:: NEWS COCKTAIL aka BlahBlahBlog ::
"Everything is being compressed into tiny tablets. You take a little pill of news every day - 23 minutes - and that's supposed to be enough." -Walter Cronkite, RE TV news. The Web has changed that for many, however, and here is an extra dose for your daily news cocktail. This prescription tends to include surveillance and now war-related links, along with the occasional pop culture junk and whatever else seizes my attention as I scan online news sites.:: 9.23.2009 ::
:: Barack Obama puts Bush era behind him in UN general assembly speech
::
Guardian.co.uk
Barack Obama put the Bush era decisively behind him today in a speech to the United Nations in which he rejected unilateralism in favour of countries working together to problems ranging from the Middle East to Iran and North Korea.
Obama, in his first address to the UN general assembly, pleaded he would need the support of other countries in tackling what described as the world's most intractable problems.
"Make no mistake: this cannot solely be America's endeavour. Those who used to chastise America for acting alone in the world can not now stand by and wait for America to solve the world's problems alone," said.
In contrast with Bush's speeches at the UN that were usually heard in sullen silence, Obama was greeted with two minutes of applause at the end of his 41-minute speech, as well as bursts of appreciation throughout.
But, in contrast with Obama's soaring rhetoric, the UN continues to be bedevilled by divisions and walk outs.
Among the 100-plus world leaders attending were the Iranian leader, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Libyan leader, Muammar Gaddafi, attending for the first time, and the Venezuelan leader, Hugo Chávez. European leaders included Gordon Brown, the French president Nicolas Sarkozy and the Italian president Silvio Berlusconi.
Highlighting the problems of Obama's call for unity, Ahmadinejad is threatened with a walk out when he delivers his speech because of his reiteration on Friday that there was no Holocaust. The Canadian prime minister, Stephen Carter, was among leaders who said his country would leave its seat empty.
Ahmadinejad, sitting in the fifth row, was among the few leaders not to applaud Obama. Gaddafi, also faced a walk out when he took to the podium immediately after Obama, mainly because of US anger over the release of the Libyan convicted of the Lockerbie bombing, Abdelbaset al-Megrahi.
White House aides made sure that Obama and Gaddafi did not meet and all the members of the US delegation, other than a notetaker and an African specialist, left the chamber when the Libyan leader began a speech that lasted one hour and 40 minutes.
Obama, in the most sweeping foreign policy speech he has delivered since becoming president in January, set out four priorities are: nuclear non-proliferation, Middle East peace, climate change and addressing poverty among developing nations.
There were bursts of applause when he mentioned all these, and when he promised to close the Guantánamo detention centre and push to end the conflict in Sudan.
At the heart of his speech, he promised to work with the UN in a way that Bush had not: "The choice is ours. We can be remembered as a generation that chose to drag the arguments of the 20th century into the 21st.... Or, we can be a generation that chooses to see the shoreline beyond the rough waters ahead; that comes together to serve the common interests of human beings, and finally gives meaning to the promise embedded in the name given to this institution: the United Nations."
Read more here.
Video of the speech.
posted by me
:: 3:14:00 PM [+] ::
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