Ben Jealous to Focus on Voter and Economic Empowerment at Center for American Progress by Hazel Trice Edney

May 5, 2014

Ben Jealous to Focus on Voter and Economic Empowerment at Center for American Progress
By Hazel Trice Edney

benjealous3

(TriceEdneyWire.com) - Former NAACP President/CEO Benjamin Todd Jealous, who recently announced his new position as a venture partner with the Calif.-based Kapor Center for Social Impact, has also joined the Center for American Progress (CAP) as a senior fellow.

In an interview with the Trice Edney News Wire this week, Jealous said he will write op-eds and reports for the non-partisan CAP, focusing on the intersection between democratic and economic power.

“The first report I’ll write will focus on voting rights. It will focus on the future of our country and where we’re headed and ultimately our opportunities through the ballot box to make a more prosperous and inclusive future for our country come faster for all,” Jealous said. “I’ve always suggested that people vote to take control of the future. Right now when you look throughout many parts of the country, the people who are in control aren’t focused on expanding opportunity and expanding prosperity. They tend to be focused on just the opposite – keeping it constrained to a very small number of people.”

Though Jealous’ has a Kapor Center office in Oakland, Calif., he and his wife, Leah, and their two children, still live in Washington, D.C., where CAP is based. Jealous says there is no conflict between his work with the two organizations and he still maintains time to spend with his family, which is the reason he gave for leaving the NAACP in December.

The CAP fellowship is a volunteer position, which will enable him to continue his thought leadership as an advocate and activist.

“This is something that sits at the nexus of the work that I do every day as an investor and an organizer to continue to shape the conversation in our country,” he said. "The writing that I will do will help people see the connection between expanding the prosperity for all of us and expanding participation at the ballot box and in government. The two have always gone together. Gaining more power in our democracy, they tend to gain more prosperity in our economy.”

A CAP press release said Jealous will also “focus on tracking political trends impacting civil and human rights and will contribute to developing policy solutions that ensure equity and opportunity for all Americans.”

CAP President Neera Tandan lauded Jealous as having “a long and outstanding history of dedicating his talents toward defending the civil rights of all Americans and is a proven civic leader and public servant. Promoting social and economic fairness and opportunity should be a priority for policymakers across the political spectrum, and we are thrilled to welcome Ben to CAP and look forward to working with him to find innovative solutions to narrowing the gaps in opportunity and achievement for all Americans.”

Jealous, had served as NAACP President/CEO since 2008 when he departed in December. He joined the Kapor Center in March. It uses technology to impact social justice. CAP describes itself as a "nonpartisan research and educational institute dedicated to promoting a strong, just and free America that ensures opportunity for all.”

Jealous says he will also continue building a political action committee to support “transformative Democratic and Republican candidates.”

He concluded this week, “The things that are worth doing are worth talking about. I’m blessed to be able to contribute to our economy and our democracy in ways that are dynamic and help the future come faster. And I’m excited to be able to focus time on talking about those ideas, spreading those ideas.”

FAMU Graduating Senior Accepted by Six Medical Schools

May 5, 2014

FAMU Graduating Senior Accepted by Six Medical Schools

adekoya nellena

Nellena Adekoya

Special to the Trice Edney News Wire from Florida A&M University

Florida A&M University (FAMU) graduating senior Nellena Adekoya has a lot to smile about. On Saturday, May 3, she was among more than 1,300 candidates who receive diplomas during FAMU’s spring 2014 commencement ceremonies, according to a release from the University.

Behind Adekoya’s infectious smile is also the excitement of beginning her journey to obtain the title of doctor. The Grayson, Ga. native has accomplished the phenomenal feat of being accepted into six medical schools: the University of Tennessee College of Medicine, the Meharry Medical College, the University of Kentucky College of Medicine, the Florida State University College of Medicine, the Indiana University School of Medicine and the Medical College of Georgia School of Medicine. She’s decided to attend the Medical College of Georgia, which is located near her hometown.

With her sight’s set on becoming an OB-GYN, Adekoya, 21, said she believes what’s made her such an attractive candidate for medical school is simply her warm personality and passion for helping others.

“I think what helped me to standout was the interview process. I was able to show them that what I had to offer was more than what was on paper,” said Adekoya, who will graduate summa cum laude with a bachelor’s degree in biology.

Letina Banks, biology instructor and academic advisor, said she knows exactly why so many distinguished medical programs courted Adekoya. “Nellena has been a superb student from start to finish. She is a shining star,” Banks explained. “No matter what, she always has a smile on her face, is always humble and displays a caring personality. She is a model student and has never been afraid to ask questions or ask for help. She truly has what it takes to be a great physician – she will be a great physician.”

Adekoya’s interest in practicing medicine stems back to before she was a kindergartener.

“Since I was a four-year-old I've wanted to become a doctor. I used to watch a show called ‘Rescue 911’ with my mother and I was inspired to help people in need,” said Adekoya. “From there I took science classes, shadowed physicians and volunteered. I’ve never had any other career option in mind.”

According to Adekoya, a self-proclaimed soccer enthusiast, who donates much of her free time to coaching area youth, FAMU has served as a foundation for her ability to excel in and out of the classroom. She was a recipient of FAMU’s Life Gets Better Scholarship, which offers a full-ride to National Achievement and Merit Semifinalists who maintain at least a 3.5 GPA in high school and major in the areas of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM).

“FAMU gave me every tool I needed, both academically and socially, to form a great foundation for medical school,” Adekoya said. “We have some of the most caring and available professors around. I'm very proud to be a Rattler.”

While Adekoya is poised to become one of the nation’s next leaders in medicine, she asserts that everything she has accomplished to get her to this point is not about her.

“My main goal is to help as many people as I can,” she said. “Once I'm established, I'd like to do my best to institute free or discounted medical care services every year. I'm not interested in fame or fortune, just impacting lives.”

Angola A Playground for Accused Sex Trafficker

May 5, 2014

Angola A Playground for Accused Sex Trafficker

Bento dos Santos Kangamba

Special to the Trice Edney News Wire from Global Information Network

(TriceEdneyWire.com) – An army general close to Angola’s President Jose Eduardo dos Santos has been red listed the Interpol wanted list by Brazilian police. He’s accused of trafficking women for the purposes of sexual exploitation.

But Bento dos Santos Kangamba is not living in fear but enjoying the good life among Angola’s newly-minted millionaires. There is no extradition treaty between Angola and Brazil so the politician can indefinitely avoid arrest.

As an extra level of security, Dos Santos Kangamba is married to the niece of the president and is a die-hard supporter of Angola’s ruling MPLA party.

The trafficking network was uncovered by Brazilian police in a year-long operation called Operação Garina, led by the federal police commissioner of São Paulo, Luis Tempestini. Garina means young girl in Angolan slang.

The alleged trafficking was said to have been running for at least 10 years and to have involved a total turnover of $45-million.

The Angolan Parliament approved a treaty for the transfer of prisoners between the two countries in 2011 but President Dos Santos failed to sign the treaty into law. The government has offered no explanation for the delay.

In June this year, police tried to detain Kangamba in Monaco in connection with the transportation of $3-million in cash from Portugal to France. He avoided arrest by using his diplomatic passport.

Among items seized by police were a registry of diamond transactions and banking transfers in Israel and Switzerland.

Kangamba has denied all accusations relating to the alleged trafficking of women and money laundering.

According to the U.S. State Dept.’s Trafficking in Persons Report, Angola is a source and destination for men, women, and children subjected to sex trafficking and forced labor. Angolans are reportedly forced to work in agriculture, construction, domestic service, and artisanal diamond mines within the country.

Underage girls, as young as 13, work in prostitution while some Angolan boys are taken to Namibia for forced labor in cattle herding.

Angolan adults may use children under the age of 12 for forced criminal activity, as children cannot be tried in court. Forced begging also occurs in Angola. Angolan women and children are subjected to domestic servitude in South Africa, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Namibia, and European nations, primarily Portugal.

Despite the crimes against Angola’s growing poor and jobless population, European nations are increasingly looking to do business with Angola – Africa’s second biggest oil producer, pumping 1.8 million barrels a day.

President Dos Santos this week held talks with French officials, ending years of frosty ties between the two countries. The standoff was precipitated by the so-called ‘Angolagate’ scandal involving French arms sales to Luanda in the 1990s. It was considered one of the largest corruption cases on the continent with multimillions owed to taxpayers ending up in private pockets of Angolan officials.

'It Won't Be a Quiet Summer' as Groups Campaign for Voters By Zenitha Prince

May 5, 2014

'It Won't Be a Quiet Summer' as Groups Campaign for Voters

By Zenitha Prince

Special to the Trice Edney News Wire from the Afro American Newspaper

(TriceEdneyWire.com) - The civil rights community’s get-out-the-vote machine is slowly reawakening. But, given what’s at stake in this year’s mid-term elections, activists say, GOTV campaigners need to shake off the malaise—ASAP.

“It is too quiet, and we’ve got to get busy really fast,” said Melanie Campbell, president and CEO of the National Coalition on Black Civic Participation, adding that many groups seem to be in the planning stage.

Voter registration and turnout among communities of color and the young tend to drop in non-presidential election cycles, a tendency that will present one of the major challenges.

“Those drops are what allows so many shifts in the political landscape,” said Marvin Randolph, the NAACP’s senior vice president of campaigns. “Our goal is to ensure that is not the case….We’re going to be taking it to the streets this year.”

It was one of those political shifts that ushered in a series of laws that will prove the biggest obstacle to voter registration and mobilization efforts this year. In response to the historic election of President Barack Obama in 2008, the mid-term elections of 2010 saw the rise of the Tea Party as conservative Republicans flooded Congress, state legislatures and governor’s mansions across the country. And those empowered GOP legislators immediately set out to enact laws that would, ostensibly, combat voter fraud and increase elections integrity, but which, in reality, were meant to suppress the votes of minorities, the young, poor and others who tend to vote Democrat.

“We went from breakthrough in 2008 to backlash (with the rise of the Tea Party) to rollback (with the rise of voter suppression laws),” Randolph said.

“This has been the most coordinated attack on voting rights since Jim Crow,” added the NAACP leader of the wave of laws that cut early voting, increased residency requirements, demanded proof of citizenship, required photo IDs for registration and voting, gerrymandered districts and more.

In 2012, the NAACP and other pro-voting rights groups fought back against the repressive voting laws and the punditry that predicted waning Black enthusiasm over Obama’s presidency would be reflected in lower voter turnout.

“In 2012, not only did we run a get-out-the-vote and voter mobilization campaign, we also ran a campaign to fight voter suppression laws. We fought in the courts, in the court of public opinion and in the streets,” Randolph said.

Due to national and state level work, the NAACP was able to register more than 350,000 voters and mobilized 1.2 million people to the polls on or before Election Day, according to its website.

“The [GOP] backlash had a backlash: Your parents and mine did not wait to vote, they came early because they were educated by folks like the NAACP that their vote was under attack…. People stayed in line, sometimes for eight hours, because they wanted to exercise their right to vote,” Randolph said. “Those laws are what gave people the extra push…knowing that their rights were being impinged upon.”

Activists say they hope voters will be similarly motivated this year, especially since GOP-led legislatures have become more emboldened, further reversing voters’ civil rights since the Supreme Court struck down Section 4 and invalidated Section 5 of the {Voting Rights Act}, which was used to legally challenge laws that blocked equal access to the ballot box.

But getting the electorate motivated will require waging a robust education campaign to combat voter confusion and disillusionment.

“We have to get information out early, early, early, to ensure that people are informed of their rights,” Campbell said.

Earlier this month, Campbell’s National Coalition on Black Civic Participation held a Black Youth Vote conference, where young people from 10 states gathered to get training on how to register and mobilize voters. The group also has a Power
of the Sister Vote campaign, which focuses on educating and mobilizing women voters.

“We tend to have a strong focus on women because when they have information they tend to pass it on to their families,” Campbell said.

This week, Rev. Al Sharpton and the National Action Network announced they are “gearing up” to launch a freedom summer campaign in key states—Arkansas, Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, North Carolina, Ohio, Texas and Virginia—where voting rights are under attack. The goal of the campaign will be to recruit and train volunteers to carry out voter registration drives and to help fight voter suppression by providing critical support to voters, such as driving seniors to get new IDs, babysitting children so that their parents can take time to get copies of their birth certificate, or holding townhalls to educate communities.

On May 1, the National Coalition of 100 Black Women – Central Alabama Chapter will host a nationally simulcast panel discussion on the impact of the repressive laws. The same day, the American Bar Association will host several events in Washington, D.C., focused on those barriers to voting and ways to combat them, and there are other similar initiatives.

Randolph, the NAACP campaigns director, said his organization has a year-long GOTV program, during which volunteers get “very intense” training in the use of “21st century campaign tactics.”

The organization has a database of almost 1 million voters that allows for targeted campaigning, and they will be looking to garner even more voters, he said.“We will be making phone calls, knocking on doors, putting announcements on the radio… [and] we have a very active campaign on social media,” Randolph said.

Campbell said pro-civic engagement groups may have to surmount the scarcity of resources available for GOTV efforts in a non-presidential election cycle, but vowed that what had to be done would be accomplished “with or without.”

With the Jim Crow-lite laws as a spur, coupled with the fast approaching 50th anniversary of the seminal Freedom Summer—a courageous attempt to register Black voters in the then-segregated South—Campbell said she believes GOTV efforts will soon go into high gear.

She promised, “It won’t be a quiet summer.”

Somali Mother of Stowaway Teen Weeps to Learn of His Risky Flight U. N. Says Mom and Son May Be Re-united Soon

May 5, 2014

Somali Mother of Stowaway Teen Weeps to Learn of His Risky Flight
U. N. Says Mom and Son May Be Re-united Soon

Ubah Mohamed Abdullahi

Special to the Trice Edney News Wire from Global Information Network

(TriceEdneyWire.com) – The mother of the 14-year-old boy who risked death to stow away in the wheel well of a plane bound for Hawaii wept upon learning of his life-threatening adventure. According to the latest reports, efforts are now underway to reunite the teenager, Yahya Abdi, with his mother in the U.S. The youth risked his life taking the plane, saying he has been trying to get home to his mother. The U.N. refugee agency says she might qualify to immigrate to America, and could possibly move to the U.S. in less than a year.

Ubah Mohamed Abdullahi, who lives in a refugee camp in Ethiopia, says it was the first news she had heard about her lost son for six years. Divorced from his father, she has not been in contact with the family since they moved to the US in 2008. The boy's father said the 16-year-old had been trying to return to Somalia. The boy, Yahya Abdi, survived lack of oxygen and freezing temperatures on a five-hour flight from California to Hawaii.

According to the young man’s father, Yahya Abdi was "always talking about going back to Africa" and since the family came to the US, the boy had been bothered by "education problems". Since 1991 Somalia has seen clan-based warlords, rival politicians and Islamist militants battle for control - a situation that has allowed lawlessness and piracy to flourish.

The years of anarchy and drought have forced many Somalis to seek sanctuary elsewhere but since a UN-backed government was installed in 2012, a small measure of stability has returned to some areas of the country. BBC Somali's Abdifitah Ibrahim Cagayare says in the middle of the interview Ms Abdullahi broke down and sobbed uncontrollably.

She said that since her two sons and daughter went to the US in 2008 with her ex-husband she had been desperately trying to get in touch with them. "We are divorced… I called him [her ex-husband] several times through his relatives and he refused to talk to me," she said.

"I want to hear the voice of my children, I want to see them, please help me and guide me to that, please," the mother wept. Somalis began seeking refuge in Ethiopia in 2011 during a crippling famine that killed an estimated 260,000 people, half of them under the age of 6. Many international aid activists believe that tens of thousands of people died needlessly because outside nations were slow to respond to early signs of approaching hunger in East Africa in late 2010 and early 2011.

Shedder Refugee Camp, in far eastern Ethiopia near the border with Somalia, is home to Yahya Abdi’s mother and some 10,300 Somalis who fled their country because of a deadly power struggle in which African, U.S. and other regions have been taking part. Most Somalis here are from minority groups who face persecution.