Politics

Dear Mr Mayor, I am writing to encourage you to bring the issue of future port reclamation back to the Auckland Council table. I have yet to change my vote. But like others I am calling for these matters to be formally revisited by the Governing Body in a calm and collected way with all the information new and old presented without fear or favour. Given the significant level of public interest, we at least owe that to Aucklanders. Like other councillors, I always do my best to represent the public while balancing the economic interests of our city and region. And I thought I was doing the right thing by supporting tightening up the old reclamation rules, but it's clear that's still not going far enough to reflect the wishes of the wider Auckland community. I supported...

Dear friends, In the past two months we have all been in a turbulence of violence, uncertainty, and clash of values and beliefs. After 14 years of rockets falling on civilian communities, on men, women, and children, the Israeli Government decided to act. Whether the actions were the right ones, and whether the rockets will stop – we are still in the midst of the operation and only time will tell. But, I have decided to write to you now, so you can feel a little bit of what we feel here. I was drafted on the first day of Operation Protective Edge. At 19:00 in the evening, I got home, put all the gear in my usual Miluuim backpack, gave a big hug to my wife and two children, and started my way towards my unit which sits in the center of Israel. After a night of gearing up and making...

Dear Sen. Paul, We agree with you that Congress should obey the Constitution. We should never engage in foreign wars without a congressional declaration of war, a restraint on military action put in place by our Founding Fathers to ensure lawmakers never send our troops to war without deliberation. But a constitutional war in the Middle East is just as bloody, destructive, and likely to incite terrorism as an unconstitutional war. Our half-century of interventions in the Middle East have been a colossal failure. We have provided arms, military training, and subsidies to virtually every country in the region, inciting continual war and unrest. This has created a breeding ground for international terrorists that pose a real danger to our country and the world — one that would not...

Dear Mr Dmitry, The military exercises Zapad-2009 are being carried out in our country now. More than 6000 Russian soldiers take part in them. It’s the first time in the history of independent Belarus when the country meets such amount of foreign soldiers. The objective of the exercises is training to repel a possible military aggression from the West. In our view, presence of such amount of Russian soldiers in Belarus is inadmissible and may be a threat to our country's independence. You often say in your speeches that your aim is creating a new Russia. You also warn not to repeat the tragic mistakes of the past. However, we see that Russia’s policy towards our country hasn’t changed for many centuries. Neither Russian tsars, nor Bolsheviks regarded our country as an...