Palestinian Children’s attitudes to women and minorities:

Limiting Women’s Occupations:
"73% [Grades 9 and 12] agree to limit women’s work to traditional occupations."
"16% [Grade 12] support women’s right to work as taxi drivers."

Limiting Women’s Freedom
"33% [Grade 12] believe that hitting a woman is permissible under specified circumstances."
"23% [Grade 9] do not accept a woman has the right to chose a life companion freely."
"32% [Grade 9] do not accept a woman’s right to chose her own clothes."

Limiting Women’s Political Involvement:
"52% [Grade 9] do not accept that women can have positions on a Municipal Local Council."
"37% [Grade 9] do not accept women’s right to vote in elections."

Children’s attitudes to different races, religion, sex and handicapped
"60% [Grade 12] expressed unwillingness to choose a friend who is not of their religion."
"24% [Grade 12] do not welcome the idea of friendship with others, who have a different skin color."
"51% [Grade 12] are not willing to choose a friend who is not of their sex."
"9% [Grade 12] do not welcome the idea of friendship with people from other countries."
"No more than 60% [Grade 9 and 12] favor handicapped rights in the areas of occupation, education, and presenting candidacy for elections."

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(2004-03-03) -- John Forbes Kerry, the presumptive Democrat presidential nominee, today said President George Bush lied about the presence of water on Mars.

The charge comes a day after NASA announced that its Mars rovers had found evidence that there may have been water on Mars in the past.

"Evidence of previous water is not the same as the presence of actual water now," said Mr. Kerry. "No one doubts that Mars once had a ’water program’, if you will. But Mr. Bush spent $800 million on his unilateral Martian adventure. That money could have provided affordable health care for poor children of minimum-wage-earning same-sex domestic partners who were wounded by assault weapons on underfunded public school playgrounds."

Mr. Kerry added that when he supported increased funding for NASA, he didn’t know that "Bush would...uh...foul it up as badly as he did."

• 27-year-old Han Bong-hee, who came to South Korea in August 2001, escaped North Korea by crossing the Tumen River into China together with her family. Chinese police, however, caught her mother and father and forcefully repatriated them to North Korea. She has yet to hear from them since. Fighting back tears as she recalled his family's history, Han said, "I was moved when I came to Poland and saw that foreigners are paying attention to the human rights situation in North Korea," and, "I ask the international community to show even more interest so that North Koreans can quickly find freedom."
  
  
• 22-year-old Kim Hyeok, who was born in Cheongjin, North Hamgyeong Province, lost his parents at an early age and was raised in an orphanage. When he was teenager, he began crossing back and forth across the Chinese border in order to make a living. At the age of 16, he was caught and forced to spend time in prison. While he was in prison, he saw an engineer -- a university graduate -- brought in on charges of eating children. "At first, I thought, 'How can a person eat other people?' But as I starved, I began to experience hallucinations in which people appeared as beasts, too. I became extremely frightened of myself." When Kim was released from prison, he crossed over the Chinese border once again, and with the help of locals, reached South Korea in 2001.
  
  
• 23-year-old Byeon Nan-i's older brother was publicly executed, and even though she crossed over into China together with her family, circumstances separated them. Bursting into tears, she said, "I went to China to get word of my parents who returned to North Korea, and I heard that because of my older brother who was publicly executed, the state took away their home. They put up a plastic tent in the mountains, and live by picking and eating grass. They're now bedridden."
  
  
• Foreign media attention has been particularly focused on 41-year-old Lee Yeong-guk, who in 1978 was selected as a bodyguard for Kim Jong-il at the tender age of 16. He served in that capacity until 1989. Lee attempted to defect in October 1993, but was arrested by North Korean authorities and subjected to extreme torture. Afterward, he spent four years at Yodeok Political Prison Camp. Discussing life at the camp, Lee said, "We ate an average of 120g of corn gruel a day and had to endure 15 or 16 hours of forced labor. Men and women had to lay face down, wearing only their underwear, and were beaten with ash tree branches until 10 [branches] snapped." He told of how starving inmates would catch snakes, frogs, and mice, and eat them in their entirety -- snake skin, mice fur, guts and all. He testified that while he was at Yodeok, there was a prisoner who was charged with having salt in his pocket. The guards killed the man by chaining his ankles to a car and dragging him until the flesh from his head and back had been stripped off. Now and then, guards would kill prisoners by beating them with rifle butts or kicking them with their boots until their heads cracked open.
  
  
• Of the five defectors, the oldest was 59-year-old Kim Hee-suk, who lost to starvation her mother-in-law, husband, and son -- in that order. Kim came to South Korea following her daughter, who had defected previously. Fighting tears, she said, "Coming to South Korea, every time I eat my fill, I think of my only son who starved to death, and I can't eat."