Don Hill

Also by Don Hill

• September 08, 2005

  U.S.: Hurricane Devastates New Orleans, Unique American City (Part 2)

  More than one week after Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans, the city’s future remains an open question. Some 60 percent of the city remains underwater, and it will take months to dry out -- and years to rebuild. In the second of a five-part series on the storm, RFE/RL takes a look at the unique history and culture of New Orleans, and what may have been lost in the hurricane’s wake. But as one native tells it, the birthplace of jazz will overcome its tragedy -- and live to sing another day.

• August 10, 2005

  World: Bird Flu Threatens Globe, But Might Never Spread

  Nearly 8,500 birds have died in Russia since the virus hit Siberia in mid-July Remember this combination of letters and numbers: H5N1. It is the name of an influenza virus that has killed millions of chickens and dozens of people in Asia. It shows signs of changing into a virus that could wipe out millions of human beings. It already has created a massive headache for world health officials. How can they alert the public without promoting panic? How much can they responsibly tell the public about something that might happen, or might not?

• August 05, 2005

  Iraq: From Politics to War, Iraqis Stand On Shifting Sands

  Iraq's leaders, like Prime Minister al-Ja'fari, are caught in a constitutional crisis before they even have a constitution Iraq's top leaders are set now to meet on 7 August to work out snags over a draft constitution. Major differences remain among the factions, including the extent to which Islamic law should be the basis of Iraq’s legal code. The obstacles come as Baghdad continues to wrestle with insurgent violence. Yesterday, Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Ja'fari set out a 12-point security strategy that he said provides for better intelligence, improved border security, and an economic plan to defeat the insurgency.

• June 09, 2005

  OSCE: Anti-Semitism Conference Termed 'Disappointing'

  A two-day meeting of leaders from 55 nations ended today in Cordoba, Spain, in an atmosphere of disappointment. It was to have been a grand step forward in international efforts to stamp out anti-Semitism and other forms of intolerance. At a similar meeting last year in Berlin, delegates pledged to compile detailed data on hate crimes targeting Jews. This time, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) widened the focus to include intolerance aimed at Muslims, Roma, and other minorities. But in a speech in Cordoba, Edgar W. Bronfman, president of the World Jewish Congress, scolded the participants. He said that delegates promised a year ago to take action in the battle against intolerance. Most, as he put it, "failed miserably to do so."

• June 03, 2005

  Bosnia: Videotape Appears To Show Serb Murder Of Srebrenica Victims

  Women mourn those killed at Srebrenica (file photo) A smoking gun has come to light in the case of the 10-year-old Srebrenica massacre. Serbian authorities have obtained a videotape that shows, in graphic detail, Serbian paramilitary police torturing and killing Muslim men at Srebrenica in Bosnia-Herzegovina in July 1995. Serbian security forces killed more than 7,000 Muslim men and boys in that massacre, which is said to be the worst atrocity in Europe since World War II. But many Serbs deny the event took place, or claim that the perpetrators were Bosnian Serbs, not Serbian nationals. The videotape shows the faces of some of the killers, and Serbia's prime minister says that some already have been arrested.

• May 19, 2005

  World: New Technology Helping To Decipher Long-Lost Notes Of Father Of Technology -- Archimedes

  A physicist at Stanford University in the United States is scanning a 1,000-year-old document made of parchment on which were recorded some of the writings of Archimedes -- some say the greatest mathematician of all time. It is a remarkable new direction for the physicist's pioneering work in advanced applications of X-rays. The inscriptions have been scratched out and overwritten in the centuries since they were set to parchment. But because they were penned in an iron-based ink, X-rays in the Stanford lab have made readable the only known early Greek recordings of Archimedean thought.

• May 05, 2005

  Central and Eastern Europe: Report Says Gender Gap Worsening

  The Open Society Institute and the Bucharest-based Center for Partnership and Equality have just published a joint study of disparities in pay and political representation between men and women in Eastern and Central Europe. It says that women in some of the countries studied are paid two-thirds of what their male counterparts make. In all of the countries examined, the report says, women hold only a small number of political-leadership positions. They make up, of course, slightly more than 50 percent of the population. The report's authors are calling on the countries to take steps to provide equal opportunities for women in politics and in the labor force. RFE/RL talks to the study's authors in Romania and Turkey about the stubborn problems behind their findings.

• April 18, 2005

  World: The Line Between Science And Religion (Part I)

  The late Pope John Paul's life and death has attracted renewed interest in the Roman Catholic Church -- and tensions between the church and the modern world. In a three-part series, we take a closer look at the church's relationship to three modern issues -- science, birth control, and social justice. Catholicism is not the only church that must confront the tension between belief and science. Did God create the world as described in the Christian, Islamic and Jewish scriptures? Did humans evolve from lower orders of animals? Should experimentation in human cloning be forbidden or regulated? Can abortion, contraception, capital punishment or euthanasia ever be justified? In this report, we look at what happens when religious faith and scientific observation confront each other. [See also The Roman Catholic Church And Birth Control (Part II) --> http://rfe.rferl.org/featuresarticle/2005/04/e2fc418b-846e-4f8e-a084-c797733c206f.html and The Roman Catholic Church And Social Welfare (Part III) --> http://rfe.rferl.org/featuresarticle/2005/04/cfcd1e67-4b32-49ca-8532-c32d7c1daceb.html .]

• April 05, 2005

  World: Rights Group Says More Countries Outlawing Execution, But More People Executed

  The human rights group Amnesty International says that revulsion toward the death penalty and use of the death penalty both are growing around the world. The group says that the list of countries that have outlawed or abandoned judicial executions is longer than ever before. But Amnesty says also that the states that continue to use the death penalty last year killed more people than in all but one of the last 25 years. Amnesty says in a new report that the leading death penalty countries include some of the most repressive nations in the world. They also include the United States.

• March 10, 2005

  World: Press Groups Expect Sgrena Case To Make A Difference

  With daily violence, journalists face great risks in Iraq International freedom-of-the-press watchdog groups have been calling this week for full U.S. disclosure in the case of Giuliana Sgrena and Nicola Calipari. She's the prominent Italian journalist whom insurgents in Iraq abducted last month. He's the Italian intelligence agent who negotiated her release but who then died under fire from U.S. soldiers as he escorted her to the Baghdad airport. She was wounded in that shooting. The watchdog groups have made similar demands in the past over killings of journalists by U.S. troops in Iraq -- with little result. But as our correspondent reports, the press groups expect the Sgrena-Calipari case to be different.

• February 18, 2005

  World: Ashura Preparations Call For Piety, Heightened Security In Iraq

  Worshippers in Karbala (file photo) Devout Shi'a Muslims around the world are preparing for the holy day of Ashura tomorrow, a traditional day of mourning and self-flagellation. The civil authorities in some Muslim-majority countries are preparing also. They are on high alert for terrorist acts or other unrest on the day that also commemorates the split of Islam into the Sunni and Shi'a branches.

• February 17, 2005

  Iraq: War Crimes Trials Reported Near For Hussein Associates

  Al-Majid is being linked to the extrajudicial executions of 120 Iraqi men in 1999 in Al-Basrah. (file photo) War crimes trials in Iraq for former leader Saddam Hussein and his associates reportedly will begin this spring. "The New York Times" and other news outlets quote Iraqi officials -- speaking on the condition that they n-o-t be identified -- as saying that the series of trials is likely to begin with that of Ali Hassan al-Majid, known as “Chemical Ali” for his alleged role in poison-gas attacks that killed thousands of Iraqi Kurds in the late 1980s. Hussein's day in court, they say, will most likely not come until 2006.

• February 08, 2005

  U.S.: New Secretary Of State Focuses On 'Common Goals' In Paris Speech

  U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice today asked Europeans to turn away from disagreements over the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq and begin a new phase in the trans-Atlantic alliance's history. In her first major foreign-policy speech since taking office, Rice said the United States wants to work with Europe. And Europe, she said, "must stand ready to work with America." She delivered the speech at the National Foundation for Political Sciences in Paris before an audience of about 500 students and intellectuals.

• February 04, 2005

  Sudan: Darfur Crisis Causes U.S. To Stumble Over Opposition To International Court

  Darfur refugees in Chad (file photo) A United Nations commission says government troops and the Janjawid Arab militia have committed mass killings, torture, rape, and other atrocities against rebel African tribesmen in Sudan's Darfur region since 2003. The UN Security Council has called on two principals in the two-year conflict to appear before the council next week. They are Sudanese Vice President Ali Osman Mohammed Taha and John Garang, head of the main southern Sudan rebel group. The commission recommends that the Security Council refer the crimes to the new International Criminal Court (ICC). Though such a case seems custom-made for the ICC, the issue could become tangled in international diplomacy.

• February 02, 2005

  Eastern Europe: 'Decade Of Roma Inclusion' Starts In Sofia

  Prime ministers from eight Central and Eastern European countries meet today in Sofia to start the most ambitious international program ever to attack the illiteracy, discrimination and exclusion that affect Roma, Europe's largest minority. The meeting is the symbolic launch of what is being called the "Decade of Roma Inclusion." The participants in Sofia expect to adopt a declaration committing to plans to reduce Romany segregation in schools and housing, and to improve their health care, reduce illiteracy, and fight discrimination.

• January 21, 2005

  Europe: Case Of Swedish Pastor Convicted Of Hate Speech Tests Limits Of Freedom

  A Swedish pastor convicted of hate speech for a sermon denouncing homosexuality is appealing his sentence of a month in prison. Aake Green told an appeals court in southern Sweden that all he did was enlighten people on what the Bible says. RFE/RL reports that the case has divided Swedes about where the balance lies between tolerance and free expression.

• January 19, 2005

  Iraq: 'Camp Babylon' Scandal Dramatizes Fragility Of Archaeological Treasures

  Iraqis looted virtually everything in their country after Hussein's government fell Interim Iraqi Culture Minister Mufid al-Jaza'iri has announced that the ancient city of Babylon will be closed to visitors until experts can catalog the extent of damage U.S. and Polish troops have done to the site. A new report by the prestigious British Museum finds that troops who used the site as a military base did irreparable harm to one of the world's foremost historical treasures. The report's findings have triggered numerous media reports and the condemnation of archaeologists. RFE/RL reports that the warnings of damage to Babylon and other sites in Iraq have been sounded since the U.S.-led invasion.

• January 12, 2005

  Kazakhstan: Study Contends Baikonur Launches Are Poisoning Children, Environment

  Prague, 12 January 2005 (RFE/RL) -- Russian researchers say rocket launches from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan are causing serious illnesses among people who live nearby. Russia's Rosaviakosmos space agency, the U.S. space agency NASA, and the European Space Agency (ESA) all launch rockets from the base. The unpublished study contends that unburned remnants of toxic fuels regularly spray over inhabited parts of Kazakhstan's Altai area. It says this is resulting in increased levels and severity of sickness among the area's children.

• January 12, 2005

  World: Worries Grow Over Danger Of Flu Pandemic

  International public-health officials say the world is overdue for an influenza pandemic -- a worldwide epidemic -- that could kill millions of people. The UN's World Health Organization has been sounding the alarm for more than a year. The authoritative science journal "Nature" reports in its latest issue that the conditions to trigger a devastating pandemic are already in place now in Vietnam. But, says "Nature," governments are underestimating the danger, and research to deal with the threat is dangerously underfunded.

• December 09, 2004

  Belarus: 'Prisoner Of Conscience' Remembered On Human Rights Day

  Human rights experts call them "prisoners of conscience." Hundreds of them around the world are forced to live in deplorable conditions in jail cells and prison camps. Many are anonymous and largely forgotten. But others remain in the public eye because rights groups refuse to look away. RFE/RL took the case of a well-known "prisoner of conscience" ahead of the United Nations' International Human Rights Day.

Load more