix of people who clearly knew the songs and the moves, some who wore Haitian flag bandanas, and people of Montréal’s many other backgrounds and colors all having a blast. At midnight, a drum line leads a thousand or so party-goers through the village.

I asked my dinner friends about this. I couldn’t put my finger on it, but the vibe was different from something you’d see south of the border, even in a place like Brooklyn or L.A.

“Diversity just isn’t cliquey here,” says Andolina, my new Chinese-Dominican-Quebecoise friend. Her friend Adam, a native Montréaler can’t find the word in English, but settles on “joyous togetherness” to describe the city’s prevailing attitude.

Maxim calls Montréal “a patch work of inclusion.” He points to the four flowers on the city’s flag for the four nations that founded the city: the fleur de lis for the French, a shamrock for the Irish, the English rose, and Scottish thistle. This year, the city added a white pine at the center of the flag for the first peoples of Montreal, a symbol chosen by that group.

Before there was a restaurant scene or young startups bringing food to the community, Montréalers shared their family recipes and the cuisine of their home countries. Pépinière joins the food-trucks and pop-up restaurants in brining this “pot luck culture” into the 21st century.

Cultural Entrepreneurship

The culture of inclusion is inseparable from the city’s business ethos. Montréal sees itself as a brand. Their main industry is the city itself and the myriad sights and tastes it offers visitors. This isn’t sanctimony or an effort to stick it to their less tolerant southern neighbors. It’s business. Pépinière joins a tradition of cultural entrepreneurship. Montréal manufactures experiences and connections. Maxim calls it a “city of festivals.” Montréal’s best known export is Cirque du Soleil, the circus reimagined, which spawned a lighting and stagecraft industry that also works with Celine Dion–or simply Celine as she’s known up here–and Quebec’s film industry.

Haiti’s Brain-Drain, Montréal’s gain

Everyone I spoke with at the Village seemed to have some knowledge of Haitian food, this makes sense given the Haitian community’s prominence and long history in Montréal. Haitians fleeing poverty and political turmoil have come to Quebec since the 1960s. The province is popular for its linguistic and cultural commonalities that make assimilation easier. In Canada, immigrants from the poorest country in the western hemisphere found not only a better life but a place in the middle class. As one frequently quoted statistic has it, there have been more Haitian doctors in Canada than in Haiti since the 1970s. According to historian and Haitian-American Maxo Marc, Montréal and Quebec are Haitian cities in the same way Chicago and Boston are Irish. (He points out that Chicago, by the way, was founded by a Haitian, Jean-Baptist-Point Du Sable.)

Unfortunately, new arrivals haven’t been so lucky. The latest wave of Haitian immigrants are coming not from Haiti, but from the United States. Fearing the new administrations immigration policies, and chasing rumors of an open-door policy, thousands are heading north, often crossing illegally. Once in Canada, they face an asylum seeking process that sees about half of applicants deported back to Haiti. They await their fate in “Welcome Centers” (read: shelters.) In Montréal, the Olympic Stadium is a temporary home for hundreds of Haitian asylum seekers.

Pépinière found themselves in a unique position to help the Stadium’s residents. Their space in the public garden is right next to the stadium. They organized a day of activities, food and music in collaboration with Maison d’Haiti. This wasn’t a political act, it was a matter of brining fun and recreation to people who haven’t had much of either in a while. There are plenty of NGOs and government bureaus interested in giving these people handouts and necessities, but Pépinière addresses their need to relax and get their minds off their tenuous situation, if only for a day.

The field day at the stadium was a welcome to Montréal, of sorts. The day included Haitian food, but also showcased the city’s global cuisine.

We’re not in Canada

We wait in line for goat for about an hour. There’s an even longer line for griot. People hold their places in the queue while friends go to bring back fresco—shaved ice—and ti’ punch—a rum cocktail. We talk about food as we wait to eat. Catherine, a child psychologist who works with refugees and immigrants, tells me she waited two hours for jerk chicken on Caribbean night and they ran out by the time it was her turn. We’re told they’re prepared for the demand tonight and there’ll still be plenty when we make it to the grill.

I meet Cordia, Andolina, and Adam in line. Three friends who go on “food crawls” every weekend. They make fast friends with Catherine, debating where the best gnocchi is to be found. They recommend places I must try while I’m here, from a Hungarian butcher, to a new Palestinian spot. “We try not to go to the same place twice,” Cordia tells me, “and we’re not even close to trying every place.” And they probably never will, considering Montréal has the most restaurants per capita of any Canadian city, and is second only to New York in North America. When I ask them to pick a favorite, they can’t.

Catherine teases that my favorites so far have been poutine–Quebec’s answer to chilli cheese fries–and Tim Horton’s coffee. They crack up.

Adam is representing his borough with a t-shirt featuring the neighborhood’s name and the image of a typical Montréal street of balconied triplex apartments. He says he’s from his borough first, then he’s a Montréaler, then Québécois, and finally Canadian.

In the summer he commutes to work by kayak and I tell him that’s pretty Canadian if you ask me. As a local, he tells me it’s easy to forget all that’s available right in his backyard. He credits his friends from elsewhere with giving him a new take on his hometown. “I discovered Montréal through friends who moved here.”

Cordia moved here from Hong Kong eight years ago. When it came to learning French she says she started with the food words, and that was enough to make friends.

The post Montréal’s Pot Luck Startup | Canada appeared first on roam.

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comfsy · 7 years ago

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Montréal’s Pot Luck Startup | Canada

by Charles Daly

All the Marrow

The Village

This is “the river” from Leonard Cohen’s “Suzanne.”

The bridge, slightly upstream is named for Jacques Cartier, the founder of Montréal, and is lit up every night this summer in celebration the 375th anniversary of his accomplishment.

Across the water, at La Ronde, an amusement hosts a summer-long international fireworks competition. The Village started as a place to catch the show for free.

The Potluck Startup

Pépenière has projects in 8 of Montréal’s 19 boroughs and they are constantly branching out. Their goal is to design a template for action that could work anywhere.

I asked my dinner friends about this. I couldn’t put my finger on it, but the vibe was different from something you’d see south of the border, even in a place like Brooklyn or L.A.

Cultural Entrepreneurship

Haiti’s Brain-Drain, Montréal’s gain

The field day at the stadium was a welcome to Montréal, of sorts. The day included Haitian food, but also showcased the city’s global cuisine.

We’re not in Canada

Catherine teases that my favorites so far have been poutine–Quebec’s answer to chilli cheese fries–and Tim Horton’s coffee. They crack up.

Cordia moved here from Hong Kong eight years ago. When it came to learning French she says she started with the food words, and that was enough to make friends.

The post Montréal’s Pot Luck Startup | Canada appeared first on roam.

Montréal’s Pot Luck Startup | Canada published first on http://ift.tt/2vmoAQU

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fautpaspousser-fpp · 8 years ago

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Discours de @JohnKerry qui fera date

sur Israël et le proche orient le 28 Dec 2016

SECRETARY KERRY: Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you very, very much. Thank you. (Coughs.) Excuse me. Thank you for your patience, all of you. For those of you who celebrated Christmas, I hope you had a wonderful Christmas. Happy Chanukah. And to everybody here, I know it’s the middle of a holiday week. I understand. (Laughter.) But I wish you all a very, very productive and Happy New Year.

Today, I want to share candid thoughts about an issue which for decades has animated the foreign policy dialogue here and around the world – the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Throughout his Administration, President Obama has been deeply committed to Israel and its security, and that commitment has guided his pursuit of peace in the Middle East. This is an issue which, all of you know, I have worked on intensively during my time as Secretary of State for one simple reason: because the two-state solution is the only way to achieve a just and lasting peace between Israelis and Palestinians. It is the only way to ensure Israel’s future as a Jewish and democratic state, living in peace and security with its neighbors. It is the only way to ensure a future of freedom and dignity for the Palestinian people. And it is an important way of advancing United States interests in the region.

Now, I’d like to explain why that future is now in jeopardy, and provide some context for why we could not, in good conscience, stand in the way of a resolution at the United Nations that makes clear that both sides must act now to preserve the possibility of peace.

I’m also here to share my conviction that there is still a way forward if the responsible parties are willing to act. And I want to share practical suggestions for how to preserve and advance the prospects for the just and lasting peace that both sides deserve.

So it is vital that we have an honest, clear-eyed conversation about the uncomfortable truths and difficult choices, because the alternative that is fast becoming the reality on the ground is in nobody’s interest – not the Israelis, not the Palestinians, not the region – and not the United States.

Now, I want to stress that there is an important point here: My job, above all, is to defend the United States of America – to stand up for and defend our values and our interests in the world. And if we were to stand idly by and know that in doing so we are allowing a dangerous dynamic to take hold which promises greater conflict and instability to a region in which we have vital interests, we would be derelict in our own responsibilities.

Regrettably, some seem to believe that the U.S. friendship means the U.S. must accept any policy, regardless of our own interests, our own positions, our own words, our own principles – even after urging again and again that the policy must change. Friends need to tell each other the hard truths, and friendships require mutual respect.

Israel’s permanent representative to the United Nations, who does not support a two-state solution, said after the vote last week, quote, “It was to be expected that Israel’s greatest ally would act in accordance with the values that we share,” and veto this resolution. I am compelled to respond today that the United States did, in fact, vote in accordance with our values, just as previous U.S. administrations have done at the Security Council before us.

They fail to recognize that this friend, the United States of America, that has done more to support Israel than any other country, this friend that has blocked countless efforts to delegitimize Israel, cannot be true to our own values – or even the stated democratic values of Israel – and we cannot properly defend and protect Israel if we allow a viable two-state solution to be destroyed before our own eyes.

And that’s the bottom line: the vote in the United Nations was about preserving the two-state solution. That’s what we were standing up for: Israel’s future as a Jewish and democratic state, living side by side in peace and security with its neighbors. That’s what we are trying to preserve for our sake and for theirs.

In fact, this Administration has been Israel’s greatest friend and supporter, with an absolutely unwavering commitment to advancing Israel’s security and protecting its legitimacy.

On this point, I want to be very clear: No American administration has done more for Israel’s security than Barack Obama’s. The Israeli prime minister himself has noted our, quote, “unprecedented” military and intelligence cooperation. Our military exercises are more advanced than ever. Our assistance for Iron Dome has saved countless Israeli lives. We have consistently supported Israel’s right to defend itself, by itself, including during actions in Gaza that sparked great controversy.

Time and again we have demonstrated that we have Israel’s back. We have strongly opposed boycotts, divestment campaigns, and sanctions targeting Israel in international fora, whenever and wherever its legitimacy was attacked, and we have fought for its inclusion across the UN system. In the midst of our own financial crisis and budget deficits, we repeatedly increased funding to support Israel. In fact, more than one-half of our entire global Foreign Military Financing goes to Israel. And this fall, we concluded an historic $38 billion memorandum of understanding that exceeds any military assistance package the United States has provided to any country, at any time, and that will invest in cutting-edge missile defense and sustain Israel’s qualitative military edge for years to come. That’s the measure of our support.

This commitment to Israel’s security is actually very personal for me. On my first trip to Israel as a young senator in 1986, I was captivated by a special country, one that I immediately admired and soon grew to love. Over the years, like so many others who are drawn to this extraordinary place, I have climbed Masada, swum in the Dead Sea, driven from one Biblical city to another. I’ve also seen the dark side of Hizballah’s rocket storage facilities just across the border in Lebanon, walked through exhibits of the hell of the Holocaust at Yad Vashem, stood on the Golan Heights, and piloted an Israeli jet over the tiny airspace of Israel, which would make anyone understand the importance of security to Israelis. Out of those experiences came a steadfast commitment to Israel’s security that has never wavered for a single minute in my 28 years in the Senate or my four years as Secretary.

I have also often visited West Bank communities, where I met Palestinians struggling for basic freedom and dignity amidst the occupation, passed by military checkpoints that can make even the most routine daily trips to work or school an ordeal, and heard from business leaders who could not get the permits that they needed to get their products to the market and families who have struggled to secure permission just to travel for needed medical care.

And I have witnessed firsthand the ravages of a conflict that has gone on for far too long. I’ve seen Israeli children in Sderot whose playgrounds had been hit by Katyusha rockets. I’ve visited shelters next to schools in Kiryat Shmona that kids had 15 seconds to get to after a warning siren went off. I’ve also seen the devastation of war in the Gaza Strip, where Palestinian girls in Izbet Abed Rabo played in the rubble of a bombed-out building.

No children – Israeli or Palestinian – should have to live like that.

So, despite the obvious difficulties that I understood when I became Secretary of State, I knew that I had to do everything in my power to help end this conflict. And I was grateful to be working for President Obama, who was prepared to take risks for peace and was deeply committed to that effort.

Like previous U.S. administrations, we have committed our influence and our resources to trying to resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict because, yes, it would serve American interests to stabilize a volatile region and fulfill America’s commitment to the survival, security and well-being of an Israel at peace with its Arab neighbors.

Despite our best efforts over the years, the two-state solution is now in serious jeopardy.

The truth is that trends on the ground – violence, terrorism, incitement, settlement expansion and the seemingly endless occupation – they are combining to destroy hopes for peace on both sides and increasingly cementing an irreversible one-state reality that most people do not actually want.

Today, there are a number – there are a similar number of Jews and Palestinians living between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. They have a choice. They can choose to live together in one state, or they can separate into two states. But here is a fundamental reality: if the choice is one state, Israel can either be Jewish or democratic – it cannot be both – and it won’t ever really be at peace. Moreover, the Palestinians will never fully realize their vast potential in a homeland of their own with a one-state solution.

Now, most on both sides understand this basic choice, and that is why it is important that polls of Israelis and Palestinians show that there is still strong support for the two-state solution – in theory. They just don’t believe that it can happen.

After decades of conflict, many no longer see the other side as people, only as threats and enemies. Both sides continue to push a narrative that plays to people’s fears and reinforces the worst stereotypes rather than working to change perceptions and build up belief in the possibility of peace.

And the truth is the extraordinary polarization in this conflict extends beyond Israelis and Palestinians. Allies of both sides are content to reinforce this with an us or – “you’re with us or against us” mentality where too often anyone who questions Palestinian actions is an apologist for the occupation and anyone who disagrees with Israel policy is cast as anti-Israel or even anti-Semitic.

That’s one of the most striking realties about the current situation: This critical decision about the future – one state or two states – is effectively being made on the ground every single day, despite the expressed opinion of the majority of the people.

The status quo is leading towards one state and perpetual occupation, but most of the public either ignores it or has given up hope that anything can be done to change it. And with this passive resignation, the problem only gets worse, the risks get greater and the choices are narrowed.

This sense of hopelessness among Israelis is exacerbated by the continuing violence, terrorist attacks against civilians and incitement, which are destroying belief in the possibility of peace.

Let me say it again: There is absolutely no justification for terrorism, and there never will be.

And the most recent wave of Palestinian violence has included hundreds of terrorist attacks in the past year, including stabbings, shootings, vehicular attacks and bombings, many by individuals who have been radicalized by social media. Yet the murderers of innocents are still glorified on Fatah websites, including showing attackers next to Palestinian leaders following attacks. And despite statements by President Abbas and his party’s leaders making clear their opposition to violence, too often they send a different message by failing to condemn specific terrorist attacks and naming public squares, streets and schools after terrorists.

President Obama and I have made it clear to the Palestinian leadership countless times, publicly and privately, that all incitement to violence must stop. We have consistently condemned violence and terrorism, and even condemned the Palestinian leadership for not condemning it.

Far too often, the Palestinians have pursued efforts to delegitimize Israel in international fora. We have strongly opposed these initiatives, including the recent wholly unbalanced and inflammatory UNESCO resolution regarding Jerusalem. And we have made clear our strong opposition to Palestinian efforts against Israel at the ICC, which only sets back the prospects for peace.

And we all understand that the Palestinian Authority has a lot more to do to strengthen its institutions and improve governance.

Most troubling of all, Hamas continues to pursue an extremist agenda: they refuse to accept Israel’s very right to exist. They have a one-state vision of their own: all of the land is Palestine. Hamas and other radical factions are responsible for the most explicit forms of incitement to violence, and many of the images that they use are truly appalling. And they are willing to kill innocents in Israel and put the people of Gaza at risk in order to advance that agenda.

Compounding this, the humanitarian situation in Gaza, exacerbated by the closings of the crossings, is dire. Gaza is home to one of the world’s densest concentrations of people enduring extreme hardships with few opportunities. 1.3 million people out of Gaza’s population of 1.8 million are in need of daily assistance – food and shelter. Most have electricity less than half the time and only 5 percent of the water is safe to drink. And yet despite the urgency of these needs, Hamas and other militant groups continue to re-arm and divert reconstruction materials to build tunnels, threatening more attacks on Israeli civilians that no government can tolerate.

Now, at the same time, we have to be clear about what is happening in the West Bank. The Israeli prime minister publicly supports a two-state solution, but his current coalition is the most right wing in Israeli history, with an agenda driven by the most extreme elements. The result is that policies of this government, which the prime minister himself just described as “more committed to settlements than any in Israel's history,” are leading in the opposite direction. They're leading towards one state. In fact, Israel has increasingly consolidated control over much of the West Bank for its own purposes, effectively reversing the transitions to greater Palestinian civil authority that were called for by the Oslo Accords.

I don’t think most people in Israel, and certainly in the world, have any idea how broad and systematic the process has become. But the facts speak for themselves. The number of settlers in the roughly 130 Israeli settlements east of the 1967 lines has steadily grown. The settler population in the West Bank alone, not including East Jerusalem, has increased by nearly 270,000 since Oslo, including 100,000 just since 2009, when President Obama's term began.

There's no point in pretending that these are just in large settlement blocks. Nearly 90,000 settlers are living east of the separation barrier that was created by Israel itself in the middle of what, by any reasonable definition, would be the future Palestinian state. And the population of these distant settlements has grown by 20,000 just since 2009. In fact, just recently the government approved a significant new settlement well east of the barrier, closer to Jordan than to Israel. What does that say to Palestinians in particular – but also to the United States and the world – about Israel’s intentions?

Let me emphasize, this is not to say that the settlements are the whole or even the primary cause of this conflict. Of course they are not. Nor can you say that if the settlements were suddenly removed, you’d have peace. Without a broader agreement, you would not. And we understand that in a final status agreement, certain settlements would become part of Israel to account for the changes that have taken place over the last 49 years – we understand that – including the new democratic demographic realities that exist on the ground. They would have to be factored in. But if more and more settlers are moving into the middle of Palestinian areas, it’s going to be just that much harder to separate, that much harder to imagine transferring sovereignty, and that is exactly the outcome that some are purposefully accelerating.

Let’s be clear: Settlement expansion has nothing to do with Israel's security. Many settlements actually increase the security burden on the Israeli Defense Forces. And leaders of the settler movement are motivated by ideological imperatives that entirely ignore legitimate Palestinian aspirations.

Among the most troubling illustrations of this point has been the proliferation of settler outposts that are illegal under Israel’s own laws. They’re often located on private Palestinian land and strategically placed in locations that make two states impossible. There are over 100 of these outposts. And since 2011, nearly one-third of them have been or are being legalized, despite pledges by past Israeli governments to dismantle many of them.

Now leaders of the settler movement have advanced unprecedented new legislation that would legalize most of those outposts. For the first time, it would apply Israeli domestic law to the West Bank rather than military law, which is a major step towards the process of annexation. When the law passed the first reading in the Israeli parliament, in the Knesset, one of the chief proponents said proudly – and I quote – “Today, the Israeli Knesset moved from heading towards establishing a Palestinian state towards Israeli sovereignty in Judea and Samaria.” Even the Israeli attorney general has said that the draft law is unconstitutional and a violation of international law.

Now, you may hear from advocates that the settlements are not an obstacle to peace because the settlers who don’t want to leave can just stay in Palestine, like the Arab Israelis who live in Israel. But that misses a critical point, my friends. The Arab Israelis are citizens of Israel, subject to Israel’s law. Does anyone here really believe that the settlers will agree to submit to Palestinian law in Palestine?

Likewise, some supporters of the settlements argue that the settlers could just stay in their settlements and remain as Israeli citizens in their separate enclaves in the middle of Palestine, protected by the IDF. Well, there are over 80 settlements east of the separation barrier, many located in places that would make a continuous – a contiguous Palestinian state impossible. Does anyone seriously think that if they just stay where they are you could still have a viable Palestinian state?

Now, some have asked, “Why can’t we build in the blocs which everyone knows will eventually be part of Israel?” Well, the reason building there or anywhere else in the West Bank now results in such pushback is that the decision of what constitutes a bloc is being made unilaterally by the Israeli Government, without consultation, without the consent of the Palestinians, and without granting the Palestinians a reciprocal right to build in what will be, by most accounts, part of Palestine. Bottom line – without agreement or mutuality, the unilateral choices become a major point of contention, and that is part of why we are here where we are.

You may hear that these remote settlements aren’t a problem because they only take up a very small percentage of the land. Well, again and again we have made it clear, it’s not just a question of the overall amount of land available in the West Bank. It’s whether the land can be connected or it’s broken up into small parcels, like a Swiss cheese, that could never constitute a real state. The more outposts that are built, the more the settlements expand, the less possible it is to create a contiguous state. So in the end, a settlement is not just the land that it’s on, it’s also what the location does to the movement of people, what it does to the ability of a road to connect people, one community to another, what it does to the sense of statehood that is chipped away with each new construction. No one thinking seriously about peace can ignore the reality of what the settlements pose to that peace.

But the problem, obviously, goes well beyond settlements. Trends indicate a comprehensive effort to take the West Bank land for Israel and prevent any Palestinian development there. Today, the 60 percent of the West Bank known as Area C – much of which was supposed to be transferred to Palestinian control long ago under the Oslo Accords – much of it is effectively off limits to Palestinian development. Most today has essentially been taken for exclusive use by Israel simply by unilaterally designating it as “state land” or including it within the jurisdiction of regional settlement councils. Israeli farms flourish in the Jordan River Valley, and Israeli resorts line the shores of the Dead Sea – a lot of people don’t realize this – they line the shore of the Dead Sea, where Palestinian development is not allowed. In fact, almost no private Palestinian building is approved in Area C at all. Only one permit was issued by Israel in all of 2014 and 2015, while approvals for hundreds of settlement units were advanced during that same period.

Moreover, Palestinian structures in Area C that do not have a permit from the Israeli military are potentially subject to demolition. And they are currently being demolished at an historically high rate. Over 1,300 Palestinians, including over 600 children, have been displaced by demolitions in 2016 alone – more than any previous year.

So the settler agenda is defining the future of Israel. And their stated purpose is clear. They believe in one state: greater Israel. In fact, one prominent minister, who heads a pro-settler party, declared just after the U.S. election – and I quote – “the era of the two-state solution is over,” end quote. And many other coalition ministers publicly reject a Palestinian state. And they are increasingly getting their way, with plans for hundreds of new units in East Jerusalem recently announced and talk of a major new settlement building effort in the West Bank to follow.

So why are we so concerned? Why does this matter? Well, ask yourself these questions: What happens if that agenda succeeds? Where does that lead?

There are currently about 2.75 million Palestinians living under military occupation in the West Bank, most of them in Areas A and B – 40 percent of the West Bank – where they have limited autonomy. They are restricted in their daily movements by a web of checkpoints and unable to travel into or out of the West Bank without a permit from the Israelis.

So if there is only one state, you would have millions of Palestinians permanently living in segregated enclaves in the middle of the West Bank, with no real political rights, separate legal, education, and transportation systems, vast income disparities, under a permanent military occupation that deprives them of the most basic freedoms. Separate and unequal is what you would have. And nobody can explain how that works. Would an Israeli accept living that way? Would an American accept living that way? Will the world accept it?

If the occupation becomes permanent, over the time the Palestinian Authority could simply dissolve, turn over all the administrative and security responsibilities to the Israelis. What would happen then? Who would administer the schools and hospitals and on what basis? Does Israel want to pay for the billions of dollars of lost international assistance that the Palestinian Authority now receives? Would the Israel Defense Force police the streets of every single Palestinian city and town?

How would Israel respond to a growing civil rights movement from Palestinians, demanding a right to vote, or widespread protests and unrest across the West Bank? How does Israel reconcile a permanent occupation with its democratic ideals? How does the U.S. continue to defend that and still live up to our own democratic ideals?

Nobody has ever provided good answers to those questions because there aren’t any. And there would be an increasing risk of more intense violence between Palestinians and settlers, and complete despair among Palestinians that would create very fertile ground for extremists.

With all the external threats that Israel faces today, which we are very cognizant of and working with them to deal with, does it really want an intensifying conflict in the West Bank? How does that help Israel’s security? How does that help the region?

The answer is it doesn’t, which is precisely why so many senior Israeli military and intelligence leaders, past and present, believe the two-state solution is the only real answer for Israel’s long term security.

Now, one thing we do know: if Israel goes down the one state path, it will never have true peace with the rest of the Arab world, and I can say that with certainty. The Arab countries have made clear that they will not make peace with Israel without resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. That’s not where their loyalties lie. That’s not where their politics are.

But there is something new here. Common interests in countering Iran’s destabilizing activities, and fighting extremists, as well as diversifying their economies have created real possibilities for something different is Israel takes advantage of the opportunities for peace. I have spent a great deal of time with key Arab leaders exploring this, and there is no doubt that they are prepared to have a fundamentally different relationship with Israel. That was stated in the Arab Peace Initiative, years ago. And in all my recent conversations, Arab leaders have confirmed their readiness, in the context of Israeli-Palestinian peace, not just to normalize relations but to work openly on securing that peace with significant regional security cooperation. It’s waiting. It’s right there.

Many have shown a willingness to support serious Israeli-Palestinian negotiations and to take steps on the path to normalization to relations, including public meetings, providing there is a meaningful progress towards a two-state solution. My friends, that is a real opportunity that we should not allow to be missed.

And that raises one final question: Is ours the generation that gives up on the dream of a Jewish democratic state of Israel living in peace and security with its neighbors? Because that is really what is at stake.

Now, that is what informed our vote at the Security Council last week – the need to preserve the two-state solution – and both sides in this conflict must take responsibility to do that. We have repeatedly and emphatically stressed to the Palestinians that all incitement to violence must stop. We have consistently condemned all violence and terrorism, and we have strongly opposed unilateral efforts to delegitimize Israel in international fora.

We’ve made countless public and private exhortations to the Israelis to stop the march of settlements. In literally hundreds of conversations with Prime Minister Netanyahu, I have made clear that continued settlement activity would only increase pressure for an international response. We have all known for some time that the Palestinians were intent on moving forward in the UN with a settlements resolution, and I advised the prime minister repeatedly that further settlement activity only invited UN action.

Yet the settlement activity just increased, including advancing the unprecedented legislation to legalize settler outposts that the prime minister himself reportedly warned could expose Israel to action at the Security Council and even international prosecution before deciding to support it.

In the end, we could not in good conscience protect the most extreme elements of the settler movement as it tries to destroy the two-state solution. We could not in good conscience turn a blind eye to Palestinian actions that fan hatred and violence. It is not in U.S. interest to help anyone on either side create a unitary state. And we may not be able to stop them, but we cannot be expected to defend them. And it is certainly not the role of any country to vote against its own policies.

That is why we decided not to block the UN resolution that makes clear both sides have to take steps to save the two-state solution while there is still time. And we did not take this decision lightly. The Obama Administration has always defended Israel against any effort at the UN and any international fora or biased and one-sided resolutions that seek to undermine its legitimacy or security, and that has not changed. It didn’t change with this vote.

But remember it’s important to note that every United States administration, Republican and Democratic, has opposed settlements as contrary to the prospects for peace, and action at the UN Security Council is far from unprecedented. In fact, previous administrations of both political parties have allowed resolutions that were critical of Israel to pass, including on settlements. On dozens of occasions under George W. Bush alone, the council passed six resolutions that Israel opposed, including one that endorsed a plan calling for a complete freeze on settlements, including natural growth.

Let me read you the lead paragraph from a New York Times story dated December 23rd. I quote: “With the United States abstaining, the Security Council adopted a resolution today strongly deploring Israel’s handling of the disturbances in the occupied territories, which the resolution defined as, including Jerusalem. All of the 14 other Security Council members voted in favor.” My friends, that story was not written last week. It was written December 23rd, 1987, 26 years to the day that we voted last week, when Ronald Reagan was president.

Yet despite growing pressure, the Obama Administration held a strong line against UN action, any UN action, we were the only administration since 1967 that had not allowed any resolution to pass that Israel opposed. In fact, the only time in eight years the Obama Administration exercised its veto at the United Nations was against a one-sided settlements resolution in 2011. And that resolution did not mention incitement or violence.

Now let’s look at what’s happened since then. Since then, there have been over 30,000 settlement units advanced through some stage of the planning process. That’s right – over 30,000 settlement units advanced notwithstanding the positions of the United States and other countries. And if we had vetoed this resolution just the other day, the United States would have been giving license to further unfettered settlement construction that we fundamentally oppose.

So we reject the criticism that this vote abandons Israel. On the contrary, it is not this resolution that is isolating Israel; it is the permanent policy of settlement construction that risks making peace impossible. And virtually every country in the world other than Israel opposes settlements. That includes many of the friends of Israel, including the United Kingdom, France, Russia – all of whom voted in favor of the settlements resolution in 2011 that we vetoed, and again this year along with every other member of the council.

In fact, this resolution simply reaffirms statements made by the Security Council on the legality of settlements over several decades. It does not break new ground. In 1978, the State Department Legal Adviser advised the Congress on his conclusion that Israel’s government, the Israeli Government’s program of establishing civilian settlements in the occupied territory is inconsistent with international law, and we see no change since then to affect that fundamental conclusion.

Now, you may have heard that some criticized this resolution for calling East Jerusalem occupied territory. But to be clear, there was absolutely nothing new in last week’s resolution on that issue. It was one of a long line of Security Council resolutions that included East Jerusalem as part of the territories occupied by Israel in 1967, and that includes resolutions passed by the Security Council under President Reagan and President George H.W. Bush. And remember that every U.S. administration since 1967, along with the entire international community, has recognized East Jerusalem as among the territories that Israel occupied in the Six-Day War.

Now, I want to stress this point: We fully respect Israel’s profound historic and religious ties to the city and to its holy sites. We’ve never questioned that. This resolution in no manner prejudges the outcome of permanent status negotiations on East Jerusalem, which must, of course, reflect those historic ties and the realities on the ground. That’s our position. We still support it.

We also strongly reject the notion that somehow the United States was the driving force behind this resolution. The Egyptians and Palestinians had long made clear to all of us – to all of the international community – their intention to bring a resolution to a vote before the end of the year, and we communicated that to the Israelis and they knew it anyway. The United States did not draft or originate this resolution, nor did we put it forward. It was drafted by Egypt – it was drafted and I think introduced by Egypt, which is one of Israel’s closest friends in the region, in coordination with the Palestinians and others.

And during the time of the process as it went out, we made clear to others, including those on the Security Council, that it was possible that if the resolution were to be balanced and it were to include references to incitement and to terrorism, that it was possible the United States would then not block it, that – if it was balanced and fair. That’s a standard practice with resolutions at the Security Council. The Egyptians and the Palestinians and many others understood that if the text were more balanced, it was possible we wouldn’t block it. But we also made crystal clear that the President of the United States would not make a final decision about our own position until we saw the final text.

In the end, we did not agree with every word in this resolution. There are important issues that are not sufficiently addressed or even addressed at all. But we could not in good conscience veto a resolution that condemns violence and incitement and reiterates what has been for a long time the overwhelming consensus and international view on settlements and calls for the parties to start taking constructive steps to advance the two-state solution on the ground.

Ultimately, it will be up to the Israeli people to decide whether the unusually heated attacks that Israeli officials have directed towards this Administration best serve Israel’s national interests and its relationship with an ally that has been steadfast in its support, as I described. Those attacks, alongside allegations of U.S.-led conspiracy and other manufactured claims, distract attention from what the substance of this vote was really all about.

And we all understand that Israel faces very serious threats in a very tough neighborhood. Israelis are rightfully concerned about making sure that there is not a new terrorist haven right next door to them, often referencing what’s happened with Gaza, and we understand that and we believe there are ways to meet those needs of security. And Israelis are fully justified in decrying attempts to legitimize[1] their state and question the right of a Jewish state to exist. But this vote was not about that. It was about actions that Israelis and Palestinians are taking that are increasingly rendering a two-state solution impossible. It was not about making peace with the Palestinians now – it was about making sure that peace with the Palestinians will be possible in the future.

Now, we all understand that Israel faces extraordinary, serious threats in a very tough neighborhood. And Israelis are very correct in making sure that there’s not a terrorist haven right on their border.

But this vote – I can’t emphasize enough – is not about the possibility of arriving at an agreement that’s going to resolve that overnight or in one year or two years. This is about a longer process. This is about how we make peace with the Palestinians in the future but preserve the capacity to do so.

So how do we get there? How do we get there, to that peace?

Since the parties have not yet been able to resume talks, the U.S. and the Middle East Quartet have repeatedly called on both sides to independently demonstrate a genuine commitment to the two-state solution – not just with words, but with real actions and policies – to create the conditions for meaningful negotiations.

We’ve called for both sides to take significant steps on the ground to reverse current trends and send a different message – a clear message – that they are prepared to fundamentally change the equation without waiting for the other side to act.

We have pushed them to comply with their basic commitments under their own prior agreements in order to advance a two-state reality on the ground.

We have called for the Palestinians to do everything in their power to stop violence and incitement, including publicly and consistently condemning acts of terrorism and stopping the glorification of violence.

And we have called on them to continue efforts to strengthen their own institutions and to improve governance, transparency, and accountability.

And we have stressed that the Hamas arms buildup and militant activities in Gaza must stop.

Along with our Quartet partners, we have called on Israel to end the policy of settlement construction and expansion, of taking land for exclusive Israeli use and denying Palestinian development.

To reverse the current process, the U.S. and our partners have encouraged Israel to resume the transfer of greater civil authority to the Palestinians in Area C, consistent with the transition that was called for by Oslo. And we have made clear that significant progress across a range of sectors, including housing, agriculture, and natural resources, can be made without negatively impacting Israel’s legitimate security needs. And we’ve called for significantly easing the movement and access restrictions to and from Gaza, with due consideration for Israel’s need to protect its citizens from terrorist attacks.

So let me stress here again: None of the steps that I just talked about would negatively impact Israel’s security.

Let me also emphasize this is not about offering limited economic measures that perpetuate the status quo. We’re talking about significant steps that would signal real progress towards creating two states.

That’s the bottom line: If we’re serious about the two-state solution, it’s time to start implementing it now. Advancing the process of separation now, in a serious way, could make a significant difference in saving the two-state solution and in building confidence in the citizens of both sides that peace is, indeed, possible. And much progress can be made in advance of negotiations that can lay the foundation for negotiations, as contemplated by the Oslo process. In fact, these steps will help create the conditions for successful talks.

Now, in the end, we all understand that a final status agreement can only be achieved through direct negotiations between the parties. We’ve said that again and again. We cannot impose the peace.

There are other countries in the UN who believe it is our job to dictate the terms of a solution in the Security Council. Others want us to simply recognize a Palestinian state, absent an agreement. But I want to make clear today, these are not the choices that we will make.

We choose instead to draw on the experiences of the last eight years, to provide a way forward when the parties are ready for serious negotiations. In a place where the narratives from the past powerfully inform and mold the present, it’s important to understand the history. We mark this year and next a series of milestones that I believe both illustrate the two sides of the conflict and form the basis for its resolution. It’s worth touching on them briefly.

A hundred and twenty years ago, the First Zionist Congress was convened in Basel by a group of Jewish visionaries, who decided that the only effective response to the waves of anti-Semitic horrors sweeping across Europe was to create a state in the historic home of the Jewish people, where their ties to the land went back centuries – a state that could defend its borders, protect its people, and live in peace with its neighbors. That was the vision. That was the modern beginning, and it remains the dream of Israel today.

Nearly 70 years ago, United Nations General Assembly Resolution 181 finally paved the way to making the State of Israel a reality. The concept was simple: to create two states for two peoples – one Jewish, one Arab – to realize the national aspirations of both Jews and Palestinians. And both Israel and the PLO referenced Resolution 181 in their respective declarations of independence.

The United States recognized Israel seven minutes after its creation. But the Palestinians and the Arab world did not, and from its birth, Israel had to fight for its life. Palestinians also suffered terribly in the 1948 war, including many who had lived for generations in a land that had long been their home too. And when Israel celebrates its 70th anniversary in 2018, the Palestinians will mark a very different anniversary: 70 years since what they call the Nakba, or catastrophe.

Next year will also mark 50 years since the end of the Six-Day War, when Israel again fought for its survival. And Palestinians will again mark just the opposite: 50 years of military occupation. Both sides have accepted UN Security Council Resolution 242, which called for the withdrawal of Israel from territory that it occupied in 1967 in return for peace and secure borders, as the basis for ending the conflict.

It has been more than 20 years since Israel and the PLO signed their first agreement – the Oslo Accords – and the PLO formally recognized Israel. Both sides committed to a plan to transition much of the West Bank and Gaza to Palestinian control during permanent status negotiations that would put an end to their conflict. Unfortunately, neither the transition nor the final agreement came about, and both sides bear responsibility for that.

Finally, some 15 years ago, King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia came out with the historic Arab Peace Initiative, which offered fully normalized relations with Israel when it made peace – an enormous opportunity then and now, which has never been fully been embraced.

That history was critical to our approach to trying to find a way to resolve the conflict. And based on my experience with both sides over the last four years, including the nine months of formal negotiations, the core issues can be resolved if there is leadership on both sides committed to finding a solution.

In the end, I believe the negotiations did not fail because the gaps were too wide, but because the level of trust was too low. Both sides were concerned that any concessions would not be reciprocated and would come at too great a political cost. And the deep public skepticism only made it more difficult for them to be able to take risks.

In the countless hours that we spent working on a detailed framework, we worked through numerous formulations and developed specific bridging proposals, and we came away with a clear understanding of the fundamental needs of both sides. In the past two and a half years, I have tested ideas with regional and international stakeholders, including our Quartet partners. And I believe what has emerged from all of that is a broad consensus on balanced principles that would satisfy the core needs of both sides.

President Clinton deserves great credit for laying out extensive parameters designed to bridge gaps in advanced final status negotiations 16 years ago. Today, with mistrust too high to even start talks, we’re at the opposite end of the spectrum. Neither side is willing to even risk acknowledging the other’s bottom line, and more negotiations that do not produce progress will only reinforce the worst fears.

Now, everyone understands that negotiations would be complex and difficult, and nobody can be expected to agree on the final result in advance. But if the parties could at least demonstrate that they understand the other side’s most basic needs – and are potentially willing to meet them if theirs are also met at the end of comprehensive negotiations – perhaps then enough trust could be established to enable a meaningful process to begin.

It is in that spirit that we offer the following principles – not to prejudge or impose an outcome, but to provide a possible basis for serious negotiations when the parties are ready. Now, individual countries may have more detailed policies on these issues – as we do, by the way – but I believe there is a broad consensus that a final status agreement that could meet the needs of both sides would do the following.

Principle number one: Provide for secure and recognized international borders between Israel and a viable and contiguous Palestine, negotiated based on the 1967 lines with mutually agreed equivalent swaps.

Resolution 242, which has been enshrined in international law for 50 years, provides for the withdrawal of Israel from territory it occupied in 1967 in return for peace with its neighbors and secure and recognized borders. It has long been accepted by both sides, and it remains the basis for an agreement today.

As Secretary, one of the first issues that I worked out with the Arab League was their agreement that the reference in the Arab Peace Initiative to the 1967 lines would from now on include the concept of land swaps, which the Palestinians have acknowledged. And this is necessary to reflect practical realities on the ground, and mutually agreed equivalent swaps that will ensure that the agreement is fair to both sides.

There is also broad recognition of Israel’s need to ensure that the borders are secure and defensible, and that the territory of Palestine is viable and contiguous. Virtually everyone that I have spoken to has been clear on this principle as well: No changes by Israel to the 1967 lines will be recognized by the international community unless agreed to by both sides.

Principle two: Fulfill the vision of the UN General Assembly Resolution 181 of two states for two peoples, one Jewish and one Arab, with mutual recognition and full equal rights for all their respective citizens.

This has been the fundamental – the foundational principle of the two-state solution from the beginning: creating a state for the Jewish people and a state for the Palestinian people, where each can achieve their national aspirations. And Resolution 181 is incorporated into the foundational documents of both the Israelis and Palestinians. Recognition of Israel as a Jewish state has been the U.S. position for years, and based on my conversations in these last months, I am absolutely convinced that many others are now prepared to accept it as well – provided the need for a Palestinian state is also addressed.

We also know that there are some 1.7 million Arab citizens who call Israel their home and must now and always be able to live as equal citizens, which makes this a difficult issue for Palestinians and others in the Arab world. That’s why it is so important that in recognizing each other’s homeland – Israel for the Jewish people and Palestine for the Palestinian people – both sides reaffirm their commitment to upholding full equal rights for all of their respective citizens.

Principle number three: Provide for a just, agreed, fair, and realistic solution to the Palestinian refugee issue, with international assistance, that includes compensation, options and assistance in finding permanent homes, acknowledgment of suffering, and other measures necessary for a comprehensive resolution consistent with two states for two peoples.

The plight of many Palestinian refugees is heartbreaking, and all agree that their needs have to be addressed. As part of a comprehensive resolution, they must be provided with compensation, their suffering must be acknowledged, and there will be a need to have options and assistance in finding permanent homes. The international community can provide significant support and assistance. I know we are prepared to do that, including in raising money to help ensure the compensation and other needs of the refugees are met, and many have expressed a willingness to contribute to that effort, particularly if it brings peace. But there is a general recognition that the solution must be consistent with two states for two peoples, and cannot affect the fundamental character of Israel.

Principle four: Provide an agreed resolution for Jerusalem as the internationally recognized capital of the two states, and protect and assure freedom of access to the holy sites consistent with the established status quo.

Now, Jerusalem is the most sensitive issue for both sides, and the solution will have to meet the needs not only of the parties, but of all three monotheistic faiths. That is why the holy sites that are sacred to billions of people around the world must be protected and remain accessible and the established status quo maintained. Most acknowledge that Jerusalem should not be divided again like it was in 1967, and we believe that. At the same time, there is broad recognition that there will be no peace agreement without reconciling the basic aspirations of both sides to have capitals there.

Principle five: Satisfy Israel’s security needs and bring a full end, ultimately, to the occupation, while ensuring that Israel can defend itself effectively and that Palestine can provide security for its people in a sovereign and non-militarized state.

Security is the fundamental issue for Israel together with a couple of others I’ve mentioned, but security is critical. Everyone understands that no Israeli Government can ever accept an agreement that does not satisfy its security needs or that risk creating an enduring security threat like Gaza transferred to the West Bank. And Israel must be able to defend itself effectively, including against terrorism and other regional threats. In fact, there is a real willingness by Egypt, Jordan, and others to work together with Israel on meeting key security challenges. And I believe that those collective efforts, including close coordination on border security, intelligence-sharing, joint cooperations – joint operation, can all play a critical role in securing the peace.

At the same time, fully ending the occupation is the fundamental issue for the Palestinians. They need to know that the military occupation itself will really end after an agreed transitional process. They need to know they can live in freedom and dignity in a sovereign state while providing security for their population even without a military of their own. This is widely accepted as well. And it is important to understand there are many different ways without occupation for Israel and Palestine and Jordan and Egypt and the United States and others to cooperate in providing that security.

Now, balancing those requirements was among the most important challenges that we faced in the negotiations, but it was one where the United States has the ability to provide the most assistance. And that is why a team that was led by General John Allen, who is here, for whom I am very grateful for his many hours of effort, along with – he is one of our foremost military minds, and dozens of experts from the Department of Defense and other agencies, all of them engaged extensively with the Israeli Defense Force on trying to find solutions that could help Israel address its legitimate security needs.

They developed innovative approaches to creating unprecedented, multi-layered border security; enhancing Palestinian capacity; enabling Israel to retain the ability to address threats by itself even when the occupation had ended. General Allen and his team were not suggesting one particular outcome or one particular timeline, nor were they suggesting that technology alone would resolve these problems. They were simply working on ways to support whatever the negotiators agreed to. And they did some very impressive work that gives me total confidence that Israel’s security requirements can be met.

Principle six: End the conflict and all outstanding claims, enabling normalized relations and enhanced regional security for all as envisaged by the Arab Peace Initiative. It is essential for both sides that the final status agreement resolves all the outstanding issues and finally brings closure to this conflict, so that everyone can move ahead to a new era of peaceful coexistence and cooperation. For Israel, this must also bring broader peace with all of its Arab neighbors. That is the fundamental promise of the Arab Peace Initiative, which key Arab leaders have affirmed in these most recent days.

The Arab Peace Initiative also envisions enhanced security for all of the region. It envisages Israel being a partner in those efforts when peace is made. This is the area where Israel and the Arab world are looking at perhaps the greatest moment of potential transformation in the Middle East since Israel’s creation in 1948. The Arab world faces its own set of security challenges. With Israeli-Palestinian peace, Israel, the United States, Jordan, Egypt – together with the GCC countries – would be ready and willing to define a new security partnership for the region that would be absolutely groundbreaking.

So ladies and gentlemen, that’s why it is vital that we all work to keep open the possibility of peace, that we not lose hope in the two-state solution, no matter how difficult it may seem – because there really is no viable alternative.

Now, we all know that a speech alone won’t produce peace. But based on over 30 years of experience and the lessons from the past 4 years, I have suggested, I believe, and President Obama has signed on to and believes in a path that the parties could take: realistic steps on the ground now, consistent with the parties’ own prior commitments, that will begin the process of separating into two states; a political horizon to work towards to create the conditions for a successful final status talk; and a basis for negotiations that the parties could accept to demonstrate that they are serious about making peace.

We can only encourage them to take this path; we cannot walk down it for them. But if they take these steps, peace would bring extraordinary benefits in enhancing the security and the stability and the prosperity of Israelis, Palestinians, all of the nations of the region. The Palestinian economy has amazing potential in the context of independence, with major private sector investment possibilities and a talented, hungry, eager-to-work young workforce. Israel’s economy could enjoy unprecedented growth as it becomes a regional economic powerhouse, taking advantage of the unparalleled culture of innovation and trading opportunities with new Arab partners. Meanwhile, security challenges could be addressed by an entirely new security arrangement, in which Israel cooperates openly with key Arab states. That is the future that everybody should be working for.

President Obama and I know that the incoming administration has signaled that they may take a different path, and even suggested breaking from the longstanding U.S. policies on settlements, Jerusalem, and the possibility of a two-state solution. That is for them to decide. That’s how we work. But we cannot – in good conscience – do nothing, and say nothing, when we see the hope of peace slipping away.

This is a time to stand up for what is right. We have long known what two states living side by side in peace and security looks like. We should not be afraid to say so.

Now, I really began to reflect on what we have learned – and the way ahead – when I recently joined President Obama in Jerusalem for the state funeral for Shimon Peres. Shimon was one of the founding fathers of Israel who became one of the world’s great elder statesmen – a beautiful man. I was proud to call him my friend, and I know that President Obama was as well.

And I remembered the first time that I saw Shimon in person – standing on the White House lawn for the signing the historic Oslo Accords. And I thought about the last time, at an intimate one-on-one Shabbat dinner just a few months before he died, when we toasted together to the future of Israel and to the peace that he still so passionately believed in for his people.

He summed it up simply and eloquently, as only Shimon could, quote, “The original mandate gave the Palestinians 48 percent, now it’s down to 22 percent. I think 78 percent is enough for us.”

As we laid Shimon to rest that day, many of us couldn’t help but wonder if peace between Israelis and Palestinians might also be buried along with one of its most eloquent champions. We cannot let that happen. There is simply too much at stake – for future generations of Israelis and Palestinians – to give in to pessimism, especially when peace is, in fact, still possible.

We must not lose hope in the possibility of peace. We must not give in to those who say what is now must always be, that there is no chance for a better future. It is up to Israelis and Palestinians to make the difficult choices for peace, but we can all help. And for the sake of future generations of Israelis and Palestinians, for all the people of the region, for the United States, for all those around the world who have prayed for and worked for peace for generations, let’s hope that we are all prepared – and particularly Israelis and Palestinians – to make those choices now.

Thank you very much. (Applause.)

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