• There are four methods of becoming a citizen in Romania. Here is a quick overview of all of them.

1. Birth

So basically, if one or both of a person’s parents are Romanian citizens, he is. This applies if he is born abroad. If a child found in Romania’s parents are unknown, that child is considered a Romanian citizen.

2. Adoption

If a child is adopted by two Romanian citizens, then he is a citizen upon the date of adoption. If only one of his parents is a citizen, and the other is a foreign citizen or has no citizenship, the child’s citizenship must be mutually agreed on by the adopting parents. If they cannot agree, the court will decide on the child’s citizenship based on what is in his best interests. His consent is necessary for this decision to be valid if he is fourteen or over. However, if his adoption is stated invalid or annulled, and he resides abroad or chooses to reside abroad, he loses his citizenship.

3. Repatriation

If one loses one’s citizenship, one can reapply for repatriation. The same basic rules for a child being adopted by citizens apply to a child whose parents are applying for repatriation. If both parents are repatriated the child is considered a Romanian citizen. If only one is repatriated, the parents must agree on the child’s citizenship, or the courts will decide. Again the child’s consent is necessary if he is fourteen or older. If one spouse is repatriated, it does not affect the citizenship of the other.

3. Request

If one was born in Romania, but never had a citizenship or does not currently have one, he can apply for one if he currently resides in Romania. Even if he was not born in Romania, he can apply for a citizenship after residing in Romania for five years, or three if his spots or civil partner is a Romanian citizen. If he is applying for citizenship, he must:

• Be 18 or over
• Show a loyal attitude to Romania
• Have generally good behavior and not have committed any crimes making him unworthy of citizenship
• Have legal proof of existence (birth certificate)
• Have a general understanding of the Romanian language so that he can thrive in Romanian society

A child is granted citizenship the date that his parents are. If only one parent is a Romanian citizen, they must agree on the child’s citizenship or the court will decide for them. The child’s consent is necessary of he is fourteen or older.

“It’s appalling that a country as educationally advanced as India is still mired in the caste system where women and people of lower rank are treated as inferior, and male government officials still make excuses for rapists. This is a country that had a female prime minister before the whole western world did, and half their country is still ignored and things like this are still allowed to happen. Yes, that same dichotomy exists in our country; we have ghettos with desperately under-educated people living in poverty and crime, but I still don’t think our country takes any crimes as casually as this.” –Julie Howard

In 2012, a young Indian woman was beaten and gang-raped on a moving bus, and the injuries she sustained proved to be fatal when she died from her wounds. This caused a huge uproar among India’s citizens.

Before this incident, laws against rape were lightly enforced, and rape victims were often shamed by the authorities. After the 2012 bus rape, politicians promised that rape would be treated as a serious crime and that perpetrators would be punished accordingly. Many changes have taken place since then, including harsher laws against sexual assault and less media avoidance of the topic. However, last week, two teenage girls, cousins, were brutally gang raped and murdered, their bodies left swinging from a mango tree, and the reaction to this crime is considered largely disproportionate by many. Politicians have said little on the matter, media coverage died quickly after the rapes, and few protests of the rapes have taken place. Many think this seeming indifference can be attributed to the fact that the girls were “untouchables”, the lowest and most highly discriminated against group in India’s severe caste system. Ranjana Kumari, a prominent women’s activist in India, believes the rapes could have been a brutal form of political revenge, as the group the girls belonged to, the dalits, had very few supporters of the Yadavs, the ruling party that the men accused of the crime belong to. The crime has not gone completely ignored–suspects have been arrested, as well as negligent police officers–but the reaction the rapes received was quiet and showed little outrage.

In 2011, only 24,000 rapes were reported in India, and while that may seem like a lot, experts estimate that fewer than one in ten rapes are actually reported, due to how stigmatized rape in India really is. In the US, rape victims are seen as just that–victims. In India, they are shamed and ostracized.

I believe Rape is one of the worst things a person could ever do to another human being, possibly the worst. It goes beyond violation of the body. Sexual assault is the deepest invasion of someone’s rights, their freedom, their choice. Their CHOICE. Rape takes away someone’s choice on whether they want to give their body to someone, whether they want to be vulnerable, whether they want to trust the person they are with. Rape makes a person into a plaything for others to use for their own pleasure. It is the deepest and most horrific form of abuse there is. It is sex in its worst form, in a way sex was never meant to be: not an act of love, not an act of pleasure, but a way of putting someone down to the point where they don’t feel safe in their own skin.  Rape takes away someone’s control in the surest and most cruel way possible and leaves them powerless. Rape is violation. It is abuse. It is terror. It is hell put into a person, who burns and burns others with no remorse. It is shame. It is stigma. It is pain. It is rage. It is everything we as humans are supposed to despise.

Now imagine a society where Rape, capital R stigma shame abuse terror hell rage

goes unsaid, unpunished. Imagine a society where Rape can be inflicted on two young girls, girls my age, and not be cried about. Imagine a man who hears about this and says, “Boys will be boys.” Imagine your daughter, sister, mother living in such a society. Imagine that. Now tell me there is progress being made in such a country. Tell me there is change. Tell me there is fairness. You can’t. You can’t because there is not. You can’t because not everyone in India, not everyone in the world, will be saddened by the gang rape of two girls. There is no fairness. There is no justice. There is Rape, and there is acceptance of it. And that is the deepest violation this world will ever know.

Well, the moral of this game is…I’m a horrible politician. And politics suck. And believe me, there is WAY too much pressure on Politicians! We don’t give Obama nearly enough credit. I’m not kidding when I say this game was scarring, and near impossible for someone who knows almost nothing about politics in general and even less about the politics of the Middle East. Sure, I understand the basics: Palestinians and Israelis pretty much hate each other, the Israelis because they think they have a right to the land that was formerly Palestine, and the Palestinians because they think the Israelis are always judging them. Well, you see, in the game, the player has two scores: what the Palestinians think of you, and what the Israelis think  of you. The player has the option of playing as The Palestinian President or the Israeli Prime Minister. I played as the Israeli Prime Minister. Now, the only way to win the game is to get complete support from both nations…well, suffice it to say, I didn’t win. My tactic was try to make everyone happy at once, without paying attention to the annoying polls in the corner…don’t even really know what those are about. Anyway. My people were jerks. Yeah, that’s right. Whenever I did something to help the Palestinians, they said I was rewarding terror. When I did something that negatively affected the Palestinians, the Israelis were happy enough, but the Palestinians hated me. So I tried to patch up my relationship with them by offering aid, and they said my actions were suspicious because they were right after an intense negative action toward them. Hmm…they may be right. Still, though! Politicians are hugely underappreciated. If this is what things are really like in the Middle East, then boy, am I glad I don’t live there. By the end, I was close to tears and practically had a nervous breakdown. In a fit of rage, I bombed the Palestinian government AND police, offered above mentioned suspicious aid randomly, and basically screwed everybody over that I could int he worst ways possible until I was kicked out of office. So basically, you do NOT want me managing your nation. I think I’ll just stick to joining the peace corps or something, because if any big decisions are ever left up to me, I’ll just end up blowing up my people because they don’t understand my stress. Yeah. That would work.

Ugandan president Yoweri Museveni passed into law an anti-gay bill that states that homosexual acts are punishable by years in prison on Monday. Gay acts were illegal in Uganda even before the bill was passed; now, some of these acts are even punishable by life in prison. Museveni did take out the death penalty originally included in the bill. The reason he has passed this law is because he thinks homosexuality, bisexuality, and transgender people are wrong, and he thinks these things are a choice, and does not want his country’s morals to be affected by the U.S.’s wishes. However, this has badly damaged Uganda’s relationship with the U.S., who is one of the country’s largest donors.

What do I think? This reminds me of a paper my brother has to write on whether or not Japanese internment camps were wrong. Yes, they were wrong. That is pretty much the only answer to that question, in my opinion. So yes, Museveni needs to get his head out of his judgmental @$$ and wake up to the fact that his way of life is not the only one. Homosexuality, bisexuality, and being transgender are not choices. They are not sicknesses. Museveni is the only one who is sick in this situation. My friend Scarlett doesn’t believe in laws against sexuality and thinks that it is dumb to damage his country’s relationship with the U.S. just for his beliefs. She thinks it should have been voted on. The author showed no bias.

Visuwords web, extending outward from Betty Friedan

They were soldiers

or boys, if you prefer

carrying guns like men because that’s what grown ups do, right

and they said goodbye to mom and dad and 

they set off. And

they sailed into an alien solar system with bullets in their guns and steel in their eyes

and they set down in their metal birds and they weren’t used to all the green there

so much green on

this alien planet

so it, the jungle I mean, swallowed them up because they were soft and unknowing  

and it hungered for muted colors

like gray

and then the jungle was calm and soft and dull

and empty for a long time.

But

soldiers quickly

turn

from gray to green, you know

and they grew branches instead of arms and legs

and their soft brown hair spiraled into floppy green leaves

and their soft pink skin grew hard and brown

and their roots dug into the ground and held firm and powerful

and there they stood

desperate 

and angry

for many, many

years

And that was their skin.

And they waited. 

And a long time after they dug their roots in, after they sprouted leaves and branches, when they were all asleep

a jet sailed through the air like a crow

or a hawk or

maybe a raven even

and the horizon flooded tangerine

tangerine clouds.

And the sleeping trees opened their eyes

which were really just knots in their bark and they said

what is that?

and the ugly orange cloud seeped toward them and they tried to run but
but

their roots were dug too deep in the alien planet, too deep in the

filthy,

barren dirt

and they stood there stuck in the ground

thrashing and

waiting

helpless

for the cloud

in the distance

creeping

creeping

closer.

and one tree, smaller than the rest

he imagined that if he could still smell, he would taste oranges in the air

and he closed his eyes and he imagined his home.

and then, then he could smell but

all his nose filled with was gas and

his branches turned back into limbs but

they were too weak to hold him

and 

he fell and

his sockets, they came back but his eyes were just scorched ash

and

he screamed through his dead mouth

and

the trees, they watched through their ashy sockets as they grew soft and pink and just boys again

they watched as their hard brown skin peeled off and left them raw

they watched as their bodies burned

and they were left ravaged 

and stolen

and dead inside

in the alien jungle.

And many years later

Some of them were

back home but

changed

and some of them were

scrawled on a tall V planted in

the ground

and some of them were forgotten and

left broken in the alien jungle that they were left to call home

and some were just fine.

but in the end

After trees and

jungles and

gas and

scars

and guns

all were men

if you know what I mean.

For a project in class, we had to interview a veteran from Vietnam. Since Ms. Christensen’s father was in Vietnam as a young man, we skyped him and asked him some of our questions, which are below, along with their answers.

1. Did you know you would be in the war when you heard about the draft? How did you feel when you heard about it, and how did you feel when you were drafted?

Mr. Christensen told me that he didn’t expect to be in the war or expect to be drafted. This was because, since he was in college, for four years he received a deferment, which meant he didn’t have to go to war. However, after that, he didn’t get another deferment, and before he knew it or had time to think, he was heading off to Vietnam, which he says was very overwhelming, but he was able to handle.

2. What sorts of people did you meet in the war? Do you still know any of them?

He was outdistanced from many of his fellow soldiers, but he does still have a very good friend from the war named Fred, and they still see each other sometimes. The two met in training and got to know each other well. Fred, who was an engineer in the war, was actually in combat, unlike Mr. Christensen.

3. Before you were drafted, did you feel like we should be in the war or not? Did your feelings change once you were in Vietnam or after you got back? Why or why not?

He was a dove before, which he felt was ignorant on his part because he didn’t know what it was like to be fighting in the war. After his service, he was a hawk, although he felt many mistakes were made in how the war was handled.

4. Were you surprised by the culture in Vietnam, or did you know what it was going to be like? What did you think about the culture?

He didn’t know what it was going to be like in Vietnam. The Vietnamese way of life was a new, alien culture, but eventually he got used to it, and he feels his experiences in the war were the foundation of his life.

5. Looking back, do you think the war was necessary? Why or why not?

He says that he cannot second-guess his decisions. He doesn’t know if the whole war was necessary, but he does know that we had obligations to the South Vietnamese that we couldn’t ignore.