Monday, November 8, 2010

IntLawGrrls

IntLawGrrls

Breaking: Obama for India as P-6

Posted: 08 Nov 2010 06:11 AM PST

At a speech before India's Parliament today, President Barack Obama said:

The just and sustainable international order that America seeks includes a United Nations that is efficient, effective, credible and legitimate. That is why I can say today — in the years ahead, I look forward to a reformed U.N. Security Council that includes India as a permanent member.

The Associated Press plays down the announcement, calling it a "diplomatic gesture," and The New York Times' Sheryl Gay Stolberg stresses the time and difficulties ahead.
Still, this is huge.
The announcement not only recognizes, as Obama said, that "India has emerged," but also signals a willingness to discuss in a realignment of the Council that inevitably would engage all the countries of the world -- the many other aspirants to a "P-" seat as well the other "-4" who've held that plum since 1945.

Not so fast toward the EU?

Posted: 08 Nov 2010 03:00 AM PST

'Our children must not be burdened by policies of the 1990s.'

So said Serbian President Boris Tadić a few days ago, while laying a wreath near Vukovar, Croatia, where Serb forces executed more than 200 hospital patients as part of a 3-month siege in which more than 1,000 Croats were killed, 5,000 civilians seized, and 22,000 non-Serbs expelled. (credit for Reuters photo)
Tadić said he had come
to pay respect to the victims, to say words of apology, to show regret and create a possibility for Serbia and Croatia to turn a new page.
Part of that post-atonement chapter, Serbia hopes, is European Union membership, so that Serbia no doubt welcomed subsequent EU and the U.S. State Department comments heralding the visit as a welcome step toward reconciliation.
But the move brings to mind the objection that Serge Brammertz (below right), Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, raised regarding any plan to allow EU admission while ICTY indictees like former Bosnian Serb General Ratko Mladić remain at large. As we've posted, Brammertz has said:
Be sure to ask countries to support the tribunal. There is a tendency to think, 'Let's move on. Let's take the countries into the international community. We are saying, 'There can be no compromise. There can be no alternative to bringing the fugitives to justice.'

On November 8

Posted: 08 Nov 2010 01:04 AM PST

On this day ...
... 1895 (115 years ago today), the X-ray was discovered by Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen. Researching cathode rays with a group of scientists, the German physicist found that in a dark room, objects placed in the rays' path could be captured on film. Experiments continued. A month later, when he immobilized the hand of his wife, Bertha (right),
in the path of the rays over a photographic plate, he observed after development of the plate an image of his wife's hand which showed the shadows thrown by the bones of her hand and that of a ring she was wearing, surrounded by the penumbra of the flesh, which was more permeable to the rays and therefore threw a fainter shadow.
"When she saw her skeleton she exclaimed 'I have seen my death!'" The discovery revolutionized the practice of medicine; for it, Röntgen won the 1901 Nobel Prize in physics.

(Prior November 8 posts are here, here, and here.)
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