Guest Post/Bloggers Wanted Hey everyone. The time has come to open Today's Hot Topic up to some talented writers. Do you like to write? Do you like to spread your love for on a particular topic? Well be a guest poster! ...
Country Profile of Haiti Haiti became the world's first black-led republic and the first independent Caribbean state when it threw off French colonial control and slavery in a series of wars in the early 19th century.
However,...
Haiti: How to help the country International charities are appealing for donations to help Haiti.
In the UK the DEC - an umbrella group which launches and co-ordinates responses to major disasters overseas - has launched a Haiti...
Help to Haiti after the earthquake International efforts to help Haiti in the wake of the 7.0 magnitude earthquake are under way, as governments around the world and aid agencies mobilise search and rescue teams and aid supplies.
Although...
The singer and actress Eartha Kitt has died at the age of eighty-one. She was blacklisted in 1968 after she spoke out against the Vietnam War at a White House luncheon hosted by Lady Bird Johnson. When Johnson asked her about the Vietnam War, Kitt replied, “You send the best of this country off to be shot and maimed. They rebel in the street. They don’t want to go to school because they’re going to be snatched off from their mothers to be shot in Vietnam.” The First Lady reportedly burst into tears. For four years afterward, Kitt performed almost exclusively overseas and was investigated by the FBI and CIA.
Eartha Kitt: “My greatest challenge was to be able to survive in the business and to be able to survive according to what I was doing, not according to what other people were doing. And therefore, I just stuck to my own guns, and I think that’s one of the ways I have survived, is that I didn’t follow the herd. I followed my own path.”
Kitt was born Eartha Mae Keith on a cotton plantation in North, South Carolina, a small town in Orangeburg County near Columbia, South Carolina. Her mother was of Cherokee and African-American descent and her father of German and Dutch descent. She claimed she was conceived by rape.
Kitt was raised by her mother’s sister, Anna Mae Riley, an African-American woman whom she believed to be her mother. Kitt claimed that she suffered abuse and neglect at the hands of a family to whom Anna Mae Riley entrusted her—”given away for slavery,” as she described it in many interviews. Kitt said that as she was given away, she always wondered who would accept her and was afraid of being rejected.[5] After Riley’s death, she was sent to live in New York City with Mamie Kitt, who she learned was her biological mother; she had no knowledge of her father, except that his surname was Kitt and that he was supposedly a son of the owner of the farm where she had been born.[4] Newspaper obituaries state that her white father was “a poor cotton farmer.
In Louisiana, the family of a police taser victim has filed a wrongful death lawsuit against city officials in the town of Winnfield. Baron Pikes died on January 17 from electrocution after a police officer shot him nine times with a taser. Pikes had been in handcuffs at the time. His death has been ruled a homicide. Pikes was the first cousin of Mychal Bell, the lead defendant in the Jena Six case. The lawsuit comes as a grand jury has begun convening on whether to charge the police officer involved.
A major study prepared for the Pentagon has criticized how the Bush administration has focused on using military might to defeat al-Qaeda in the so-called war on terror. The RAND Corporation study concludes that the current strategy for defeating al-Qaeda has failed in diminishing the group’s capabilities. The study recommends a “fundamental rethinking of US strategy” to focus on minimizing overt military action while increasing intelligence collection and partnerships with law enforcement agencies around the world. The co-author of the study, Seth Jones, said, “Terrorists should be perceived and described as criminals, not holy warriors, and our analysis suggests there is no battlefield solution to terrorism.”
Police in the city of Winnfield, Louisiana are being accused of covering up the death of twenty-one-year-old Baron Pikes. He died in police custody on January 21 after being shot nine times with a taser gun while in handcuffs. The city police chief initially claimed that Pikes was high on crack cocaine and PCP at the time of his death. But the coroner recently ruled Pikes’ death to be a homicide, after an autopsy determined there were no drugs in his system. The coroner also determined that the police shot Pikes twice after he lost consciousness.
Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence
By Rev. Martin Luther King
4 April 1967
Speech delivered by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., on April 4, 1967, at a meeting of Clergy and Laity Concerned at Riverside Church in New York City
I come to this magnificent house of worship tonight because my conscience leaves me no other choice. I join with you in this meeting because I am in deepest agreement with the aims and work of the organization which has brought us together: Clergy and Laymen Concerned about Vietnam. The recent statement of your executive committee are the sentiments of my own heart and I found myself in full accord when I read its opening lines: “A time comes when silence is betrayal.” That time has come for us in relation to Vietnam.
The truth of these words is beyond doubt but the mission to which they call us is a most difficult one. Even when pressed by the demands of inner truth, men do not easily assume the task of opposing their government’s policy, especially in time of war. Nor does the human spirit move without great difficulty against all the apathy of conformist thought within one’s own bosom and in the surrounding world. Moreover when the issues at hand seem as perplexed as they often do in the case of this dreadful conflict we are always on the verge of being mesmerized by uncertainty; but we must move on.
War Made Easy exposes a 50-year pattern of government deception and media spin that has dragged the United States into one war after another from Vietnam to Iraq. Narrated by actor and activist Sean Penn, the film exhumes remarkable archival footage of official distortion and exaggeration from LBJ to George W. Bush, revealing in stunning detail how the American news media have uncritically disseminated the pro-war messages of successive presidential administrations.
I was just listening to a report of a man that had been victim of former President Charles Taylor’s policies. His right hand was chopped off and his story was just heartbreaking. More below…
From BBC
Mr Taylor – who is accused of trading weapons for diamonds – showed no emotion as the first witness, an expert on “blood diamonds”, testified.
He is the first African former head of state to face an international war crimes court and faces 11 charges.
He denies responsibility for atrocities committed by rebels during the civil war in neighbouring Sierra Leone.
The trial opened in June last year but proceedings were postponed after Mr Taylor fired his defence lawyer and boycotted the opening of the trial.
He now has a new defence team – a senior British lawyer, who is being paid for by the court, as Mr Taylor says he cannot afford it himself.
Mr Taylor is accused of responsibility for the actions of Revolutionary United Front rebels during the 1991-2001 civil war in Sierra Leone, which included unlawful killings, sexual slavery, use of child soldiers and looting.
My heart goes out to the families and victims of this massacre.
A mob torched a Kenyan church on Tuesday, killing villagers cowering inside, as the death toll from ethnic riots triggered by President Mwai Kibaki’s disputed re-election soared to nearly 200.
The opposition said around 250 people had died.
In the most grisly incident, about 30 people died when fire engulfed a church near Eldoret town where scores of Kibaki’s Kikuyu tribe had taken refuge in fear of their lives.
The attack revived traumatic memories in east Africa of the slaughter in churches of tens of thousands of victims of Rwanda’s 1994 genocide, and the mass suicide of hundreds of Ugandan cult members in a church fire in 2000.
Police, reporters and a senior security official said the blaze at the Kenya Assemblies of God Pentecostal church was deliberately started by a gang of youths.
Witnesses said charred bodies, including women and children, were strewn about the smouldering wreckage.
‘This is the first time in history that any group has attacked a church. We never expected the savagery to go so far,’ police spokesman Eric Kiraithe said.
Reinforcements were being rushed to the area to arrest all troublemakers ‘regardless of their status in society’, he said.
