
Inmate beatings by prison guards occur across Georgia following an eight-day peaceful protest to highlight inhumane conditions in the prisons. These protesting prisoners must be silenced because a whole range of corporate interests has found that they can profit from caging human beings.

On or about Dec. 16, Terrance Bryant Dean was severely beaten by guards at Macon State Prison. The Concerned Coalition to Respect Prisoners’ Rights asserts this brutal beating was in retaliation against the multiracial group of prisoners who staged a peaceful protest demanding their human rights.

“People forget that Dr. King was every bit as committed to economic justice as he was to ending racial segregation,” author Michael K. Honey said. “As we struggle with massive unemployment, a staggering racial wealth gap and near collapse of our financial system, King’s prophetic writings and speeches underscore his relevance for today.”

On Dec. 15, a French judge filed preliminary charges against six people close to Rwandan President Paul Kagame for the 1994 assassination of the Rwandan and Burundian presidents that triggered the Rwanda Genocide. When will Obama take heed of these new French charges? How much longer will the U.S. back the regime sued on two continents and in three countries?

The threat of the recent cholera outbreak in Haiti has been intensified by Hurricane Tomas. The already bad sanitary conditions combined with the flooding from the hurricane is expected to cause the infection rate to jump.

Rwandan President Kagame denied the accusations in the new U.N. report, most of all the accusations of genocide, and then responded by arresting Victoire Ingabire Umuhoza, the second of three opposition presidential candidates to be jailed since attempting to contest this year’s presidential election against Kagame.

Bro. Muteen (Robert Brown) died shut away in Nevada’s dungeons but never shut up. He got a lot of respect and took great pride in helping other convicts fight for their rights and their freedom in the courts.

With this campaign we have to fight to plug the mass leak of people systemically pressed into nearly abject poverty. It is like watching the death of the spirit of a city that the world depends upon to be the one place where right is right and fair is fair.

With Arizona’s harsh new immigration law threatening to unleash a wave of racial profiling, Bay Area African-American clergy and community leaders traveled to Phoenix late last month on a four-day solidarity mission.

The Right to Return Weekend challenges the forced removal of all public housing residents following Hurricane Katrina and the discriminatory policies of the government to permanently displace low-income Black communities from the “new” New Orleans.

Foreclosures are soaring. Some housing experts say 4 million foreclosures are possible in 2010. To fight back, organizations across the U.S. are engaging in “housing liberation” and “housing defense” to exercise their human rights to housing. Here are a few examples.

“Damn Detroit Police Department! You burned, shot and killed Aiyana Jones, a little 7-year-old girl. You threw a stun grenade through the front window and lit the little girl’s blanket on fire! And then you shot off a bullet that landed in her neck!” – Read this account by Kimora Lee Simmons, another by a 12-year-old girl and the full story by veteran Detroit journalist Abayomi Azikiwe.

Michelle Alexander’s “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness” (published by The New Press, 2010) looks at the invisible people and the invisible birdcage that keeps the masses of Black people locked in and alienated from society – the targets of the War on Drugs.

The People’s National Party of Belize organized a Kayak for Haiti Kayakathon to raise funds for the victims of the quake. Despite the inclement weather, Kayak for Haiti was a success because the target was met and surpassed. The total amount raised was $1,404. The money will go to the Haiti Emergency Relief Fund.

Despite the fact that over a million people remained homeless in Haiti one month after the earthquake, U.S. Ambassador to Haiti Ken Merten is quoted at a State Department briefing on Feb. 12, saying: “In terms of humanitarian aid delivery … frankly, it’s working really well. And I believe that this will be something that people will be able to look back on in the future as a model for how we’ve been able to sort ourselves out as donors on the ground and responding to an earthquake.”

This statement reflects the position of an international community of adoptees of color who wish to pose a critical intervention in the discourse and actions affecting the child victims of the recent earthquake in Haiti and who feel compelled to voice our opinion about what it means to be “saved” or “rescued” through adoption.

Hundreds of thousands of people in Haiti have had no access to clean water since the quake hit. Have you ever felt the raw fear in the gut when you are not sure where your next drink of water is going to come from? People can die within hours if they are exposed to heat without water.

Allow all Haitians in the U.S. to work and send money home. Do not allow U.S. military in Haiti to point their guns at Haitians. Do not allow the victims to be cast as criminals. Give Haiti grants as help, not loans. Enact Temporary Protected Status for Haitians. Release all Haitians in U.S. jails who are not accused of any crimes. And more.

Historic Wesley United Methodist Church, the second oldest African American church in New Orleans, the eighth oldest in the United States and a symbol of the struggle for emancipation and human rights in the state of Louisiana, is in jeopardy. Unless those who are trying to save it acquire financial support soon, the church may be torn down due to hurricane damage and replaced with a parking lot.

Communities from up and down the West Coast that had planned to converge in San Francisco to demonstrate our immense energy and BE THE CHANGE this administration needs to do what is right have been denied a previously approved permit to gather – why? on the grounds that the rally will be too large. Is this a re-run of the rise and fall of the Poor People’s Campaign’s Resurrection City on the Washington Mall in 1968?