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| For much of the 20th century, the proportion of whites shrank in most U.S. cities. In recent years the decline has slowed considerably -- and in some significant cases has reversed. Between 2000 and 2006, eight of the 50 largest cities, including Boston, Seattle and San Francisco, saw the proportion of whites increase, according to Census figures. The previous decade, only three cities saw increases. The changing racial mix is stirring up quarrels over class and culture. Beloved institutions in traditionally black communities--minority-owned restaurants, book stores are losing the customers who supported them for decades. |
| www.hiphopcaucus.org, and Multi-Platinum, Grammy Award Winning Superstar T.I. have joined forces to launch a powerful new voter registration and Get Out the Vote campaign that combines the power of celebrity and media with 21st century grassroots organizing tactics to mobilize and educate young people between the ages of 18 and 29, who are not in college. Hip Hop Caucus President, Rev. Lennox Yearwood, Jr., who helped create VOTE OR DIE! with Sean "Diddy" Combs in 2004, explains "No matter who wins in November, if large numbers of young people do not vote, then we all lose. |
| A House panel Wednesday voted to cite former top White House aide Karl Rove for contempt of Congress for defying a subpoena to answer questions about the dismissals of several federal prosecutors as its Senate counterpart explored punishments for an array of alleged Bush administration misdeeds. Voting 20-14 along party lines, the House Judiciary Committee said that Rove had broke the law by failing to appear at a July 10 hearing on allegations of White House influence over the Justice Department, including whether Rove encouraged prosecutions against Democrats such as former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman. |
| According to the popular narrative, hip-hop grew out of gang culture in the South Bronx. One of its pioneers - gang leader Afrika Bambaataa, who had turned his life around - used hip-hop to get people out of gangs and into something more positive. Bambaataa had led the Black Spades in the Bronx River Houses project before deciding to take his followers in a new direction, first by forming "the Organization. " Later, after learning about the Zulus of South Africa, who fought colonial rule, Bambaataa transformed the Organization into the Mighty Zulu Nation, now known as the Universal Zulu Nation. It remains not only the oldest but the largest hip-hop organization, with chapters on every continent and tens of thousands of members. |
| While blacks account for one in eight people in the United States, half of all Americans infected with HIV are black, the report found. "We are 30 percent of the new cases among gay men, 40 percent of the new cases among men in general, 60 percent of the cases among women and 70 percent of the new cases among youth," Black AIDS Institute CEO Phill Wilson told reporters in a telephone briefing. "Yet ... the U.S. response to AIDS in black America stands in sharp contrast to the international response to the epidemic overseas," |
| The Commission determined that the merger benefits consumers "by making available to them a wider array of programming choices at various price points and by affording them greater choice and control over the programming to which they subscribe." Commissioners Michael Copps and Jonathan Adelstein voiced their dissent in their own statements. According to Copps, "The inescapable logic...is that by 2011 satellite radio subscribers will face monopoly price hikes by a company with the incentive and ability to impose them. No one has been able to explain to me how this could possibly serve the public interest." |
| US actor Danny Glover, who plans an epic next year on Haitian independence hero Toussaint-Louverture, said he slaved to raise funds for the movie because financiers complained there were no white heroes. "Producers said 'It's a nice project, a great project... where are the white heroes?'" "Toussaint," Glover's first project as film director, is about Francois Dominique Toussaint Louverture (1743-1803), a former slave and one of the fathers of Haiti's independence from France in 1804, making it the first black nation to throw off imperial rule and become a republic. |
| President Bush will leave his successor with a record-high budget deficit of $482 billion, according to an administration estimate released Monday. White House officials blamed the slowing economy and a $150-billion bipartisan stimulus package for the worsening picture for the 2009 fiscal year, but Democrats cited the president's tax cuts and fiscal management over his eight years in office. "Mr. Bush came to office with the biggest surpluses in history and he will leave office with the biggest deficit in history. That's the bottom line," |
| Senior aides to former Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales broke Civil Service laws by using politics to guide their hiring decisions, picking less-qualified applicants for important nonpolitical positions, slowing the hiring process at critical times and damaging the department’s credibility, an internal report concluded on Monday. The report released on Monday goes much further in documenting pervasive evidence of political hiring for some of the department’s most senior career positions, including immigration judges, assistant United States attorneys and even senior counterterrorism positions. |
| Barack Obama enthralled a crowd of more than 200,000 people here yesterday as he appealed for a unified world to combat terrorism - which he likened to the communism that died in the rubble of the Berlin Wall. "If we could win a battle of ideas against the communists, we can stand with the vast majority of Muslims who reject the extremism that leads to hate instead of hope," Obama told the massive crowd - the largest of his campaign |
| What brought the democratic era to an end was a split between the communists and the social democrats, i.e., the left and the near left and the liberals, which permitted Hitler’s National Socialists in a coalition with the conservatives and nationalists to win the election, even though the left-center coalition had more voters objectively. It was the split which allowed the right to consolidate power. There is no way Obama is even in the presidential race condemning Israel or embracing Cuba. Not to know this is not to know where you are or where you have been for the last 40 years. |
| The hip-hop star joined about 50 protesters, (less than another anti-FNC protest in 2004) from two organizations: ColorofChange.org and MoveOn.org who called on the network to, "stop its racist smears against the Obamas and other Black Americans." Nas and Fox News have a history going back to last fall. It led Nas to produce the song "Sly Fox" on his new album. John Gibson took on the rapper in October over his purported album title. |
| Is Shaniqua living in a tenement in Brooklyn with five babies by five different “men” watching? Is James, who stands on a corner in Baltimore selling crack cocaine to his community watching? T-Bone, a Blood from South Central and his boys and rival Crips from cross-town, are they watching? Janice, who dropped out of Somerville High School in Massachusetts, will she be tuning in? I doubt it. And here in lies the problem with shows like “Black in America,” and books like “The Covenant with Black America” they don’t reach the people who need to hear and read it most. |
| Times are tougher economically in this country than perhaps they've been for quite a long time. We've all seen the stats -- median income has declined by almost $2,500 over the past seven years, we have a zero personal savings rate in America for the first time since the Great Depression, and 5 million people have slipped below the poverty level since the beginning of the decade. And stats aside, most everyone out there knows what the deal is. |
| In a new sign of increasing inequality in the U.S., the richest 1% of Americans in 2006 garnered the highest share of the nation's adjusted gross income for two decades, and possibly the highest since 1929, according to Internal Revenue Service data. Meanwhile, the average tax rate of the wealthiest 1% fell to its lowest level in at least 18 years. The group's share of the tax burden has risen, though not as quickly as its share of income. |
| Despite spending $230m an hour on healthcare, Americans live shorter lives than citizens of almost every other developed country. And while it has the second-highest income per head in the world, the United States ranks 42nd in terms of life expectancy. The US has a higher percentage of children living in poverty than any of the world's richest countries. The US is far behind many other countries in the support given to working families, particularly in terms of family leave, sick leave and childcare. The country has no federally mandated maternity leave. |
| Each day across Manhattan, music peddlers work the sidewalks, selling their own voices, rhythms and poetry about gangs, cash and hustling to those with a few minutes and dollars to spare. For these rap artists hoping to make it big, Times Square, Herald Square, Union Square and the Village are paved with gold: packed with people who have money and maybe, just maybe, the connections that could lead to a record deal. Spending long hours outside in snow, rain and sun is a full-time job for the artists, and the money they earn each day goes to supporting their professional ambitions and their families. |
| "Today's reality is harsh. But what's even harder for many to accept and admit is that our quality of life today is the making of the Democratic and Republican Parties. What our country has become through their public policy is reflective of their values. We will never get a United States that is reflective of different values if we continue to do the same thing. Those who delivered us into this mess cannot be trusted to get us out of it. That's why I signed up to do something I've never done before so I can have something I've never had before: My country, made in the likeness of the values of the Green Party." |
| Instead of "stick 'em up," it will be more like "pull 'em up" now that fashion police in New Jersey have started a crackdown on baggy pants. It's happening in Paterson, where city officials want to put the kibosh on this form of fashion. "We're tired of seeing your behind," Davis said. "We don't want to see your back side. We don't need to see your underwear. We don't need to see your drawers. Wear your pants." |
| The problem is the collaboration between Arbitron, which drastically undercounts Black listenership, and Madison Avenue, which insists that if their clients are to advertise on Black stations at all, they will only do so at discounted rates far below what they pay to advertise on “white” stations. After all, they figure, Blacks will buy their products anyway, so why pay to advertise on these stations? |
| The Rev. Jesse Jackson's offhand insult of Barack Obama last week has exposed a heated debate over whether Obama's groundbreaking presidential campaign - and his repeated challenge to the black community to straighten out its own affairs - is displacing and alienating some in Jackson's generation of black leadership, which held the government accountable for the plight of African-Americans. |
| The New Yorker magazine hits the news stands today with a shocking cover a caricature of Barack and Michelle Obama depicting the presidential candidate in a turban, fist-bumping his wife who has a machine gun slung over her shoulder, while the American flag burns in the fireplace. The cover is shocking in that it depicts the Obamas in bizarre caricatured images and associations which reflect the very stereotypes with which the conservatives, particularly Fox News, have been trying to frame both the Obamas. |
| When Obama started his "Impossible Dream," the number of unemployed stood at 6.9 million and the jobless rate was 4.5 percent. Since then, a trio of crises - housing, credit and financial - have rocked the economy. That's caused economic growth to slow to a crawl and businesses and consumers to tighten their belts. The country's economic problems are a top concern for candidates vying to win the White House; but they, and most of the country, are mute on more Black youth getting jobs. Overall teenage unemployment increased to 18.7 percent, while Black teens' unemployment remains over six times the national rate - 32.3 percent. |
| U.S. foreclosure filings rose 53 percent in June from a year earlier and bank repossessions almost tripled as deteriorating property values and higher payments on adjustable mortgages forced more people to give up their homes. More than 252,000 properties, or one in every 501 U.S. households, were in some stage of foreclosure, RealtyTrac Inc., an Irvine, California-based seller of default data, said today in a statement. Nevada, California and Arizona had the highest foreclosure rates. |
| Bowing to President Bush's demands, the Senate sent the White House a bill Wednesday overhauling bitterly disputed rules on secret government eavesdropping and shielding telecommunications companies from lawsuits complaining they helped the U.S. spy on Americans. Opponents assailed the eavesdropping program, asserting that it imperiled citizens' rights of privacy from government intrusion. |
| Helms' death Friday, at age 86, brings America a small step closer to the end of the post-antebellum era in our politics that saw the men who had battled to deny the franchise to millions of Americans because of the color of their skin -- and who fought even more aggressively to deny adequate education, nutrition and health care to African-American children -- make the easy transition to leadership positions in the "modern" Republican Party. |
| At Fox News, media relations is a kind of rolling opposition research operation intended to keep reporters in line by feeding and sometimes maiming them. Shooting the occasional messenger is baked right into the process. As crude as that sounds, it works. By blacklisting reporters it does not like, planting stories with friendlies at every turn, Fox News has been living a life beyond consequence for years. Honesty compels me to admit that I have choked a few times at the keyboard when Fox News has come up in a story and it was not absolutely critical to the matter at hand. |
| "Of the top six or seven crews in the world, I'd say half of them are from Korea," says Christopher "Cros One" Wright, 33, an American dance promoter and b-boy who was recently in Suwon, South Korea, to judge the second annual global invitational hip-hop dance competition, called R16, that was held at the end of May. the world's biggest b-boy contest -- they won "best show" honors and a fourth-place trophy. Every year since, a Korean crew has placed first or second. Says Battle of the Year founder Thomas Hergenrother, "Korea is on a different planet at the moment." |
| Plummeting home prices have in recent months eliminated jobs for hundreds of thousands of people, from bankers and real estate agents to construction workers and furniture manufacturers. Tighter lending standards imposed by banks in the wake of huge mortgage losses have made it hard for many Americans to secure credit — the lifeblood of expansion in recent years — crimping the appetite of consumers, whose spending amounts to 70 percent of the economy. |
| frican leaders pointedly avoided public criticism of Robert Mugabe yesterday as he arrived in Egypt for a summit expected to press him to negotiate with the opposition that his Zanu-PF party bullied out of last week's election. The African Union summit allowed the 84-year-old leader to take his seat, despite strong criticism from African election monitors who questioned the legitimacy of Friday's uncontested vote. |
| Regardless of what you think of Soulja Boy's message, it speaks to the youth that hip-hop has sought to speak to since it was first born. If the youth are in a position where the songs that they can relate to depict "supersoaking hos," there's a much larger issue at hand than just the song or the artist that composed it. If you feel like Soulja Boy isn't real hip-hop because of his graphic and negative songs, find a way to educate the kid or at least the kids that are bumping his sshh. |
| In part because of the nature of the crime. Sex crimes may be viewed as less important in a community defined by race and the issues surrounding it. Sexism isn't discussed much in the black community, but it's hard not to think about it here. It remains to be seen what impact national figures such as Michelle Obama, who could become the first-ever African-American First Lady--will have on the self-esteem of African-American women, in a culture in which music videos and lyrics that constantly show women only as sex objects help diminish that self-esteem. |
| New York hip-hop and R&B radio station Hot 97 (WQHT) announced today morning jock Miss Jones and the morning crew (Michael Sean and DJ Envy) will be relieved of duty as the current morning show "Miss Jones In The Morning" next week and will be replaced with the nationally syndicated show "Big Boy In The Morning" from 7am-10am. |
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