At Claire McCaskill’s (Missouri) town hall, an African American woman brings a Rosa Parks poster with her to attend the meeting. Out of nowhere, a white guy decides to walk over, snatch it from her and tears it up.

WTF?

Seriously people – there’s some bad blood brewing in the country right now. The fact that the right wing is actually embracing these people instead of disowning them says just how out of touch they are.

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Here are some tips for making it work:

1. Ask the important questions at the onset, to make sure you are both clear on the parameters of the relationship. These can be difficult and awkward questions to ask, but will save you great heartache and misunderstanding down the line. For example, are you open to the possibility of relocating if the relationship should become more serious?

2. Communicate in some way every day – more than once if possible. Since you won’t be seeing each other, it’s important to establish and maintain an emotional connection. These don’t have to be long, in-depth conversations (though those should occur sometimes). Tell each other about your little triumphs and tragedies. Ask for advice. Use an instant messenger program or VoIP for real-time chat, or webcams for that visual connection. E-mail is great so make sure you use it, especially if long-distance phone calls put a strain on your budget. Write love letters. Send small gifts or flowers for no reason. In this case, quantity is as important as quality. You may discover an advantage over others whose partner is close at hand – you don’t take communication for granted!

3. Recognize, and take advantage of, the benefits that long distance relationships offer such as more time with friends and/or family, no arguments over toothpaste caps, the pleasure of seeing your sweetheart again after a long absence. Most important, being far apart gives you a chance to maintain your individuality – something that can get lost in the shuffle when couples spend all their free time together.

4. Pursue common interests, even if it means pursuing them apart. If there’s a movie you’re both interested in seeing, watch it individually and then call each other afterward and discuss it. Read a certain book at the same time. Stargaze while on you’re on the phone. Set your watches to go off at the same time every day, and synchronize your alarm with that of your partner. Make it a point to think of each other when your watch goes off, and revel in the fact that he or she is thinking about you, too. Find creative ways to bond.

5. Avoid the temptation to be controlling. People have free will and no one can or should control another person. As long as you are both interested in being in the relationship, you will stick with it and distance will not make a difference. As soon as one of you decides the other is not a good match – or someone else is a better match – your relationship ends, whether you live 3000 miles apart, two streets over, or share the same bed with your wedding picture on the wall. Most relationship advice boils down to common sense; needless to say you are going to have to trust each other completely if this relationship is going to work.

6. Talk about your future together. Assuming that ultimately you’d want to live together, discussing how you’re going to get to that point will help you prove to each other that long distance relationships can go somewhere and that your efforts and frustrations are not in vain.

Perhaps the toughest aspect of long distance relationships is this: Know when to say good-bye. While this is tough in any relationship, this can be especially hard over long distances. When communication becomes one-sided or sparse for too long and for no apparent reason, when arguments (yes, you’ll have them) become too frequent, when the whole thing just seems like more trouble than it’s worth, it’s time to re-evaluate the relationship. Either you’ll decide to go your separate ways, or you’ll get closer for having overcome another obstacle to your happiness together.

About The Author
Emily Kensington is a couples therapist. For free relationship advice and romance tips visit http://www.hearts-and-kisses.com

Wyclef Jean is one of the world’s most recognizable stars, performing before sold-out audiences, selling more than 50 million records in a 20-year career. His music is an eclectic mix, rooted in his Haitian DNA. Known primarily as a hip hop artist, he has a gift for guitar that reminds many of Jimi Hendrix.

“I came from Haiti. English is not my first language. I came to the land of the free, the land of the opportunities. I made somethin’ of myself,” Wyclef told Pelley.

Asked what he thinks would have happened had he never left Haiti, he said, “I think about that all the time. I always think ‘Why you, Clef? There’s close to ten million people in that place. Why you?’”

He comes from a country both beautiful and destitute. The average Haitian lives on less than $300 a year. Half the people scratch out a meager living on the land. The others are packed into cities like the capital, Port-au-Prince.

To most Haitians, he’s the living incarnation of their dream, someone who got out, struck it rich, but didn’t forget where he came from.

“These kids, they could identify with me, ’cause they say, ‘He looks like us, and he talks our language,’” says Jean.

Harris endeared such characters to readers who were otherwise unfamiliar with them, using themes and backdrops familiar to urban professionals, conditioned by their upbringings, their church leaders or their friends to condemn and criticize homosexuality in the African-American community. A proud Razorback cheerleader at the University of Arkansas who struggled with his own sexuality before becoming a pioneer of gay black fiction, Harris died Thursday at age 54 while promoting his latest book in Los Angeles.

Publicist Laura Gilmore said Harris died Thursday night after being stricken at the Peninsula Hotel in Beverly Hills, and a cause of death had not been determined. She said Harris, who lived in Atlanta, fell ill on a train to Los Angeles a few days ago and blacked out for a few minutes, but seemed fine after that.

An improbable and inspirational success story, Harris worked for a decade as an IBM executive before taking up writing, selling the novel “Invisible Life” from his car as he visited salons and beauty parlors around Atlanta. He had unprecedented success for an openly gay black author and his strength as a romance writer led some to call him the “male Terry McMillan.”

In 15 years, Harris became the genre’s most successful author, penning 11 titles, ten of them New York Times bestsellers. More than four million of his books are in print.

Source: AP

David Axelrod, a senior adviser to President Obama, said Sunday that he believed the president’s expression of regret for his initial statement that the police “acted stupidly” was having “the desired effect.”

“People are talking more constructively now,” Mr. Axelrod said on CBS’s “Face The Nation.” “The steam has gone out of this. Instead of heat being generated, more light is being generated.”

The incident highlighted social divisions that Mr. Obama hoped had been eased by his election as the nation’s first African-American president. The emotions triggered by his comments on the Gates arrest suggest that the issue of race continues to hang over his presidency.

The Cambridge Police Department in Massachusetts dropped a disorderly conduct charge against Gates, calling his arrest “regrettable and unfortunate” in a statement yesterday. Police arrested Gates at his home July 16 after a verbal confrontation with him. They said they were called to the house after a passerby mistook Gates’ effort to open his jammed front door for a break-in.

E-mails and telephone calls flew among black academics around the U.S. after Gates, 58, a leading scholar who has written about race and justice, was handcuffed on the front porch of his home, and only three blocks from the Harvard campus where he teaches. Kerry Haynie, a political scientist at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, said he received more than a dozen calls and e-mails from friends about Gates’s trouble.

“It’s shocking,” Haynie said yesterday in a telephone interview. “Even before this incident came up, I spoke with a reporter about whether we’re in a post-race society. My immediate thought was, hell no.”

Source: bloomberg

Since 2003, concerts have been presented by 46664 in South Africa, Spain, Norway and England, before New York City this year. This was the first one Mr. Mandela could not attend, because he no longer travels outside South Africa. Now Mr. Mandela’s admirers hope to see his birthday, July 18, become an internationally recognized Mandela Day: “Not a holiday,” Mr. Mandela admonished on video, but “a day dedicated to service.”

His call for volunteerism has a theme song, “With My Own Two Hands,” which was written by Ben Harper and was performed on Saturday by a South African singer, Chris Chameleon, and a Senegalese one, Baaba Maal.

Pressing the case, and calling on the audience to devote time to unselfish deeds, were Morgan Freeman, Forest Whitaker, Whoopi Goldberg, Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins, among other actors.

Stevie Wonder concluded the show, flanked by all the other performers, exulting in his own “Happy Birthday” — a song that once supported the creation of the Martin Luther King’s Birthday holiday, now repurposed.

Source: NYT

Bill Cosby at this point in his career is not just internationally famous; he has become an icon in the black community as a successful, inspiring individual who did not let his color get in the way making his mark on society. So when this highly recognizable and well-loved entertainer came out two years ago with a tirade against the black community, citing hip hop and the language associated with it as part of the problem with today’s black youth, people paid attention. His rant, delivered at a NAACP event honoring the 50th anniversary of Brown vs. Board of Education caused quite a stir.

As founder of Def Jam Records Russell Simmons aptly put it, “pointing the finger may not be helpful — we still have more struggle as a society and more work to do to reform it.” (Debate Continues as Cosby Again Criticizes Black Youths, by Hamil L. Harris, Washington Post)

True, there is in fact a negative connotation to some of the language in hip hop, but conversely this same language has been adopted and assimilated into modern culture. How can you have politicians, parents and critics lambasting the same language that is used to market anything from cell phones to Subway sandwiches? As the oft misquoted line from Shakespeare’s Hamlet states, “Ah there’s the rub.”

Many in the hip hop world would tell you that language of hip hop is the language of the street — the lexicon of the day-to-day struggle in urban life.

Love And Hate
It’s hard to imagine a music culture that has evolved economically and culturally and has become so widely accepted to still suffer such censorship and harsh criticisms.

Love: Hip Hop group The Fugees won 5 grammys in 1999 essentially confirming what everybody knew all along — the music is not only popular but is also highly profitable.

Hate: Negative stereotypes and objectification of women dominate the lyrics of many popular hip hop songs and artists. Adding more ammunition to the hate revolver, The Rand Corporation recently did a study linking promiscuous sexual activity in teens to sex-laden (primarily hip hop songs) lyrics. (Rand Study Finds Adolescents Who Listen To A Great Deal of Music With Degrading Sexual Lyrics Have Sex Sooner, www.rand.org).

Love: As a recent Time.com article mentioned, the love affair between hip hop and advertisers continues to stay strong. In fact hip-hop’s power to direct tastes in everything from malt liquor to SUVs is constantly being wooed and courted by the advertising industry. (’Hip-Hop Nation ‘Is Exhibit a for America’s Latest Cultural Revolution, www.time.com)

Hate: Writer John McWhorter cites that the language of hip hop reinforces the same stereotypes that have hindered blacks in this country for decades by glorifying a “thuggish” adversarial stance that is the “proper” response to an allegedly racist, never changing white society that continues to oppress them. He firmly believes that this in essence, retards black success. (How Hip-Hop Holds Blacks Back, John H. McWhorter, The Manhattan Institute’s City Journal). For an example he cites several snippets from recent rap songs including this one from one of hip hop’s iconic figures, the late Tupac Shakur

gotta know how to shake the snakes, nigga,
‘Cause the police love to break a nigga,
Send him upstate ’cause they straight up hate the nigga.

For every positive someone can make a valid point for a negative aspect to this music. There is no right or wrong here. If you put both sides of this debate in a room you might as well make it a round room because that’s how the argument will go.

Breaking the circle
The language of hip hop isn’t going to change anytime soon. For every reference to the N word, guns and sex there are just as many references to empowerment, being strong and standing up for what you believe. Not everyone who plays a videogame shoots up a school. Not everyone who listens to hip hop will abuse women and join a gang. Understanding, interaction and communication is the key rather than focusing primarily on the negative aspects of hip hop.

It’s like being a part of that brotherly bond. And that’s the thing that feels good about it. It’s your people, and you hear other people using it, it’s kind of flattering, you know what I’m saying? Even if they don’t give the recognition like they are supposed to! It feels good to hear people out there ‘biting’ [using] your slang, basically. It’s communication, you know what I mean? It’s communication.” (Ameen, Oakland California youth talking about the impact of the language of hip hop to an NPR reporter).

Author Bio
HIPHOPDX – The premier spot for all things Hip Hop, Rap and R&B culture, what’chu know ’bout that?

The Internet had it right, and Chappelle showed up close to 1 a.m. and began cracking jokes, Oregon Live reported.
But maybe the wayward comic didn’t realize just how popular he still is. The small sound system he brought with him made it impossible for most of those who gathered to actually hear his routine, in which thanked the crowd for showing and poked fun at what some of them were wearing (apparently, not much).

A stage was already in place for a free lunchtime concert series. He thanked Portland police for not arresting him, and told the crowd, “This has never happened in my entire career,” garnering a huge cheer. “I’m grateful everybody came out,” he said as quoted by Oregon Live.

It was unclear why the comedian, who has been mostly out of the spotlight since he declined a rich Comedy Central offer to continue doing “Chapelle’s Show” in 2005, was in Oregon.
But despite the sound problems, fans were happy he was there.

Source: NY Daily News

Inspired by the Tuskeegee Airmen, 15-year-old Kimberly Anyadike flew a single-engine Cessna cross-country from her hometown of Compton, Calif., to Newport News, Va.

Anyadike is thought to be the youngest African American female pilot to complete the journey, which took 13 days. She arrived home in Los Angeles on Saturday, July 11.

Anyadike learned to fly at age 12 through the Compton-based Tomorrow’s Aeronautical Museum, which offers aviation lessons in an after-school program for disadvantaged youths, the Los Angeles Times reported. It was their plane that she flew on her cross-country trip.

The brave teenager came up with the idea for the trip on her own, the museum’s founder, Robert Petgrave, told the Times.
“I told her it was going to be a daunting task, but she just said, ‘Put it on. I got big shoulders,’” Petgrave said.

Source: NY Daily News

Benjamin, who chairs the Federation of State Medical Boards of the United States, has been lauded in recent years for her dogged determination in overcoming repeated disasters to run her rural clinic on the hurricane-battered Gulf coast.
The Bayou La Batre Rural Health Clinic in Alabama, which she founded, has been repeatedly hit by massive storms, most recently in 2005 by Hurricane Katrina.

In accepting the nomination, Benjamin pledged to be “a voice in the movement to improve our nation’s healthcare,” as she thanked Obama for putting healthcare reform at the head of his domestic agenda.

“As a nation, we have reached a sobering realization: Our healthcare system simply cannot continue on the path that we’re on,” Benjamin said, lamenting the millions of Americans without health insurance. She also said that if confirmed by the US Senate, she wanted to use her role as surgeon general to “ensure that no one — no one — falls through the cracks as we improve our healthcare system.”

Ghana is getting ready for President Barack Obama’s visit with a fresh coat of white paint on the curbs along his route and a series of billboards – some welcoming the president and first lady, others showing the president with Ghanian leader John Atta-Mills under the words: Partnership for Change.

President Mills won election earlier this year in a hard-fought, closely-contested vote that saw the ruling party concede defeat.

At Accra’s main fire station, rescue workers say the decision by America’s first black president to make this country his first stop in Sub-Saharan Africa reflects Ghana’s political maturity.

“We are the first country to show maturity in elections because all other countries, after or before elections, there are fights and all this misunderstanding,” she said. “But we comport ourselves and go accordingly on the electoral procedure.”

Her colleague says Mr. Obama’s visit will help focus attention on Ghana’s stability.

Source: voanews.com

However, several looming questions hang over Jones’ head: Can Q rescue the brand name without assuming Vibe’s heavy load of debt? And what digital model will Vibe.com v. 2.0 run with?

Source: sfweekly.com

“We’re seeing more and more single African-American women who are not finding men,” Caldwell says. “There’s a lack of qualified black men to get into relationships with.”

The numbers are grim. According to the 2006 U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, 45 percent of African-American women have never been married, compared with 23 percent of white women. Sound Off: What are the biggest challenges for black families?

Yet the decision to adopt isn’t just driven by the paucity of eligible African-American men, others say.

Toni Oliver, founder and CEO of Roots Adoption Agency in Atlanta, Georgia, says her agency sees more single African-American women adopting because of infertility issues.

Some of the infertility issues may be related to advancing age or health issues, she says. But the result of not being a mother for many older African-American women is the same: panic.

“Their doctors, friends and family are telling them the same thing: ‘You’re not getting younger; you better hurry up,’ ” Oliver says.]

Source: cnn.com

Clad all in white, a visibly distraught Janet remained strong as she fought back tears while addressing the audience.

“My entire family wanted to be here tonight but it was too painful,” she told the crowd — which included her father Joe Jackson — which cheered and stood on its feet. She then said her comments would be brief.

“To you, Michael is an icon,” Janet said. “To us, Michael is family. He will forever live in all of hearts.

“On behalf of my family and myself, thank you for all of your love, thank you for all of your support. We miss him so much. Thank you so much.” She teared up toward the end of her comments.

Janet’s thoughts led into a profound, almost gospel performance of “I’ll Be There” by show host Jamie Foxx and Ne-Yo. The song — one of the Jackson 5’s biggest hits — was a #1 hit single upon its original release in 1970 and again when covered by Mariah Carey for “MTV Unplugged” in 1992. On Sunday night, it was rendered quietly, with the duo accompanied only by a pianist. The performance was a strikingly different way to end an awards show, which usually conclude with big, rousing finales. It gave the show a dignified ending that perfectly suited the nature of the Jackson tribute.

Source: MTV

“His passing will be grieved far beyond that of any other singer, composer, producer, dancer and choreographer, in the history of the world. Indeed, in my very firmest, personal, belief there will never, ever, be another Michael Jackson!”

Don Cornelius, host of the show “Soul Train”

Michael Jackson has died at age 50 after being rushed to UCLA Medical Center, NBC News has confirmed.

Los Angeles Fire Department Capt. Steve Ruda told the L.A. Times that Jackson was not breathing when paramedics arrived at his home and CPR was performed.

TMZ.com reported that he may have suffered cardiac arrest.

Jackson had been due to start a series of comeback concerts in London on July 13 running until March 2010. The singer, whose hits included “Thriller” and “Billie Jean,” had been rehearsing in the Los Angeles area for the past two months.

The Senate voted unanimously Thursday for a resolution acknowledging “the fundamental injustice, cruelty, brutality and inhumanity of slavery and Jim Crow laws,” which authorized the segregation that followed the Civil War.

If the House passes a similar measure next week, as expected, it would mark the highest official mea culpa for the hundreds of years of discrimination that had been enshrined by the Constitution and courts.

“Slavery and Jim Crow, and their continuing consequences, are not the historical baggage of one state, one region or one company,” said Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), the resolution’s sponsor. “They are an enduring national shame.”

Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush had both expressed remorse for slavery. And Congress has recognized other injustices, such as the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II.

“No one pretends that a mere apology – or any words – can right the wrongs of the past,” said Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. “But it represents our recognition of that past and our commitment to more fully live up to our nation’s promise.”
The measure does have one caveat. It says it doesn’t imply support for paying reparations.

Source: nydailynews.com