Went there friday nite with wife and friends, food good but pricey 13-25 and up entrees, appeitizers 10-13 dollars sides are extra, if you drink 11 dollars & up. he place is in a brownstone on 119th see link below, overall very cool for yo jazz cats..........
www.billiesblack.com
Third stone from the sun, which airs on www.area24radio.com, live every other sunday 6 pm to 7.45 pm. Also posts of political articles and entertainment in the hudson river valley. Enjoy.......
Tuesday, December 29, 2009
Tuesday, December 8, 2009
http://www.rubensmexicancafe.com/
Comment:
One of the best places to eat in Westchester county, in the mood for Mexican...........try it.
Comment:
One of the best places to eat in Westchester county, in the mood for Mexican...........try it.
Wednesday, October 7, 2009
Podcasts of my radio show which is live on sundays 10 am - 11:30 am
http://randoradio.com/images/BTS_09.27.09.mp3
http://randoradio.com/images/BTS_09.27.09.mp3
Sunday, September 27, 2009
Watercolor cafe
A hidden jazz club in Larchmont, N.Y. The food is excellent an american menu is what they serve. Go to www.watercolorcafe.net for more info , my wife and I went to this estabishment last night to hear a good friend of mines band, Wali Ali and the Tamborine band. Good food is right hear y'all, let say that I ordered a Chicken saute and my wife had the bronze salmon. Mine came with spinach and potatoes and two boneless breasts, the bronze salmon was just as appealing to the eye= good size portions wife needed doggie bag....Total for food and entertainment was 75.00 including tip, people their is no cover charge.....
http://www.watercolorcafe.net/
Thursday, September 24, 2009
Wednesday, September 23, 2009
Tuesday, September 22, 2009
Tuesday, August 4, 2009
Tuesday, June 2, 2009
Tuesday, April 21, 2009
Sunday, March 15, 2009
the obama deception
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KrpRocaEfQE
just keep an open mind, this is a 12 part series.....judge 4 yourself
peace.
just keep an open mind, this is a 12 part series.....judge 4 yourself
peace.
Friday, March 13, 2009
ARABS IN AFRICA By NAIWU OSAHON
Egypt is still so intimidated by its glorious Black African past that its Arab government would not allow thorough research into Egypt’s past. President Gamal Abdel Nasser falsified Egyptian history when he declared Egypt an Arab Republic. Egyptian authorities refused to allow American film makers to make a film on the life of Anwar Sadat in Egypt on the ground that the actor chosen for Sadat’s role was black. When Morocco left the OAU in 1984, it aspired to become a member of the European Union.In Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco, Algeria, Libya, Sudan, Somalia, Eritrea, Mauritania and the rest of the Arab world, Africans are treated as the scum of the earth. They are second-class citizens at the very best in their own countries. Blacks in these countries cannot aspire to positions of respect or authority. There are hardly Africans in high government positions in Arab governed African countries. Like Brazil, which is just as racially cruel against their black natives, there is no legislation favouring slavery (except in Mauritania). It is simply a way of life that’s all. Blacks do not really exist or at best are not humans.Mauritania left the Economic Community of West African States to join the union formed by the Arab North African States. A few years ago, Mauritania sacked all black natives from their civil service positions. Black Mauritanians protest their plight to the African Union (AU) without receiving attention, because AU black leaders fear offending their Arab colleagues in the AU. In Mauritania, they have had to declare an end to slavery six times in this century alone, and still nothing has changed for the captive majority African natives. African slavery is still in their statute books. African slavery in Mauritania is what the on going quarrel between Mauritania and Senegal is about. The quarrel forced black African refugees to pour across the border from Mauritania into Senegal.In Algeria, Arabs throw stones at black people, including diplomats, in markets and other public places. To quote Prof. Clarke, “Arabs always act as though they are not in Africa. Once when I was visiting Egypt, I told my Egyptian Arab host to get a cab ready for the next morning that I was going to Kenya. ‘So you are going to Africa to visit your people? We got no diseases here, why are you leaving us?” the host asked. Even across the Red Sea, in Mecca, Saudi Arabia, blacks are treated worse than animals, after using their life’s savings to go there on pilgrimage.Hundreds of blacks who have lived all their lives in Saudi Arabia are being repatriated daily right now, after loosing an arm or leg for some minor or trumped up offense and without regard for their comfort, welfare or rights. Racism towards black Moslems in Saudi Arabia is so strong it makes one wonder if making pilgrimage to Mecca should be one of the five pillars of the Muslim faith, and why blacks bother to be Muslim.Col. Gadhafi saw vicious white racism in the tragic death in August 1997, of Princess Diana of Wales, the mother of a future king of England, and her Arab lover. What no one remembered to ask Gadhafi was whether he himself was disposed to allowing any daughter of his to marry even the richest black man in the world let alone a black Libyan. If one were to ask Gadhafi why Africans are not high up in his government, he might balk that all Libyans are Africans. In that case, one should go and find out the truth for oneself in the poor sections of town. One would be shocked by the plight of our African kith and kin that constitute the bulk of the population in oil rich Libya and other Northern African countries similarly afflicted with Arab racism. While pretending to champion pan-African interest, he is busy getting rid of black immigrants from Libya.On 9 May, 1997, in flagrant defiance of a UN embargo on flights in and out of Libya, Col. Gadhafi invaded Nigeria with his planes carrying 1,000 members of his rag-tag army, plus 500 journalists. They strategically occupied the Kano airport and his other reception facilities, with the connivance of the Nigerian Muslim dictator host. The purpose was to launch a jihad in supposedly religiously secular Nigeria, or at least precipitate a serious schism between the predominantly Moslem north of the country and the Christian and animist south. Right now the Moslem world is trying to use ‘Sharia’ to dismember Nigeria. Pakistan, Libya and Saudi Arabia, to name a few, have pumped substantial funds into Zamfara, the first of Nigeria’s Sharia states, to start the process of Islamizing, (or at least trigger mayhem and civil war), in Nigeria as in Sudan.No nation in Africa has suffered more in the hands of the Arabs than Ethiopia. It has been going on since Arabs first invaded Africa in the 7th century CE. Recently, with Libya supporting the people of Eritrea, they destroyed the basic structure of Ethiopia, to cut her from the sea and weaken this section of Africa, and eventually all of Africa, for further Arabization. They did this mercilessly with religion.In the last 38 years, Gadhafi at one time or the other, tried to force Libya’s unification with Egypt, Algeria etc, and has continued the effort since with Sudan. He forcibly annexed the Auzon Strip from Chad, and sponsored destabilization in Liberia, Sierra Leone, Uganda, Mali, Cote d’ Ivoire, Niger, etc in pursuance of his Arabization of Africa policy, laced with inordinate imperial personal ambition. In 1998, his strategy got a fillip with the founding of his community of Sahel-Savannah States (CEN – SAD), which he was hoping to use to control the envisaged African Union (AU). The CEN – SAD, at the moment, ropes in 25 African states from West, East, and Central Africa, and includes Senegal, Cote d “Ivoire, Chad, Sudan, Somalia, Comoro Islands etc. Most of these unsuspecting African countries were stable until they joined CEN – SAD.Col. Muammar Gadhafi pushed desperately for a United States of Africa government to be approved, set up, and launched right there and then, at the 9th ordinary Session of the Assembly of the heads of states of the African Union (AU), held in July 2007, in Accra, Ghana.He has heightened his Arabization policy pursuit at the AU level since 2001, pretending to be promoting the Pan-African agenda of Kwame Nkrumah. Chinweizu, the renowned scholar, described Gadhafi’s Arab-Black Africa government plan at the time, “as unification of nigger monkey with python.” Arabs themselves divide Africa into North Africa and sub-Saharan Africa to instigate a division and as long as the invaders continue to occupy our land and treat us as slaves in North Africa, the two segments of the continent cannot cohabit.
In a paper presented at the meeting of the Arab league in Amman, Jordan, in 2001, Muammar Gadhafi spelt out the Arabization agenda against Africa in language reminiscent of Adolph Hitler’s Lebensraum, (Hitler’s sick obsession to secure a living space for political and economic expansion in Europe) for the Germans, (the superior race). Gadhafi in his address during the Amman’s Arab conference invited his Arab brothers outside of Africa to come to Africa in the following words. “The third of the Arab community living outside Africa should move in with the two-thirds (about 250 million) on the continent, and join the African Union, which is the only space we have.”Gadhafi’s unbridled urge in modern times to enlarge Arabia inside Africa, is a continuation of the Arab war against Africans and the Arabization of African lands that started in the 7th century CE. Arabs have since settled on one-third of Africa, pushing continuously southwards towards the Atlantic Ocean. Arabs’ racial war against black Africa started with their occupation and colonization of Egypt between 637 and 642 CE, decimating the Coptic or black population.
Between 642 and 670 CE, more Arab invaders poured into Africa and occupied areas known today as Tunisa, Libya, Algeria and Morocco, where they physically eliminated most of the native (Berber) inhabitants. The Berbers that escaped death ran westwards and southwards towards the Sahara. In the 11th century CE, fresh Arab migrants of nomadic origin, migrated into North Africa to displace and drive the remaining pastoral Berbers deeper into the Sahara desert. With Arab consolidation and backing in Northern Africa, new waves of Arab invaders and migrants pushed deeper into the Nile banks, inhabited then by the Nilotic Shiluk, and continued all the way down to where Dueim stands today, belonging then to the Dinka and Furnawi autochthons. The entire territory was known at the time as Bilad as-Sudan (the Arabic for land of the Blacks), and currently includes the Republic of Sudan. Continuing with their Arabization of African land policy through elimination, displacement, separation, marginalization and suppression, the Arab invaders of Bilad as-Sudan, over the passage of time, decimated the population of (the Nilotic Shiluk, Dinka and Furnawi autochthons) , owners of the land, and pushed to restrict the rest waiting for elimination to Darfur area and the South of the country, which the Arab invaders are now intent on taking from the native Black Africans. This is the genesis of the war in Sudan. It is a racial war. The Arabs want the Republic of Sudan, which by land mass is the largest country in Africa, to be an entirely Arab state, by exterminating the Black native population gradually to the last person.The war in Sudan is our modern day Haiti war in terms of black liberation, and our recent fight against apartheid. Arabs are carrying out ethnic cleansing right now in Southern Sudan, with the financial support of the Arab world, particularly Libya and Saudi Arabia. China is backing them against Africa. The Janjaweed, with Sudanese and Arab governments’ backing, are trying to wipe out the black population so as to expropriate their lands, but Africans, including Nigerians, do not know where their interests should reside. The Arabs succeeded in doing the same thing in Northern Africa where the original Nubian African owners of the land have almost all been wiped out and the rest marginalized (enslaved) by their Arab invaders/settlers since 642 CE.Islamization is not the problem in Sudan because the majority Furnawi people of Darfur are Moslems. Arabs do not consider Black Moslems authentic or of consequence. At best, they concede to blacks, the role of ordained slaves or animals, to be used as beasts of burden by the “superior Arab race.” The rule applies to all blacks, whether Moslems or non-Moslems and whether of Nigerian (Hausa/Fulani or Yoruba extractions) , Tanzanians, Ugandans, Malians or African-Americans.A traveller in Sudan observed in 1930 that “In the eyes of the Arab rulers of Sudan, the black slaves were simply animals given by Allah to make life of Arabs comfortable.” Osama Bin Laden, in a discussion with the Sudanese-American novelist, Kola Boof, in Morocco in 1996 said, “when next you meet an Arab, you should ask what is the Arabic word for slave, you’ll discover that the words are the same “abeed.” Which is why, when an Arab looks at a black African, what he sees is a slave.”In 1962, the Arab Sudanese General, Hassan Beshir Nasr, while flagging off his troops to the war front against black Africans in South Sudan, declared: “We don’t want these black slaves…….what we want is their land.” Arabs’ attitude to blacks derives from Genesis’ racist fiction of the three sons of Noah – Ham, Japheth and Shem. Arabs claim that “the accursed Ham was the progenitor of the black race; that Japheth begat the full-faced, small eyes Europeans, and that Shem fathered the handsome of face with beautiful hair Arabs,” of course.A coalition of 50 charities in Darfur, Sudan, published a study in mid December, 2008, confirming what the world already knew that the Janjaweed and the Sudanese army, with the backing of their government, during joint or individual attacks, raped, tortured and killed Sudanese Africans and razed their villages to repopulate them with Arab nomads. They rounded up and abducted escapees from hide-outs in the bush, and at other times raided refugee camps to kidnap Africans as sex and labour slaves, working them to the bones as domestic and farm labour. The army flew their captives in planes to Khartoum at night and shared them among soldiers, like you allocate bags of commodities, and used them as sex and domestic servants. Kidnapped victims interviewed, said their captors told them that ‘they were not human beings and that they were there to serve them.’In the five years between 2003 and 2008, over 300,000 Sudanese Africans were killed, 100,000 abducted and 2.7 million rendered homeless refugees, with their land appropriated by Arabs. The Khatoum government admitted 14,000 kidnaps. You can imagine what happened when the world turned a blind eye on Sudan, in the twenty years between 1983 when the conflict began, and 2003. You have to ask yourself what African leaders are doing in AU with Arabs. Arabs are Africans’ mortal foes.Al Qaeda’s bombing of the American Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, left 260 black civilians that included 12 Americans, dead. Over 4,000 Kenyans and Tanzanians were wounded. A remorseless top Arab journalist justified the attack by quoting Stalin: “You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.”
Ibn Sina (Avicenna 980–1037), Arab’s most famous and influential philosopher/ scientist in Islam, described blacks as “people who are by their very nature slaves.” He wrote: “All African women are prostitutes, and the whole race of African men are abeed (slave) stock.” He equated black people with “rats plaguing the earth.”
Ibn Khaldum, an Arab historian stated that “Blacks are characterized by levity and excitability and great emotionalism,” adding that “they are every where described as stupid.”
al-Dimashqi, an Arab pseudo scientist wrote, “the Equator is inhabited by communities of blacks who may be numbered among the savage beasts. Their complexion and hair are burnt and they are physically and morally abnormal. Their brains almost boil from the sun’s heat…..”Ibn al-Faqih al-Hamadhani painted this no less horrid picture of black people, “…..the zanj (the blacks) are overdone until they are burned, so that the child comes out between black, murky, malodorous, stinking, and crinkly-haired, with uneven limbs, deficient minds, and depraved passions…..”NAIWU OSAHON Hon. Khu Mkuu (Leader, Pan-African Movement world-wide); Ameer Spiritual (Spiritual Prince) of the African race; MSc. (Salford); Dip.M.S; G.I.P.M; Dip. I.A (Liv.); D. Inst. M; G. Inst. M; G.I.W.M; A.M.N.I.M.Awarded: Key to the City of Memphis, Tennessee, USA; Honourary Councilmanship, Memphis City Council; Honourary Citizenship, County of Shelby; Honourary Commissionership, County of Shelby, Tennessee and a silver trophy from Morehouse College, Atlanta, USA for his contributions to the unity and uplift of his race.
http://www.owogienedo.com/Edo_Empire_and_Civilization
In a paper presented at the meeting of the Arab league in Amman, Jordan, in 2001, Muammar Gadhafi spelt out the Arabization agenda against Africa in language reminiscent of Adolph Hitler’s Lebensraum, (Hitler’s sick obsession to secure a living space for political and economic expansion in Europe) for the Germans, (the superior race). Gadhafi in his address during the Amman’s Arab conference invited his Arab brothers outside of Africa to come to Africa in the following words. “The third of the Arab community living outside Africa should move in with the two-thirds (about 250 million) on the continent, and join the African Union, which is the only space we have.”Gadhafi’s unbridled urge in modern times to enlarge Arabia inside Africa, is a continuation of the Arab war against Africans and the Arabization of African lands that started in the 7th century CE. Arabs have since settled on one-third of Africa, pushing continuously southwards towards the Atlantic Ocean. Arabs’ racial war against black Africa started with their occupation and colonization of Egypt between 637 and 642 CE, decimating the Coptic or black population.
Between 642 and 670 CE, more Arab invaders poured into Africa and occupied areas known today as Tunisa, Libya, Algeria and Morocco, where they physically eliminated most of the native (Berber) inhabitants. The Berbers that escaped death ran westwards and southwards towards the Sahara. In the 11th century CE, fresh Arab migrants of nomadic origin, migrated into North Africa to displace and drive the remaining pastoral Berbers deeper into the Sahara desert. With Arab consolidation and backing in Northern Africa, new waves of Arab invaders and migrants pushed deeper into the Nile banks, inhabited then by the Nilotic Shiluk, and continued all the way down to where Dueim stands today, belonging then to the Dinka and Furnawi autochthons. The entire territory was known at the time as Bilad as-Sudan (the Arabic for land of the Blacks), and currently includes the Republic of Sudan. Continuing with their Arabization of African land policy through elimination, displacement, separation, marginalization and suppression, the Arab invaders of Bilad as-Sudan, over the passage of time, decimated the population of (the Nilotic Shiluk, Dinka and Furnawi autochthons) , owners of the land, and pushed to restrict the rest waiting for elimination to Darfur area and the South of the country, which the Arab invaders are now intent on taking from the native Black Africans. This is the genesis of the war in Sudan. It is a racial war. The Arabs want the Republic of Sudan, which by land mass is the largest country in Africa, to be an entirely Arab state, by exterminating the Black native population gradually to the last person.The war in Sudan is our modern day Haiti war in terms of black liberation, and our recent fight against apartheid. Arabs are carrying out ethnic cleansing right now in Southern Sudan, with the financial support of the Arab world, particularly Libya and Saudi Arabia. China is backing them against Africa. The Janjaweed, with Sudanese and Arab governments’ backing, are trying to wipe out the black population so as to expropriate their lands, but Africans, including Nigerians, do not know where their interests should reside. The Arabs succeeded in doing the same thing in Northern Africa where the original Nubian African owners of the land have almost all been wiped out and the rest marginalized (enslaved) by their Arab invaders/settlers since 642 CE.Islamization is not the problem in Sudan because the majority Furnawi people of Darfur are Moslems. Arabs do not consider Black Moslems authentic or of consequence. At best, they concede to blacks, the role of ordained slaves or animals, to be used as beasts of burden by the “superior Arab race.” The rule applies to all blacks, whether Moslems or non-Moslems and whether of Nigerian (Hausa/Fulani or Yoruba extractions) , Tanzanians, Ugandans, Malians or African-Americans.A traveller in Sudan observed in 1930 that “In the eyes of the Arab rulers of Sudan, the black slaves were simply animals given by Allah to make life of Arabs comfortable.” Osama Bin Laden, in a discussion with the Sudanese-American novelist, Kola Boof, in Morocco in 1996 said, “when next you meet an Arab, you should ask what is the Arabic word for slave, you’ll discover that the words are the same “abeed.” Which is why, when an Arab looks at a black African, what he sees is a slave.”In 1962, the Arab Sudanese General, Hassan Beshir Nasr, while flagging off his troops to the war front against black Africans in South Sudan, declared: “We don’t want these black slaves…….what we want is their land.” Arabs’ attitude to blacks derives from Genesis’ racist fiction of the three sons of Noah – Ham, Japheth and Shem. Arabs claim that “the accursed Ham was the progenitor of the black race; that Japheth begat the full-faced, small eyes Europeans, and that Shem fathered the handsome of face with beautiful hair Arabs,” of course.A coalition of 50 charities in Darfur, Sudan, published a study in mid December, 2008, confirming what the world already knew that the Janjaweed and the Sudanese army, with the backing of their government, during joint or individual attacks, raped, tortured and killed Sudanese Africans and razed their villages to repopulate them with Arab nomads. They rounded up and abducted escapees from hide-outs in the bush, and at other times raided refugee camps to kidnap Africans as sex and labour slaves, working them to the bones as domestic and farm labour. The army flew their captives in planes to Khartoum at night and shared them among soldiers, like you allocate bags of commodities, and used them as sex and domestic servants. Kidnapped victims interviewed, said their captors told them that ‘they were not human beings and that they were there to serve them.’In the five years between 2003 and 2008, over 300,000 Sudanese Africans were killed, 100,000 abducted and 2.7 million rendered homeless refugees, with their land appropriated by Arabs. The Khatoum government admitted 14,000 kidnaps. You can imagine what happened when the world turned a blind eye on Sudan, in the twenty years between 1983 when the conflict began, and 2003. You have to ask yourself what African leaders are doing in AU with Arabs. Arabs are Africans’ mortal foes.Al Qaeda’s bombing of the American Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, left 260 black civilians that included 12 Americans, dead. Over 4,000 Kenyans and Tanzanians were wounded. A remorseless top Arab journalist justified the attack by quoting Stalin: “You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.”
Ibn Sina (Avicenna 980–1037), Arab’s most famous and influential philosopher/ scientist in Islam, described blacks as “people who are by their very nature slaves.” He wrote: “All African women are prostitutes, and the whole race of African men are abeed (slave) stock.” He equated black people with “rats plaguing the earth.”
Ibn Khaldum, an Arab historian stated that “Blacks are characterized by levity and excitability and great emotionalism,” adding that “they are every where described as stupid.”
al-Dimashqi, an Arab pseudo scientist wrote, “the Equator is inhabited by communities of blacks who may be numbered among the savage beasts. Their complexion and hair are burnt and they are physically and morally abnormal. Their brains almost boil from the sun’s heat…..”Ibn al-Faqih al-Hamadhani painted this no less horrid picture of black people, “…..the zanj (the blacks) are overdone until they are burned, so that the child comes out between black, murky, malodorous, stinking, and crinkly-haired, with uneven limbs, deficient minds, and depraved passions…..”NAIWU OSAHON Hon. Khu Mkuu (Leader, Pan-African Movement world-wide); Ameer Spiritual (Spiritual Prince) of the African race; MSc. (Salford); Dip.M.S; G.I.P.M; Dip. I.A (Liv.); D. Inst. M; G. Inst. M; G.I.W.M; A.M.N.I.M.Awarded: Key to the City of Memphis, Tennessee, USA; Honourary Councilmanship, Memphis City Council; Honourary Citizenship, County of Shelby; Honourary Commissionership, County of Shelby, Tennessee and a silver trophy from Morehouse College, Atlanta, USA for his contributions to the unity and uplift of his race.
http://www.owogienedo.com/Edo_Empire_and_Civilization
Nigerian scientists discover baseline test for HIV/AIDS
www.chinaview.cn 2009-03-10 19:43:42
Print
LAGOS, March 10 (Xinhua)-- A team of Nigerian scientists led by Dauda Oladepo of the International Institute for Pharmaceutical Research and Development (NIPRD) has discovered CD4 Lymphocyte baseline for testing HIV/AIDS patients in Nigeria, the Vanguard newspaper reported on Tuesday.
CD4 is used for monitoring and enrolling HIV patients for retroviral therapy, but before the discovery, scientists had argued that the CD4 baseline currently in use since the outbreak of HIV infection worldwide is meant for the white and not the black.
Leading his team to visit Nigeria's Minister of Health Babatunde Oshotimehi in Abuja on Monday, Oladepo said CD4 Lymphocyte baseline is very vital in monitoring and managing the disease progression of HIV infected people.
He said it is imperative to determine local baseline CD4 count and also provide national data for reference values for the nation. According to him, Nigeria did not have a National CD4 counts baseline which could be used in enrolling HIV patients and other clinical decisions.
"Before now, CD4 counts are very important for every nation since all races have their different genetic makeup," he added.
Oladepo disclosed that proposal for research into CD production in Nigeria started in 2006, adding that the fund was approved and released by the Federal Ministry of Health's national HIV/AIDS andSTI control program (NASCP) through the Global Fund for HIV/AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria.
Responding, Nigeria's minister for health, Oshotimehin commended the efforts of the scientists and Director-General of NIPRID Uford Inyang for his support and creating enabling environment for the study.
He acknowledged the support of the NACA, and NASCP for the funding of the project through the Global Fund for HIV/AIDS Tuberculosis and Malaria.
The minister challenged all persons, organizations and stakeholders to renew their commitment to the cause of HIV/AIDS and recommended that the result of the study should be used as a basis for making decisions in clinical practice in Nigeria.
Editor: Du
www.chinaview.cn 2009-03-10 19:43:42
LAGOS, March 10 (Xinhua)-- A team of Nigerian scientists led by Dauda Oladepo of the International Institute for Pharmaceutical Research and Development (NIPRD) has discovered CD4 Lymphocyte baseline for testing HIV/AIDS patients in Nigeria, the Vanguard newspaper reported on Tuesday.
CD4 is used for monitoring and enrolling HIV patients for retroviral therapy, but before the discovery, scientists had argued that the CD4 baseline currently in use since the outbreak of HIV infection worldwide is meant for the white and not the black.
Leading his team to visit Nigeria's Minister of Health Babatunde Oshotimehi in Abuja on Monday, Oladepo said CD4 Lymphocyte baseline is very vital in monitoring and managing the disease progression of HIV infected people.
He said it is imperative to determine local baseline CD4 count and also provide national data for reference values for the nation. According to him, Nigeria did not have a National CD4 counts baseline which could be used in enrolling HIV patients and other clinical decisions.
"Before now, CD4 counts are very important for every nation since all races have their different genetic makeup," he added.
Oladepo disclosed that proposal for research into CD production in Nigeria started in 2006, adding that the fund was approved and released by the Federal Ministry of Health's national HIV/AIDS andSTI control program (NASCP) through the Global Fund for HIV/AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria.
Responding, Nigeria's minister for health, Oshotimehin commended the efforts of the scientists and Director-General of NIPRID Uford Inyang for his support and creating enabling environment for the study.
He acknowledged the support of the NACA, and NASCP for the funding of the project through the Global Fund for HIV/AIDS Tuberculosis and Malaria.
The minister challenged all persons, organizations and stakeholders to renew their commitment to the cause of HIV/AIDS and recommended that the result of the study should be used as a basis for making decisions in clinical practice in Nigeria.
Editor: Du
Thursday, January 15, 2009
From Mississippi to Gaza
Killing Children With Impunity
By Henry A. Giroux
January 14, 2009 "Counterpunch" -- -The unsettling and deeply disturbing images of children in Gaza mutilated, bleeding, and dead evoke similar images from our collective memory. One such image is that of Emmett Till, whose body arrived home in Chicago in September 1955. White racists in Mississippi had tortured, mutilated, and killed the young 14-year-old African-American boy for allegedly whistling at a white woman. Determined to make visible the horribly mangled face and twisted body of the child as an expression of racial hatred and killing, Mamie Till, the boy's mother, insisted that the coffin, interred at the A.A. Ranier Funeral Parlor on the South Side of Chicago, be left open for four long days. While mainstream news organizations ignored the horrifying image, Jet magazinepublished an unedited photo of Till's face taken while he lay in his coffin. Shaila Dewan points out that "[m]utilated is the word most often used to describe the face of Emmett Till after his body was hauled out of the Tallahatchie River in Mississippi. Inhuman is more like it: melted, bloated, missing an eye, swollen so large that its patch of wiry hair looks like that of a balding old man, not a handsome, brazen 14-year-old boy."
Till had been castrated and shot in the head; his tongue had been cut out; and a blow from an ax had practically severed his nose from his face—all of this done to a teenage boy who came to bear the burden of the inheritance of slavery and the inhuman pathology that drives its racist imaginary. The photos not only made visible the violent effects of the racial state; they also fuelled massive public anger, especially among blacks, and helped to launch the Civil Rights Movement.
From the beginning of the early Civil Rights Movement to the war in Vietnam and more recently the tragedy of Hurricane Katrina, images of human suffering and violence provided the grounds for a charged political indignation and collective sense of moral outrage inflamed by the horrors of poverty, militarism, war, and racism—eventually mobilizing widespread opposition to these antidemocratic forces.
Fifty years after the body of Emmett Till was plucked out of the mud-filled waters of the Tallahatchie River, another set of troubling visual representations emerged that both shocked and shamed the nation. In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, grotesque images of bloated corpses floating in the rotting waters that flooded the streets of New Orleans circulated throughout the mainstream media. Dead people, mostly poor African-Americans, left uncollected in the streets, on porches, in hospitals, nursing homes, electric wheelchairs, and collapsed houses prompted some people to claim that America had become like a "Third World country" while others argued that New Orleans resembled a "Third World Refugee Camp."
The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) tried to do damage control by forbidding journalists to "accompany rescue boats as they went out to search for storm victims." As a bureau spokeswoman told Reuters News Agency, "We have requested that no photographs of the deceased be made by the media."
But questions about responsibility and answerability would not go away. Even the dominant media, CNN included, for a short time rose to the occasion of posing tough questions about accountability to those in power in light of such egregious acts of incompetence and indifference. The images of dead bodies kept appearing in New Orleans. For many, the bodies of the poor, black, brown, elderly, and sick came to signify what the battered body of Emmett Till once unavoidably revealed, and America was forced to confront these disturbing images and the damning questions behind the images. The Hurricane Katrina disaster, like the Emmett Till affair, revealed a vulnerable and destitute segment of the nation's citizenry that conservatives not only refused to see but had spent the better part of two decades demonizing. But like the incessant beating of Poe's tell-tale heart, cadavers have a way of insinuating themselves on consciousness, demanding answers to questions that aren't often asked.
In light of this legacy of collective indignation to horrible images of human suffering, why is it that shocking representations of devastation, suffering, and the killing of hundreds of children in Gaza have elicited so little outrage among the mainstream media and intellectuals in the United States? In the international media stories abound of children being killed as part of the military imperative—supported by weapons from the United States—to stop Hamas from firing rockets into Israel, indeed a terrible act but one that has resulted in very few deaths. Jimmy Carter and others rightly argue that Hamas's launching of rockets from Gaza is an act of terrorism. But terrorism is most destructive when it makes its own politics and use of power invisible—that is, when it disguises itself as its opposite, as a legitimate act of violence.
Even when terrorist acts become visible, should all acts of terrorism be treated equally, regardless of the scope and degree of military operations and human suffering they cause among civilians, and especially children? Certainly not for the Israeli government, which portrays itself as a victim and refuses to end the slaughter of civilians and children on the grounds that its military operations have not yet been successful enough. In this discourse, children no longer serve as an ethical referent against acts of barbarism, they simply become collateral damage, while a ghastly and inhumane act is justified under the pretense of historical necessity and “surgical strikes”—a language that reveals more about a political state that uses such euphemisms than the repugnant strategies it denotes.
Is any military strategy justified when it results in the killing of over 300 defenseless children? And what does it mean when the issue of military disproportionality is simply treated by the media as an obvious fact and not understood as part of the equation used to define state terrorism, particularly when the most sophisticated military weapons are used unchallenged against densely crowded civilian populations that have no comparable military technology? Why are the shocking images of Emmet Till or the bloated bodies of Katrina victims any more moving or a cause for outrage and collective action among Americans than the image of a two year-old child hit by an Israeli shell while running for safety? One such image was described by an aid worker in the following terms: "It was like charcoal. ... Also without any limbs, because some of the animals ate some of his limbs." Is it conceivable that Palestinians are now viewed as a population so disposable and without any redeeming value that even images of Palestinian children being blown apart by rockets and gunfire no longer elicit a need for moral outrage and rigorous political criticism?
What is it that connects the death of Emmett Till, the abandonment of largely poor African-Americans in New Orleans, and the deaths of innocent children in Gaza? All three are tied together by the racialized logic of disappearance and disposability implemented under the practices of a modern state. All three reference, as David Theo Goldberg points out in his newest book, The Threat of Race, populations marked as targets to be dispensed with, "heel on face eating dust when they have anything to eat at all ... deserted, reduced to philistinism, untrusted because untrustworthy. And once deserted, having nowhere to turn, no one to appeal to but a few folks of conscience, they are fair game."
All three embody the ideology of a racial state in which it is assumed that in the absence of African-Americans and Palestinians, including children, there would be no police violence, threats, insecurity, checkpoints, blockades, economic problems, immigrants—just a racially cleansed society no longer at war with itself and others. What unites all three events is the shame of racist violence and the practices of state terrorism, hardly a legitimizing foundation, normative or political, for the repulsive images and deadly actions of the type we see in Gaza promoted by Israel in the name of democracy.
Children provide a powerful referent for social criticism and collective change because their suffering and hardships offer the promise of both a public hearing and a potent social category by which to connect a range of issues and problems that are too often addressed in isolation as a subtle effect of identifying grievances without inquiring into their social and political roots. More than any other group, they provide a credible referent for opening up the possibility for progressive individuals and movements to create new ethical discourses and modes of advocacy within the wider struggle for democracy. Children invoke compassion and understanding, which are crucial to shaping the civic imagination. A critical analysis of the plight and killing of children in Gaza is important because it foregrounds the relationship between acts of military power and aggression and the lived realities of massive suffering and death shaped by an expansionist state. Moreover, it reminds us once again that the plight of children must play a central role in reclaiming those democratic values, practices, and relations that would make such treatment of children indefensible regardless of the appeals to justice, defense, and democracy made by those for whom a child's death can be legitimated as one unfortunate element in waging a successful military strategy.
Of course, there is more at work here than the horror and immediacy of children being killed senselessly, there is a suppressed history, dangerous memories of entire populations being displaced after the 1967 war, and how unchecked state power can commit the most ruthless deeds in the name of fighting terrorism and spreading democracy. But there is more. There is also the issue of what a country becomes when it loses its ability to question power, views military values as the highest ideals, ignores international law, and becomes indifferent to the suffering of the most innocent and defenseless. Hannah Arendt once argued that when the public realm loses its power of illumination, one result is that more and more people retreat Afrom the world and their obligations within it.
Surely, in this instance, we are seeing more than a retreat: we are witnessing a crime against humanity for which indifference and silence makes one deeply complicit with the killing and disappearance of young children. Gaza reminds us that the "dark times" that haunted Arendt's generation can now be seen in the images of wounded and dead children and should serve as a desperate reminder of what it means when politics, social responsibility, and justice, as the lifeblood of democracy, become cold and indifferent in the face of death.
Henry A. Giroux holds the Global TV Network chair in English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University in Canada. His most recent books include: "Take Back Higher Education" (co-authored with Susan Searls Giroux, 2006), "The University in Chains: Confronting the Military-Industrial-Academic Complex" (2007) and "Against the Terror of Neoliberalism: Politics Beyond the Age of Greed" (2008). His newest book, "Youth in a Suspect Society: Democracy or Disposability?" will be published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2009.
Sources.
Shaila Dewan, “How Photos Became an Icon of the Civil rights Movement,” New York Times (August 28, 2005).
Rosa Brooks, “Our Homegrown Third World,” Los Angeles Times (September 07, 2005), pp. 1–2.
Terry M. Neal, “Hiding Bodies Won’t Hide the Truth,” Washington Post (September 8, 2005).
Cited in Ahmed Abu Hamda and Dion Nissenbaum, “UN Wants to Know if war Crimes were Commited in Gaza.” Truthout (January 1, 2009).
David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race (Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009, p. 119.
Hannah Arendt, Men in Dark Times (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1955), p. 4.
Killing Children With Impunity
By Henry A. Giroux
January 14, 2009 "Counterpunch" -- -The unsettling and deeply disturbing images of children in Gaza mutilated, bleeding, and dead evoke similar images from our collective memory. One such image is that of Emmett Till, whose body arrived home in Chicago in September 1955. White racists in Mississippi had tortured, mutilated, and killed the young 14-year-old African-American boy for allegedly whistling at a white woman. Determined to make visible the horribly mangled face and twisted body of the child as an expression of racial hatred and killing, Mamie Till, the boy's mother, insisted that the coffin, interred at the A.A. Ranier Funeral Parlor on the South Side of Chicago, be left open for four long days. While mainstream news organizations ignored the horrifying image, Jet magazinepublished an unedited photo of Till's face taken while he lay in his coffin. Shaila Dewan points out that "[m]utilated is the word most often used to describe the face of Emmett Till after his body was hauled out of the Tallahatchie River in Mississippi. Inhuman is more like it: melted, bloated, missing an eye, swollen so large that its patch of wiry hair looks like that of a balding old man, not a handsome, brazen 14-year-old boy."
Till had been castrated and shot in the head; his tongue had been cut out; and a blow from an ax had practically severed his nose from his face—all of this done to a teenage boy who came to bear the burden of the inheritance of slavery and the inhuman pathology that drives its racist imaginary. The photos not only made visible the violent effects of the racial state; they also fuelled massive public anger, especially among blacks, and helped to launch the Civil Rights Movement.
From the beginning of the early Civil Rights Movement to the war in Vietnam and more recently the tragedy of Hurricane Katrina, images of human suffering and violence provided the grounds for a charged political indignation and collective sense of moral outrage inflamed by the horrors of poverty, militarism, war, and racism—eventually mobilizing widespread opposition to these antidemocratic forces.
Fifty years after the body of Emmett Till was plucked out of the mud-filled waters of the Tallahatchie River, another set of troubling visual representations emerged that both shocked and shamed the nation. In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, grotesque images of bloated corpses floating in the rotting waters that flooded the streets of New Orleans circulated throughout the mainstream media. Dead people, mostly poor African-Americans, left uncollected in the streets, on porches, in hospitals, nursing homes, electric wheelchairs, and collapsed houses prompted some people to claim that America had become like a "Third World country" while others argued that New Orleans resembled a "Third World Refugee Camp."
The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) tried to do damage control by forbidding journalists to "accompany rescue boats as they went out to search for storm victims." As a bureau spokeswoman told Reuters News Agency, "We have requested that no photographs of the deceased be made by the media."
But questions about responsibility and answerability would not go away. Even the dominant media, CNN included, for a short time rose to the occasion of posing tough questions about accountability to those in power in light of such egregious acts of incompetence and indifference. The images of dead bodies kept appearing in New Orleans. For many, the bodies of the poor, black, brown, elderly, and sick came to signify what the battered body of Emmett Till once unavoidably revealed, and America was forced to confront these disturbing images and the damning questions behind the images. The Hurricane Katrina disaster, like the Emmett Till affair, revealed a vulnerable and destitute segment of the nation's citizenry that conservatives not only refused to see but had spent the better part of two decades demonizing. But like the incessant beating of Poe's tell-tale heart, cadavers have a way of insinuating themselves on consciousness, demanding answers to questions that aren't often asked.
In light of this legacy of collective indignation to horrible images of human suffering, why is it that shocking representations of devastation, suffering, and the killing of hundreds of children in Gaza have elicited so little outrage among the mainstream media and intellectuals in the United States? In the international media stories abound of children being killed as part of the military imperative—supported by weapons from the United States—to stop Hamas from firing rockets into Israel, indeed a terrible act but one that has resulted in very few deaths. Jimmy Carter and others rightly argue that Hamas's launching of rockets from Gaza is an act of terrorism. But terrorism is most destructive when it makes its own politics and use of power invisible—that is, when it disguises itself as its opposite, as a legitimate act of violence.
Even when terrorist acts become visible, should all acts of terrorism be treated equally, regardless of the scope and degree of military operations and human suffering they cause among civilians, and especially children? Certainly not for the Israeli government, which portrays itself as a victim and refuses to end the slaughter of civilians and children on the grounds that its military operations have not yet been successful enough. In this discourse, children no longer serve as an ethical referent against acts of barbarism, they simply become collateral damage, while a ghastly and inhumane act is justified under the pretense of historical necessity and “surgical strikes”—a language that reveals more about a political state that uses such euphemisms than the repugnant strategies it denotes.
Is any military strategy justified when it results in the killing of over 300 defenseless children? And what does it mean when the issue of military disproportionality is simply treated by the media as an obvious fact and not understood as part of the equation used to define state terrorism, particularly when the most sophisticated military weapons are used unchallenged against densely crowded civilian populations that have no comparable military technology? Why are the shocking images of Emmet Till or the bloated bodies of Katrina victims any more moving or a cause for outrage and collective action among Americans than the image of a two year-old child hit by an Israeli shell while running for safety? One such image was described by an aid worker in the following terms: "It was like charcoal. ... Also without any limbs, because some of the animals ate some of his limbs." Is it conceivable that Palestinians are now viewed as a population so disposable and without any redeeming value that even images of Palestinian children being blown apart by rockets and gunfire no longer elicit a need for moral outrage and rigorous political criticism?
What is it that connects the death of Emmett Till, the abandonment of largely poor African-Americans in New Orleans, and the deaths of innocent children in Gaza? All three are tied together by the racialized logic of disappearance and disposability implemented under the practices of a modern state. All three reference, as David Theo Goldberg points out in his newest book, The Threat of Race, populations marked as targets to be dispensed with, "heel on face eating dust when they have anything to eat at all ... deserted, reduced to philistinism, untrusted because untrustworthy. And once deserted, having nowhere to turn, no one to appeal to but a few folks of conscience, they are fair game."
All three embody the ideology of a racial state in which it is assumed that in the absence of African-Americans and Palestinians, including children, there would be no police violence, threats, insecurity, checkpoints, blockades, economic problems, immigrants—just a racially cleansed society no longer at war with itself and others. What unites all three events is the shame of racist violence and the practices of state terrorism, hardly a legitimizing foundation, normative or political, for the repulsive images and deadly actions of the type we see in Gaza promoted by Israel in the name of democracy.
Children provide a powerful referent for social criticism and collective change because their suffering and hardships offer the promise of both a public hearing and a potent social category by which to connect a range of issues and problems that are too often addressed in isolation as a subtle effect of identifying grievances without inquiring into their social and political roots. More than any other group, they provide a credible referent for opening up the possibility for progressive individuals and movements to create new ethical discourses and modes of advocacy within the wider struggle for democracy. Children invoke compassion and understanding, which are crucial to shaping the civic imagination. A critical analysis of the plight and killing of children in Gaza is important because it foregrounds the relationship between acts of military power and aggression and the lived realities of massive suffering and death shaped by an expansionist state. Moreover, it reminds us once again that the plight of children must play a central role in reclaiming those democratic values, practices, and relations that would make such treatment of children indefensible regardless of the appeals to justice, defense, and democracy made by those for whom a child's death can be legitimated as one unfortunate element in waging a successful military strategy.
Of course, there is more at work here than the horror and immediacy of children being killed senselessly, there is a suppressed history, dangerous memories of entire populations being displaced after the 1967 war, and how unchecked state power can commit the most ruthless deeds in the name of fighting terrorism and spreading democracy. But there is more. There is also the issue of what a country becomes when it loses its ability to question power, views military values as the highest ideals, ignores international law, and becomes indifferent to the suffering of the most innocent and defenseless. Hannah Arendt once argued that when the public realm loses its power of illumination, one result is that more and more people retreat Afrom the world and their obligations within it.
Surely, in this instance, we are seeing more than a retreat: we are witnessing a crime against humanity for which indifference and silence makes one deeply complicit with the killing and disappearance of young children. Gaza reminds us that the "dark times" that haunted Arendt's generation can now be seen in the images of wounded and dead children and should serve as a desperate reminder of what it means when politics, social responsibility, and justice, as the lifeblood of democracy, become cold and indifferent in the face of death.
Henry A. Giroux holds the Global TV Network chair in English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University in Canada. His most recent books include: "Take Back Higher Education" (co-authored with Susan Searls Giroux, 2006), "The University in Chains: Confronting the Military-Industrial-Academic Complex" (2007) and "Against the Terror of Neoliberalism: Politics Beyond the Age of Greed" (2008). His newest book, "Youth in a Suspect Society: Democracy or Disposability?" will be published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2009.
Sources.
Shaila Dewan, “How Photos Became an Icon of the Civil rights Movement,” New York Times (August 28, 2005).
Rosa Brooks, “Our Homegrown Third World,” Los Angeles Times (September 07, 2005), pp. 1–2.
Terry M. Neal, “Hiding Bodies Won’t Hide the Truth,” Washington Post (September 8, 2005).
Cited in Ahmed Abu Hamda and Dion Nissenbaum, “UN Wants to Know if war Crimes were Commited in Gaza.” Truthout (January 1, 2009).
David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race (Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009, p. 119.
Hannah Arendt, Men in Dark Times (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1955), p. 4.
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