reference work, is to be published by Greenwood Press in late 2008.
The encyclopedia consists of fifty narrative entries/chapters
organized alphabetically by state. Each entry will be 5,000 words in
length and the publisher will pay $200 for each entry. Currently, the
editor is soliciting additional contributors for the following state
entries: (1) Arkansas; (2) Delaware; (3) Iowa; (4) Kentucky; (5)
Louisiana; (6) Maine; (7) Nebraska; (8) Nevada; (9) New Hampshire;
(10) New Mexico; (11) North Carolina; (12) North Dakota; (13)
Pennsylvania; (14) South Carolina; (15) Tennessee; and (16) Vermont.
If interested, please contact Professor Jun Xing by e-mail:
jxing@oregonstate.edu or by phone: (541) 737-9546.
October 23, 2007
"G.O.A.'L is running a nationwide campaign in order to raise awareness in regards to birthparents search. During the campaign we will visit three major cities with our information booth. Many volunteers will help with distributing information material and explaining the cause of our campaign to the visitors. We will also distribute our 2007 Search Brochure where we printed short infos about 160 adoptees. The brochure is all in Korean because we target with that the birthparents. We also distributed already this brochure to the media, to the national assembly and to all major district offices."
More information found at the G'OAL website.
WASHINGTON (AFP) - - Saturday, Oct 6, 2007. Yahoo! News.
With a private tour of Washington
for North Korean diplomats and a possible Pyongyang concert by the
prestigious New York Philharmonic, the United States is beginning to
warm up to the communist regime after more than five decades of a
diplomatic freeze.
But US officials insist a full blossoming of relations shut down since the 1950-53 Korean War won't happen until North Korea fully abides by its agreement to dismantle its nuclear weapons program.
Within weeks of Pyongyang's first steps to shut down its key Yongbyon reactor under an agreement sealed in six-nation talks in February, the change is evident.
Aside from the commencement of huge shipments of fuel oil promised by South Korea, Russia, the United States, China and Japan as part of the agreement, Pyongyang has scored some softer benefits.
A group of 16 North Korean UN diplomats and their families, normally confined to within a 40-kilometer (25-mile) radius from New York City, got an unprecedented secret tour of Washington last month, seeing the White House and Lincoln Memorial and driving past the Pentagon, the Chicago Tribune reported on its website Friday.
The Tribune said the North Koreans came to Washington with the approval of Christopher Hill, the senior US diplomat in charge of negotiating the North Korean nuclear disarmament deal under the six-party framework.
Hill was also credited by the New York Philharmonic for opening the door to talks on the United States' premier orchestra holding a concert in Pyongyang next February, at the tail end of its tour of China.
Top officials from the orchestra left the United States for North Korea on Thursday, the New York Times reported, to hold talks on the concert.
"It would be kind of extraordinary for us to play there," orchestra president Zarin Mehta told the Times.
"If this venture helps in furthering what's been going on in the last couple of weeks in terms of the normalizing of relationships, that would become a wonderful thing for the world."
But US officials on Thursday stressed that more formal improvement of bilateral ties, including removal of North Korea from the US list of state sponsors of terrorism, a full peace treaty ending the Korean War, and normalization of ties, would depend on the Stalinist regime abiding by its pledge to dismantle its nuclear weapons program.
Those steps are "all conditioned on action-for-action" progress on the denuclearization deal, said US national security spokesman Gordon Johndroe.
"It's a process, there are certain actions that we expect by the end of the year, such as the disablement of Yongbyon, and their actions will be met with actions on our end," said Johndroe.
His comments came after North and South Korean leaders called Thursday for a permanent peace pact to end the world's last Cold War divide as they wrapped up a historic summit.
State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said Thursday that a formal peace is part of the deal in the six-party talks.
"It's a matter of historical fact that the United States is party to the (1953) armistice. And that, if you just look back at the September 2005 joint statement, it talks about coming to a peace agreement on the Korean Peninsula as part of the six-party talks," McCormack said.
However, he added, a peace agreement is linked to "the need to move forward on the six-party talks as a whole and the core issue of the six-party talks, which is a denuclearized Korean Peninsula."
In the meantime the North Koreans are benefiting from the "soft diplomacy" on offer from the United States.
The hush-hush tour of Washington on September 8 was a first step. Escorted by US officials and Fred Carriere, executive director of the Korea Society, the diplomats saw much of the US capital's famed sites.
They were not completely impressed, though, Carriere told the Chicago Tribune.
"They were like, 'Is that all?' when they stopped at the White House, he told the newspaper.
