The Children of the World choir ( playing and singing ) was founded to promote the well-being of humanity. The Children of the World appeared in the Paramount Studios’ feature film “FACE/OFF” with John Travolta and Nicolas Cage, executive produced by Michael Douglas. They also appeared on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, Jimmy Kimmel Live, Entertainment Tonight, Access Hollywood, Extra, news broadcasts, movies and other television programs, nationally and internationally, the Special Olympics Opening Ceremony, . This young group has performed for presidents, royalty, and well-known artists and personalities such as Liza Minnelli, Jessica Simpson, Natalie Cole, Sting, Tom Hanks, Robert DeNiro, Tom Cruise, Elizabeth Taylor, Whoopi Goldberg, Quincy Jones, Elizabeth Taylor, Whitney Houston, Bruce Springsteen, Ashton Kutcher, Warren Beatty, Dustin Hoffman, Robert Downey Jr., Will Smith and others.
Website: www.cotwc.com.

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The Strategic Arms Limitation Talks refers to two rounds of bilateral talks and corresponding international treaties involving the United States and the Soviet Union-the Cold War superpowers—on the issue of armament control. There were two rounds of talks and agreements: SALT I and SALT II. A subsequent treaty was START.

Negotiations started in Helsinki, Finland, in 1969 and focused on limiting the two countries’ stocks of nuclear weapons. These treaties have led to START (Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty). START I (a 1991 agreement between the United States and the Soviet Union) and START II (a 1993 agreement between the United States and Russia) placed specific caps on each side’s number of nuclear weapons.

By 1961, hundreds of thousands of Cubans had left for the United States. The 1961 Bay of Pigs Invasion (La Batalla de Girón) was an unsuccessful attempt to overthrow the Cuban government by a U.S.-trained force of Cuban exiles with U.S. military support. The plan was launched in April 1961, less than three months after John F. Kennedy became the U.S. President. The Cuban armed forces, trained and equipped by Eastern Bloc nations, defeated the exiles in three days. The bad Cuban-American relations were exacerbated the following year by the Cuban Missile Crisis, when the Kennedy administration demanded the immediate withdrawal of Soviet missiles placed in Cuba, which was a response to U.S. nuclear missiles in Turkey and the Middle East. The Soviets and Americans soon agreed on the removal of Soviet missiles from Cuba and American missiles secretly from Turkey and the Middle East within a few months. Kennedy also agreed not to invade Cuba in the future. Cuban exiles captured during the Bay of Pigs Invasion were exchanged for a shipment of supplies from America. By 1963, Cuba was moving towards a full-fledged Communist system modeled on the USSR. The U.S. imposed a complete diplomatic and commercial embargo on Cuba and began Operation Mongoose.

In 1965, Castro merged his revolutionary organizations with the Communist Party, of which he became First Secretary, and Blas Roca became Second Secretary. Roca was succeeded by Raúl Castro, who, as Defense Minister and Fidel’s closest confidant, became and has remained the second most powerful figure in Cuba. Raúl’s position was strengthened by the departure of Che Guevara to launch unsuccessful insurrectionss in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and then Bolivia, where he was killed in 1967.

During the 1970s, Castro dispatched tens of thousands troops in support of Soviet-supported wars in Africa, particularly the MPLA in Angola and Mengistu Haile Mariam in Ethiopia. The standard of living in 1970s was “extremely spartan” and discontent was rife. Fidel Castro admitted the failures of economic policies in a 1970 speech. By the mid-1970s, Castro started economic reforms.

Cuba was expelled from the Organization of American States (OAS) in 1962 in support of the U.S. embargo, but in 1975 the OAS lifted all sanctions against Cuba and both Mexico and Canada broke ranks with the US by developing closer relations with Cuba. On 3 June 2009 the OAS adopted a contentious resolution to end the 47-year exclusion of Cuba, but the U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton walked out in protest as the resolution was being drafted. Cuban leaders have repeatedly announced they are not interested in rejoining the OAS.

As of 2002, some 1.2 million persons of Cuban background (about 10% of the current population of Cuba) reside in the U.S., Many of them left the island for the U.S., often by sea in small boats and fragile rafts. On 6 April 1980, 10,000 Cubans stormed the Peruvian embassy in Havana seeking political asylum. The following day, the Cuban government granted permission for the emigration of Cubans seeking refuge in the Peruvian embassy. On 16 April, 500 Cubans left the Peruvian Embassy for Costa Rica. On 21 April, many of those Cubans started arriving in Miami via private boats and were halted by the U.S. State Department, but the emigration continued, because Castro allowed anyone who desired to leave the country to do so through the port of Mariel. Over 125,000 Cubans emigrated to the U.S. before the flow of vessels ended on 15 June.

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David MacMichael is a former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) analyst. A ten-year veteran of the U.S. Marine Corps, he was a counter-insurgency expert in South-East Asia for four years. He also served as an analyst for the National Intelligence Council from 1981-1983. MacMichael graduated with an MA and Ph.D. in History from the University of Oregon.

MacMichael resigned from the CIA in July 1983 because he felt the Agency was misrepresenting intelligence for political reasons. His public resignation from the Agency gave credence and notability to his vocal indictment of the Reagan Administration’s policy toward Central America. He was considered the “key witness” in Nicaragua v. United States. The case was heard in 1986 before the International Court of Justice, which ruled that the United States had violated international law by supporting the Contras in their war against the Nicaraguan government and by mining Nicaragua’s harbors. MacMichael also testified in front of Congress on this matter.

A former investigator for the Christic Institute, he was an outspoken critic of the Institute’s reliance on conspiracy theory, arguing that the Institute “was eager, perhaps overeager, to demonstrate that this enterprise [a "secret team" of conservatives] was responsible for everything since Cain slaying Abel.” In July 2005, he testified at a special joint hearing of Congressional and Senate Democrats about the consequences of the Plame affair.

MacMichael is a member of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS), founding member of Association of National Security Alumni and the Association for Responsible Dissent, and an outspoken critic of the Iraq War and the Bush Administration. He has participated in six documentary films from 1988-2003. Journalist John Pilger has described him as a “CIA renegade.”

The Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) was a proposal by U.S. President Ronald Reagan on March 23, 1983 to use ground and space-based systems to protect the United States from attack by strategic nuclear ballistic missiles. The initiative focused on strategic defense rather than the prior strategic offense doctrine of mutual assured destruction (MAD). The Strategic Defense Initiative Organization (SDIO) was set up in 1984 within the United States Department of Defense to oversee the Strategic Defense Initiative.

The ambitious initiative was “widely criticized as being unrealistic, even unscientific” as well as for threatening to destabilize MAD and re-iginite “an offensive arms race.” It was soon derided as Star Wars, after the popular 1977 film by George Lucas. In 1987 the American Physics Society concluded that a global shield such as “Star Wars” was not only impossible with existing technology, but that ten more years of research was needed to learn whether it might ever be feasible.” Under the administration of President Bill Clinton in 1993, its name was changed to the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization (BMDO) and its emphasis was shifted from national missile defense to theater missile defense; and it scope from global to regional coverage. It was never truly developed or deployed, though certain aspects of SDI research and technologies paved the way for some anti-ballistic missile systems of today. BMDO was renamed to the Missile Defense Agency in 2002. This article covers defense efforts under the SDIO.

Space-related defense research and testing remains heavily-budgeted to this day, irrespective of the program names, operative/reporting organizations, politics, or reports to the contrary in the press. Although it is difficult to compile actual spending totals across the complete spectrum of space-based defense programs (including classified “off-budget” “black projects”), the U.S. has certainly invested well over $100 billion on “SDI” and follow-on programs, and holds a commanding lead over all current or potential future adversaries in the realm of space technology/warfare. The vast majority of this investment has been made in basic research at National Laboratories and Universities, and these programs continue to be a key source of funding for top research scientists in the fields of high-energy physics, supercomputing/computation, advanced materials, and many other critical science and engineering disciplines: funding which indirectly supports other research work by top scientists, and which would be largely unavailable outside of the defense budget environment.

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The Regional Inter-Agency Task Team on Children and AIDS in eastern and southern Africa known as RIATT will convene a high-level conference starting tomorrow here in the Tanzanian capital. Participants will review progress and achievements to date in order to scale up the response to issues facing children affected by HIV and AIDS. They will also encourage young people themselves to take part in shaping that response.

Representatives of governments, civil society groups, UN agencies, the International Comparison Program for Africa and others are travelling from 19 eastern and southern African countries to attend.

The 23 organizations that comprise RIATT first came together in 2006 to build consensus around a regional strategy for children affected by the pandemic through resource-tracking, social protection measures, advocacy, regional engagement and social innovation. Among the teams member organizations are the African Union, the Southern African Development Community, UNICEF, the UN Development Programme and the Food and Agriculture Organization.

To read the full story, visit: http://www.unicef.org/infobycountry/tanzania_45764.html

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Roger Nash Baldwin became head of the National Civil Liberties Bureau (NCLB) in 1917. An independent outgrowth of the American Union Against Militarism, the Bureau opposed American intervention in World War I. The NCLB provided legal advice and aid for conscientious objectors and those being prosecuted under the Espionage Act of 1917 or the Sedition Act of 1918. In 1920, the NCLB changed its name to the American Civil Liberties Union, with Baldwin continuing as its director and Walter Nelles as chief counsel. Jeannette Rankin, Jane Addams, Crystal Eastman, Albert DeSilver, Helen Keller, along with other former members of the NCLB, assisted Baldwin with the founding of the ACLU. Among the founding members was Felix Frankfurter, who later became an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. DeSilver and Nelles were Baldwin’s closest associates.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) consists of two separate non-profit organizations: the ACLU Foundation, a 501(c)(3) organization which focuses on litigation and communication efforts, and the American Civil Liberties Union, a 501(c)(4) organization which focuses on legislative lobbying. The ACLU’s stated mission is “to defend and preserve the individual rights and liberties guaranteed to every person in this country by the Constitution and laws of the United States.” It works through litigation, legislation, and community education. Founded in 1920 by Crystal Eastman, Roger Baldwin and Walter Nelles, the ACLU was the successor organization to the earlier National Civil Liberties Bureau founded during World War I. The ACLU reported over 500,000 members at the end of 2005.

Lawsuits brought by the ACLU have been influential in the evolution of Constitutional law. The ACLU provides legal assistance in cases in which it considers civil liberties to be at risk. Even when the ACLU does not provide direct legal representation, it often submits amicus curiae briefs.

Outside of its legal work, the organization has also engaged in lobbying of elected officials and political activism. The ACLU has been critical of elected officials and policies of both Democrats and Republicans.

The ACLU was formed to protect aliens threatened with deportation, along with U.S. nationals threatened with criminal charges by U.S. Attorney General Alexander Mitchell Palmer for their communist or socialist activities and agendas. It also opposed attacks on the rights of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and other labor unions to meet and organize.

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Founded in 2007 in partnership with the UN Foundation, the task force represents the combined forces of UNICEF, the UN Population Fund, the International Labour Organization, the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, the UN Development Fund for Women and the World Health Organization.

This collaborative initiative aims to help achieve the Millennium Development Goals by targeting disenfranchised adolescent girls in developing countries.

In this video, Mayan activist Marcia Azucena Yat Jor, 18, describes her role as a youth mentor with the Abriendo Oportunidades programme in Guatemala.

To read the full story, visit http://www.unicef.org/policyanalysis/index_48500.html

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Founded in 2007 in partnership with the UN Foundation, the task force represents the combined forces of UNICEF, the UN Population Fund, the International Labour Organization, the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, the UN Development Fund for Women and the World Health Organization.

This collaborative initiative aims to help achieve the Millennium Development Goals by targeting disenfranchised adolescent girls in developing countries.

In this video, model and human rights activist Noella Coursaris Musunka discusses her work as an advocate for girls’ education in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

To read the full story, visit http://www.unicef.org/policyanalysis/index_48500.html

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