The Ku Klux Klan started after and because of the civil war.

“Slavery ended a long time ago. Blacks have it much better today. Why can’t they just get over it?” .-
There’s an never ending list of Americans that still think this way. I was reading my friend's post today, and it said that racism has been going on for 300 years now!
The truth is racism is still very present in the US.

And a way to prove this, is the KKK still exists. African-Americans, Jews and Catholics are only some of the groups
tormented by these white supremacists.
So let me tell you a little part of the Ku Klux Klan story.

As we all know the US Civil War was a conflict between the Northern and the Southern states. The states in the South (Confederates) wanted to be independent because they wanted to keep slavery going on in their own country. But the ones in the North (Union) besides being against slavery, wanted to keep just one country. The North won. Not long after this happened, in 1866 a group of ex- Confederates, the majority being democratic and extremely racist, created a association called the Ku Klux Klan.

It was made to keep White Americans in the government and prevent the African Americans from revolting. The Klan resisted Reconstruction by intimidating the new free man.

They started by scaring them with their particular masks and white robes. But it didn’t take them too long to use violent methods. They started killing a lot of people. By doing this they were killing the hopes and dreams of liberty of the free surviving African-American man. That sense of Privacy that America had was not made for them as long as the crosses kept burning every day.

Fifty three years passed and Mrs. Till couldn't forget That her son Emmett Till was murder just because he tried to make the rights for African American people real. He was murdered by the KKK. And she had to live with that. Do you really think that's living?

KKK started growing more and more, the terrible fact is we are now in 2008 and they still keep forming new groups. Maybe not killing people as much as they used to, but the fear is still there.The KKK lives to say that racism in America is still going on. And getting worst.

















You have to watch this!!


link here Till's mother talking.


Here are some link's to the history of the KKK.


Easy to read KKK history


Obama and the KKK
Burning a cross
The second Klan

Fletcher vs. Peck

In 1795, the Georgia legislature sold thirty-five million acres of Native American land to four land speculating companies for one-half million dollars. The state sold the land to some Developers. John Peck bought some of the land from him.

He coudn't finish paying so He sold it to Robert Fletcher.

When Fletcher find out He brought suit against Peck, claiming that he did not have clear title to the land when he sold it. The case reached the Supreme Court, which in a unanimous decision ruled that the state legislature's repeal of the law was unconstitutional.

A year later the people elected new legislature people. The state of Georgia dicided that the legislature made a bad decicion a year before and that they should have the land back, and maybe give it back to the native american. So they want it the land.

But the Supreme court overruled the state and said they were wrong and because of the property right's and Ex Post Facto the land owner was fletcher.

It was the first case in which the Supreme Court ruled a state law unconstitutional.

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This are some links to get more details.

you have to watch this video! It's so amazing...

wikipedia

encyclopedia article

Analysis

This is an article I find interesting and easy to read.(but still mine is better.)

Fletcher v. Peck

US Supreme Court decision of 1810 dealing with the right of states to impair contracts. A complaint was filed against the Georgia state legislature, which had revoked land claims of settlers who had bought land from fraudulent land companies that had been granted the land by the corrupt legislature. In the Yazoo Land Fraud the Court ruled that the judiciary could not judge the motives of the state legislature and that Georgia could not pass a law impairing what was therefore a valid contract.

This article is © Research Machines plc 2004. All rights reserved. Helicon Publishing is a division of Research Machines plc.

After blogging comes the journling....

Reflection

Before I start answering the questions, I will say that this has been a very interesting project. We are all learning a lot. so two things are for sure. By the end of the year I will probably be really good posting, and I will be sick tired of it too. But for now is good. I don't have nothing to be proud of because what I did anyone could of done it. And I could of done it better. so I'm going to answer the next three.

What would i improve during future blogs?

I would say that my blog wasn't that interesting at all. It was just normal. It had a few pictures (one with me in it :) but nothing more than that. for example my post "Bank of America takes Marill Lynch" didn't have a single picture. Well that has to change, my future posts will have more videos, pictures, games and colors.
And even though I think my opinions are kind of be cool, they were to short. So next time they will be longer and easier to read. In fact instead of using "copy-paste" I will just write about the article and insert the link to it.

How can we better connect our blogs?

I think that we should have everyone Else's blog on a list. On our own blog. that way it would be easier to see other blogs. Other idea would be to make a post about someone Else's blog. And maybe it would be good if we had to comment too.

It would be good if the blogging about other persons was assigned by Randy or the project managers. That way every one would have a comment on their blog.

How has blogging impacted my understanding of..

The US? I just move from another country, Mexico. So if three weeks ago you came and ask me who Obama was, I would have no clue. Before I came to this country I knew I would learn a lot about the US government and culture, but blogging help me so much. I learn new and old stuff about this place.

The media? I learn a lot about all the different tools that we can use to make something more interesting and eye catching. I love when I see that kind of stuff on blogs. Now, that doesn't mean that I like doing it, it takes so much for me. I think that's the reason why i didn't have much media stuff on my blog. But I have to start doing it. They look so much better with it.
And you learn so much about it ,that you can use it on other things, things that you actually like, for example myspace.

Current events? Lets just say that before this I wasn't interested on the news at all. I thought they were boring and a lot of the times sad, I simply did not like them. That change. now I see it a little bit different. News and current events can be interesting and necessary. How did I discover this? well during this 3 weeks of blogging we would look for all types of news and articles. Not only the boring ones that we see on TV. So you get to explore what's going on with the world in a interesting way.

And "old news"? About old news it can be so interesting how you can actually relate them to the current ones, and they make sense. And we discover that People doesn't change at all, they just change the names.

Barbies can be seen as terrorists!!

In Iran, Barbie seen as cultural invader
By Scott Peterson Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor
from the September 15, 2008 edition

Reporter Scott Peterson discusses symbols used in Iranian politics, going back to the Islamic Revolution in 1979.
TEHRAN, Iran - According to Iran's judiciary, the most dangerous items in a Tehran toy shop are not the lifelike pistols and sub-machine guns in the display case. The authorities have instead singled out the hot-pink boxes showcasing Barbie dolls as the real portents of a Western "cultural invasion."
Illegally imported Barbie dolls are "destructive culturally and a social danger," Iranian prosecutor Ghorban Ali Dori Najafabadi warned in a letter last April. Barbie, Batman, Spiderman, and Harry Potter toys, he wrote, are a "danger that needs to be stopped." He added: "Undoubtedly, the personality and identity of the new generation and our children, as a result of unrestricted importation of toys, has been put at risk and caused irreparable damage."
The curvaceous and often scantily clad Barbie dolls with peroxide-blond hair and a suggestion of unbridled Western fun are seen here as a direct challenge to the conservative and religious sensibilities officials hope to encourage. But a decade-long, anti-Barbie campaign waged by hard-liners has met with little success.
Toy sellers have yet to hear about new rules limiting the sale of Barbie, once famously labeled a "Trojan Horse with many cultural invading soldiers inside it."
"We never heard an official statement" against selling the dolls, says the owner of a toy shop in downtown Tehran, where the Fashion Fever Barbie and Barbie Glamour Pup are squeezed between Westernized knockoffs such as the Juicy Bling doll and Action Man. "Those kids who watch foreign television and [illegal] satellite want Barbie dolls," says the shop owner, who asked not to be named.
But of the three to four dolls he sells per day, only one or two a week are Barbies. Even 15 years ago, the shop owner found that a shipping container-worth of imported Barbie paraphernalia sold more slowly than he had hoped. But he says that has more to do with a small market and competition from other Western dolls than the government crackdown.
Official efforts to create an Iranian version called Sara also failed to stem Barbie's popularity. First slated for roll out in 1999 for the 20th anniversary of the Islamic Revolution, dolls of Sara and her brother Dara were delayed for lack of "suitable hair," officials told the Monitor at the time. But the first prototypes made in Iran reportedly did not appeal to children, and the job was then contracted to China, where Barbie dolls are also made.
The first Sara and Dara dolls were launched in spring 2002, when a crackdown on Barbie led one north Tehran shop owner to tell the London daily The Guardian that a morality police squad had confiscated $11,000 worth of Barbie merchandise and detained him for three days.
At the time of its release, Sara was one of the first attempts at marketing a Muslim doll. In 2003, Syrian designers introduced Fulla, a dark-eyed doll with "Muslim values," which met with some success. Within two years, 1.5 million Fulla dolls had been sold across the Middle East. A Michigan-based company also launched a veiled doll called Razanne in 2003, geared towards Muslims in the United States and Britain. Last year, Salma dolls in headscarves and ankle-length dresses were launched in Indonesia.

But during a recent visit to a downtown Tehran toy shop, there were no Sara and Dara dolls on the shelf because they simply don't sell. "They are very heavy and stiff – [there's] a baby character and a big doll and they are twice the price," explains the shop owner.
Iranians "who have seen Sara and Dara advertisements abroad come and buy them because they are 'traditional,'" he says. "But kids who live here, they never ask for it." Sara and Dara "are a good idea, if they can make something similar to these [Barbies] with a chador or headscarf. Kids might say 'this looks cool' and buy it," adds the owner. "As a toy seller, I would prefer these all to be locally produced ... [but] you can't compare. They are different dolls."

Obamas's birth certificate

Some claim that Obama posted a fake birth certificate to his Web page. That charge leaped from the blogosphere to the mainstream media earlier this week when Jerome Corsi, author of a book attacking Obama, repeated the claim in an Aug. 15 interview with Steve Doocy on Fox News.

The Obama birth certificate, held by FactCheck writer Joe Miller

Corsi: Well, what would be really helpful is if Senator Obama would release primary documents like his birth certificate. The campaign has a false, fake birth certificate posted on their website. How is anybody supposed to really piece together his life?

Doocy: What do you mean they have a "false birth certificate" on their Web site?

Corsi: The original birth certificate of Obama has never been released, and the campaign refuses to release it.

Doocy: Well, couldn't it just be a State of Hawaii-produced duplicate?

Corsi: No, it's a -- there's been good analysis of it on the Internet, and it's been shown to have watermarks from Photoshop. It's a fake document that's on the Web site right now, and the original birth certificate the campaign refuses to produce.

Corsi isn't the only skeptic claiming that the document is a forgery. Among the most frequent objections we saw on forums, blogs and e-mails are:

• The birth certificate doesn't have a raised seal.
• It isn't signed.
• No creases from folding are evident in the scanned version.
  
• In the zoomed-in view, there's a strange halo around the letters.
• The certificate number is blacked out.
• The date bleeding through from the back seems to say "2007," but the document wasn't released until 2008.
• The document is a "certification of birth," not a "certificate of birth."
  

Recently FactCheck representatives got a chance to spend some time with the birth certificate, and we can attest to the fact that it is real and three-dimensional and resides at the Obama headquarters in Chicago. We can assure readers that the certificate does bear a raised seal, and that it's stamped on the back by Hawaii state registrar Alvin T. Onaka (who uses a signature stamp rather than signing individual birth certificates). We even brought home a few photographs.

Alvin T. Onaka's signature stamp

The raised seal

Blowup of text

You can click on the photos to get full-size versions, which haven't been edited in any way, except that some have been rotated 90 degrees for viewing purposes.

The certificate has all the elements the State Department requires for proving citizenship to obtain a U.S. passport: "your full name, the full name of your parent(s), date and place of birth, sex, date the birth record was filed, and the seal or other certification of the official custodian of such records." The names, date and place of birth, and filing date are all evident on the scanned version, and you can see the seal above.

The document is a "certification of birth," also known as a short-form birth certificate. The long form is drawn up by the hospital and includes additional information such as birth weight and parents' hometowns. The short form is printed by the state and draws from a database with fewer details. The Hawaii Department of Health's birth record request form does not give the option to request a photocopy of your long-form birth certificate, but their short form has enough information to be acceptable to the State Department. We tried to ask the Hawaii DOH why they only offer the short form, among other questions, but they have not given a response.

The scan released by the campaign shows halos around the black text, making it look (to some) as though the text might have been pasted on top of an image of security paper. But the document itself has no such halos, nor do the close-up photos we took of it. We conclude that the halo seen in the image produced by the campaign is a digital artifact from the scanning process.

We asked the Obama campaign about the date stamp and the blacked-out certificate number. The certificate is stamped June 2007, because that's when Hawaii officials produced it for the campaign, which requested that document and "all the records we could get our hands on" according to spokesperson Shauna Daly. The campaign didn't release its copy until 2008, after speculation began to appear on the Internet questioning Obama's citizenship. The campaign then rushed to release the document, and the rush is responsible for the blacked-out certificate number. Says Shauna: "[We] couldn't get someone on the phone in Hawaii to tell us whether the number represented some secret information, and we erred on the side of blacking it out. Since then we've found out it's pretty irrelevant for the outside world." The document we looked at did have a certificate number; it is 151 1961 - 010641.

Blowup of certificate number

Some of the conspiracy theories that have circulated about Obama are quite imaginative. One conservative blogger suggested that the campaign might have obtained a valid Hawaii birth certificate, soaked it in solvent, then reprinted it with Obama's information. Of course, this anonymous blogger didn't have access to the actual document and presents this as just one possible "scenario" without any evidence that such a thing actually happened or is even feasible.

We also note that so far none of those questioning the authenticity of the document have produced a shred of evidence that the information on it is incorrect. Instead, some speculate that somehow, maybe, he was born in another country and doesn't meet the Constitution's requirement that the president be a "natural-born citizen."

We think our colleagues at PolitiFact.com, who also dug into some of these loopy theories put it pretty well: "It is possible that Obama conspired his way to the precipice of the world’s biggest job, involving a vast network of people and government agencies over decades of lies. Anything’s possible. But step back and look at the overwhelming evidence to the contrary and your sense of what’s reasonable has to take over."

In fact, the conspiracy would need to be even deeper than our colleagues realized. In late July, a researcher looking to dig up dirt on Obama instead found a birth announcement that had been published in the Honolulu Advertiser on Sunday, Aug. 13, 1961:

Obama's birth announcement

The announcement was posted by a pro-Hillary Clinton blogger who grudgingly concluded that Obama "likely" was born Aug. 4, 1961 in Honolulu.

Of course, it's distantly possible that Obama's grandparents may have planted the announcement just in case their grandson needed to prove his U.S. citizenship in order to run for president someday. We suggest that those who choose to go down that path should first equip themselves with a high-quality tinfoil hat. The evidence is clear: Barack Obama was born in the U.S.A.

Update, August 26: We received responses to some of our questions from the Hawaii Department of Health. They couldn't tell us anything about their security paper, but they did answer another frequently-raised question: why is Obama's father's race listed as "African"? Kurt Tsue at the DOH told us that father's race and mother's race are supplied by the parents, and that "we accept what the parents self identify themselves to be." We consider it reasonable to believe that Barack Obama, Sr., would have thought of and reported himself as "African." It's certainly not the slam dunk some readers have made it out to be.

When we asked about the security borders, which look different from some other examples of Hawaii certifications of live birth, Kurt said "The borders are generated each time a certified copy is printed. A citation located on the bottom left hand corner of the certificate indicates which date the form was revised." He also confirmed that the information in the short form birth certificate is sufficient to prove citizenship for "all reasonable purposes."

–by Jess Henig, with Joe Miller
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What happen is some people started the rumor that Obama was not American and that His birth certificate was false, but this guys now proved that certificate is real, and that Obama was born in the United States.
I think that is acceptable for people to think that he is not American but not to say it like they sure of it.

Bank of America takes Merrill lynch

By ANDREW ROSS SORKIN
Published: September 14, 2008
This article was reported by Jenny Anderson, Eric Dash and Andrew Ross Sorkin and was written by Mr. Sorkin.

In one of the most dramatic days in Wall Street’s history, Merrill Lynch agreed to sell itself on Sunday to Bank of America for roughly $50 billion to avert a deepening financial crisis, while another prominent securities firm, Lehman Brothers, filed for bankruptcy protection and hurtled toward liquidation after it failed to find a buyer.
The humbling moves, which reshape the landscape of American finance, mark the latest chapter in a tumultuous year in which once-proud financial institutions have been brought to their knees as a result of hundreds of billions of dollars in losses because of bad mortgage finance and real estate investments.
But even as the fates of Lehman and Merrill hung in the balance, another crisis loomed as the insurance giant American International Group appeared to teeter. Staggered by losses stemming from the credit crisis, A.I.G. sought a $40 billion lifeline from the Federal Reserve, without which the company may have only days to survive.
The stunning series of events culminated a weekend of frantic around-the-clock negotiations, as Wall Street bankers huddled in meetings at the behest of Bush administration officials to try to avoid a downward spiral in the markets stemming from a crisis of confidence.
“My goodness. I’ve been in the business 35 years, and these are the most extraordinary events I’ve ever seen,” said Peter G. Peterson, co-founder of the private equity firm the Blackstone Group, who was head of Lehman in the 1970s and a secretary of commerce in the Nixon administration.
It remains to be seen whether the sale of Merrill, which was worth more than $100 billion during the last year, and the controlled demise of Lehman will be enough to finally turn the tide in the yearlong financial crisis that has crippled Wall Street and threatened the broader economy.
Early Monday morning, Lehman said it would file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in New York for its holding company in what would be the largest failure of an investment bank since the collapse of Drexel Burnham Lambert 18 years ago, the Associated Press reported.
Questions remain about how the market will react Monday, particularly to Lehman’s plan to wind down its trading operations, and whether other companies, like A.I.G. and Washington Mutual, the nation’s largest savings and loan, might falter.
Indeed, in a move that echoed Wall Street’s rescue of a big hedge fund a decade ago this week, 10 major banks agreed to create an emergency fund of $70 billion to $100 billion that financial institutions can use to protect themselves from the fallout of Lehman’s failure.
The Fed, meantime, broadened the terms of its emergency loan program for Wall Street banks, a move that could ultimately put taxpayers’ money at risk.
Though the government took control of the troubled mortgage finance companies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac only a week ago, investors have become increasingly nervous about whether major financial institutions can recover from their losses.
How things play out could affect the broader economy, which has been weakening steadily as the financial crisis has deepened over the last year, with unemployment increasing as the nation’s growth rate has slowed.
What will happen to Merrill’s 60,000 employees or Lehman’s 25,000 employees remains unclear. Worried about the unfolding crisis and its potential impact on New York City’s economy, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg canceled a trip to California to meet with Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. Instead, aides said, Mr. Bloomberg spent much of the weekend working the phones, talking to federal officials and bank executives in an effort to gauge the severity of the crisis.
The weekend that humbled Lehman and Merrill Lynch and rewarded Bank of America, based in Charlotte, N.C., began at 6 p.m. Friday in the first of a series of emergency meetings at the Federal Reserve building in Lower Manhattan.
The meeting was called by Fed officials, with Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. in attendance, and it included top bankers. The Treasury and Federal Reserve had already stepped in on several occasions to rescue the financial system, forcing a shotgun marriage between Bear Stearns and JPMorgan Chase this year and backstopping $29 billion worth of troubled assets — and then agreeing to bail out Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
The bankers were told that the government would not bail out Lehman and that it was up to Wall Street to solve its problems. Lehman’s stock tumbled sharply last week as concerns about its financial condition grew and other firms started to pull back from doing business with it, threatening its viability.
Without government backing, Lehman began trying to find a buyer, focusing on Barclays, the big British bank, and Bank of America. At the same time, other Wall Street executives grew more concerned about their own precarious situation.
The fates of Merrill Lynch and Lehman Brothers would not seem to be linked; Merrill has the nation’s largest brokerage force and its name is known in towns across America, while Lehman’s main customers are big institutions. But during the credit boom both firms piled into risky real estate and ended up severely weakened, with inadequate capital and toxic assets.
Knowing that investors were worried about Merrill, John A. Thain, its chief executive and an alumnus of Goldman Sachs and the New York Stock Exchange, and Kenneth D. Lewis, Bank of America’s chief executive, began negotiations. One person briefed on the negotiations said Bank of America had approached Merrill earlier in the summer but Mr. Thain had rebuffed the offer. Now, prompted by the reality that a Lehman bankruptcy would ripple through Wall Street and further cripple Merrill Lynch, the two parties proceeded with discussions.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/15/business/15lehman.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

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In my opinion the government should'n help the banks because they have to learn their lesson, and if they do it now , in the future the other banks will be smart and they won't do what this bank have been doing.plus if they do give them the money they need we will have to barrow money from China or another country and i think we have enough of that.
kaory

Hostile takeove

Aiming to stop the bleeding in the tumultuous housing market, the government takeover of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac has finally seized the public-private chimeras that have stoked global financial havoc.

Stock markets are perking up at the news of the bailout, and if you're eyeing a new mortgage loan, you could benefit in the immediate term from cheaper rates. But in the end, this one's probably gonna cost us. Some analysts predict the public will get saddled with a bill of possibly tens of billions of dollars, though Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson has promised to try to shield taxpayers.

The government conservatorship of Fannie and Freddie is designed to keep them from being hijacked by profit-driven shareholders. But in the long run, lawmakers, and the next president, face the herculean challenge of injecting disipline into a system that appears haywire by design.

The economics blog AngryBear questions the squishy reform ideas rolled out by both presidential candidates:

“John McCain wants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to shrink so that their size no longer is a threat. Would he say the same thing about Bear Stearns, albeit it is far smaller? Should Bear Stearns not have been allowed to grow so large? How do we shrink such a massive entities? Remember, they hold over $5 trillion in mortgages.…. Is it big government that is the problem--or big corporations that run the government?

“Obama wants Fannie and Freddie out of the profit-making business. Is America ready for nationalizing such institutions? Is Obama? …

“Although the American public is not exactly happy with the economy, it has no idea of the depth of the problems. Most people think the government's check writing ability is infinite.

“Well, the government is broke and broken.”

At EconLog, Arnold Kling sees the feds in a fiercesome pickle :

Winston Churchill said that the appeasers had to choose between war and dishonor, that they chose dishonor, and ultimately they would have war. Similarly, our current political leaders had to choose between a financial meltdown and putting the U.S. government firmly behind risky mortgage debt. They chose to meddle, and thereby they have incurred new obligations that ultimately could lead to a meltdown in which the U.S. government itself loses its credit standing.

Maybe Fannie and Freddie -- as a dangerous marriage of government guarantees and a freewheeling market -- just weren't meant to be. But the New York Times' Paul Krugman argues that historically, it was the privatization of the institutions that subtly distorted their role.

Although most ordinary Americans might be lost in the economic jargon and policy prescriptions glutting today's news, there’s a stunning simplicity to the machinations of the crisis, says Robert Kuttner of the American Prospect:

"Here is the cycle: government invents something virtuous. The private market takes it over, loses hundreds of billions. Government then bails it out. This is best understood as socialized risk, privatized gain. Yes, the shareholders of Fannie Mae will deservedly lose a bundle -- it's always the shareholders who take a hit -- but the insiders who thought up subprime and the executives of Fannie Mae during the roaring '90s already made their pile."

“This was all the fruit of ultra free-market ideology, as carried out by an opportunistic Wall Street-Washington axis…

“In competent hands, government can do some things more reliably than Wall Street.”

No one knows for certain whose hands will be steering Fannie and Freddie’s future come next January. But after years of officials and inside players waving off the warning signs, we can be sure that the hands-off approach is no longer an option.

http://weblogs.newsday.com/news/opinion/viewsday/2008/09/hostile_takeover.html

Uganda calls for federalism

By Moses Mulondo THE Uganda People’s Congress (UPC) has asked the Government to listen to the people’s demands and implement a federal system of governance. Citing Article 1 of the Constitution that says all power belongs to the people, UPC chairman Badru Wegulo said there was no justification as to why the Government has delayed federalism after the 1994 Odoki Commission found that most Ugandans wanted it. “Ultimately, as a country, we have to respond to the people’s popular demand for devolution of power. Since the Constituent Assembly of 1994, the UPC has advocated for national dialogue on the federal form of government for Uganda,” Wegulo told journalists yesterday in Kampala. He said in a multi-ethnic country, like Uganda, tribes are always suspicious of each other. Wegulo added that sustainable peace and development can best be achieved under a federal system of government “where each region is given autonomy do define its destiny”. He said federalism would reduce the level of tribalism, increase the productivity of each region, reduce corruption and promote good governance.
http://www.newvision.co.ug/D/8/13/647935

Russia sends cash, builders to S. Ossetia

By YURAS KARMANAU – 23 hours ago

TSKHINVALI, Georgia (AP) — Russia has sent hundreds of workers to rebuild this shattered rebel capital just weeks after its military routed Georgian forces here, and has promised cash payments for every South Ossetian — the latest in efforts to shore up its alliance with the breakaway Georgian province.

Russian builder Igor Semyonov is proud just to be a part of the substantial reconstruction effort his country is funding.

Semyonov stood in the center of what is now called Three Tank Square, where the scorched remains of Georgian tanks are surrounded by battle-scarred buildings including one with a tank turret sitting on its front steps.

"It will be more beautiful than ever," the he promised as he worked to reconstruct a shattered labor union headquarters.

Moscow is matching in South Ossetia what the U.S. and its allies are doing in Georgia, pouring in aid to support its ally along the new confrontation line that has grown up between Russia and the West.

Russian authorities have dispatched 500 construction workers to repair and rebuild scores of damaged or destroyed administrative buildings and schools, as well as the region's main hospital in Tskhinvali. It's a massive effort made possible by Russia's oil-fueled economic resurgence.

Znaur Gassiyev, speaker of South Ossetia's legislature, said it will cost $400 million to repair the destruction.

In addition to the construction effort, South Ossetian Prime Minister Boris Chochiyev said that Russia has promised to pay South Ossetians up to $2,000 each in compensation for war damage.

Russia has provided financial, military and political support to South Ossetia, as well as another separatist-held Georgian territory, Abkhazia, since the early 1990s. Last year alone, Russia spent an estimated $66 million in subsidies for South Ossetia, Gassiyev said.

The territory has no economy of its own and Russian subsidies are its only source of income, officials here said.

Russia is the only country to recognize South Ossetia and Abkhazia as independent nations. Over the next few years, many expect Moscow formally to annex one or both of them — calling their citizens victims of Georgian aggression.

In the meantime, there is plenty of work to do.

Both areas bear the scars of earlier conflicts from the 1990s, and both show the ravages of struggling for nearly two decades with barely functioning economies. Tskhinvali's newest apartment building was built in 1989, a few years before the region sank into the bloody chaos of its first separatist war.

A Georgian artillery shell hit the regional prison during the latest fighting, prompting its warden to open the gates and let all inmates run free. Now prison chief Valentin Gobozov is looking to Moscow to pay for the repairs."Together with united Russia!" declares a sign painted on a fence. "Thank you, Russia!" trumpets another.

http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5hV2N6fVKS5slf10A13Dj_uIdaZ4QD92VE84G0

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I think that lock would agree with this, the government taking control of all the damage...
Kaory

"No texas border wall"

Two weeks before the 2006 midterm elections, President Bush signed the Secure Fence Act into law. It states that “the Secretary of Homeland Security shall provide for at least 2 layers of reinforced fencing, the installation of additional physical barriers, roads, lighting, cameras, and sensors,” along up to 850 miles of the United States’ southern border. Walls have already been built in parts of California and Arizona. According to a report commissioned by Congress, the border walls have had no impact on the number of immigrants who are in the United States illegally. The walls have already done tremendous damage, and the construction of hundreds more miles will magnify that damage. NO BORDER WALL opposes the construction of the walls called for by the Secure Fence Act, and urges Congress to repeal it immediately and halt construction. A number of misconceptions surround the Secure Fence Act, the first of which is the use of the term “fence.”
Chosen to evoke images of the picket fence that separates suburban neighbors, the barriers that have been built along the southern border more closely resemble the Berlin Wall. In California and Arizona rusted steel plates have been driven into the earth to create walls that are 15 feet tall. South of San Diego two more layers were added, the result being parallel concrete and steel walls with a graded road between them and 50 feet on either side cleared of all vegetation. Estimates of the construction costs for the full 850 miles of border wall called for in the Secure Fence Act range from $4 billion to $46 billion.


NO BORDER WALL is a grassroots coalition of groups and individuals united in our belief that a border wall will not stop illegal immigration or smuggling and will not make the United States any safer. A border wall tells the world that we are a fearful nation, not a strong and confident nation, and that we are unable to address difficult issues in an intelligent and meaningful way. It will do irreparable harm to our borderlands and our country as a whole. Many of us live on the border, and we know what will be lost if a wall tears through our communities, farms, and natural areas. We urge our elected representatives to reject the border wall and repeal the Secure Fence Act and the Real ID Act.
by:http://notexasborderwall.com/
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Well i think that this has to do with life because this is what thousands of people are going through,every day hispanics try to chase there american dream looking for happines, opportunities for their family's, and maybe some day they will have the liberty that they desire so much.
Kaory Hirata