STAN'S BLOGS

Peter Schrag in an April 2, 2006 Sacramento Bee article about his new book, California: America's High-Stakes Experiment , quotes a once major political figure as saying: "...races most alien to the body of the American people and from the lowest and most illiterate classes ... and do not promise well for the standard of civilization in the United States. ... That kind of immigrants \ reduce the rate of wages by ruinous competition, and then take their savings out of the country, are not desirable. They are mere birds of passage. They form an element in the population which regards home as a foreign country, instead of that in which they live and earn money. They have no interest or stake in the country, and they never become American citizens." It was a quote by Rep. (later Sen.) Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts about Russians, Italians, Poles and Hungarians then immigrating by the millions a century ago. Similar fears were also being bandied about by other major pol

[NOW with David Brancaccio: KVIE TV Sacramento, Fridays at 10pm] Last night David Brancaccio did a program on combating human rights abuses worldwide using video cameras. No, not sending out an entire news crew with armed guards and armored SUVs; this video taping was done by courageous individuals, many times amateurs or just plain and ordinary men and women, on their own in some of the most hostile situations. The program called In Your Eyes featured musician and human rights activist Peter Gabriel. Famous as the lead singer of the 1970s rock group Genesis, Gabriel is now empowering people to document human rights abuses in their own backyards and bring them to the world's attention. He helped set up WITNESS , a Brooklyn-based organization that trains human rights advocates to use video cameras, provided by the group, to document abuses around the world. Their motto: "See it, film it, change it." Aung San Suu Kyi , born June 19, 1945 in Yangon (Rangoon), is a non

Chad moved down eight positions to rank 173 out of 177 countries last year on the U.N.'s human development index. Yep! Even though Chad's government made a relatively whopping US$307 million (about euro250 million) in exported oil between October 2003 and December 2005, they still couldn't find a way to constructively share the wealth with their own 8.8 million people. This egregious lack of unfairness comes soon after an agreement with the World Bank, who provided 4 percent of the pipeline funding, for Chad to devote two-thirds of oil revenues to projects designed to improve living standards in one of the world's poorest countries. Chad, under President Idriss Deby, had previously won praise for the World Bank agreement. But Deby now fears rebel forces whom his loyalists fought with on Thursday on the outskirts of N'djamena, the capital, and wants to continue spending the oil proceeds on the military and security forces instead of the poor. An Exxon Mobil-led con

[At least 13,000 people have been killed since the Maoists launched an armed movement against the Napali monarchy in 1996] ...but these guys don't! Reuters Foundation AlertNet is reporting from KATHMANDU that Nepali police beat pro-democracy activists with rattan canes and fired tear gas on Saturday to break up the largest anti-king protest in the capital since a campaign was launched 10 days ago. The police charged when about 8,000 demonstrators marched into the city from a western suburb, chanting slogans against King Gyanendra and demanding the restoration of democracy. — Reuters Foundation AlertNet King Gyanendra, who sacked the government and seized absolute power 14 months ago, repeated promises in a Nepali New Year message on Friday to hold elections by April 2007. But he did not respond to demands to let a representative government take charge and end a crackdown on political parties. Nepal, the world's only Hindu kingdom, launched multi-party democracy in 1990 after a

" Peru faces presidential run-off vote ," shouts this morning CNN-IBN Live news headline. I have an interest in world politics, so I dig a little deeper into the body of the article and find the prize. Yep! Another example of a recent phenomena seeping across the global, political landscape—women running for top government slots AND, many more times than ever before, winning. IBN Live goes on to report that election watchdog Transparencia has Flores with 24.4% of the vote, only 5% behind leading candidate Ollanta Humala and .1% ahead of third place Garcia. Lourdes Celmira Rosario Flores Nano is a Peruvian politician and lawyer. She currently leads the Unidad Nacional (National Unity) alliance and the Partido Popular Cristiano (Popular Christian Party or PPC) in Peru, which is the most well-known right-of-center party of the country... In 2000, Lourdes Flores led the PPC in joining with the Partido Renovación y el Partido Solidaridad Nacional to form the Unidad Nacional