Rescue Missions

Author(s):  
Gerard Toal

The Georgian Military Assault on Tskhinval(i) began with an artillery barrage by truck-mounted Grad missiles that rained down in a largely indiscriminate manner on the urban area. OSCE monitors in the city counted rounds exploding at intervals of fifteen to twenty seconds. Then Georgian forces began a ground offensive. Scores were killed, mostly civilians but also combatants and, significantly, Russian soldiers serving as peacekeepers. Those wounded were taken to make­shift basement “hospitals” as fighting raged on the streets above them. Many bled to death. Inal Pliyev’s initial claim, made in the fog of war, that two thousand civilians died proved to be more than a tenfold exaggeration, but it was his number that traveled around the world before any verifiable body count got underway. And attached to the false number was the disputatious charge of “genocide” from the script of the conflict already written by the Ossetian authorities. News of the Georgian attack and Russian response reached Beijing (four hours ahead of Tbilisi), where U.S. president George W. Bush was standing in a line of visiting dignitaries in the Great Hall of the People to greet President Hu Jintao. A few places ahead of him was Vladimir Putin. They briefly talked, and when Bush returned to his hotel he placed a call to President Dmitry Medvedev. Medvedev, according to Bush, was angry and charged that Mikheil Saakashvili was a war criminal responsible for the deaths of more than fifteen hundred civilians as well as Russian peacekeepers. Bush told Medvedev that the United States was concerned about the “disproportionality” of the Russian response, adding, “We are going to be with them.” In his memoir Bush recounts how he sought de-escalation while wondering if Russia would have been as aggressive if the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) had approved Georgia’s Membership Action Plan (MAP) application. Later, at the Opening Ceremony of the Olympics, Bush was in the same row as Putin and asked those in between to shift seats so they could speak. Through a translator Putin also described Saakashvili as a war criminal.

2021 ◽  
pp. 184-211
Author(s):  
James D. Strasburg

This chapter examines how ecumenical American Protestants sought to come to Europe’s “spiritual aid” through carrying out a “Marshall Plan for the Churches.” By the summer of 1947, these Protestant ecumenists were preparing to rebuild European churches, distribute material aid across the continent, and promote theological exchange across the Atlantic. All the while, they also sought to strengthen the standing of democracy and capitalism in Europe and, in particular, to bolster European spiritual defenses against communism. While German and European Protestants welcomed ecumenical aid, they also protested the Cold War interests of the United States. In particular, they challenged American ecumenists for contributing to the spread of what they deemed a new kind of American imperial order in the world. In response, a growing number of Europeans called on ecumenical Protestants across the North Atlantic to become a “third way” spiritual force between American democracy and Soviet communism.


2016 ◽  
Vol 35 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-20 ◽  
Author(s):  
Teresa PR Caldeira

Many cities around the world have been largely constructed by their residents, who build not only their own houses, but also frequently their neighborhoods. In this article, I use the notion of peripheral urbanization to analyze this way of producing cities that is quite pervasive in the global south. I argue that peripheral urbanization refers to modes of the production of space that (a) operate with a specific temporality and agency, (b) engage transversally with official logics, (c) generate new modes of politics, and (d) create highly unequal and heterogeneous cities. I also argue that peripheral urbanization not only produces heterogeneity within the city as it unfolds over time, but also varies considerably from one city to another. I build my arguments by juxtaposing dissimilar cases from a few cities in the global south. To focus on peripheral urbanization means simultaneously to de-center urban theory and to offer a bold characterization of modes of the production of space that are different from those that generated the cities of the North Atlantic.


2008 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Anthony G Picciano ◽  
Robert V. Steiner

Every child has a right to an education. In the United States, the issue is not necessarily about access to a school but access to a quality education. With strict compulsory education laws, more than 50 million students enrolled in primary and secondary schools, and billions of dollars spent annually on public and private education, American children surely have access to buildings and classrooms. However, because of a complex and competitive system of shared policymaking among national, state, and local governments, not all schools are created equal nor are equal education opportunities available for the poor, minorities, and underprivileged. One manifestation of this inequity is the lack of qualified teachers in many urban and rural schools to teach certain subjects such as science, mathematics, and technology. The purpose of this article is to describe a partnership model between two major institutions (The American Museum of Natural History and The City University of New York) and the program designed to improve the way teachers are trained and children are taught and introduced to the world of science. These two institutions have partnered on various projects over the years to expand educational opportunity especially in the teaching of science. One of the more successful projects is Seminars on Science (SoS), an online teacher education and professional development program, that connects teachers across the United States and around the world to cutting-edge research and provides them with powerful classroom resources. This article provides the institutional perspectives, the challenges and the strategies that fostered this partnership.


2021 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 49-54
Author(s):  
Crystal C. Hall

In the United States, the lack of personal savings has been a perennial concern in the world of public policy. Policymakers and other practitioners constantly struggle with how to encourage families to accumulate funds in preparation for inevitable, but often unpredictable, financial emergencies. The field of applied behavioral science has attempted to address this challenge—often with mixed or modest results. I argue that psychological science (personality and social psychology in particular) offers underappreciated insights into the design and implementation of policy interventions to improve the rate of individual savings. In this article, I briefly discuss examples of prior interventions that have attempted to increase saving and then lay out some opportunities that have not been deeply explored. Future research in this area should broaden and deepen the way that psychology is leveraged as a tool to improve the financial security of the people who are the most vulnerable.


1945 ◽  
Vol 49 (410) ◽  
pp. 51-54
Author(s):  
A. Gouge

A Study of the air routes of the world brings out almost at once the fact that some of the most difficult route are also the most attractive. For instance, the North Atlantic route which couples North America with Europe is certainly one of the most difficult in the world, but also by the fact that it couples two of the most densely populated, as well as the most wealthy groups of people in the world, one of the most attractive.


1988 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 266-291 ◽  
Author(s):  
James L. Cobban

By the beginning of the twentieth century, Semarang was a major port city and administrative centre on Java. Attainment of this position was due partly to the expansion of its hinterland during the nineteenth century. This expansion was closely related to developments in the means of transportation and the consequent ability of plantation owners to bring the products of their plantations to the port for shipment to foreign markets. By the end of the century virtually the whole economic life of central Java focused upon Semarang. The city also exercised administrative functions in the Dutch colonial administration and generally had been responsible for Dutch interests in the middle and eastern parts of the island. The importance of Semarang as an administrative centre increased after 1906. In that year the government incorporated the city as an urban municipality (stadsgemeente). In 1914 it had consular representation from the United States, Belgium, Denmark, France, Great Britain, Italy, Norway, Germany, and Thailand. Subsequently, in 1926 it became the capital of the Province of Central Java under the terms of an administrative reform fostered by the colonial government at Batavia. Status as an urban municipality meant that local officials sitting on a city council would govern the domestic affairs of the city. The members of the city council at first were appointed from Batavia, subsequently some of them were elected by residents of the city. By the beginning of the twentieth century Semarang had enhanced its position as a major port on the north coast of the island of Java. It was one of the foremost cities of the Dutch East Indies, along with Batavia and Surabaya, a leading port and a centre of administration and trade. This article outlines the growth of the port of Semarang during the nineteenth century and discusses some of the conflict related to this growth over living conditions in parts of the city during the twentieth century, a conflict which smouldered for several decades among the government, members of the city council, and the non-European residents of the city, one which remained unresolved at the end of the colonial era.


2011 ◽  
Vol 53 (4) ◽  
pp. 722-756
Author(s):  
Jon Adams ◽  
Edmund Ramsden

Nestled among E. M. Forster's careful studies of Edwardian social mores is a short story called “The Machine Stops.” Set many years in the future, it is a work of science fiction that imagines all humanity housed in giant high-density cities buried deep below a lifeless surface. With each citizen cocooned in an identical private chamber, all interaction is mediated through the workings of “the Machine,” a totalizing social system that controls every aspect of human life. Cultural variety has ceded to rigorous organization: everywhere is the same, everyone lives the same life. So hopelessly reliant is humanity upon the efficient operation of the Machine, that when the system begins to fail there is little the people can do, and so tightly ordered is the system that the failure spreads. At the story's conclusion, the collapse is total, and Forster's closing image offers a condemnation of the world they had built, and a hopeful glimpse of the world that might, in their absence, return: “The whole city was broken like a honeycomb. […] For a moment they saw the nations of the dead, and, before they joined them, scraps of the untainted sky” (2001: 123). In physically breaking apart the city, there is an extent to which Forster is literalizing the device of the broken society, but it is also the case that the infrastructure of the Machine is so inseparable from its social structure that the failure of one causes the failure of the other. The city has—in the vocabulary of present-day engineers—“failed badly.”


1951 ◽  
Vol 5 (4) ◽  
pp. 825-832

With the development of certain administrative frictions (concerning coal quotas, occupation costs, and the scrap metal treaty) between the western occupying powers and the German Federal Republic, early indications were that if the talk of “contractual agreements” did materialize it would reserve, for the occupying powers, wide controls over important areas of west Germany's internal and external affairs. In Washington, however, a general modification of approach was noted during the September discussions between the United States Secretary of State (Acheson), the United Kingdom Foreign Secretary (Morrison), and the French Foreign Minister (Schuman), preparatory to the Ottawa meetings of the North Atlantic Council.


1917 ◽  
Vol 85 (17) ◽  
pp. 455-456

The following is the text of the resolutions which officially entered the United States into the world war:— “Whereas the imperial German government has committed repeated acts of war against the government and the people of the United States of America; therefore be it “Resolved by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in congress assembled, that the state of war between the United States and the imperial German government, which has thus been thrust upon the United States, is hereby formally declared; and that the President be and he is hereby authorized and directed to employ the entire naval and military forces of the United States and the resources of the government to carry on war against the imperial German government; and to bring the conflict to a successful termination all of the resources of the country are hereby pledged by the Congress of the United States.”


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