North Korea, NASA and Uyghurs

The past couple of days have been pretty wild and exciting, as I ventured out to new areas of DC for panel discussions as well as a House of Representatives hearing. Just yesterday, I visited the Center for National Policy (CNP) to hear a discussion with guest speaker David Sanger from The New York Times on the subject of North Korea's nuclear tests. With a brother in South Korea (see BrotherHaynes on the left) this was a hot topic for me. Sanger's presentation really clarified our current situation with NK, and defined it in less sensational terms than what I have heard in the media. Always a plus.

Besides being wild and exciting, the past couple of days have been wet. Very wet. Soggy, in fact. Later yesterday evening I battled a hell of a storm to tag along with fellow intern Mark to his roundtable discussion with LBJ alums and the Outreach Program Manager from NASA, Beth Beck. At first this event was rather awkward for me. I'm not an LBJ alum. I'm not even a Salem alum. And I'm certainly not a working professional like Beth Beck. Fortunately, Ms. Beck has an incredible nack for discourse and can easily engage anyone in conversation, even when that person would be perfectly happy to simply hide out in the corner and drip dry. She posed some very thought provoking questions, while also providing valuable insight into the way government bureaucracies work. I really enjoyed our roundtable discussion, and think it was certainly worth sitting in wet socks for a couple hours :)

Today I went to my very first House of Representatives Hearing! The Subcommittee on International Organizations, Human Rights and Oversight convened to address the oppression of the Uyghurs, an ethnic minority group in western China. Dr. Williams knows I've been chomping at the bit to begin a research project on China's ethnic minorities, so kudos to him for finding this meeting! There were four panelists, two of which were Uyghurs themselves. And though I was very excited to be at Rayburn, their testimony of the discrimination against, and even detainment of the Uyghurs of Xinjiang province was very sobering. Fortunately the representatives who were present seemed to echo my own sentiment that labeling Uyghurs as terrorists is unfounded and unacceptable, and some real fighting words made their way onto the record. It seems that the yak poop may really hit the fan once China is actually confronted with the issue of human rights abuse in Xinjiang, and I am very interested to see how the U.S. will address this.