Reporter Chuck Philips and his supervisor, Deputy Managing Editor Marc Duvoisin, issued statements of apology Wednesday afternoon. The statements came after The Times took withering criticism for the Shakur article, which appeared on latimes.com last week and two days later in the paper’s Calendar section.
PHILADELPHIA - A federal appeals court on Thursday said former Black Panther Mumia Abu-Jamal cannot be executed for murdering a Philadelphia police officer without a new penalty hearing.
Color of Change has initiated an email campaign addressing the incarceration rate of Black men. Click the link to show your support and while you’re at it, get on their email list to stay up to date on their campaigns on our behalf. They are holdin’ it down for real.
The so-called “war on drugs” has created a national disaster: 1 in 9 young Black men in America are now behind bars.1 It’s not because they commit more crime but largely because of unfair sentencing rules that treat 5 grams of crack cocaine, the kind found in poor Black communities, the same as 500 grams of powder cocaine2, the kind found in White and wealthier communities.
These sentencing laws are destroying communities across the country and have done almost nothing to reduce the level of drug use and crime.
The manufactured controversy over Rev. Jeremiah Wright ignores the tradition of ‘prophetic preaching’ in African-American churches.
read more | digg story
Life expectancy for the nation as a whole has increased, but the affluent have made greater gains, researchers said. New government research has found “large and growing” disparities in life expectancy for richer and poorer Americans, paralleling the growth of income inequality in the last two decades.
B.B. King is the new owner of a juke joint in his Mississippi Delta hometown. Mary Shepard has owned Club Ebony in Indianola for the past three decades. King and other artists have played there throughout the years.
Jill Scott talks to Telegraph.co.uk about filming ‘The No 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency’ in Botswana with Anthony Minghella, the director who died earlier this week
An attack on Tupac Shakur launched a hip-hop war
The November 1994 assault on Tupac Shakur remains a source of fascination and frustration to law officials and fans. No one was ever charged in the attack. In 1994, Tupac Shakur was ambushed, beaten and shot at the Quad Recording Studios in New York. He insisted that friends of Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs were behind it. New information supports him.
By Chuck Philips, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
March 19, 2008
from Bruce Dixon and Black Agenda Report.
As the presidential campaign heats up, the precarious nature of Obama’s “multiracial coalition” along with the nature of the “racial reconciliation” his candidacy brings becomes more. Under the Obama version of “racial reconciliation” the opinions commonly held by most of Black America are deemed “divisive” relics of the past. Black opinion, wherever it differs from that of white corporate media is off the table. A shrewd and savvy politician, Obama is entitled to make these choices for himself, and for his own reasons. But should the voices of Black America be silenced and banished from the national discourse because they do not serve the career plans or short term interests of the Obama campaign? Just what shots does Black America call in this reconciliation, and what benefits do African Americans receive in this “multiracial coalition”?
Five years ago tonight, on March 19, 2003, the US launched the invasion of Iraq. Half a decade later, as the occupation continues with no end in sight, some of the most powerful voices against the war have been the men and women who have fought in it. For four days this past weekend, soldiers convened at the National Labor College in Silver Spring, Maryland for Winter Soldier, an eyewitness account of the war and occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan. We broadcast their voices.
The Rev. Al Sharpton is backing Barack Obama, but he’s made the strategic decision to keep his support quiet. That’s the message Sharpton delivered to his flock last Saturday.
I am the son of a black man from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas. I was raised with the help of a white grandfather who survived a Depression to serve in Patton’s Army during World War II and a white grandmother who worked on a bomber assembly line at Fort Leavenworth while he was overseas. I’ve gone to some of the best schools in America and lived in one of the world’s poorest nations. I am married to a black American who carries within her the blood of slaves and slaveowners – an inheritance we pass on to our two precious daughters. I have brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews, uncles and cousins, of every race and every hue, scattered across three continents, and for as long as I live, I will never forget that in no other country on Earth is my story even possible.It’s a story that hasn’t made me the most conventional candidate. But it is a story that has seared into my genetic makeup the idea that this nation is more than the sum of its parts – that out of many, we are truly one.
If racism is truly in the past as the current political climate asks us to believe, then it should be no problem to start correcting past acts of racism.
Via Color of Change
Call on the Dept. of Justice & Louisiana Governor to Investigate
Herman Wallace and Albert Woodfox have have endured 35 years of solitary confinement after being framed in a murder that everyone now knows they didn’t commit—locked up for daring to speak out against inhumane conditions in Angola, Louisiana State Penitentiary. They now spend every day in a 6×9 foot cell on the site of a former plantation.As with the Jena 6, we’re seeing another example of Louisiana’s sense of justice—unfair and unaccountable—and funded by our tax dollars. Please join us in demanding a full and fair investigation into the case of the Angola 3 and the Louisiana Prison system.
Wild Roots Media
