Ohio delegation blasts Mount McKinley name change Gregory Korte, USA TODAY8:53 p.m. EDT August 31, 2015
President Obama will officially change Mount McKinley's name back to Denali. Here are 5 things to know about the 20,237-foot mountain. USA TODAY
WASHINGTON — When it comes to getting around Congress, President Obama may not be able to move mountains — but he can rename them.
The Obama administration's decision to rename North America's tallest peak to its original native name of Denali is drawing protests from Republican lawmakers in Ohio.
That's because the mountain's previous namesake, President William McKinley, was also a Republican from Ohio.
"This decision by the administration is yet another example of the President going around Congress," Sen. Rob Portman, R-Ohio, said, noting that Congress had been debating the name for years.
Ohio Gov. John Kasich, a Republican presidential candidate, said Obama "overstepped his bounds."
Rep. Bob Gibbs, R-Ohio, went even further, calling it another example of Obama's "constitutional overreach."
"President Obama has decided to ignore an act of Congress in unilaterally renaming Mount McKinley in order to promote his job-killing war on energy," Gibbs said in a tweeted statement Sunday. "This political stunt is insulting to all Ohioans."
Obama timed the announcement to coincide with a three-day trip to Alaska to highlight the problem of climate change in the Arctic. But the dispute over the name goes back decades.
The 20,237-foot mountain was originally known as Denali, which means "the great one" in the Athabascan language of the original Alaskans. But that began to change when European-American prospectors and explorers arrived. A Seattle man, William Dickey,rediscovered the mountain in 1896 while prospecting for gold.
"We named our great peak Mount McKinley, after William McKinley of Ohio, who had been nominated for the presidency,and that fact was the first news we received on our way out of that wonderful wilderness," he wrote in a dispatch to the New York Sun.
McKinley was not yet president then, and the naming may have been a political stunt in itself: McKinley, in running against the populist Democrat William Jennings Bryan, favored the gold standard to back U.S. dollars.
That name was formalized in 1917 when President Woodrow Wilson signed the Mount McKinley National Park Act, which required the park to be "dedicated and set apart as a public park for the benefit and enjoyment of the people under the name of the Mount McKinley National Park."
But another law passed in 1947 gives the Secretary of the Interior and the Board on Geographic Names the power to "provide for uniformity in geographic nomenclature and orthography throughout the federal government."
The Alaska government first petitioned the Interior Department to change the name to Denali in 1975. But because the Board on Geographic Names deferred to Congress if a name was under consideration by lawmakers, the Ohio delegation was able to prevent a name change for four decades simply by introducing bills to keep the McKinley name — even if those bills never passed.
Friday, Interior Secretary Sally Jewell said that impasse had gone on long enough. In her order issued Friday, she noted that McKinley never stepped foot in Alaska.
Still, House Speaker John Boehner, who hails from the opposite corner of Ohio, said he was "disappointed" in the decision.
"There is a reason President McKinley’s name has served atop the highest peak in North America for more than 100 years, and that is because it is a testament to his great legacy," Boehner said in a statement.
He recited McKinley's record, which included service in the Union Army in the Civil War, elections to the House of Representatives and to the Ohio governorship. "And he led this nation to prosperity and victory in the Spanish-American War as the 25th President of the United States," Boehner said.
It's unclear what the Ohioans can do about the decision. Gibbs said he would would work to overturn the decision legislatively; Portman said he would ask the National Park Service to find a way to "preserve McKinley's legacy somewhere else in the national park that once bore his name."
The issue is not strictly a partisan one. Ohio Democrats, too, have introduced bills over the years to retain the McKinley name.
And Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska — while critical of Obama on energy policy — praised the decision to rename the mountain. “For centuries, Alaskans have known this majestic mountain as the ‘great one,’" she said in a statement Sunday. "I’d like to thank the President for working with us to achieve this significant change to show honor, respect, and gratitude to the Athabascan people of Alaska."
"Palmyra, under threat from Isis, is an ancient Roman site whose significance and value is exceeded by very few others: those in Rome itself, Pompeii, possibly Petra in Jordan. Its temples, colonnades and tombs, its theatre and streets are extensive, exquisite, distinctive, rich. The loss of Palmyra would be a cultural atrocity greater than the destruction of the Buddhas in Bamiyan. It is hard to think of deliberate vandalism to equal it, despite the grim examples offered by the last hundred years."
托馬斯·庫吉斯基是德國魏瑪包豪斯大學（Bauhausuniversität Weimar ）的在讀博士生。2008年以來，他在柏林藝術大學（Universität der Künste in Berlin ）任教。他是柏林藝術大學聲音建築研究小組（AARU ）的創始人之一。在科研和教學工作之餘，他還從事印象設備安裝和音效作品製作。
Stanford scholar illuminates history of disputed China Sea islands
Friction between China and Japan over sovereignty for the resource-rich Diaoyu Islands has escalated in recent years. Research by Stanford graduate student Xiang Zhai reveals new details about the dispute that might help resolve it.
This rocky outcropping in the East China Sea is part of the disputed Senkaku Islands, which are also known as the Diaoyu Islands. Stanford graduate student Xiang Zhai has found new details of the islands' history in the Hoover Institution Archives.
A desolate chain of small, rocky islands in the East China Sea has caused more than a few waves between Japan and China in recent years.
The Senkaku Islands, also known as the Diaoyu Islands, were under Chinese rule from ancient times until the late 19th century when Japan laid claim to the uninhabited islands. The United States affirmed the Japanese claim in 1971 under the Okinawa reversion agreement.
China renewed its interest in the 1970s when oil and natural gas were found there. Many Chinese also perceive the Diaoyu Islands as a symbol of China's historical defeats. As such, the islands have continued to be a source of tension between the two nations.
New research by Stanford's Xiang Zhai, a master's degree candidate in the Center for East Asian Studies, dispels widely accepted narratives about the history of the islands. Zhai says his findings, which draw from the recently declassified diaries of Chiang Kai-shek, could help resolve the conflict.
Zhai's investigation centers on Chiang, who ruled China from 1927 to 1949 and Taiwan from 1949 to 1975. His alleged indifference toward the fate of the Diaoyu Islands is frequently cited as the reason that the islands have not come back under Chinese control. According to Zhai, academia has paid insufficient attention to Chiang's role in determining the islands' fate.
Zhai spoke with the Stanford News Service about his research:
What do the Diaoyu Islands mean to the Chinese people today?
These islands may be small, but they are a point of national pride for the Chinese people and their ownership represents political influence and security. The resolution of the disputes will carry tremendous psychological weight, as the Chinese use the status of the Diaoyu Islands to evaluate China's success. It has been the consensus among the Chinese that the government should resolve the Diaoyu Island disputes; therefore, the government is constantly pressured to revisit the issue.
On a pragmatic level, the dispute is about oil. China's energy demands will comprise a quarter of the world's by 2035, and the islands could help meet those needs.
This June 1948 entry is from the diary of Chiang Kai-shek, who fled mainland China after the nationalist forces he led lost the civil war to the Communists.
First, Chiang recognized on the eve of the 1943 Cairo Conference [with President Franklin D. Roosevelt and British leader Winston Churchill] that China's claim to Okinawa might raise U.S. concerns about Chinese expansionism. So, he became more cautious and less proactive about the Okinawa issue. Second, in the years following World War II Chiang had to prioritize fighting the civil war. When he lost that war, he focused on protecting his base in Taiwan, from where he planned to regroup and launch a counterattack on mainland China. Chiang's preoccupation with these missions likely prevented him from focusing on Okinawa.
Third, although Chiang proposed to Roosevelt at Cairo that Okinawa be placed under joint administration by the U.S. and China, the U.S.'s sole administration of Okinawa was acceptable to him, especially after the State Department assured Chiang's ambassador in 1952 that the U.S. did not support restoring the Ryukyus (Okinawa) to Japan.
Finally, Chiang did not believe that the U.S. would return strategically important Okinawa to Japan without a struggle. It was only after the Kennedy administration announced America's intention to restore Okinawa to Japan that Chiang became more attentive.
How did you come upon Chiang's diaries?
Chiang's diaries have been in storage at the Hoover Institution since 2005 and were fully declassified in 2009. Luckily, they were immediately available to me as a research assistant at Hoover and as a master's student at Stanford. The challenge was that the information I needed was scattered throughout the diaries – a full 76 boxes of material.
I read every page to make sure that I gleaned all the relevant information. It was easy to miss references to the events because the diaries were written informally and often included only passing mention of Chiang's thoughts on the subject. I familiarized myself with Chiang's style and get inside his head.
What was most surprising about your findings?
The most surprising discovery for me was learning that Chiang studied history himself. In early 1967, he read a book concerning the history of the Ryukyu Kingdom. He immediately regretted not having read it sooner. He wrote in his diary that his lack of knowledge about the Ryukyus' tributary relations with China and the story of it passing into Japanese hands had resulted in his "loss of the perfect opportunity to recover the Ryukyus." I infer that the opportunity he was referring to is the Cairo Conference. It's remarkable that Chiang's change of heart in the 1960s might have been influenced by a history book.
Another surprising finding was that Roosevelt, Churchill, [U.S. Secretary of State Cordell] Hull, [British Foreign Minister Anthony] Eden and [Soviet leader Josef] Stalin all agreed to return Okinawa to China after WWII during or around the time of the 1943 Cairo Conference. China had significant disagreements with all three major Allies concerning Myanmar [Burma], India, Hong Kong and so on – still, Chiang gained seemingly unanimous approval from his peers on the Okinawa issue.
How do you think your work will impact Chiang's legacy?
I hope to correct both the public and academic perceptions that Chiang did not care about the Ryukyu Islands. This could also change the common perception that Chiang is responsible for the Diaoyu Island disputes today.
Does your research have implications for contemporary politics in the region?
I believe my research contributes to the larger conversation. The Potsdam Declaration delineated the post-war Japanese territory and granted Japan "the islands of Honshu, Hokkaido, Kyushu, Shikoku and such minor islands as we determine." Reading Chiang Kai-shek's documents, I came to the same conclusion he did in his late career: that the Ryukyu and the Diaoyu Islands are included in the minor islands referred to in the declaration.
Though Japan benefits in part from controlling the islands, the Japanese have alienated the Chinese, lost China as a friend, and stirred up unhappy historical memories. This has been a lose-lose situation that we can resolve by understanding its true history.
OVER the past year the Senkaku islands, a clutch of five uninhabited islets in the East China Sea, have shown their ability to convulse relations between China and Japan, Asia’s two biggest powers.
若用實際擁有者佔上風(possession is nine-tenths of the law)來看，這個答案很簡單：日本。日本宣稱在1884年｢發現」了這些無主島群。並且在1895年初期併吞了尖閣諸島。時間就在甲午戰爭中打敗日漸衰弱的中國，獲得台灣做為賠償後沒多久。古賀辰四郎獲得在該島發展的許可。他的鰹魚加工廠有兩百多位員工，這兩百多位員工也殺了許多(曾經數量眾多的)信天翁，來取得其羽毛。古賀家族的最後一位員工在第二次世界大戰中離開。1945年日本戰敗後，這些群島的控制權落到美國人手中，他們則拿這些群島來作投彈測試。1972年，美國佔領結束後(譯按：更精確來講，是美國返還琉球群島。因為同盟國對日本本土的佔領在1952年結束)，日本政府恢復控制尖閣諸島。
Gregory Korte, USA TODAY8:53 p.m. EDT August 31, 2015
