The U.S. Supreme Court reconvenes for its 2009-10 term on Oct. 5, with most of the attention going to the court's freshest face, newly confirmed Justice Sonia Sotomayor. But Sotomayor and her eight colleagues won't have a lot of time for orientation: the court will start immediately on a docket of controversial cases that will call on Justices to consider new facets of the Establishment Clause, gun ownership and prison terms for minors, among other issues. In total, the Justices have already agreed to hear 55 cases in the new term. Here are five to keep an eye on. (1) Salazar v. Buono - At issue: Whether the government can permit the display of a crucifix on public land as per the Establishment Clause. (2) Maryland v. Shatzer - At issue: The scope of the rights of police suspects, as given in the court's landmark 1966 decision, Miranda v. Arizona. (3) Graham v. Florida / Sullivan v. Florida - At issue: Whether life imprisonment for juveniles on nonhomicide charges constitutes cruel and unusual punishment. (4) National Rifle Association v. Chicago / McDonald v. Chicago - At issue: Second Amendment rights to gun ownership. (5) American Needle v. National Football League - At issue: Whether sporting leagues should be exempt from antitrust regulations.
Anyone taking public transportation in Washington recently has seen the posters of a beautiful Turkish dancer beckoning from Metro buses and from posters in Union Station. The advertisement invites people to attend the Seventh Annual Turkish-American Festival on Sunday. Thousands are likely to accept the invitation and on a fall afternoon, crowd Pennsylvania Avenue to enjoy "Turkish Arts, Crafts, Dance, Food and Fun." Turkey, like all nations in a tourism campaign, wants to put the best foot forward. However, as demonstrated in an early September desecration of an Orthodox Christian cemetery in Istanbul, religious minorities in Turkey face problems that go often unreported or are ignored. Because of these concerns, the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) undertook a fact finding tour of Turkey in 2006. Religious minorities reported that they continued to experience serious problems regarding opening, maintaining and operating houses of worship, as well as serious restrictions on their ability to train clergy, maintain educational and cultural organizations, and own private and collective property. Communities affected include the Greek Orthodox, Armenian Orthodox and Syriac Orthodox Churches, as well as Roman Catholics, Protestants and others. Because these and other religious freedom problems persist, and the existence of several religious communities in Turkey remains imperiled, USCIRF placed Turkey on its "Watch List" in May 2009. For more than 50 years, the Turkish government has used convoluted regulations and undemocratic laws to confiscate hundreds of religious minority properties, primarily those belonging to the Greek Orthodox, Armenian Orthodox, Syriac Orthodox, Roman Catholic and other communities. The state also has closed seminaries, denying these communities the right to train clergy. In 1971, the Turkish government nationalized the Greek Orthodox Theological School of Haliki on the island of Heybeli, depriving the Greek Orthodox community of its only educational institution for its leadership in Turkey, and putting the very survival of the Ecumenical Patriarch and the Greek Orthodox community at risk. Hate crimes are a problem, as nonstate actors have attacked religious minorities or symbols of their existence, with inconsistent government investigations or prosecutions - sometimes nothing is done at all. In addition to the desecration of the Orthodox cemetery referenced earlier, the killing of members of minority religious groups has occurred in recent years: In 2003, terrorists bombed two synagogues; in 2006, a Catholic priest was murdered; in January 2007, prominent human rights activist Hrant Dink was killed; and in April 2007, three members of a Protestant church were tortured to death. The crimes were investigated and prosecuted, but not with the speed necessary to ensure timely justice. The Turkish government has not done enough to combat this discrimination, which is sometimes violent.
In a year which has seen the collapse of many of our economic certainties, the result has created a new political alignment in Europe. Under president Nicolas Sarkozy the balance has shifted to the right and now in Germany Merkel seems to have begun the transformation that could see her morph from “Mutti” to “Eiserne Lady”. The new iron lady will be in a happy frame of mind this week when she sits down with her new FDP friends to stitch together a fresh alliance. Gone is the necessity to find common cause with the increasingly troublesome SDP, and in will come some consensus-busting tough love: simpler and lower taxes; a harder line on welfare benefits; and a return to the progressive conservativism which seemed to have become extinct under the previous CDU-SPD That’s what the centre-right is looking for and that’s what they will probably get in the first heady days of the honeymoon. Forget that the CDU won only 35% of the vote (a smaller proportion than in 2005): Merkel’s people say that she has been reinvigorated by the turnaround, and that she is delighted to be freed from what she saw as the shackles imposed by the SPD. A new cross-Rhine nexus with France will suit her perfectly but, as ever in the freshening-up of new alliances, there will be losers, and the country most affected by Merkel’s new domination looks certain to be Turkey whose application to join the EU is more or less certain to be blackballed. Merkel has already let it be known that she is prepared to offer a loose alliance but not full membership, and one of her first foreign policy decisions will be to swing Germany behind France and Italy to block Ankara’s application to join the European club. She also has EU policy on her side – no deal until Cyprus is resolved – but in her case the main stumbling block has gone with the demise of the SPD which always blocked moves to join France and Italy in rejecting Turkey’s application.
PASOK made a triumphant return to government yesterday with a clear majority in Parliament that left New Democracy on the verge of suffering the most damaging election defeat in the conservative party’s 35-year history. With 70 percent of votes counted, PASOK had 43.8 percent, New Democracy 34.4, the Communist Party (KKE) 7.3, Popular Orthodox Rally (LAOS) 5.4, the Coalition of the Radical Left (SYRIZA) 4.3 and the Ecologist Greens 2.3. This translated into 159 parliamentary seats for PASOK, 94 for ND, 20 for KKE, 15 for LAOS and 12 for SYRIZA. The Ecologist Greens failed to garner the 3 percent needed to elect deputies. Voter turnout was about 70 percent. “Our responsibility is to change the direction in which the country is going,” said PASOK leader and Prime Minister-elect George Papandreou in a brief statement during which he promised to put “smiles back on the faces of Greeks” and to “put the citizen at the heart” of his government’s actions. Apart from being a victory for PASOK and Papandreou, who will become the third member of his family to govern Greece after his grandfather and father, the result of yesterday’s election was a shattering defeat for New Democracy, which saw its share of the popular vote decline from more than 45 percent in 2004, when it was first elected to power under the leadership of Costas Karamanlis, to just over 35 percent yesterday.
Serbian government is set to file a counter-lawsuit to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) against Croatia alleging genocide during 1991-95 war. Serbia will sue Croatia for war crimes and ethnic cleansing committed against the Serb minority during the 1991-95 war in Croatia. The government and expert team representing Serbia in The Hague-based court are collecting the necessary papers to file the lawsuit. "I may confirm that we possess evidence for 10 lawsuits and we can win them all. The case is practically closed, and now we just need to prepare the evidence to establish the genesis of war crimes committed on Croatia's soil," an unnamed official of Serbian foreign ministry said.
Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov warned on Monday against pitting Russia's president against the prime minister. Asked at a news conference in Moscow where the center of power is in Russia and who "plays first fiddle," Lavrov said: "You should not pit the Kremlin against the White House [the Russian government]." Though Putin still holds the number one position in popularity ratings, Medvedev has also gained in popularity since his election in May 2008. A recent survey conducted by the independent pollster Levada Center in early September showed that the number of respondents who have trust in President Dmitry Medvedev nearly doubled, from 10.9% in May to 20.6% in late August. Figures for Prime Minister Vladimir Putin are 27.5% and 28% respectively. Lavrov also said South Stream and Nabucco, the natural gas pipelines pursued by Russia and the EU respectively, were not rival projects. The statement echoes Medvedev and German Chancellor Angela Merkel among other foreign partners, who have repeatedly denied that South Stream will rival Nabucco, designed to bring gas from Central Asia and the Caspian Sea to Europe, bypassing Russia. Lavrov's Austrian counterpart, Michael Spindelegger, said following talks earlier on Monday that Austria, a member of the Nabucco project, is also looking to join South Stream. The 25 billion-euro ($36.5 billion) South Stream project is designed to annually pump 31 billion cubic meters of Central Asian and Russian gas to the Balkans and on to other European countries, bypassing Ukraine, which has frequent disputes with Russia over gas supplies and transits.
Cal Oren was threading his way through the Santa Cruz Mountains of California early one evening in 1993, driving his wife, brother and three tired children back from a day of hiking amid the redwoods. As their car neared the town of Ben Lomond, Mr. Oren said, his brother pointed to a church on the roadside and said: “I’ve been inside this. It’s really neat.” So Mr. Oren pulled to a stop, and as the children stayed in the car, the grown-ups gingerly padded into the sanctuary of Saints Peter and Paul Antiochian Orthodox Church. A lifelong Presbyterian, Mr. Oren knew virtually nothing about the Antiochians or, for that matter, Orthodox Christianity in general. He had always associated Ben Lomond with hippies, geodesic domes and marijuana fields. As he entered, a vespers service was under way. Maybe two dozen worshipers stood, chanting psalms and hymns. Incense filled the dark air. Icons of apostles and saints hung on the walls. The ancientness and austerity stood at a time-warp remove from the evangelical circles in which Mr. Oren traveled, so modern, extroverted and assertively relevant. “This was a Christianity I had never encountered before,” said Mr. Oren, 55, a marketing consultant in commercial construction. “I was frozen in my tracks. I felt like I was in the actual presence of God, almost as if I was in heaven. And I’m not the kind of person who gets all woo-hoo.” The ineffable disclosure of that evening, a 15-minute glimpse into Byzantium, rattled everything certain in Mr. Oren’s spiritual life. Any person’s conversion is by nature an individual and idiosyncratic journey, and Mr. Oren’s reflected not only his visceral sense that Orthodoxy had a “core of holy tradition” but also his intense concern over theological concepts like giving the Eucharist to baptized infants, which may not animate other believers quite the same way. Yet in its broader outlines, his movement from the Protestant realm into the Orthodox one, specifically into the Antiochian branch, attests to a significant and fascinating example of denominational migration. Over the last 20 years, the Antiochian Orthodox Church — with its roots in Syria and Lebanon and its longtime membership in the United States made up almost entirely of Middle Eastern immigrants and their descendants — has become the destination of choice for thousands of Protestants of Northern European ancestry. Some 70 percent of Antiochian Orthodox priests in the United States are converts, according to Bradley Nassif, who, as a theology professor at North Park University in Chicago, is a leading scholar of the religion. A generation or two ago, Professor Nassif said, converts made up barely 10 percent of Antiochian clergy. Professor Nassif went so far, in a 2007 article in Christianity Today magazine, as to suggest that the 21st century might become the “Orthodox century” as disenchanted Protestants grew attracted to the historical roots, theological rigor and social conservatism of the Eastern Christian denominations. Whether or not the prediction pans out, it is certainly true that no American convert comes to the Antiochian church by convenience or ease. The denomination has only about 250,000 members in 250 congregations in the country, Professor Nassif estimated. Worshipers stand during most of the two-hour Divine Liturgy each Sunday. Nearly half the days in the year require fasting from meat, dairy, eggs and most fish.