Roosevelt Island, between Manhattan and Queens, has its own newspaper. New York City has many examples just in specific languages. Any subway rider is likely to see fellow straphangers reading Polish, Korean, Spanish, and Chinese, plus several other languages that are hard to identify over someone’s shoulder.New York also has hyper-local service for English-reading audiences […]
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Secularism: Surprisingly More Popular in Turkey than in U.S.
New York, N.Y. Recently the Turkish Cultural Center in New York held a panel discussion on whether coexistence is possible between religious and secular forces in the Muslim world. What surprised this writer was data collected from a new Gallup Poll suggests that secularism is more popular in Islamic-majority Turkey than Christian-majority America. I was also startled […]
Sri Lanka Triumphant At Last
Sri Lanka. The 26-year war against the Tamil Tigers — the so-called Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelamis (LTTE) — is over and Sri Lanka is at last and thankfully at peace. In spite of the slaughter, using their own people as human shields, creating the largest, bloodiest hostage drama of modern times, the Tigers have […]
Tibet: Polar Perspectives. Can Both Sides Be Heard?
New York, N.Y. The 50th anniversary of the Dalai Lama’s exile has generated much press and media attention. News accounts have been full of the Dalai Lama’s visa revocation which blocked him from speaking at an coming 2010 World Cup-related peace conference in South Africa, where two other Nobel Laureates where scheduled to speak. In […]
Slumdog: Greater Insult “Slum,” Not “Dog”
Mumbai, India. As founder of Orphans International Worldwide(OIWW), I have walked through the hovels and shanties of Jakarta, Bogota, and Port-au-Prince. Cite Soleil in Haiti is actually far worse than Mumbai’s Dharavi, at least as portrayed in the $100 million (and counting) smash Slumdog Millionaire. Question is this: Is this brilliant film “poverty porn”? Or might it […]
The Dominican Republic and the Office of the First Lady
Santo Domingo, D.R. It is not often that an Ambassador from the United Nations invites you to his country to meet the spouse of the president. When this unlikely event does occur, it is best to drop everything and go. So I went, arriving in the Dominican Republic in early December 2005. The First Lady of the Dominican […]
Indonesian Tsunami Docs To Assist In Gulf
New York, N.Y. The Orphans International (OI) Sumatera Tsunami Medical Team has volunteered to come to the United States and help assist refugees left in Katrina’s wake. The English-speaking doctors believe their expertise in natural disaster relief on a massive scale, especially their experience in dealing with water-borne diseases, will be an addition to the […]
