The head of South Korea’s National Council of Churches has written to President Bush, urging that sanctions on North Korea be lifted and that a peace agreement be negotiated to replace an armistice signed on the Korean Peninsula in 1953.
When evangelical pastor and best-selling author Rick Warren announced that he would make a preaching mission to North Korea next year, it raised eyebrows in the conservative religious community.
North Korea, after all, is a keystone in President Bush’s “axis of evil” and is called by the State Department and human rights groups a gross violator of religious freedom.
President Bush exercised the first veto of his presidency to reject a bill that would have expanded federal funding for embryonic stem cell research.
The legislation that Bush vetoed July 18 was passed by the Senate on a bipartisan 63-37 vote the day before, and by the House of Representatives in 2005. It would have lifted restrictions imposed by the president in 2001 on U.S. funds for stem cell research.