The Government of Ghana has closed down a ‘racist’ whites-only restaurant turned night club at Osu in Ghana’s capital, Accra.
Citi News confirmed the existence of the outfit on Tuesday after it broke as a rumour on social networking site facebook a couple of days ago.
The place is being run by Atlantic Lobster and Dolphins Limited and owned by two Italians, Marco Ranaldi and Salvatore D’azeo. Locals have alleged that the place accepts only whites and blacks are turned away.
According to the deputy minister of Tourism, Mr. Agyenim-Boateng, government decided to close down the place because it was in violation of the laws of Ghana. He added that the facility was registered to be used as a restaurant and not as a club and directed the owners of the facility to acquire the proper license to be able to run the place for that dual purpose.
“We are going to close your place down because you are in violation of our laws,” the minister said. “We want you to do what is right and proper. You have to show complete and total respect for our laws.”
“You have to go to the Ghana Tourists Authority and get this place licensed. In its current form this obviously is a restaurant, which is veiled as a club. So for now you would not be able to operate the way you have done. ”
Meanwhile, Elizabeth Okuro, a half Ghanaian-half Nigerian, who visited the club recently told Citi News that she was told in the face by the manager of the facility that she could not register as a member of the club because she is not White.
A very furious Okuro is calling on Ghanaians to boycott Atlantic Lobster and Dolphins Limited since according to her the activities of the club smacks of racism which must not be tolerated in Ghana. She has created a facebook page to champion that cause.
She, however, added that she would consider aborting the campaign against the patronage of the place if the owner who made racial comments against her comes out to apologize.
Meanwhile, owners of the Atlantic Lobster and Dolphins Limited have denied that the club is promoting racism.
Owner D’azeo said he is married to a Ghanaian woman and cannot be deemed as a racist, adding that his comment to Elizabeth was only a joke.
By: Kobina Welsing/Citifmonline. com
SOURCE: http://www.citifmonline.com/index.php?id=1.287144.1.635704
Los Angeles police are asking for help in locating a missing man who was last seen at a gas station west of Mendota in mid-September.
Michael Bell, 26, of Los Angeles, was taken to the Chevron gas station on Interstate 5 at the West Panoche Road exit about 3 p.m. Sept. 17 by a California Highway Patrol officer after Bell’s car ran out of gas on Interstate 5, Los Angeles police said.
Bell’s family reported him missing five days later after he failed to meet them in Ohio.
Bell is black with brown hair and brown eyes. He is about 6 feet tall and weighs about 190 pounds. He was last seen wearing a white shirt, black pants and white tennis shoes. Bell was carrying a dark-colored backpack.
Anyone with information about Bell’s location is asked to contact Los Angeles police at (213) 996-1800 or Crime Stoppers at (800) 222-8477. During non-business hours or on weekends, calls should be made to 1-877-LAPD-24-7.
SOURCE: http://www.fresnobee.com/2011/10/31/2597522/missing-man-last-seen-at-gas-station.html
Motorists along a lonely stretch of highway are reporting chilling encounters with a ghostly young woman.
Dozens of drivers cruising a highway outside of Birmingham have reported seeing a young woman all in white beside the road late at night.
Moments later, their vehicles die, forcing them to pull over to the side of the road-then restart as soon as she vanishes.
“I was on my way south when my car cut out,” recalls Burl Stangle, a librarian at a Birmingham-area high school. “I’d just gotten back from the Volvo dealership one day before, so I figured maybe they’d put a filter in wrong or forgotten to clamp down a fuel line or something. “I got out, popped the hood and was using my cell phone as a flashlight to look around the engine when I suddenly realized I wasn’t alone.
“I looked up and there was this girl, totally ordinary, except she was glowing white.
“She started walking away without a word, but I had the presence of mind to snap a photo on my cell phone. A second later, she was gone and the car started back up by itself.
“It was probably the creepiest experience of my life.”
Short-haul trucker Chris Jackson was running produce from a farm to a Birmingham distributor when his truck stopped dead.
“I’d heard drivers talking, but figured they were making it all up,” he says. “But there I was, no sign of why my engine wasn’t working, when she just walked by on the other side of the street. “She didn’t even look at me when I said, ‘Howdy,’ and a second later, she faded away.
“My truck started back up like magic and I took off.”
Local investigators believe the girl might have been a hitchhiker who died along the highway 79 years ago.
Get Paid to Travel – Travel Websites that Pay for Articles
Want to get paid to travel? If you’re interested in sharing your travel experiences, there are several travel websites that accept pitches from freelance writers. Here are a few of them, and what they pay per word or post. If you know of any other great sites for freelancers — that either pay or publish for experience — please let us know in the comments as we’re planning to expand this list! Also: We plan to do a “How to Pitch” series with some of these websites, so stay tuned!
Travel Websites That Pay for Freelance Articles and Posts
Lost Girls World The Lost Girls – Lost Girls – Lost Girls World http://www.lostgirlsworld.com/ ($12 per Travel Guide or “Pitching 101″ article)
Jaunted; The Pop Culture Travel Guide || Jaunted http://www.jaunted.com/ ($15 posts video posts)
Hotel Chatter Hotel Reviews, Hotel Ratings, Hotel Openings || HotelChatter http://www.hotelchatter.com/($15 posts and video posts)
Oyster Locals www.locals.oyster.com http://blog.oyster.com/category/locals/ ($25 per post)
GoNomad; Alternative Travel, Around the World travel, Destination Guides, Travel Articles on GoNOMAD.com | GoNOMAD.com http://www.gonomad.com/
BoostnAll; BootsnAll Indie Travel : RTW Tickets, Travel Inspiration & Deals. Cheap tickets, hotels & hostels., $30 to $50
New York Times, “In Transit”; Travel News – In Transit Blog – NYTimes.com $50 per post
AOL Travel; Travel Guides and Information – AOL Travel ($250 – $400 for 750 words)
Transitions Abroad; Portal for Work Abroad, Study Abroad, Cultural Travel and Living Overseas, $50 to $150 per piece
Slate; slate.com; $.50 per word
Trip.com; www.trip.com; $.75 per word
Budget Travel; Budget Travel | Travel Deals, Travel Tips, Vacation Ideas $.50 to $1 per word
Fashionable Bride; www.fashionablebride.com; $1 per word
MSN; www.msn.com; $1 per word
Travel and Leisure; www.travelandleisure.com; $1,000 per article
AARP; www.aarp.com; $1.70 per word
Galavanting; www.gogalavanting.com; $15 for all published pieces except features, which net $50
Unanchor: www.unanchor.com; $100 per self-guided tour itinerary
Locationless Living www.locationlessliving.com; $10 per 250 word article
Travel sites that accept submissions for experience, rather than a payment
Nat Geo Intelligent Travel http://blogs.nationalgeographic.com/intelligenttravel/
Pink Pangea Pink Pangea | the community for women travelers
Huffington Post Travel; http://www.huffingtonpost.com/travel/
Source:
Get Paid to Travel the World – Travel Writing Tips | The Lost Girls http://www.lostgirlsworld.com/2011/01/travel-freelancing/
By AMANDA LEE MYERS, Associated Press – 15 hours ago
PHOENIX (AP) — The grandmother of an Arizona girl missing for more than a week pleaded Thursday for more attention from police investigators and the national media, saying that the case of her granddaughter’s disappearance hasn’t been made a priority because she’s black.
Jahessye (JES’-ee) Shockley was last seen Oct. 11 by her three older siblings at their Glendale apartment in suburban Phoenix while their mother was out running an errand.
Glendale police believe Jahessye left the home through the front door but don’t know what happened next. They have no suspects, evidence or promising leads despite search efforts that included more than 100 officers and volunteers canvassing the area within three miles of the girl’s home.
Jahessye’s grandmother, Shirley Johnson, and about a dozen of her friends and neighbors went to the state capitol in Phoenix on Thursday to draw more attention to the case in hopes of finding the girl alive.
“The Glendale Police Department has not brought this to the forefront. They botched this investigation,” Johnson told reporters. “I believe it’s because she’s a little black girl.”
Glendale police Sgt. Brent Coombs said that he can’t say strongly enough how the girl’s race does not matter to investigators.
“What matters is there’s a 5-year-old girl missing,” he said. “It’s the department’s No. 1 priority. There’s so much mystery around it and we’ve got an obligation to get to the bottom of it and try our best to bring her back safely or find out where she’s at.”
Nine days after Jahessye went missing, the department still had dozens of investigators assigned to the case Thursday. They were combing over all the information they’ve collected and following up on more than 100 leads that have come into the department so far.
The department is offering a reward of up to $10,000 for anyone who leads them to a break in the case, on top of the $5,000 offered by the girl’s family and the $1,000 offered by Arizona’s Silent Witness tip line.
“It’s still as important as it was the first day that we were working the case,” Coombs said. “We’re never going to stop.”
Authorities say that if the girl had some type of accident, they would have found a sign of her by now. They say the fact that they haven’t points to a possible kidnapping.
“It is our belief that if she would have just simply walked away and not been interacted with by anybody that might have had the wrong intention, we would have found her by now,” Coombs said.
Police say they have no reason to suspect anyone in Jahessye’s family in her disappearance, including her mother, Jerice Hunter, who is eight months pregnant.
State Child Protective Services removed Hunter’s three other children from the home after Jahessye disappeared but have not said why.
Hunter declined to speak about her other children earlier this week but told The Associated Press that she just wants Jahessye back home.
“If you have my child, please take her to a safe place, a public place where she can be located,” she said. “The family will not be the same until the child is returned, and I will be relentless in my search.”
Johnson said Thursday that she feels that she has to take matters into her own hands, saying her granddaughter’s disappearance hasn’t gotten the attention that it deserves.
“People in California have barely even heard what’s going on,” she said. “Somehow, somebody’s suppressing something because the local media is keeping it local, and with all due respect to the media, it’s not getting out. … This is about my grandbaby.”
Johnson wore a purple T-shirt that said “Grandma won’t stop!” She chose the color because it was Jahessye’s favorite. Her friends and neighbors showed up at the state capitol to support Johnson, also wearing purple shirts that read, “Hope” and “Bring Jahessye home.”
Glenn Johnson, who is of no relation to Shirley Johnson and didn’t meet the family until after Jahessye disappeared, said that he’s been searching the girl’s neighborhood and passing out fliers for a few hours every day on his motorized scooter.
“I’ve got very little confidence in the police, mostly because they have no logical place to look,” he said. “I don’t see how she could be in this area and not be found at this point.”
He said that he doesn’t think the police department has been racially biased, adding that it conducted an “aggressive” search of the neighborhood.
“I don’t think it makes a difference whether she’s white, black or green. If there’s no leads, there’s no leads,” he said. “Sometimes it’s a dead end.”
Follow Amanda Lee Myers on Twitter at http://twitter.com/AmandaLeeAP
There’s no going back now. This past July, when we heard that the live-action “Akira” project had just secured a director in Spain’s Jaume Collet-Serra (”Orphan”), we were ready to start picking favorites from a proposed list of famous faces to fill its roles.
But now that the adaptation of Katsuhiro Otomo’s 8-volume manga has officially received the green light, as Variety reports, studios can finally begin a serious hunt for the story’s main characters, Kaneda and Tetsuo… and according to Variety’s sources, “Tron Legacy” actor Garrett Hedlund is already speeding swiftly towards one of those lead roles.
Hedlund was among a list of actors reportedly being considered for the role of Kaneda as early as July. Also on that list were older A-list stars Keanu Reeves and Joaquin Phoenix, whose only real involvement with the project, it turns out, may have been to earn some press for the conflicted adaptation.
Robert Pattinson and Andrew Garfield were among names thrown around for Tetsuo. No word on who Collet-Serra and studio executives plan on pursuing, but animated “Akira” fans know a post-transformation Tetsuo may be exactly what Pattinson needs to effectively erase public perception of his much infatuated-over “Twilight” Edward persona.
Katsuhiro Otomo, who also wrote and directed 1988’s animated “Akira,” cult-revered by Anime and animation fans alike, is set to executive produce the live-action film.
What do you expect from “Akira”? Who would you like to see cast as Tetsuo? Let us know what you think in the comment section or on Twitter!
SOURCE: http://splashpage.mtv.com/2011/10/20/akira-garrett-hedlund/
The New York World has uncovered what it says is a case of sex-segregation on a Brooklyn bus line.
When Melissa Franchy boarded the B110 bus in Brooklyn, she was initially allowed to sit wherever she liked, the paper reported. But when more Hasidic men started to board the bus, which runs between Williamsburg and Borough Park, she was asked by passengers to move to the back of the vehicle.
“On any other bus,” Daily Intel notes, “such a request might have resulted in an uproar, an angry confrontation, and an entertaining YouTube video. But the B110 is no ordinary bus. It’s a Jewish bus.”
The bus is run privately with permission from the city, according to the World.
The New York Post explains that the rules on the bus are designed to keep women and men from coming into contact with each other which is forbidden in Hasidic tradition. A female Post reporter was told by a B110 driver that she could not sit in the vehicle’s first row because it was reserved for men.
The Department of Transportation is looking into the incident reported by the World.
click here for video: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/10/19/sex-segregated-bus-brooklyn_n_1020064.html
One day after hundreds of thousands of people around the world demonstrated against inequality and the domination of society by the banks, President Barack Obama invoked the memory of Martin Luther King, Jr. to preach the “common humanity” of the oppressor and the oppressed.
Speaking at the official dedication of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial on Washington’s National Mall, Obama, clearly though only indirectly alluding to the growing protests, said of King: “It was that insistence, that belief that God resides in each of us, from the high to the low, in the oppressor and the oppressed, that convinced him that people and systems could change. It fortified his believe in non-violence. It permitted him to place his faith in a government that had fallen short of its ideals.”
To reinforce the point, Obama suggested that King’s legacy was the recognition that “any social movement,” to “bring about true and lasting change,” had to embrace “the possibility of reconciliation.”
The president continued: “If he were alive today, I believe he would remind us that the unemployed worker can rightly challenge the excesses of Wall Street without demonizing all who work there…”
This crude attempt to use the figure of King to promote a spirit of submission and illusions in the possibility of reforming the existing system speaks to the fear within the American ruling class that the anti-Wall Street protests express the growth of anti-capitalist and potentially revolutionary sentiment. Particularly disturbing and dangerous, from the standpoint of Obama and the class of oppressors he represents, is the fact that issues of inequality and social class have dominated the demonstrations, not the various forms of identity and life-style politics based on race, gender and sexual orientation that have been used for decades to block the emergence of an independent political movement of the working class.
The greatest fear of Obama and the US ruling elite is that the Occupy Wall Street movement portends the emergence of a far greater movement of the working class outside of the two-party system and all of its pro-capitalist agencies, such as the trade unions. They fear the reemergence of working-class struggle after decades in which it has been suppressed. This fear is entirely justified.
Hence Obama’s pretense of sympathy for the protests and his turn to pseudo-populist demagogy in recent weeks—always combined in one way or another with affirmations of support for the capitalist system.
In his speech at the King dedication, Obama made passing references to the economic crisis, unemployment and the growth of poverty today. He praised the courage of the civil rights militants who braved police batons, racist violence and prison during the anti-segregation struggles in the US South. He made no mention, however, of the hundreds of arrests of peaceful protesters carried out the day before by police across the country.
For Obama to posture as a partisan of the poor and oppressed is the height of hypocrisy. He has slavishly pursued the policies demanded by Wall Street since taking office, resulting in a more rapid decline in working-class incomes and a faster growth of poverty than under Bush, combined with bigger-than-ever profits and pay for the corporations.
There is something particularly obscene about Obama cloaking himself in the mantle of King, who, for all his political limitations, led a courageous mass struggle to achieve elementary democratic rights for African-Americans against the system of Jim Crow apartheid in the South. Barely two weeks before his King speech, Obama became the first US president to order the assassination of an American citizen—Anwar al-Awlaki—and publicly boast of its having been carried out.
Obama seizes precisely on King’s political weaknesses—his pacifism and rejection of socialist revolution—to try to prevent the emergence of a mass movement for equality and socialism today.
King courageously denounced the Vietnam War in 1967, breaking with the Democratic administration of Lyndon Johnson. He insisted that genuine freedom could not be achieved for blacks or anyone else in America so long as the United States was allowed to commit war crimes against people of other countries.
In his final years, he increasingly saw the fight for racial justice as part of a broader struggle for economic security and equality. His call for a “Poor People’s Campaign,” together with his opposition to the Vietnam War, made him a marked man, especially when he went to Memphis to support a bitter strike by sanitation workers. The FBI’s relentless campaign of spying and harassment of King ended only with his assassination in Memphis in April of 1968.
The hypocrisy of Obama—who has continued and expanded the wars of Bush and is threatening new wars against Iran and other countries—claiming the legacy of King is brazen.
By the time of King’s death, the limitations of his reformist perspective had already brought the civil rights movement to a crisis point. It must be added that the domination of the labor movement by a right-wing, pro-capitalist bureaucracy was a crucial factor in the movement of millions of African-American workers for democratic rights falling under the leadership of middle-class figures and preachers such as King.
Instead of the end of Jim Crow apartheid in the South becoming the starting point for a struggle against the capitalist system as a whole, it became the occasion for a sordid deal between the American ruling class and a privileged layer of the black upper middle class. President Nixon expanded the use of affirmative action policies to cultivate a small layer in the black population who were allowed to enter the political and economic establishment.
Meanwhile, the mass of African-American workers and the working class as a whole suffered a steady decline in living standards, which has been vastly accelerated since the Wall Street crash of 2008.
Obama is the apotheosis of this process: a right-wing, militarist, pro-Wall Street African-American president. His elevation—like that of figures such as Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice under Bush—is not some consummation of the struggle of black people for civil rights, but rather the result of an attempt by corporate interests within the Democratic Party to use Obama’s skin color to obscure their reactionary policies.
Obama, in fact, did not come out of the civil rights movement, or any tradition of social struggle. Educated for the most part in private schools and given entry into Columbia University and Harvard Law School, he was groomed from an early age by wealthy interests in Chicago to serve American imperialism and US big business, which he was done unswervingly, becoming a multimillionaire in the process.
Now he dispenses doses of religion and cheap moralizing to oppose the development of socialist consciousness in the emerging movement of the American and international working class. He preaches reconciliation and harmony while pursuing a ruthless policy of class war at home and abroad.
Leon Trotsky, in his brilliant essay Their Morals and Ours, published in 1938, opposed all such attempts to politically disarm the working class and prevent it from ruthlessly and consciously prosecuting the class struggle in defense of its interests. As he wrote: “A slave owner who through cunning and violence shackles a slave in chains, and a slave who through cunning or violence breaks the chains—let not the contemptible eunuchs tell us that they are equals before a court of morality!”
This author also recommends:
“Forty years on, some lessons from the life—and death—of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.”
[7 April 2008]
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2008/apr2008/king-a07.shtml
Norma Yeager died exactly an hour later.
“Dad used to say that a woman is always worth waiting for,” Dennis Yeager said. “Dad waited an hour for her and held the door for her.”
The inseperable couple was engaged and married within 12 hours in 1939 on the day Norma Yeager graduated from high school.
“She graduated from high school on May 26, 1939, at about 10 a.m., and at about 10 p.m. that night she was married to my dad at his sister’s house,” Sheets said.
The vibrant duo had a “very, very full life.”
They worked as a team. They traveled together, they were in a bridge club together and they worked in a Chevrolet dealership, creamery and other businesses together.
“They always did everything together,” Sheets said. “They weren’t apart. They just weren’t.”
Dennis Yeager described his father as an “outgoing” and “hyper” man who was still working on the roof of his house and sitting cross-legged with no problem at age 90.
“The party didn’t start until he showed up,” he said. “He was the outgoing one and she supported him by being the giver. She supported Dad in everything. And he would’ve been lost without her.”
Dennis Yeager said it is strange today to go into his parents’ home and see the “two chairs side-by-side that they sat in all the time,” empty. He said it was in those chairs that his parents cheered on the Arizona sports teams they loved and rarely missed an episode of “Wheel of Fortune” and “The Price Is Right.”
According to their obituary, besides their children, the Yeagers are survived by her sister, Virginia Kell, and his brother, Roger Yeager, as well as 14 grandchildren, 29 great-grandchildren and one great-great grandchild.