A Chinese delegation met with Gov. Beverly Perdue last week and visited Moore County as part of a trip aimed at strengthening ties with North Carolina, The Pilot newspaper of Southern Pines reports.

Perdue met with Yu Laishan, vice governor of Hunan Province, who encouraged Perdue to come visit, the paper reported.

The ties between Hunan Province and North Carolina reach back at least to World War II, when a pilot with the "Flying Tigers," who was from High Falls, NC, was shot down by the Japanese over the moutains of south central China. He was buried by local villagers and honored for his sacrifice.

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Former U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Dole and her husband Bob will speak in Kansas.

The two former senators will give a rare joint interview on May 3 as part of an annual lecture at the University of Kansas.

"These two individuals have had independently extraordinary careers dedicated to public service," said Bill Lacy, director of the university's Dole Institute of Politics in a statement. "Yet together, the Doles’ successes are even more remarkable."

The title of the lecture is "Unlimited Partners," also the name of a book written by the two during Bob's presidential run in 1996.

Bob Dole has given one of the lectures before, but the institute has been trying to get both of them to appear together. The lecture series commemorate his recovery from wounds suffered in World War II.

The event is free and open to the public.

Harold H. Webb, chairman of the Wake County Board of Commissioners and a former Tuskegee Airman, will have prime seats at the presidential inauguration next week.

The Joint Congressional Committee on Inaugural Ceremonies invited those still living among the flyers who trained as part of the famed segregated unit in World War II, Michael Biesecker reports.

After being drafted out of N.C. A&T State University as a freshman, Webb served two years as a mechanic and gunner in the U.S. Army Air Corps before gaining acceptance at Tuskegee. He was training to be a bomber pilot when the Japanese surrendered and the war ended.

The distinguished record of the all-black Tuskegee airmen during the war helped persuade President Harry Truman to desegregate the U.S. military in 1948.

Webb, 83, had planned to go to the Obama inauguration anyway. He has previously attended the inagurations of presidents Kennedy, Carter and Clinton.

But as a former Tuskegee Airman, he will be a honored guest sitting with former members of Congress in the terrace below the podium where Obama will be sworn in.

"It is an honor to literally have a front row seat to history being made," Webb said in a county media release. "I view the location of our seats as symbolic, because Obama stands on the shoulders of my fellow airmen and other trail blazers that helped pave the way for desegregation and ultimately, his place as the first African-American president."

U.S. Rep. Brad Miller voted against the genocide resolution.

The Raleigh Democrat, the only member of the state's Congressional delegation who is on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, which voted this week to declare the Ottoman-Turkish killings of Armenians in 1915, in which 1.5 million people died, a "genocide."

Sitting a few feet from three survivors of the event, all of them women in their 90s, Miller said in the meeting he didn't think the United States currently has the international standing to offend an important ally such as Turkey.

Miller told Dome he didn't think the resolution would accomplish much.

"I wish we had the standing in the world that if we pass that resolution, Turkey would stop and examine the history of what happened and decide whether they should do something to come to terms with it," Miller said.

"But the reality is, in Turkey and the Muslim world generally, they will simply see the resolution as an insult and will be angry about it."

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