(I received this note from Aetna.)
What to do about swine flu
The H1N1 virus, also known as "swine flu", has quickly spread around the world. A new vaccine for this virus should be ready this fall. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommends that the following groups get the vaccine first:
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Last Edited: Monday, 06 Apr 2009, 10:55 AM CDT
Created On: Monday, 06 Apr 2009, 10:41 AM CDT
(MYFOX NATIONAL) - Well, that didn't last long. Just days after it was made available in stores after only being sold online, the Barack Obama Chia Head has been pulled from some Walgreen's stores, MyFox Tampa Bay reports .
According to MyFox Tampa Bay, stores in Tampa, Fla., were asked to remove the Chia Obama from their shelves because the item "is not appropriate for the company's corporate image."
• YouTube user Samantha Jordann captured video of a Walgreen's Chia Obama display in this video
The Chia Obama is part of the Chia Pet line of ceramic chia seed planters, with the seeds sprouting from where the pet or person would grow hair. Chia Obama caused controversy even before it hit stores, inspiring debate on blogs and Amazon customer reviews about the appropriateness of a Chia president and whether or not the product is racist.
http://www.myfoxchicago.com/dpp/news/dpgo_Chia_Obama_Heads_Pulled_From_Stores_SAB_040620092390856 |  | Interactive Graphic: The Pay at the Top A look at the 2008 pay packages of 198 chief executives, including Citigroup’s Vikram S. Pandit. |
The statistics are alarming:
While health disparities worsen for African-Americans, according to
"Whether you suffer from heart disease, diabetes, obesity, high blood pressure or another chronic health condition, there is a key factor that will make a difference in your quality of life - exercise," explains Ms. Brewton.
Keeping weight under control plays a critical role in managing these health issues. However, many African-Americans face a major hurdle: they are living with chronic joint pain.
"Every warning from governmental and non-profit health organizations implores our community to 'get moving' because of the positive impact it has on combating these conditions,": explains Ms. Brewton. "But we have failed to make the direct link between painful movement and poor health."
That's the situation that
Early intervention is key as there many options to alleviate joint pain. Knee or hip discomfort should not be dismissed as one of the natural signs of aging without discussing it with a primary care physician. Today's treatment options offer non-surgical solutions, which provide temporary pain relief and more permanent solutions such as joint replacement. Total knee replacement (TKR) is an effective method of reducing pain and improving physical function among those with disabling knee osteoarthritis. However, a
Regaining mobility and being active is critical in helping to manage and defeat chronic health conditions. Healthcare disparities for African-Americans in getting joint replacement represent a serious healthcare barrier. Zimmer's Back In The Groove program is an education-based community partnership that addresses healthcare disparities impacting African-Americans in the area of joint replacement. For more information, visit www.backinthegroove.zimmer.com or call 1-866-923-2345.
Fancy restaurants in New York apparently see Black wait staff as bad for business.
A new study by economist Marc Bendick Jr., came up with the same old results: White job applicants are considerably “more likely to get follow-up interviews, be offered jobs and given information about jobs, and their work histories were less likely to be investigated in detail,” The New York Times reported Tuesday.
Hired by advocacy groups for restaurant workers, Bendick conducted his experiments by sending pairs of applicants with similar r̩sum̩s to various restaurants. The gender, appearance and experiences of the applicants Рvirtually everything but race Рwere the same.
“There really should not be a lot of difference in how the two of them are treated,” said Bendick, whose experiment is part of part of a larger report called “The Great Service Divide: Occupational Segregation and Equality in the New York City Restaurant Industry.” But there were big differences.
For example, Bendick found, non-White job applicants were 54.5 percent less likely as White applicants to get a job offer, and were less likely than White testers to receive a job interview in the first place; work experience of White job applicants was less likely to be subject to scrutiny; accents made a difference — with White candidates; White applicants with slight European accents were 23.1 percent more likely to be hired than White testers with no accent, but accents in non-White applicants made no difference.
Bendick has long researched such social ills as discrimination, ranging from racism in the advertising industry to sexism in firefighting. He said that in industries, such experiments typically found discrimination 20 percent to 25 percent of the time. In New York restaurants, it was found 31 percent of the time.
“That tells us that is a particularly serious situation of discrimination,” he said. “The rate of discrimination is worse for jobs that are really worth having. You don’t get a lot of discrimination for hamburger-flipping jobs at McDonalds.” At expensive restaurants in New York, “these are the jobs that you can make $55,000 to $100,000 a year,” Mr. Bendick said.
http://www.bet.com/NR/exeres/E6C6F6C2-11C3-4ED1-A674-8290228E8E77.htm??Referrer={0471DDF0-D0D8-48A8-9E30-ADD40CBE0269}
HARTFORD, Conn. (AP) — Connecticut legislators are considering making their state the first in New England to apologize for slavery and other racist policies of old.
A legislative committee heard testimony Monday on a resolution that would issue a formal, general apology and express the General Assembly's "profound contrition" for the official acts that sanctioned and perpetuated slavery hundreds of years ago.
The state's African-American Affairs Commission, a liaison between black communities and the government, is urging legislators to pass the resolution, which it has called "an exercise in reconciliation" and not an effort to determine fault for slavery.
The commission's legislative analyst, Frank Sykes, told the legislature's Government Administration and Elections Committee that "opportunities like this must be seized," especially in light of the "giant stride" the country took last November in electing its first black president, Barack Obama.
"While this is encouraging," Sykes said, "it should inspire us and challenge us to continue peeling away at the layers of racial discrimination and intolerance."
New Jersey last year became the first Northern state to apologize for slavery, and at least five other states have done so.
Of Connecticut's population of 3.5 million people, about 10 percent are black, according to U.S. Census estimates for 2007.
John A. Stewart, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Hartford, said he believes the differences between blacks and whites in the state stem from Connecticut's participation in slavery.
Among full-time workers in the state, black men earn 70 percent of what white men earn. Black men in the state also are four times more likely than white men to live below the federal poverty line, and black children under 5 are seven times more likely than white children to live in poverty, Stewart said, citing U.S. Census data.
"Slavery has left a cultural burden on both the exploited and the exploiters that still permeates our society," Stewart said.
The resolution says slavery was practiced in Connecticut from the 17th through 19th centuries. There were about 5,100 slaves in the colony by the mid-1770s, about 3 percent of the population at the time.
In 1723, the colony passed an act creating a 9 p.m. curfew for slaves to prevent what it called the "Disorder of Negro and Indian Servants and Slaves in the Night Season." Violation of the curfew was punishable by a whipping for the servant and a fine for the master.
The resolution mentions how Connecticut's wealth grew as merchants participated in the Triangle Trade, which carried slaves, crops and goods among West Africa, the Caribbean and America.
It also mentions how Connecticut legislators rejected emancipation bills in 1777, 1779 and 1780 and how the new state Constitution in 1818 specifically denied the right of blacks to vote. But it later mentions how Connecticut changed its ways and played a key role in abolition efforts, culminating in the outlawing of slavery in 1848.
The resolution would need to be voted on by the Government Administration and Elections Committee, possibly next week, before going to the House of Representatives and then the Senate.
Copyright © 2009 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5i6RR5oQaEKSr9EmhJZg_rlCvDoKQD9740LR80
The chips are in.
Every three years, the Federal Reserve, in its Survey of Consumer Finances, takes a look at how U.S. households are doing and reports on our assets and liabilities. The euphoria of our gambling spree is over. In the harsh glare of morning, the hangover is tough. And the latest data are from 2007, so they don't even capture the worst of the decline.
The net worth of the average American family is less than it was in 2001. We borrowed more for that trip to Vegas than we brought home. Everyone knows this now.
But here's something being talked about much less: The gap between the wealth of white Americans and African Americans has grown. According to the Fed, for every dollar of wealth held by the typical white family, the African American family has only one dime. In 2004, it had 12 cents.
This is not just a gap. It's a deepening canyon.
The overhyped political term "post-racial society" becomes patently absurd when looking at these economic numbers. This week, experts on asset building in communities of color are meeting with members of Congress to talk about closing the wealth gap. While the government is rescuing failing financial institutions as a short-term measure, those at the two-day Color of Wealth Policy Summit will make the case that the nation's long-term economic future depends on the inclusion of all Americans in opportunities to build wealth.
Why such a big gap? The biggest predictor of the future economic status of a child is the net worth of the child's parents. Even modest inheritances or gifts within a parent's lifetime -- such as paying for college or providing the down payment on a home -- can give a child a lift up the economic ladder. And historically, white families have enjoyed more government support and tax-paid subsidies for their asset-building activities.
Let's look at the rules of the game in homeownership, for example.
During the Depression, the Home Owners' Loan Corp. was formed to rescue families whose homes were in foreclosure. Not a single loan went to a family of color. The black section of Detroit was simply excluded. After World War II, GIs received government-subsidized home mortgages, but there was no oversight to ensure that soldiers of color got their fair share. Of the 67,000 mortgages issued under the GI Bill in New York and northern New Jersey, 66,900 went to white veterans, as documented in Ira Katznelson's "When Affirmative Action Was White."
Recently, there have been sins of omission and commission. White families are five times as likely as families of color to have a bank account and access to responsible loan terms. Because of the lack of federally insured and regulated financial institutions on reservations and in inner cities, rural areas, barrios and Chinatowns, payday lenders and other shady financial dealers operating without government oversight have preyed on people of color, fueling the economic and foreclosure crises. African Americans and other people of color were more than three times as likely as white borrowers to be steered to high-interest loans, even when they qualified for a prime loan. A Harvard University study showed that in Massachusetts, a high-income African American was more likely than a low-income white borrower to get a subprime loan. Such studies abound.
Additionally, rules in our tax code have strengthened the hand of those who already have assets. You can get a tax deduction for the interest paid on home mortgages of up to $1 million -- a nice break for those who hardly need one. But if you own a home and make too little to itemize, the mortgage interest deduction doesn't help you at all.
So what can we do? We need a Financial Product Safety Commission to act against discriminatory lending policies and to stop the marketing of dangerous loans such as exploding adjustable-rate mortgages. We also should cap the mortgage interest deduction and make it refundable so low-income homeowners can benefit. Mandating that new schools and transportation and commercial projects that are supported by federal dollars be located only in areas with racially inclusive zoning policies would also do much to create and grow neighborhoods of opportunity.
Building wealth is essential to the American promise of opportunity for economic mobility and security regardless of the accident of one's birth. In the 21st-century global marketplace, the diversity of our population is an asset -- if we play our cards right.
The chips on the table reflect the fact that the game was fixed. It's time to start an honest game with a new deck. All of our futures depend on it.
Meizhu Lui is director of the Closing the Racial Wealth Gap Initiative at the Insight Center for Community Economic Development in Oakland, Calif. The center is organizing the Color of Wealth 2009 Policy Summit, to be held in Washington today and tomorrow. This column was also published today on The Root.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/03/22/AR2009032201506.html?referrer=myspace
A brace of therapies ranging from improved bone marrow transplantation to stem cell research may finally put sickle cell anemia on the run.
Sebastian Kaulitzki
Sickle cell anemia, the first genetic disorder recognized by medicine, is still not well understood.
Identified in 1910 by James B. Harrick in Chicago, the disease affects close to 100,000 people in the United States, mostly African American, and millions worldwide. The consequences for patients are
devastating.
According to Sophie Lanzkron, director of the Sickle Cell Center for Adults at Johns Hopkins University, 30 percent of sickle cell patients experience pain 90 percent of days. "This is a tough disease; they have intermittent episodes of excruciating pain — they can’t go to college or have careers. Patients spend their lives just trying to manage the pain.”
With no objective measure of the disease, Lanzkron said patients are frequently stigmatized when they seek medical attention — being mistaken for addicts in search of narcotics — and treated with disdain by emergency-room personnel unfamiliar with the disorder.
The physiological consequences of sickle cell anemia include severe damage to organ systems, particularly to the kidneys and lungs, and can reduce life expectancy for those with sickle cell to the mid-40s. Complications include life-threatening infections and stroke — even in young children.
Children who suffer intermittent attacks miss school with predictable consequences for their lives and for their futures. Meanwhile, their caregivers must miss work to tend to them. Added to this are the health-care costs. Sickle cell patients, Lanzkron said, are often “understandably depressed."
“There are so many unmet needs in this patient population,” says Lanzkron, “and I see people come in with horrible complications.”
But researchers are targeting the disease with new multidisciplinary approaches with promising results. Combining a novel chemotherapy protocol with a proven bone marrow transplant technique, Robert Brodsky, director of the hematology division at Johns Hopkins University Medicine, announced the first-ever cure of an adult sickle cell anemia patient — Pamela Newton of Capitol Heights, Md. And researchers with the National Institutes of Health have developed innovative techniques spanning the spectrum from chemotherapy to irradiation to move step-by-step towards a cure for sickle cell and related disorders.
More than meets the eye
Normal red blood cells are disk-shaped and flexible, explained Lanzkron, allowing them to squeeze through tiny capillaries to bring oxygen and nutrients into every part of the body.
In those with sickle cell, their red blood cells contain unusual polymers that intermittently cause the cells to lose their elasticity and lock into a sickle shape, massing and tangling to block blood vessels and capillaries. That’s where the pain starts. “But we know it’s more complicated than that,” she said. The sickle cells also have a reduced oxygen capacity and shortened life expectancy compared to normal blood cells, and they seem to have a negative impact on the blood vessels themselves, “It affects the whole environment.”
“Scientists believe (the) sickle cell trait developed in malarial regions over time through natural selection,” said Lanetta B. Jordan, chief medical officer with the Sickle Cell Disease Association of America. It persists, she says, “because of the survival benefit it confers against malaria.”
Lanzkron elaborated: “People carrying the trait can still get malaria, but they are less likely to die from it.” But, she said, “There is no harm in having the trait,” which is carried by a recessive gene.
However, when two parents have the trait, their offspring each have a one-in-four chance of having sickle-cell disease. Although mostly associated with blacks in the United States, the disorder is also seen among Latinos, Asians and others with Mediterranean or African ancestry.
Aside from the not-always-effective pain medications, only two approved treatments exist for sickle cell, Jordan said — the chemotherapy drug hydroxyurea to ameliorate crises and bone marrow transplant.
An elusive and risky cure
Bone marrow transplants have been recognized as a cure for sickle cell for more than 20 years, but they have always required a perfect tissue match between the donor and the recipient. Only siblings can meet that requirement, and even then, the odds are one in four of a perfect match. However, because sickle cell is hereditary, closely matched siblings also have a high probability of sharing the disorder.
Lanzkron describes a lifesaving operation: “We give the patient agents that knock out the bone marrow; then it’s like getting a transfusion. We harvest a bit of marrow from the donor and infuse it into the patient.
“The bone marrow cells do the rest. They know where to go.” It sounds deceptively simple, but Lanzkron says that a bone marrow transplant has between a 10 percent to 20 percent mortality rate. Although the procedure has been used to cure the disease in about 200 patients — all of them children — bone marrow transplant is so problematic in adults that it is rarely attempted except in life-threatening circumstances.
“It is very difficult for adults to embark on a transplant course because, by that time, they have experienced so many transfusions that finding a match in itself is a challenge,” Jordan explained. Furthermore, in adulthood, mounting complications and decades of organ damage may render patients too fragile to withstand the chemotherapy required to make it work.
Over the past year, important advances have been made both in widening the pool of potential marrow donors and in lowering the risks of bone marrow transplant.
The intensive chemotherapy regimen, employed up until the 1990s to make way for bone marrow transplants, destroys the patient’s native bone marrow so that a graft can take root. But if the graft fails, the patient, with his own marrow obliterated, can no longer produce new blood cells and must be re-transplanted immediately in order to survive.
But this scenario is turning around dramatically thanks to Brodsky's innovative technique developed at Johns Hopkins. Brodsky and his team, who reported the first adult cure in May of last year, took a new approach by utilizing a less toxic chemotherapy regime than customarily used for bone marrow transplants.
It employs just enough chemotherapy to prevent the patient's immune system from rejecting the donated stem cells while preserving as much of the patient's bone marrow as possible.
Three days after the bone marrow transplant, doctors dose the patient with the drug cyclophosphamide to kill off the donor’s lymphocytes (white blood cells that attack foreign cells) before they can begin an attack upon the body of their new host. This combination therapy gives the recipient patient's new stem cells a chance to establish themselves in the bone marrow and begin producing healthy blood cells while a compatible — and home-grown — immune system develops.
Most significantly, Brodsky said the procedure allows for transplants not only between fully matched siblings, but also between half-matched pairs, expanding the potential donor pool to parents and other relatives.
Immunosupressive Advances for Sickle Cell and Related Disorders
Jonathan Powell, a National Institutes of Health research fellow, has been collaborating with Dr. John Tisdale at NIH on a different approach, which shows promise not only for sickle cell, but also for thalassemia, Diamond-Blackfan anemia and other severe congenital blood disorders.
Following Tisdale and Powell’s protocol, the donor receives specialized chemotherapy for five days with injections of G-CSF, an agent that stimulates white blood cell formation, to prepare the marrow for transplantation. The cells, once harvested, are frozen for five months before being infused into the patient. Patients undergo their own course of immune suppressing chemotherapy, and are given a single dose of full-body radiation to retard the immune system’s response to the donated stem cells.
According to Powell, 10 of the 11 people with sickle cell anemia who have undergone this procedure have taken well to the grafts. And in both studies, failure is not necessarily of dire consequence.
Javier Bolaños-Meade, assistant professor of oncology at Johns Hopkins, says with the reduced chemotherapy approach used by both NIH and Hopkins, “the worst case scenario is that the transplant doesn’t take — then we’re back to square one and the person ends up still having sickle cell,” but their bone marrow recovers and they can survive to try an alternative therapy.
Powell said NIH’s results have been promising “not in numbers, but in the positive response the patients have had. It shows that we’re on the right track.
“There are no major technical hurdles left. Bone marrow transplant is a way to cure sickle cell — unequivocally.”
In January 2009, NIH’s bone marrow transplant study was expanded to include not only fully matched adults, but also children and half-matched donor/recipient pairs, and recruitment for these new participants is currently under way; likewise for an ongoing study at Hopkins.
Powell says he is exploring collaboration between the NIH study and Brodsky’s research at Hopkins that would draw upon the best of both worlds. “We may end up combining ideas.”
Bolaños-Meade, who led the Hopkins research team, is also confident and says sickle cell shows some of the best results for transplant therapy for any blood disorder. “Given that this is a common condition, if there’s a way to correct the problem, we believe we can have a profound impact.”
http://www.miller-mccune.com/article/new-therapies-break-sickle-cell%E2%80%99s-painful-grip-1038
Last night, this commercial appeared during the broadcast of American Idol on Fox 5. We, here at the office, have all had mixed reactions.
What do you think? Is it racist? Should we be offended? Just curious…
CHECK OUT MY OPINION BELOW!!!!
WATCH it here:
Ok, so I don’t ACTUALLY think this Old Navy commercial is racist. But let’s just pick this apart for a moment.
All this talk about us being a post-racial society now that we have a Black president is clearly a load of BS. Everyone knows it. Obviously, it’s a major step in the right direction that we were able to elect Barack Obama to the presidency. But our work is not done. In fact, it’s only really just begun, as the prez never fails to remind us.
That said, the racist, black-white society we live in has trained us (by “us” I mean all people who are not white) to be a little skeptical. When it remains in the recent collective memory that Black folks couldn’t vote, couldn’t ride in the front of the bus, and couldn’t drink at the same water fountains as white people, it’s sort of expected no? When your own government, the same government who exploited and abused you and was now institutionalizing the discriminatory practices that STILL AFFECT US TODAY, and remains hostile towards you for generations, it’s hard not to give a side-eye to things like an otherwise benign Old Navy commercial.
Yea, it’s obnoxious and counterproductive to cry “RACE” every time something like this makes an appearance. Buying into what has become a profitable enterprise for most major media outlets, stoking public outrage, is useless and not at all revolutionary. I hear you, BlackPlanet.
But honestly, a naked Black female mannequin?
Among the many vitriolic stereotypes leveraged against the African-American community, one of the most incendiary has been the hypersexualization of Black men and women. Black men are always portrayed as the savage, sexually-superior antithesis to all things decent about white men. Black women are thought of as subhuman, irresponsible, and promiscuous. This is not MY opinion, bear in mind. There is a well-documented historical context to these assumptions. Why do you think one of the most infamous cases coming out of the Post-Reconstruction South was the Scottsboro case, where eight young Black males were accused of gang-raping two white women? Of course, after over 40 years of controversy, the truth was finally revealed that the women made up the whole accusation. It was precisely that deep-seated notion that Black men and women were capable of such lewd and sexual crimes, the idea that it was in their nature to be so oversexualized that a crime like this could not be put past them, that forced these men to wear the Scarlet letter for most of their adult lives.
So when a Black woman sees a mannequin meant to resemble her, from the hairstyle to skin color, to the twangy regional dialect, it’s hard to separate the mannequin from what it represents. It becomes difficult to understand why she is stripped of her clothing and left standing there with her “plastic” unmentionables censored. It just seems a little unnecessary doesn’t it? Why even go there?
Additionally, the bizarre way in which the white man and barking dog respond to the suddenly naked wife and mother raises an eyebrow. How interestingly cryptic that the “predator” is now the white man and the Black man is trying to protect his wife from his roving eye. This smacks of a “Black body as spectacle” mentality, something we used to see a lot more of when the Negritude movement was all the rage, which then influenced the Harlem Renaissance, etc.
Anyway, my bottomline here is that, while I personally am not going to read too much into this commercial, I can understand completely why Black women viewing this ad might feel at best, uncomfortable, and at worst, outraged.
http://newsone.blackplanet.com/nation/just-curious-what-do-you-think-about-the-new-old-navy-commercial/
FOUNDING SPONSOR
Last summer, The New Yorker magazine set off a firestorm of controversy when it published a controversial cover image depicting Michelle Obama as part of a clandestine terrorist cell in the White House. The magazine said it was satire meant to reflect the caricature of Mrs. Obama presented by her critics in the media. That was then.
In the latest cover illustration, Mrs. Obama is depicted in three colorful runway poses suitable for New York's fashion week. Gone is the huge Afro, the combat boots and fatigues, the assault rifle over her shoulder and the fist bump with her husband that was shown in last summer's controversial image.
In last year's image, Barack Obama was shown winking at the viewer while wearing Muslim headdress and outerwear. An American flag was shown being burned in the fireplace and a portrait of Osama bin Laden hung above the mantle. This time Mr. Obama is left out of the scene.
Back then, Obama was a candidate for president and conservative critics predicted that some damning information about his wife might surface by election day. It never did. Instead, Obama went on to win the White House and his wife's popularity soared and remains high today.
But The New Yorker said then that it never intended to impugn the Obamas, which is why the cover illustration was called "The Politics of Fear."
Not everyone was convinced back then. "It's the most gross, sick and pathetic attempt at satire I've ever seen in my life," columnist Maggie Van Ostrand wrote. "Shame on The New Yorker for stooping so low to increase their circulation, which must be in the toilet, where it belongs," she said.
AlterNet columnist Don Hazen described the magazine's decision as "arrogant and indulgent" and said the cover "turns the magazine into a potential Molotov cocktail, to be gleefully tossed by Fox News and the conservative blogs, into the already combustible tinderbox of race and muslim stereotypes just below the surface of America's public discourse."
But Chicago Tribune columnist Clarence Page called it "quite within the normal realms of journalism." Speaking on Howard Kurtz's CNN media program, Page said the cover is "just lampooning all the crazy ignorance out there."
Today there doesn't appear to be much talk about Michelle Obama as a closet radical, and the new magazine cover hasn't drawn any notable criticism. Of course, today the Obamas live in the White House and many of the more outrageous fears have been discounted.
http://thedailyvoice.com/voice/2009/03/the-new-yorker-takes-a-second-001675.php
(This is an email I received this morning from a friend. His comments included below. The article at the link, nails it!!!!)
Folks,
This is an excellent summary of the causes of America's financial/economic meltdown and the overall solution.
I believe that it is more than a lost decade. It began in the "Reagan Revolution" which had as it primary objective to make the rich hideously rich, the middle class poor, and poor absolutely destitute: trickle down. Instead of trickling down it trickled up and away.
Bill
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2009/3/8/13649/98119/998/703785
Today, there are approximately 12,000 people in New York prisons under the Rockefeller Drug Laws, more than 90 percent of who are Black and Latino. There is no excuse for this disparity.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/russell-simmons/dumping-the-rockefeller-d_b_173203.html
"We all recognize for sure that we stand on the shoulders of those that were before us," said Fenty, 38. "It's our job to pick up the baton and run with it even further."
Johnson agreed: "I think what happened is our generation kind of watched our cities not reach their potential."
(This is my nephew... I am so proud of him.)
Yehudah Webster, a participant on the trip from Oheb Shalom, whacks weeds in front of the house the group worked on. He said the trip really helped him bond with the other teens from the synagogue.
http://www.njjewishnews.com/njjn.com/030509/mwTeenagersGiveGet.html
Description: Emailed image
Circulating since: Feb. 2009
Status: Authentic / See details below
Email example contributed by Laurence W., Feb. 21, 2009:
FW: Barnes & Noble - Racism???
Subject: Racism still exists obviously
Let us not be lulled into a sense of complacency, due to the recent political success of President Obama.
Racism still exists in this country. Like all things, nothing is perfect on this planet, in this world.
We have an obligation to be active on issues that simply cannot be ignored.
Along these lines we should all actively spread the word of how Barnes and Noble apparently feels about black people or at least our President.
Please forward this to as many people you think should be aware of this and would be offended by this.
Boycotting Barnes and Noble will show the economic effect of people who will not tolerate racism.
Barnes and Noble had this as their store front display in Coral Gables FL in the Miracle Mile Mall. I am totally disgusted and I think it is important that we all find a different place to buy our books. Obviously this is a place of extreme ignorance. How far have we really come? God bless.
This month we set out to find 5 technology companies in Africa and the Diaspora that will likely make major strides in 2009. Here’s what we came up with…
 Recently launched, Pamoja Media has established itself as a pioneer in online marketing by targeting both the African Diaspora and continent. The company with its ‘first to market’ designation has positioned itself as the only online ad network for businesses targeting Africans in both the Diaspora and Africa. Historically, its been difficult to target the diverse groups of Africans in the Diaspora, but Pamoja has positioned themselves as leaders in what may become a crowded space if they are successful. The founder and owner, Joshua Wanyama, was recently selected as a TED 2009 Fellow, which probably had a lot to do with his work on Pamoja Media. Pamoja Media also recognizes the Diaspora market as becoming a more sought after market than ever before. Companies in Africa and in the Diaspora alike have witnessed this group of individuals become the largest single source of foreign direct investment to African economies, making it very hard to ignore the spending power that this group holds. Given that there are enough mid to large online publishers on the Pamoja Network, we believe companies will see this Ad network as a great one stop solution to reaching this highly educated and prosperous demographic. That is why we chose Pamoja Media as our number 5 company to watch in 2009. |
 While Frontline SMS has been around for a while and is already successfully used by various organizations around the world, we believe that in 2009 there will be increased demand on the African continent for their mass text messaging platform. Given an increase in the number of Africans accessing information on mobile devices, coupled with the realization by many organizations that technology is a viable way of reaching mass groups of people in Africa, NGO’s and other organizations will recognize the need to use a tool like Frontline SMS. Historically, a lack of efficient communication tools has been a major barrier for grassroots non-governmental organizations (NGOs) working in developing countries. FrontlineSMS is the first text messaging system created exclusively with this problem in mind. That’s why we chose Frontline as our number 4 choice for technolgy companies to watch in 2009. |
 Orange is a French telecoms company that has successfully bought itself into the African market over the last few years, by either partnering with or buying local telecoms, possibly making them the single largest investor and owner of fixed lines in Africa. We chose Orange as our number three company to watch because, the company will likely start to realize a quick return on investment, as some fibre optic undersea cables are completed and go live this year. It is about to give African Multinational Telecoms firms MTN and Celtel a run for their money. We believe Orange will control the high end market, as corporations, governments and NGO’s seek more secure communication solutions through fixed line broadband solutions. France Telecom-Orange is also backing the development of a new 12,000 km cable, called ACE (Africa Coast to Europe), that will extend from Gabon to France, and from 2011 will connect Gabon, Cameroon, Nigeria, Benin, Togo, Ghana, Ivory Coast, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Guinea Bissau, Senegal, Gambia, Cape Verde, Mauritania, Morocco, Spain, Portugal and France. An extension to South Africa is also being studied. For this project, France Telecom and its subsidiaries Côte d’Ivoire Telecom, Orange Bissau, Orange Cameroun, Orange Guinée, Orange Mali, Orange Niger, Orange Spain and Sonatel have teamed up with numerous international operators. We’ve chosen Orange as our number 3 company to watch in 2009, as their investments in some African countries are harvested and threaten other Telecoms operators. |
 Afrigator Internet (Pty) Ltd is a technology company based in Cape Town, South Africa that was launched in 2007 as a social media aggregator and blog directory - and more recently launched Adgator - a targeted blog advertising network. The company, our number two pick, has already enjoyed a fair amount of success with a steady 25% month-to-month growth rate. As the blogosphere continues grow at increasing rates on the continent of Africa, Afrigator is establishing themselves as the leading agrigator and online ad agency in top African markets. This company is well positioned to be a market leader in the African online advertising space. A space that is growing exponentially in Africa and poised to grow even faster as costs decrease accross the continent. Their focus on blogs gives them a leading presence in what is the most viral community on the web. We’re looking for incredible growth this year from this company, as infrastructure improvements make internet access cheaper and more accessible than ever. It doesn’t hurt that they recently recieved a cash infusion from MIH Print Africa, a subsidiary of Naspers Limited, which bought a majority share in the company. Afrigator is our number 2 technology company to watch in 2009. |
 There is perhaps, no other African online venture that has received more press than Ushahidi in 2008 and 2009. Ushahidi, which is a a Kiswahili word meaning ‘Testimony’, become a viable tool during the recent erruption of post election violence in Kenya. The Ushahidi Engine is a platform that allows anyone to gather distributed data via SMS, email or web and visualize it on a map or timeline. Their goal is to create the simplest way of aggregating information from the public for use in crisis response. They are our number one choice for several reasons. First, the management team lead by Erik Hersman is well respected in African circles as well as by the international media. Secondly, with several ongoing conflicts on the continent of Africa, and other regions there is real demand for their mapping tool and finally its a free and open source platform for everyone to use. Ushaidi is our number 1 African tech company to watch in 2009http://www.africabusinesswire.com/articles/innovation/top-5-african-tech-firms-to-watch-in-2009/ |
Originally presented in Chicago last fall, Ruined is set in a small mining town in Democratic Republic of Congo, and follows Mama Nadi (Ekulona), a shrewd businesswoman whose bar/brothel plies rebel and government soldiers with music, beer and good times, as the land outside is torn apart by civil war. Is she a war profiteer, exploiting the women she shelters? How far will she go to survive?
The creative team for Ruined includes Derek McLane (scenic design), Paul Tazewell (costume design), Peter Kaczorowski (lighting design), Rob Milburn and Michael Bodeen (sound design and music direction), Dominic Kanza (original music), Lynn Nottage (lyrics), Randy Duncan (movement director). |  | No Money Equals No Honey? How Finance Impacts Romance The entire idea of marital bliss without significant cash flow is a lie, of course. The proverbial cute couple that loves each other unconditionally is a breathtaking thought. At some point, reality has a wonderful way of setting in. [Full Story] |
Imagine a powerful, charismatic, handsome black man. Now imagine him arm-in-arm with a black woman and then a white woman. How do your perceptions of him change? The cliche goes that once African American men gain success, they marry interracially as the last sign that they had 'made it.'
That stereoptype, though, is a myth, says Professor France Winddance Twine. Black men have always desired black women. Look no further than the marriage of President Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama.
http://nsrc.sfsu.edu/media/marrying_black_marrying_michelle_obama_interracial_marriage_and_strong_black_women_1
ON THIS DAY The forgotten black victims of Nazi Germany
National Halocaust Day held earlier this month was largely set up to commemorate the six million million Jewish men, women and children murdered by Hitler’s Nazi regime.
While much has been written about these Jewish victims, the fate of other groups at the hands of the Nazi’s is less well documented. Another 5 million ‘others’ died in Nazi concentration camps and included groups as diverse as communists, gays, Jehovah's Witness, gypsies, and the physical and mentally handicapped.
Only in fairly recent times have academics looked at the fate of black people who were living in Nazi controlled Europe and captured black prisoner of wars. Indeed the fact that there were any black people living in Germany at the time of Adolph Hitler is a surprise to many.
According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, D.C., “The fate of black people from 1933 to 1945 in Nazi Germany and in German-occupied territories ranged from isolation to persecution, sterilization, medical experimentation, incarceration, brutality, and murder. However, there was no systematic program for their elimination as there was for Jews and other groups.”
After Germany’s defeat in the First World War, the Treaty of Versailles in 1919 stripped the nation of its African colonies and many of the Germans based in Africa returned bringing with them strong racist attitudes.
The Versailles treaty also allowed the Allies to occupy the Rhineland in western Germany where the use of French colonial troops, some of whom were African, encouraged anti-black sentiment in Germany.
The notion of Africans controlling white Germans infuriated many in the country and racist propaganda portrayed the African troops who had relationships with locals as rapists of German women and spreaders of sexual and other diseases.
The children of black soldiers and German women were called ‘Rhineland bastards’ and the Nazis, then a fringe political movement, viewed them as a threat to German racial purity. In his book Mein Kampf (My Struggle), Hitler stated that ‘the Jews had brought the Negroes into the Rhineland with the clear aim of ruining the hated white race by the necessarily-resulting bastardisation’.
When Hitler came to power, many of these mixed-race Germans were rounded up by the German secret police, the Gestapo and forcibly sterilized.
According to academic Terese Pencak Schwartz, who has extensively researched the subject,
“The Nazis set up a secret group, Commission Number 3, to organize the sterilization of these offspring to keep intact the purity of the Aryan race. In 1937, all local authorities in Germany were to submit a list of all the children of African descent. Then, these children were taken from their homes or schools without parental permission and put before the commission.
“Once a child was decided to be of black descent, the child was taken immediately to a hospital and sterilized. About 400 children were medically sterilized -- many times without their parents' knowledge.” says Schwartz.
Hans Hauck, a victim of Hitler's sterilisation program, told decades later in a documentary film ‘Hitler's Forgotten Victims’, that when he was forced to undergo the painful operation as a teenager, he was given no anaesthetic. Once he received his sterilization documentation, he was ‘free to go’, so long as he agreed to have no sexual relations with German women.
There were an estimated 20,000 to 25,000 black people living in Germany at the time of Hitler coming to power. Some were Africans who had come from German colonies, some from the French African troops who had stayed in Germany after the First World War, and others from other parts of the world who were working in Germany often as entertainers.
Prior to Hitler coming to power, black entertainers were popular in Germany, but the Nazi hatred of other ‘inferior’ races led to a ban on Jazz music which was seen as ‘corrupt negro music’.
While not subject to an orgainsed, official policy of ethnic extermination like the Jews, black people did not escape the ideology of German racial purity. Apart from those that were forcibly sterilised, others mysteriously disappeared, or ended being used for medical experiments.
Mixed-race people were not allowed to go to university, prevented from joining the military and kept out of many jobs. It was a terrifying time because no person of black origin felt safe. Not knowing if one day there time may be up.
It was Hitler’s obsession and focus on exterminating the Jews which meant that many black people in Germany didn’t get sent immediately to the concentration camps.
What Hitler thought of black people was clear long before the start of the war in 1939. At the 1936 Berlin Olympic games he was so annoyed that black American sprinter Jesse Owens had beaten German athletes and won three golds, that he refused to take part in the awarding of Owen’s medals.
One of the early black victims of the Nazis was Hilarius (Lari) Gilges, a dancer, who was murdered by the SS in 1933. Gilges' German wife later received compensation from a postwar German government for his killing.
African Americans like female jazz trumpeter Valaida Snow, living in German occupied Europe were imprisoned in Axis internment camps for alien nationals. The artist Josef Nassy, living in Belgium, was arrested as an enemy alien and held for seven months in the Beverloo transit camp in German-occupied Belgium. He was later transferred to Germany, where he spent the rest of the war in the Laufen internment camp.
Other black people whose stories are known include: Lionel Romney, a sailor in the U.S. Merchant Marine, who was imprisoned in the Mauthausen concentration camp. Jean Marcel Nicolas, a Haitian, was imprisoned in the Buchenwald and Dora-Mittelbau concentration camps in Germany. Jean Voste, an African Belgian, was incarcerated in the Dachau concentration camp. Bayume Mohamed Hussein from Tanzania died in the Sachsenhausen camp, near Berlin.
Captured black prisoners of war were often shot on the spot or taken to camps were they were segregated from white prisoners. They were subject to harsher treatment and given the worst prison camp jobs.
African-American pilot Lieutenant Darwin Nichols, was sent to a Gestapo prison in Butzbach. Black soldiers of the American, French, and British armies were worked to death on construction projects or died as a result of mistreatment in concentration or prisoner-of-war camps.
Due to the relatively small number of black people in Germany and occupied Europe there was no official Nazi policy of murder. However there was no recording of the numbers of black people including prisoners of war who did at the hands of the Nazis.
* The Imperial War Museum in London will feature a lecture ‘Black Victims of the Nazis’
on February 22 , 1.00pm - 4.30pm at Museum Conference Room. The lecture will focus on the Black victims of Nazi persecution before and during the Second World War. Films will include Black Victims of the Nazis, about the Black population in Germany during the Second World War.
http://www.voice-online.co.uk/content.php?show=15123
That’s a good segue into my story, because never in a million years could I have honestly imagined I’d end up with a white man. A lover of all things black men, and a childhood spent ogling the sexiest of the sexy on Video Soul, including Donnie himself — I saw my beautiful Black family fall victim to a drawn out divorce as a kid, and became vigilant to one day have a resilient and unfaltering Black family of my own. As I got older, I clung to this even more, realizing white boys served only two functions in life, face and cake. Beyond that, I was insistent no white man could ever really understand me for the intelligent yet, complex woman who existed at my core. More importantly, they could never relate to my struggles, for self love, acceptance and identity in a Eurocentric society. My narrow view of white men limited them to a good time and nothing more, certainly nothing worth taking seriously. I knew it was a strong brotha who would be the missing half, that would make us together a whole.
Yet, as I began to seriously consider leaving the playing field to settle down with my brown sugar boo, I found it was the brothers who were missing something. For every woman it’s different — the one component we are not willing to compromise on, a fatal flaw if you will. For some it’s a job, a self-esteem, a degree, but for me it was simple willingness to want to settle down, to commit. During this time I dated some of the most fabulous Black men the city of Atlanta had to offer: successful, sexy, charming, well-endowed. But sometimes, indulging in the honey pot makes you wake up and realize you want maple syrup. It seemed, for one reason or another, that they all had an explanation for why they were just not yet ready to settle down. I’m willing to admit, maybe it was me. Perhaps a fearless ambitious woman who knows what she wants, including a family, was too much for the new millennium Black man to handle.
However, I digress.
A chance meeting at a night club led to our first official date. Since then, I’ve been living on cloud nine. I had found my Dr. Feelgood.
Yet, the cadre of brothers, who back then didn’t want me, now had a lot to say. Most of it to the tune of, “how come you and I never worked out?” Meanwhile a good portion of my girlfriends (while also taking a left down hater avenue) had questions like, “whats it like with a white dude?“, “I’ve never seen you so happy, what has this guy done to you?”, and my personal favorite, “he’s cute, does he have any friends?“
As expected, my biggest concern was the reaction of my family, seeing as my father forbade us to attend my cousin’s wedding when she chose to marry a white man. Then there was my mother who had admonished me on more than one occasion as a kid growing up to stop thinking that I could act like those “white folks”. In a startling surprise twist of fate my family loved him from day one. Steve is now my Dad’s favorite drinking buddy. My mother, grandmother and aunts all took to him immediately. They were duly impressed by the way he treated me and ironically enough, were each still nursing their own bitter wounds left from Black men who left them with a house full of children to raise and no emotional or financial support in the wake of their departure.
Let me be clear. By no means am I attacking brothers. If you want to play the field until you are 40, that’s your prerogative. In fact, this is an all-out attack on my sista-friends and our ridiculous refusal to look for love outside the realm of our own race. It doesn’t have to be a white guy; I am imploring you to cross the cultural barrier and date an African, a Mexican man, yes, even an Asian man! So many of us are looking for love, yet if it ain’t Boris, Idris or Will Smith, we are not interested. There are men of all colors and backgrounds who have something to offer. If you know in your heart that you are a passionate, loving woman who brings some strong credentials to the table, why not try reaching out to the other side?
