US Vice President Biden hits nerve in Russia
By LYNN BERRY
The Associated Press
Monday, July 27, 2009 12:16 PM
MOSCOW -- An interview U.S. Vice President Joe Biden gave to an American newspaper was front-page news Monday in Moscow, where his characterization of Russia as a weakened nation hit a raw nerve.
Biden said Russia's economic difficulties are likely to make the Kremlin more willing to cooperate with the United States on a range of national security issues.
"I think we vastly underestimate the hand that we hold," he said in an interview to The Wall Street Journal published Saturday.
Biden's comments appeared to catch the Kremlin by surprise, coming less than three weeks after President Barack Obama said on a visit to Moscow that the U.S. wants to see a "strong, peaceful and prosperous Russia."
"It raises the question: Who is shaping U.S. foreign policy? The president or members of his team, even the most respected ones?" said Kremlin foreign policy adviser Sergei Prikhodko.
White House spokesman Robert Gibbs on Monday downplayed suggestions that Biden was setting a different U.S. policy from that laid out by the president.
When asked whether Obama thought Biden had gone too far in his remarks, Gibbs said the president stated his views on Russia during his recent visit and the vice president agrees with those views.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/07/27/AR2009072701154_pf.html
If nothing else, Biden makes me laugh.
Obama slammed as 'racist' at Jerusalem rally
'This insolence will bring about the downfall of the American leadership'
JERUSALEM – President Obama's policies against Jewish construction in eastern Jerusalem and the strategic West Bank were slammed as "racist" today by participants in a rally drawing about 2,000 Israelis in front of the U.S. consulate in Jerusalem.
"George Mitchell go home!" yelled protestors in front of the U.S. government building.
Mitchell, Obama's envoy to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, is here discussing the American administration's call for a halt to all Jewish settlement activity, including natural growth or accommodating the needs of existing Jewish populations in the areas in question.
"Obama should not be pressing Israel to compromise and freeze building in Judea, Samaria and eastern Jerusalem," protest organizer Yaacov Steinberg told WND.
Clinton on Iran
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said on Sunday that Iran would not be allowed to have a nuclear weapon and reiterated Washington's commitment to protect close ally Israel from any threat posed by Tehran.
"We are going to do everything we can to prevent you (Iran) from getting a nuclear weapon. Your pursuit is futile," she told NBC's "Meet the Press" program, adding that Iran did not have the right to develop a nuclear weapon.
Clinton annoyed ally Israel last week by saying the United States would cope with a nuclear Iran by arming its allies in the Gulf and extending a "defense umbrella" over the region.
A senior Israeli official said the United States should focus on preventing Iranfrom getting a nuclear weapon rather than talking as if this may be a fait accompli.
FILE - This 1997 file photo released by Harvard University shows professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., on the Harvard University campus in Cambridge, Mass. (AP Photo/Jane Reed, File) "Civil rights took us all by surprise," wrote Gates, whose life was changed, as millions were, by the 1954 Supreme Court decision outlawing the "separate but equal" laws in public schools.
Just two years later, Gates began at the Davis Free Elementary School, integrated in 1955 and virtually the only place in Piedmont where blacks and whites gathered together. Gates arrived more determined than afraid. He was "marked out to excel," an early reader and writer "blessed with the belief that I could learn anything."
"I was all set to become the little prince of that almost all-white school," he wrote.
He was an A student who loved history and geography and would practice the way African leaders' names were pronounced by following the newscasts of Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite. He gave the valedictory address at high school and graduated summa cum laude from Yale, where he majored in history.
To his eventual embarrassment, he wrote in his Yale application:
"As always, whitey now sits in judgment of me, preparing to cast my fate. It is your decision either to let me blow with the wind as a nonentity or to encourage the development of self. Allow me to prove myself."
As I have said in the past, blacks are more raciest than white people.
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