Newspaper watch -- Bush/Chavez/Ahmedinejad
Its a week for memorable quotes. Chavez at the UN General Assembly (ie. in NYC):
Yesterday the devil came here and this place still smells of sulphur
(About Bush, who spoke earlier).
Whew.
Also - "He came here talking as if he were the owner of the world". Chavez quoted from Chomsky, Aristotle and Hitchcock.
He was warmly applauded it seems, which is very intriguing. Imagine Condoleeza Rice and henchmen sitting in front of a video screen: "Mali !!! I caught the representative from Mali applauding ! Off with their development allowance for next year ! Rewind!"
Ahmedinejad also slammed the US and UK though not quite so memorably. "hegemonic powers" who impose "their exclusionist policies on international decision-making mechansisms including the security council. And " some even have a bleak record of using them (nuclear bombs -- ed) against humanity"
I'm curious how all this is 'playing' in the US. Are any of the inciendiary quotes mentioned in the newspapers at all. If you live in the US and have the tempo, write a comment on how your local media reported it.
================
In other news, the front page story is a Delhi traders bandh which turned violent and 3 people (including an infant) were killed. I don't understand this story properly, but it seems the Supreme Court is imposing strong directives on the Delhi government to clean up years of malpractice in zoning (stuff like setting up a shop or office in an area where you are not allowed to do that). Another story is from Karnataka where the government is going to abruptly derecognise 1,416 schools across the state. The reason (again I'm not very clear) seems to be that they claim to be English medium but are actually not really teaching English medium.
Both these stories point to a trend of coming to grip with years of corruption/misgovernance/that kind of stuff. But the way it happened in these two cases is in a completely top-down way with no discussion, dissemination or consensus. The medicine might well kill the patient.
(The Hindu of Sep 21st , Friday)
Yesterday the devil came here and this place still smells of sulphur
(About Bush, who spoke earlier).
Whew.
Also - "He came here talking as if he were the owner of the world". Chavez quoted from Chomsky, Aristotle and Hitchcock.
He was warmly applauded it seems, which is very intriguing. Imagine Condoleeza Rice and henchmen sitting in front of a video screen: "Mali !!! I caught the representative from Mali applauding ! Off with their development allowance for next year ! Rewind!"
Ahmedinejad also slammed the US and UK though not quite so memorably. "hegemonic powers" who impose "their exclusionist policies on international decision-making mechansisms including the security council. And " some even have a bleak record of using them (nuclear bombs -- ed) against humanity"
I'm curious how all this is 'playing' in the US. Are any of the inciendiary quotes mentioned in the newspapers at all. If you live in the US and have the tempo, write a comment on how your local media reported it.
================
In other news, the front page story is a Delhi traders bandh which turned violent and 3 people (including an infant) were killed. I don't understand this story properly, but it seems the Supreme Court is imposing strong directives on the Delhi government to clean up years of malpractice in zoning (stuff like setting up a shop or office in an area where you are not allowed to do that). Another story is from Karnataka where the government is going to abruptly derecognise 1,416 schools across the state. The reason (again I'm not very clear) seems to be that they claim to be English medium but are actually not really teaching English medium.
Both these stories point to a trend of coming to grip with years of corruption/misgovernance/that kind of stuff. But the way it happened in these two cases is in a completely top-down way with no discussion, dissemination or consensus. The medicine might well kill the patient.
(The Hindu of Sep 21st , Friday)
posted by VK at 8:22 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home