Mes: agosto 2019

(AP) TOLEMAIDA, Colombia – Their peace talks don’t begin until next month, and the Colombian government and the country’s main leftist rebel movement already have run into differences. Just hours after leaders of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia proposed on Thursday that both sides observe a truce during the negotiations, President Juan Manuel Santos firmly rejected the idea. Santos said there would be no end to fighting until a peace accord is agreed on. He said Colombia’s military and police have been told to intensify offensive actions. “There’s not going to be any cease-fire. We will not give anything until we get the final agreement, and I want to make that very clear,” the president told reporters at a military base in central Colombia. Santos, who spoke after meeting with more than 100 generals and colonels, did not respond to questions. There was no immediate comment from the FARC rebels. Leaders of the movement said during a news conference in Cuba that their first item on the negotiations’ agenda would be to propose a truce in Colombia’s half-century of fighting that has killed tens of thousands. “We will propose a cease-fire the moment we sit down at the table,” said Mauricio Jaramillo, a spokesman and top FARC leader. “We are going to discuss it.” Before Santos rejected that idea, he said during a radio interview Thursday that a...

(CBS/AP) NEW YORK – When you heard that Pulitzer Prize winner Philip Levine was appointed America’s new poet laureate, you probably wondered just what a poet laureate does. Well, for starters, he – or she – receives $35,000 and is known officially from October through May as the Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry for the U.S. The laureate has few official duties and poets before Levine have used the job to pursue a range of personal projects. For example, Billy Collins (2001-2003) started the Poetry 180 program which encourages the reading of verse in high school. The 180 refers to the 180 poems Collins selected for the program. Collins also wrote a poem to commemorate the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and read it aloud at a special joint session of Congress on Sept 6, 2002. Another previous poet laureate, Robert Hass (1995-1997) went around the country lecturing on poetry and ecological awareness and organized a nationwide “Watershed” conference on nature writing. He also wrote a column about poetry for the Washington Post. What is Levine planning? “I don’t want to overextend myself, but at the same time I would like to use the ‘bully pulpit,’ as they call it, to bring attention to some of my concerns,” the 83-year-old poet told the Associated Press. “There’s a great deal of American poetry that’s hardly known and that should be known....

(CBS/AP) NEW YORK – When you heard that Pulitzer Prize winner Philip Levine was appointed America’s new poet laureate, you probably wondered just what a poet laureate does. Well, for starters, he – or she – receives $35,000 and is known officially from October through May as the Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry for the U.S. The laureate has few official duties and poets before Levine have used the job to pursue a range of personal projects. For example, Billy Collins (2001-2003) started the Poetry 180 program which encourages the reading of verse in high school. The 180 refers to the 180 poems Collins selected for the program. Collins also wrote a poem to commemorate the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and read it aloud at a special joint session of Congress on Sept 6, 2002. Another previous poet laureate, Robert Hass (1995-1997) went around the country lecturing on poetry and ecological awareness and organized a nationwide “Watershed” conference on nature writing. He also wrote a column about poetry for the Washington Post. What is Levine planning? “I don’t want to overextend myself, but at the same time I would like to use the ‘bully pulpit,’ as they call it, to bring attention to some of my concerns,” the 83-year-old poet told the Associated Press. “There’s a great deal of American poetry that’s hardly known and that should be known....

(AP) AZAZ, Syria – Syrian fighter jets screamed through the sky Wednesday over this rebel-held town, dropping bombs that leveled the better part of a poor neighborhood and wounded scores of people, many of them women and children buried under piles of rubble. Activists said more than 20 people were killed. The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said 23 people died in the double airstrike and more than 200 were wounded. Mohammed Nour, a local activist reached by phone, put the death toll at 25. Neither figure could be independently confirmed. More in After the Arab Spring Reporters from The Associated Press saw nine dead bodies in the bombings’ immediate aftermath, including a baby. The bombings sent panicked civilians fleeing for cover. So many were wounded that the local hospital locked its doors, directing residents to drive to the nearby Turkish border so the injured could be treated on the other side. One person’s remains were bundled into a small satchel. A group of young men found a man buried in the wreckage of destroyed homes, his clothes torn and his limbs dirty, but still alive. “God is great! God is great!” they chanted as they yanked him out and 충청남도출장업소 laid him on a blanket. Nearby, a woman sat on a pile of bricks that once was her home, cradling a dead baby wrapped in a dirty...