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SHOOTING SUSPECT ACCUSED OF USING RACIAL SLURS DURING INCIDENT
WASHINGTON DC — The NAACP requested that the U.S. Department of Justice investigate the Caswell County, North Carolina shooting by a 52-year-old white man in the direction of three African American children. The shots fired from a 12-gauge shotgun injured two of the children, ages 7 and 10, and left all three children, including another 10-year-old, psychologically traumatized. The shooting is believed to be racially motivated.
John Clyde Fuqua, 52, has been charged with two felony counts of assault with a deadly weapon inflicting serious injury and two misdemeanor counts of assault with a deadly weapon. Prior to the incident, Fuqua, was heard yelling racial slurs before asking his wife to retrieve his shotgun. According to reports, Fuqua fired the shotgun three times in the direction of three children. He was was released shortly after the shooting on a $5,000 bond.
“These children and their families have been traumatized. The disturbing history of this man’s racial animosity toward African Americans and the hateful epithets he has been accused of yelling must be investigated as indications that this was indeed as a possible hate crime,” said Rev. Dr. William Barber II, President of the North Carolina State Conference. “The North Carolina NAACP will not back down from racism and its manifestations under any circumstances.”
“It is appalling that these small children may have suffered serious physical and psychological harm because of the violent inhumanity of this kind of racial intolerance,” said Benjamin Todd Jealous, President and CEO of the NAACP. “We are pleased that the Department of justice will look into this case and the national NAACP stands firmly behind the North Carolina State Conference in ensuring that justice is served in Caswell County.”
Source: NAACP

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has contributed $10 million to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, expected to open in late 2015 on the National Mall in Washington. The purpose of the grant is to support the capital campaign of the new museum, which is raising funds for the design and construction of its building.

The building, to be built on a five-acre tract adjacent to the Washington Monument, will be designed by Freelon Adjaye Bond/SmithGroup. The design, construction and exhibition installations are expected to cost about $500 million, half provided by congressional funding and the remainder raised by the museum.

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, Image via Wikipedia, Ralph Bunche at 1963 March on Washington (USIA)

In 1950 the Norwegian Nobel Committee awarded the Nobel Peace Prize to the first non-white person, the African-American and United Nations (UN) official Ralph Bunche. He received the Peace Prize for his efforts as mediator between Arabs and Jews in the Israeli-Arab war in 1948-1949. These efforts resulted in armistice agreements between the new state of Israel and four of its Arab neighbours: Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria.
Read more in Color Daily Magazine.

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SILVER SPRING, Md., PRNewswire-USNewswire -- The Obesity Society would like to make known its response to recent criticism regarding President Obama's nomination of Dr. Regina Benjamin, his candidate to serve as the next Surgeon General. Critics have suggested that because Dr. Benjamin is overweight, this sends the wrong message from the person who will be the public face of America's health initiatives.

A person's body weight provides no indication of an individual's character, credentials, talents, leadership, or contributions to society. To suggest that Dr. Benjamin's physical appearance discounts and discredits her qualities and accomplishments is inappropriate, unjust and wrong.

The criticism of Dr. Benjamin is an unfortunate example of the weight bias and stigmatization that is pervasive in North American society. The prevalence of weight discrimination in the United States has increased by 66% in the past decade, and is now on par with rates of racial discrimination.

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by Robin Fields, ProPublica - July 27, 2009 4:50 pm EDT


A charity headed by star Harvard University professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. is filing an amended 2007 report to the Internal Revenue Service because $11,000 it paid to foundation officers as compensation was mischaracterized as being for research grants.
Questions about Inkwell Foundation emerged over the weekend, part of a tsunami of attention Gates has received since July 16, when he was arrested at his home by a police officer responding to a report about a possible burglary in progress. The incident ignited a national debate over racial profiling, further magnified when President Obama jumped into it.
ProPublica inquired about Inkwell after receiving an e-mail from Joseph Culligan, a private investigator who makes public on his Web site documents about prominent people, from Ann Coulter to Sonia Sotomayor. The e-mail spotlighted a $10,000 grant made to Joanne Kendall, the foundation's treasurer, pointing out that she is also Gates' assistant at Harvard.
Gates, a member of ProPublica's board of directors, said Monday that the award to Kendall was actually payment for doing administrative work for Inkwell and not, as Inkwell's IRS 990 form states, a research grant.
"It should have been listed as compensation," he said in a telephone interview. In part, he added, the payment was designed to make sure she wasn't doing foundation work on Harvard's dime.
Gates also said $1,000 paid to foundation secretary Abby Wolf was for secretarial work, not research.
Inkwell was started by Gates in 2005 to support programs and research on African and African-American literature, art, history and culture.
It reported no activities until 2007, when it raised $205,543 and spent $27,600, state and federal filings show. The payments to Kendall and Wolf were among the foundation's largest — only four of 23 Inkwell grants exceeded $500.
As the foundation's president, Gates signed the report submitted to the IRS, but said he missed the inaccuracies it contained until ProPublica brought it to his attention. The foundation's accountant, David Schwartz, said he was unsure how the payments ended up being misclassified.
"If I knew why, this wouldn't have happened," he said. Schwartz said he expected the amended report to be filed in the next week or so.
As part of maintaining their tax-exempt status, foundations have to file annual reports to the IRS showing where their money goes, separating program expenses from administrative overhead.
Regulators and watchdog groups expect charities to spend more on activities that serve their core missions, but it's not unusual for administrative costs to eat up more of the budget early on.
By reclassifying the payments to Kendall and Wolf, administrative expenses will constitute almost 40 percent of Inkwell's 2007 spending instead of less than one percent.
Aside from Kendall and Wolf, others with close ties to the charity or to Gates also have received funds from Inkwell.
Gates volunteered that the foundation's second-largest grant, for $6,000, went to his fiancée, Angela DeLeon, who was also on Inkwell's board from 2005 to 2006. Gates said he recused himself from the vote on DeLeon's grant, which was for a project translating documents from Spanish and Dutch about the slave trade to Mexico.
A grant of $500 also went to Evelyn Higginbotham, chairwoman of Inkwell's board. Higginbotham is the chairwoman of Harvard’s Department of African and African-American studies and, with Gates, edited the 2004 book "African American Lives." Gates said that, as per the foundation's bylaws, she did not vote on the grant.
Inkwell has not yet filed its 990 form for 2008 and Schwartz said it has not yet been prepared.

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Arab, Muslim Americans Have High Hopes for Obama's Cairo Speech


President Barack Obama is to deliver a long awaited speech to the world's Muslims from Egypt on June 4. The speech is widely seen as an opportunity for President Obama to set a new course in U.S. foreign policy. Arab and Muslim Americans around the United States will be watching closely to understand if Mr. Obama plans to bring a permanent and lasting peace to the Middle East.

Michigan has largest U.S. Arab community
One-third of the population in Dearborn, Michigan are Muslim
The southeastern part of the midwestern state of Michigan, with 300,000 Arab Americans, is home to one the largest Muslim communities in the United States. In Dearborn, a suburb of Detroit, one-third of the population is Arab American, many of them are Muslim.
Fay Saad of the Arab American National Museum says "We call it Little Beirut. There are of course other ethnic backgrounds, like Iraqis, Palestinians, and Yemenis. It's a very close knit community. We all come together when times are tough, and we all come together when times are good."
2006 was tough for Saad. An Israeli bomb destroyed a family home in Beirut, killing her grandmother and aunt.

Sense of fairness
Saad hopes President Obama will restore what she considers a sense of fairness in dealing with the Palestinians and with Lebanon.
"Our American bombs killed my grandmother. They were American made bombs," she said. "And if America continues to give our bombs and our ammunition to Israel to continue demolishing Arab countries, it's just not fair."
Anan Ameri, a Palestinian-American, and director of the museum, hopes President Obama's speech is a first step in establishing permanent peace between "Israel and Palestine" - her word for the Palestinian territories.
"This is a problem that has been in existence for a very long time, and it's not going to be solved overnight," Ameri said. "But at least the intentions or the messages we are getting is that the Middle East is an important issue and it should be resolved fairly, and that Palestinians should have a fair resolution to their problems."

Local newspaper talks about speech
The Arab American community in Dearborn has its own newspaper. Many recent articles have dealt with Mr. Obama's upcoming speech.
Osama Siblani is the publisher. He says the president should look within the United States for help in launching a peace initiative.
"I think he has two of the biggest assets actually right within his reach," Siblani said. "One of them is President Jimmy Carter, and the other is Arab Americans."

Great expectations
Some of those Arab Americans live in California.
Khaled Soliman works for the city of Los Angeles. He has great expectations for President Obama's speech.
"What I expect from him in Cairo, that he will deliver a message of hope and also show that the United States is sincere in dealing with the Muslim world and really change the image of the last eight years," Soliman said. "And of course, whatever he says, it should be followed by action."

On the east coast of the United States, Malika Rushdan says one speech won't determine whether or not President Obama can improve relations with Muslims.
"I wouldn't want to be in his position because he has a heavy, heavy load to bear and a long road to travel, I think, as far as healing US-Muslim relations throughout the world, and thusfar, I think the verdict is still out," Rushdan said.

Wait and see
The prospects for Arab-Israeli peace efforts, and therefore improved relations with Muslims, will become clearer a few months after the speech, says University of Michigan Professor and author Juan Cole.
"There will be new Palestinian elections in January, set them up right, and you get a government you might be able to negotiate with," Cole said. "So these are challenges for Obama, but they are not insuperable challenges."

Many in the Arab and Muslim American community relate to Mr. Obama's personal narrative as the son of an African Muslim who also lived for a time in Indonesia, the largest Muslim country in the world.
But many also question whether he can use his background and international goodwill to grapple with the foreign policy challenges posed by the Middle East.