19June2013

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Created on 15 June 2013
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Nelson Mandela ‘Recovering Well’ in South African Hospital, Says Grandson

Former South African president Nelson Mandela is recovering well from a lung infection after spending eight days in a Pretoria hospital, his grandson Mandla Mandela says. He claims the 94-year-old former leader “looked good” after a recent hospital visit.
 
“Madiba is recovering very well and looks good,” Mandla Mandela said in Qunu, a village in the Eastern Cape province where Mandela was born and spent his adolescent years. ”I thank the nation and the world for the prayers for Madiba, and the doctors and the office of the ANC for keeping the family updated,” he said.
 
On Thursday, South African President Jacob Zuma announced that Mandela’s health was improving, but that he remained in serious condition.
 
This marks Mandela’s fourth hospitalization since last December. The anti-apartheid activis has had a history of lung problems stemming from his time at the windswept Robben Island prison camp near Cape Town. Mandela spent 27 years there under white rule after leading South Africa’s anti-apartheid movement. He was released in 1990, and four years later became South Africa’s first black president.

Read more http://newsone.com/2592709/nelson-mandela-recovering-well-in-hospital/

  • Written by News One
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Category: WORLD

Created on 13 June 2013
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White People No Longer U.S. Majority by 2043

For the first time, America's racial and ethnic minorities now make up about half of the under-5 age group, the government said Thursday. It's a historic shift that shows how young people are at the forefront of sweeping changes by race and class.
 
The new census estimates, a snapshot of the U.S. population as of July 2012, comes a year after the Census Bureau reported that whites had fallen to a minority among babies. Fueled by immigration and high rates of birth, particularly among Hispanics, racial and ethnic minorities are now growing more rapidly in numbers than whites.
Based on current rates of growth, whites in the under-5 group are expected to tip to a minority this year or next, Thomas Mesenbourg, the Census Bureau's acting director, said.
 
The government also projects that in five years, minorities will make up more than half of children under 18. Not long after, the total U.S. white population will begin an inexorable decline in absolute numbers, due to aging baby boomers.
 
The imminent tip to a white minority among young children adds a racial dimension to government spending on early-childhood education, such as President Barack Obama's proposal to significantly expand pre-kindergarten for lower-income families. The nation's demographic changes are already stirring discussion as to whether some civil rights-era programs, such as affirmative action in college admissions, should be retooled to focus more on income rather than race and ethnicity. The Supreme Court will rule on the issue this month.
 
Studies show that gaps in achievement by both race and class begin long before college, suggesting that U.S. remedies to foster equal opportunity will need to reach earlier into a child's life.
 
"The educational system is likely to be the most widely used and most acceptable policy tool we have for equalizing life chances. But it does not seem so far to achieve this goal," said Timothy Smeeding, an economics professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who specializes in income inequality. "This specter of unequal opportunity may be the biggest negative social outcome of the continuing American inequality boom."
 
The gap between rich and poor in the U.S. has now stretched to its widest since 1970, making opportunities to reach the middle class increasingly difficult.
 
Read more at the Huffington Post.
 
(Photo: Getty Images)
  • Written by Hope Yen/Associated Press
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Category: WORLD

Created on 12 June 2013
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Washington Braces for Death of Nelson Mandela

Officials in Washington and around the world are bracing for the death of longtime civil rights leader and former South African President Nelson Mandela, who is hospitalized again in serious condition for a lung condition. His aides have asked for prayers, reports Paul Bedard of the Washington Examiner.
 
"It looks bad," said one U.S. official who added: "Washington is keeping a close eye on the former leader and civil rights hero."
 
Expectations are that President Obama and possibly former Presidents Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush would attend a funeral. No travel plans have been made, however.
 
Mandela, in prison for 27 years before being freed and eventually winning the presidency, has been in a Pretoria hospital since Saturday, his fourth hospital trip for lung ailments. On Saturday, a government spokesman said Mandela's condition had "deteriorated." On Monday, President Jacob Zuma said "his condition is unchanged."
 
Read more at the Washington Examiner.
 
(Photo: A mural of Nelson Mandela, the former South African president, on a wall in Johannesburg/AP)
 
  • Written by Paul Bedard/Washington Examiner
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Category: WORLD

Created on 12 June 2013
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Medgar Evers: His Murder 50 Years Later

In a piece at the Guardian, Martha Bergmark, founding president and CEO of the Mississippi Center for Justice, reflects back on the death of Medgar Evers, the NAACP activist who was gunned down in Jackson, Miss., 50 years ago today. She says his work still lives on. 

On this day, 50 years ago, I was a white teenager in Jackson, Mississippi, absorbed most of the time with the typical concerns of childhood. But I vividly remember 12 June 1963, because that night my family and I heard the news that Medgar Evers, a well-known civil rights leader in our state, had been shot and killed in the driveway of his home, just a few miles from where we lived.

Evers joined the U.S. army and fought in Europe during the second world war, only to return home to a state where slavery had been replaced by Jim Crow laws that institutionalized discrimination in every aspect of life. Before long, he applied unsuccessfully to become the first African American to attend the law school at Ole Miss. There, he led sit-ins and boycotts of businesses that practiced segregation – even though he knew that challenging the white power structure could cost him his life.

For many of us, white as well as black, the assassination of Medgar Evers was a turning-point. We were forced to ask ourselves with regard to the growing civil rights movement, "Where do I stand, and what am I willing to risk?"

Today, on the 50th anniversary of Evers' death, we as a nation are confronted by the same question. Undeniably, the heroic movement that Evers and many others inspired brought an end to legal apartheid and transformed my home state and our country in important ways.

But our work as a nation to achieve racial and economic justice is far from finished. It's not just that voting rights are once again under attack in many states, including Mississippi. More than that, de facto segregation and discrimination continue to threaten equal access to education, affordable housing, healthcare, financial services and the job market.

The numbers are staggering. Nationally, the African-American unemployment rate is about double that of whites. On average, black and Latino families have about one-sixth the wealth of white families. Fewer than half of black males graduate from high school, and African Americans are incarcerated at nearly six times the rate of whites.

Read more at the Guardian.

(Photo: Civil Rights Activist and NAACP Field Secretary Medgar Evers poses for a portrait circa 1960 in Jackson, Miss. (Michael Ochs Archive/Getty Images)

 

  • Written by Martha Bergmark/Guardian
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Category: WORLD

Created on 11 June 2013
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Nelson Mandela Remains in Serious Condition

South Africa's president says that Nelson Mandela remains in serious but stable condition during his fourth day in the hospital. A government statement Tuesday says that President Jacob Zuma is satisfied that the medical team treating Mandela is doing all they can to improve his health. Zuma was given a briefing by the medical staff late Monday.
 
Zuma said media reports that indicated he would visit Mandela in the hospital on Tuesday are incorrect. Mandela was hospitalized on Saturday for a recurring lung infection. It's the fourth time since December that South Africa's anti-apartheid hero has been hospitalized. Mandela spent 27 years in prison before becoming South Africa's first black president in 1994.
 
(Photo: Schalk van Zuydam/AP)
  • Written by Jason Straziuso/Associated Press
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