Peace

The National Youth and Student Peace Coalition (NYSPC) made October an action-packed pre-election month. Congress has the power to end this war, and we say: get out of Iraq or get out of office.

It is Pat’s birthday on Nov. 6, and elections are the day after. It gets me thinking about a conversation I had with Pat before we joined the military.

I spent the last eight days of Israeli-Lebanon war, Aug. 7-14, in Beirut, Lebanon’s capital. I had traveled there as part of a peace delegation from the United States. Our aim was to express solidarity with the people of Lebanon.

According to Chinese reports, North Korean leader Kim Jong Il expressed regret over his country’s nuclear weapons test, saying that it would not conduct another so long as the United States did not escalate threats against the North.

The Bush administration is suddenly dropping its “stay the course” slogan, proclaiming that it is all about “flexibility” on Iraq, according to White House press secretary Tony Snow. “It left the wrong impression about what was going on,” Snow said

Un estudio nuevo por médicos estadounidenses e iraquíes estiman que aproximadamente 600.000 iraquíes han muerto en la violencia lanzada por EEUU con su invasión del marzo 2003. Además, la muerte de 55 mil otros, por causas no violentas, indica que las condiciones sanitarias están deteriorando. “Constituye una emergencia humanitaria”, dicen los autores del estudio.

AMHERST, Mass. — Voters here and in 138 other cities and towns across Massachusetts will be able to express their opinions on the Iraq war directly, for the first time, at the ballot box in the upcoming November elections.

Kofi Annan has again urged us to be wise and to refrain from the self-defeating practice of playing superpower bully. In the wake of North Korea’s reported nuclear weapons test, the outgoing UN secretary-general was clear that Pyongyang’s nuclear test was “unacceptable.”
Instead of the militarized sanctions, he urged bilateral negotiations between Washington and Pyongyang.

In the 2005 documentary film “The Last Atomic Bomb,” Sakue Shimohira, who as a 10-year-old schoolgirl lived through the U.S. nuclear bombing of Nagasaki, says, “The wound in my heart will never heal. If you encounter an atomic bomb once, you will never be at peace again.”

On Nov. 8 the United Nations General Assembly will vote on a Cuban resolution calling for an end to the U.S. economic blockade against Cuba. In preparation for the vote, Deputy Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez held a press conference in Havana, Oct. 2, where he released Cuba’s annual report on the blockade’s impact.