Tag Archives: issue

Google Voice: A push to rewire your phone service

Google plans to unveil a service called Google Voice on Thursday that indicates Google wants to do with your telephone communications what companies such as Yahoo have done with e-mail. Google Voice, the new version of the GrandCentral technology Google acquired in July 2007, has the potential to make the search giant a middleman in an important part of people’s lives, telephone communications. With the service, people can pick a new phone number from Google Voice; when others call it, Google can ring all the actual phones a person uses and handle voice mail.

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Thailand: Myanmar to allow refugees

Myanmar will allow Rohingya refugees back into the country if they can prove that they are Bengali, Thailand’s foreign ministry said. The agreement was reached in side talks between the Thai and Myanmese foreign ministers during the 14th ASEAN summit, a meeting of Southeast Asian nations held in Thailand over the weekend, said Thai Foreign Ministry spokesman Thairit Charungwat on Monday.

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State Department scolds China on human rights

The State Department issued a report Wednesday sharply critical of China’s human rights record, despite the Obama administration’s decision to take a different approach to the Asian country. “The government of China’s human rights record remained poor and worsened in some areas,” the report said in reviewing the last year, finding Chinese authorities “committed extrajudicial killings and torture, coerced confessions of prisoners and used forced labor.” The “2008 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices,” the annual report of human rights around the world, also accused China of “severe cultural and religious repression” of minorities in Tibet and other regions and increasing harassment and detention of dissidents and activists who signed a petition calling for respect of human rights. China limits the rights of citizens to privacy and freedom of speech, assembly, movement and association, the report said.

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Holder: U.S. a ‘nation of cowards’ on race discussions

In a blunt assessment of race relations in the United States, Attorney General Eric Holder Wednesday called the American people "essentially a nation of cowards" in failing to openly discuss the issue of race. In his first major speech since being confirmed, the nation’s first black attorney general told an overflow crowd celebrating Black History Month at the Justice Department the nation remains “voluntarily socially segregated.” “Though this nation has proudly thought of itself as an ethnic melting pot, in things racial we have always been and continue to be, in too many ways, essentially a nation of cowards,” Holder declared. Holder urged Americans of all races to use Black History Month as a time to have a forthright national conversation between blacks and whites to discuss aspects of race which are ignored because they are uncomfortable.

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