Ïîïóëÿðíûå ñîîáùåíèÿ

вторник

President Obama is ratcheting up pressure on lawmakers to support his request for limited U.S. military strikes in Syria. The White House says the Syrian government is responsible for a chemical weapons attack last month near the capital, Damascus.

On Sunday night, the president stopped by a dinner Vice President Joe Biden was holding for Republican senators.

Guests included Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, Susan Collins of Maine, Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire, Bob Corker of Tennessee, Saxby Chambliss of Georgia and Deb Fischer of Nebraska.

Obama met with the senators for nearly an hour and a half, according to the White House pool report.

Ahead of his prime-time address to the American people on Tuesday, the president and his advisers have scheduled a series of meetings to try to sway lawmakers over to his side on Syria.

Obama has six network interviews scheduled Monday. He plans to meet with Senate Democrats on Tuesday, according to an unidentified official who spoke to The Associated Press.

In Tuesday's speech, Obama will try to convince the public that limited air strikes in Syria are necessary to respond to the alleged use of chemical weapons by the Assad regime.

Before the address, White House officials will also be out defending the president's message on Syria.

National Security Adviser Susan Rice will deliver a speech on Syria to the New America Foundation on Monday. She also is expected to meet with members of the Congressional Black Caucus.

White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough appeared on five network shows Sunday and is scheduled to meet with the House Democratic Caucus on Tuesday.

On Capitol Hill, classified briefings for members of Congress will be held Monday and Wednesday.

The Senate is scheduled to begin voting on a Syria resolution Wednesday, and a final vote may come at the end of the week. The House is expected to vote next week.

A survey by The Associated Press finds that House members who have staked out positions are either opposed to or leaning against Obama's plan for a military strike by more than a 6-1 margin.

The survey found nearly half of the 433-member House and a third of the 100-member Senate remain undecided.

Syrian President Bashar Assad also has been getting his message out. In an interview that will air Monday morning on CBS, Assad denied that he used chemical weapons on his people.

A U.N. study released Tuesday of 10,000 men in six countries across the Asia-Pacific region found nearly one in four acknowledged raping a woman.

The report found:

"Men begin perpetrating violence at much younger ages than previously thought. Half of those who admitted to rape reported their first time was when they were teenagers; 23 percent of men who raped in Bougainville, Papua New Guinea, and 16 percent in Cambodia were 14 years or younger when they first committed this crime.

"Of those men who had admitted to rape, the vast majority (72-97 percent in most sites) did not experience any legal consequences, confirming that impunity remains a serious issue in the region.

"Across all sites, the most common motivation that men cited for rape was related to sexual entitlement - a belief that men have a right to sex with women regardless of consent. Over 80 percent of men who admitted to rape in sites in rural Bangladesh and China gave this response.

"Overall, 4 percent of respondents said they had perpetrated gang rape against a woman or girl, ranging from 1 to 14 percent across the various sites. This is the first time we have data from such a large sample of men on the perpetration of gang rape."

Michael Ferguson sometimes jokingly refers to himself among colleagues as "the other black brewer."

That's because Ferguson, of the BJ's Restaurants group, is one of only a small handful of African-Americans who make beer for a living. Latinos and Asian Americans are scarce within the brewing community, too.

"For the most part, you've got a bunch of white guys with beards making beer," says Yiga Miyashiro, a Japanese-American brewer with Saint Archer Brewery in San Diego.

Sure, there are prominent exceptions — like Garrett Oliver, the brewmaster at Brooklyn Brewery, and Celeste and Khouri Beatty, the owners and operators of Harlem Brewing Company. There are a few others, too — but that's out of more than 2,600 breweries nationwide.

So how did American craft brewing end up so lacking in diversity?

It's a puzzle, agrees Wall Street Journal beer reviewer and author William Bostwick, who is now working on a global history of beer to be titled "The Brewer's Tale." He says that virtually every culture in the world's human history has made alcoholic beverages.

"It's one of the few things that all cultures share, so why it's now dominated here in the U.S., and maybe in Europe and Australia, by white males is something I can't explain," Bostwick says.

Frederick Douglas Opie, a food historian at Babson College, says that cultures in western and central Africa have "a long history of artisan brewing." People of the region, he says, made beer from sorghum and millet, as well as palm wine – which, he says, was considered by some a luxury product.

"So, why that discontinues in America after the Atlantic slave trade, I don't know," Opie says. Blacks, he notes, often made moonshine liquor and bootleg beer in the 1920s and '30s. But these days, they're all but absent from the craft beer scene. "It could be that beer is like a lot of things in the food industry which, as they grow popular, become very hip, yuppie and white."

Looking at the nation's community of homebrewers also sheds light on the matter, says brewer Jeremy Marshall, of Lagunitas Brewing Company.

Enlarge image i

"I've always felt hip-hop as a culture hasn't really yet embraced its international roots." That's something that Blitz the Ambassador is working to change. Born Samuel Bazawule in Ghana, he grew up listening to Public Enemy. Now, he's a rapper in the U.S. His sound blends his rap influences like Chuck D with the Afrobeat sounds of Fela Kuti and the high-life music of his home.

All these influences helped to create his identity. "The more I traveled, the more I realized that there's a specific role that I need to be playing, and that role is about bridging gaps and expanding the culture that I've been so blessed enough to be a part of," he tells NPR's Michel Martin. "That's why I went with the Ambassador."

Blitz's Afropolitan Dreams will be out early next year. It's a continuation of his musical journey documenting the African immigrant experience in America. He's just released an EP The Warm Up as a taste of what's to come.

A song like "African in New York" is "really just an assertion that we're here. There are Africans in New York." Blitz says he has always wanted someone to write a song about their experience, "selling bootlegs, or graduating from medical school, or driving cabs. It's all these things that are part of our life and our culture as immigrants that need to be celebrated."

Blog Archive