HATEWATCH: RACIST PROF LATEST TO JOIN GROUP THAT SEEKS WHITE RULE IN AMERICA

Racist Prof Latest to Join Group That Seeks White Rule in America

by Heidi Beirich on June 27, 2011

Racist activist Jamie Kelso announced this past Friday that long-time professor Virginia Abernethy has joined the board of the white nationalist American Third Position (ATP) political party. Established in 2009, the ATP was originally created by racist Southern California skinheads and is now led by a man who once sought to deport any American with an “ascertainable trace of Negro blood.” Its chief aim, ATP says, is to “return our nation to its rightful owners” ­— that is, white people — and by “liberating” it from the “banksters,” a radical-right term meaning Jews.

Abernethy, a self-described “white separatist” and emeritus professor of psychiatry and anthropology at Vanderbilt Medical School, has a long history of working with racist groups. At one time, Abernethy was on the editorial advisory board of the Council of Conservative Citizens (CCC), a racist hate group that describes black people as “a retrograde species of humanity.” But her addition to the board of ATP, with its open racism and anti-Semitism, is a further step to the extreme right.

With the addition of Abernethy, the ATP board is now populated by the top tier of American white nationalists. The chairman of the group is corporate lawyer William D. Johnson, and board members include virulent anti-Semite Kevin MacDonald — an academic like Abernethy — and white nationalist radio host James Edwards. Kelso, who for years ran former Klansman David Duke’s website and also helped moderate the white nationalist Stormfront.org, is the chief organizer for the party.

Abernethy has grown increasingly extreme in her views over the last decade. But even in 2002, she was a white nationalist, telling the Southern Poverty Law Center, “What is the point of a society that pushes [racial] mixing?” She added, “Our society pushes mixing. I think this is probably not a good thing for the society.”

Abernethy, who is also a leading nativist, has had some success in the past pushing her anti-immigrant agenda. In 2004, she was the chief spokeswoman of Protect Arizona Now, a campaign that backed a harsh anti-immigrant referendum known as Proposition 200 in that state. Though her racist background became public before the vote and helped spur the proposition’s denunciation by almost every Arizona newspaper editorial board, the referendum still passed with 56% of the vote.

Abernethy has some other interesting connections. She has held leadership positions in two organizations that claim to work toward a reduction in U.S. population as part of an effort to protect the environment. Though Carrying Capacity Network and Population-Environment Balance portray themselves as pro-environment, both are really greenwashers — groups that use environmentalism as a smokescreen to severely restrict immigration to the U.S.

Partly because of the addition of Abernethy to ATP’s board, the party has become the most serious white nationalist organization in the U.S. It is also growing quickly. In 2010, the party had 10 chapters in nine states.

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“Established in 2009, the ATP was originally created by racist Southern California skinheads and is now led by a man who once sought to deport any American with an “ascertainable trace of Negro blood.” Its chief aim, ATP says, is to “return our nation to its rightful owners” ­— that is, white people — and by “liberating” it from the “banksters,” a radical-right term meaning Jews.”

The only true rightful owners of this country are the Native Americans who were here before the coming of Columbus. So, if your so-called organization is ready to hand America back over to the Native Americans (or, at least what is left of them), then, by all means–give this country back to its rightful owners.

As for DNA tests to divulge any “ascertainable trace of Negro blood”, careful what you ask for. Wouldn’t surprise me if some of the White members of the racist ATP organization couldn’t pass a DNA genetic marker test.

 Talk about skeletons in the closet.

No, make that skeletons in the genes.

With all of the race and rape mixing that has occurred in this country in the last 500 years, there is no way anyone can claim so-called pure blood.

Some of those Black Americans that you ATP types hate so much, can be your long-lost brother, or sister.

. . . .AND NOW FOR SOMETHING COMPLETELY DIFFERENT: “THE SCREWFLY SOLUTION”

In this futuristic tale, written by James Tiptree, Jr., (and made into a Masters of Horror episode), human society has descended into chaotic destruction when men unexplainably around the world begin to murder women. Two scientists, Alan and Barney, seek to unravel the mystery as to why men become homicidal when sexually aroused. As more and more nations fall prey to this mysterious psychological plague, the body count of women and girls pile up, so much that the end of the human race is nigh. Turns out a virus is infecting men to commit murderous rages against women, with many men becoming adherents of the psycho-religion group “The Sons of Adam”–a religious mania that seems to be following an assumed airborne disease. But, the men do not stop their violence at just women and girls–soon young men and boys are destroyed, especially the sons who become victims on the altar of sacrifice.

 

While the head scientist works to find a cure for this terror, his wife, Anne, must protect herself and their daughter Amy in a world growing increasingly violent for anyone of the female gender. In the meantime, periodic sightings of “angels” forebodes doom for humankind, as these extraterrestrials definitely do not have human’s continuation on this planet in mind. In the cruel joke played on humans, while they were busy eradicating the screwfly, they themselves were now the target of an exterminator who “finally had been called in to rid Earth’s Eden of its greatest pest”.

 

In the ultimate battle of the sexes, no one will be left, for when the bearers of society are annihilated, then so to will  life for humans on this Earth cease to exist.

 

If humans were to completely leave this world, would the Earth be a better place without them, since humans contribute nothing to this planet, this place–the only planetary orb they have on which to live out their lives? Would the end of humans allow Earth to once again become the place it was once upon a time before the rape, the pillage, the scarring of the land; without the smog, the pollution of lakes, rivers, streams, and the ocean? Would it be a good thing if humans ceased to exist? Would their disappearance matter in the cosmic scheme of things?

 

Would the Earth itself breathe a sigh of relief at their demise?

 

And would these new beings in the end be no better than the humans they eradicated? Would they too become a blight, a plague upon the earth, where they will eventually themselves become pests in the eyes of some other higher life form in Earth’s Garden of Eden paradise?

 

For the Earth is a garden, entrusted to humankind’s care.

 

And the bad, contemptuous gardeners always in the end reap what they have sown.

 

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The Screwfly Solution Racoona Sheldon (JAMES TIPTREE, JR.) The young man sitting at 200 N, 750 W sent a casually venomous glance up at the nonfunctional shoofly ventilator and went on reading his letter. He was sweating heavily, stripped to his shorts in the hotbox of what passed for a hotel room in Cuyapán.How do other wives do it? I stay busy-busy with the Ann Arbor grant review programs and the seminar, saying brightly ‘Oh yes, Alan is in Colombia setting up a biological pest-control program, isn’t it wonderful?’ But inside I imagine you surrounded by nineteen-year-old raven-haired cooing beauties, every one panting with social dedication and filthy rich. And forty inches of bosom busting out of her delicate lingerie. I even figured it in centimeters, that’s 101.6 centimeters of busting. Oh, darling, darling, do what you want only come home safe.Alan grinned fondly, briefly imagining the only body he longed for. His girl, his magic Anne. Then he got up to open the window another cautious notch. A long pale mournful face looked in—a goat. The room opened on the goatpen, the stench was vile. Air, anyway. He picked up the letter.Everything is just about as you left it, except that the Peedsville horror seems to be getting worse. They’re calling it the Sons of Adam cult now. Why can’t they do something, even if it is a religion? The Red Cross has set up a refugee camp in Ashton, Georgia. Imagine, refugees in the U.S.A. I heard two little girls were carried out all slashed up. Oh, Alan.Which reminds me, Barney came over with a wad of clippings he wanted me to send you. I’m putting them in a separate envelope; I know what happens to very fat letters in foreign POs. He says, in-case you don’t get them, what do the following have in common? Peedsville, Sao Paulo, Phoenix, San Diego, Shanghai, New Delhi, Tripoli, Brisbane, Johannesburg and Lubbock, Texas. He says the hint is, remember where the Intertropical Convergence Zone is now. That makes no sense to me, maybe it will to your superior ecological brain. All I could see about the clippings was that they were fairly horrible accounts of murders or massacres of women. The worst was the New Delhi one, about “rafts of female corpses” in the river. The funniest (!) was the Texas Army officer who shot his wife, three daughters and his aunt, because God told him to clean the place up.Barney’s such an old dear, he’s coming over Sunday to help me take off the downspout and see what’s blocking it. He’s dancing on air right now; since you left, his spruce budworm-moth antipheromone program finally paid off. You know he tested over 2,000 compounds? Well, it seems that good old 2,097 really works. When I asked him what it does he just giggles, you know how shy he is with women. Anyway, it seems that a one-shot spray program will save the forests, without harming a single other thing. Birds and people can eat it all day, he says.Well, sweetheart, that’s all the news except Amy goes back to Chicago to school Sunday. The place will be a tomb, I’ll miss her frightfully in spite of her being at the stage where I’m her worst enemy. The sullen sexy subteens, Angie says. Amy sends love to her daddy. I send you my whole heart, all that words can’t say.Your AnneAlan put the letter safely in his note e and glanced over the rest of the thin packet of mail, refusing to let himself dream of home and Anne. Barney’s “fat envelope” wasn’t there. He threw himself on the rumpled bed, yanking off the light cord a minute before the town generator went off for the night. In the darkness the list of places Barney had mentioned spread themselves around a misty globe that turned, troublingly, in his mind. Something. . . But then the memory of the hideously parasitized children he had worked with at the clinic that day took possession of his thoughts. He set himself to considering the data he must collect. Look for the vulnerable link in the behavioral chain—how often Barney—Dr. Barnhard Braithwaite—had pounded it into his skull. Where was it, where? In the morning he would start work on bigger canefly cages. . ..At that moment, five thousand miles north, Anne was writing:Oh, darling, darling, your first three letters are here, they all came together. I knew you were writing. Forget what I said about swarthy heiresses, that was all a joke. My darling I know, I know . . . us. Those dreadful canefly larvae, those poor little kids. If you weren’t my husband I’d think you were a saint or something. (I do anyway.) I have your letters pinned up all over the house, makes it a lot less lonely. No real news here except things feel kind of quiet and spooky. Barney and I got the downspout out, it was full of a big rotted hoard of squirrel nuts. They must have been dropping them down the top, I’ll put a wire over it. (Don’t worry, I’ll use a ladder this time.) Barney’s in an odd, grim mood. He’s taking this Sons of Adam thing very seriously, it seems he’s going to be on the investigation committee if that ever gets off the ground. The weird part is that no one seems to be doing anything, as if it’s just too big. Selina Peters has been printing some acid comments, like: When one man kills his wife you call murder, but when enough do it we call it a life-style. I think it’s spreading, but nobody knows because the media have been asked to downplay it. Barney says it’s being viewed as a form of contagious hysteria. He insisted I send you this ghastly interview, printed on thin paper. It’s not going to be published, of course. The quietness is worse, though, it’s like something terrible was going on just out of sight. After reading Barney’s thing I called up Pauline in San Diego to make sure she was all right. She sounded funny, as if she wasn’t saying everything . . . my own sister. Just after she said things were great she suddenly asked if she could come and stay here awhile next month. I said come right away, but she wants to sell her house first. I wish she’d hurry. The diesel car is okay now, it just needed its filter changed. I had to go out to Springfield to get one but Eddie installed it for only $2.50. He’s going to bankrupt his garage. In case you didn’t guess, those places of Barney’s are all about latitude 300 N or S—the horse latitudes. When I said not exactly, he said remember the Equatorial Convergence Zone shifts in winter, and to add in Libya, Osaka, and a place I forget—wait, Alice Springs, Australia. What has this to do with anything, I asked. He said, “Nothing—I hope.” I leave it to you, great brains like Barney can be weird. Oh my dearest, here’s all of me to all of you. Your letters make life possible. But don’t feel you have to, I can tell how tired you must be. Just know we’re together, always everywhere. Your Anne Oh PS I had to open this to put Barney’s thing in, it wasn’t the secret police. Here it is. All love again. A. In the goat-infested room where Alan read this, rain was drumming on the roof. He put the letter to his nose to catch the faint perfume once more, and folded it away. Then he pulled out the yellow flimsy Barney had sent and began to read, frowning. PEEDSVILLE CULT/SONS OF ADAM SPECIAL. Statement by driver Sgt. Willard Mews, Globe Fork, Ark. We hit the roadblock about 80 miles west of Jacksonville. Major John Heinz of Ashton was expecting us, he gave us an escort of two riot vehicles headed by Capt. T. Parr. Major Helm appeared shocked to see that the N.I.H. medical team included two women doctors. He warned us in the strongest terms of the danger. So Dr. Patsy Putnam (Urbana, Ill.), the psychologist, decided to stay behind at the Army cordon. But Dr. Elaine Fay (Clinton, N.J.) insisted on going with us, saying she was the epi-something (epidemiologist). We drove behind one of the riot cars at 30 m.p.h. for about an hour without seeing anything unusual. There were two big signs saying SONS OF ADAM—LIBERATED ZONE. We passed some small pecan-packing plants and a citrus-processing plant. The men there looked at us but did not do anything unusual. I didn’t see any children or women of course. Just outside Peedsville we stopped at a big barrier made of oil drums in front of a large citrus warehouse. This area is old, sort of a shantytown and trailer park. The new part of town with the shopping center and developments is about a mile farther on. A warehouse worker with a shotgun came out and told us to wait for the mayor. I don’t think he saw Dr. Elaine Fay then, she was sitting sort of bent down in back. Mayor Blount drove up in a police cruiser and our chief, Dr. Premack, explained our mission from the Surgeon General. Dr. Premack was very careful not to make any remarks insulting to the mayor’s religion. Mayor Blount agreed to let the party go on into Peedsville to take samples of the soil and water and so on and talk to the doctor who lives there. The mayor was about 6′ 2″, weight maybe 230 or 240, tanned, with grayish hair. He was smiling and chuckling in a friendly manner. Then he looked inside the car and saw Dr. Elaine Fay and he blew up. He started yelling we had to all get the hell back. But Dr. Premack talked to him and cooled him down and finally the mayor said Dr. Fay should go into the warehouse office and stay-there with the door closed. I had to stay there too and see she didn’t come out, and one of the mayor’s men would drive the party. So the medical people and the mayor and one of the riot vehicles went on into Peedsville and I took Dr. Fay back into the warehouse office and sat down. It was real hot and stuffy. Dr. Fay opened a window, but when I heard her trying to talk to an old man outside I told her she couldn’t do that and closed the window. The old man went away. Then she wanted to talk to me but I told her I did not feel like conversing. I felt it was real wrong, her being there. So then she started looking through the office files and reading papers there. I told her that was a bad idea, she shouldn’t do that. She said the government expected her to investigate. She showed me a booklet or magazine they had there, it was called Man Listens to God by Reverend McIllhenny. They had a carton full in the office. I started reading it and Dr. Fay said she wanted to wash her hands. So I took her back along a kind of enclosed hallway beside the conveyor to where the toilet was. There were no doors or windows so I went back. After awhile she called out that there was a cot back there, she was going to lie down. I figure that was all right because of the no windows; also I was glad to be rid of her company. When I got to reading the book it was very intriguing. It was very deep thinking about how man is now on trial with God and if we fulfill our duty -God will bless us with a real new life on Earth. The signs and portents show it. It wasn’t like, you know, Sunday school stuff. It was deep. After a while I heard some music and saw the soldiers from the other riot car were across the street by the gas tanks, sitting in the shade of some trees and kidding with the workers from the plant. One of them was playing a guitar, not electric, just plain. It looked so peaceful. Then Mayor Blount drove up alone in the cruiser and came in. When he saw I was reading the book he smiled at me sort of fatherly, but he looked tense. He asked me where Dr. Fay was and I told him she was lying down in back. He said that was okay. Then he kind of sighed and went back down the hall, closing the door behind him. I sat and listened to the guitar man, trying to hear what he was singing. I felt really hungry, my lunch was in Dr. Premack’s car. After a while the door opened and Mayor Blount came back in. He looked terrible, his clothes were messed up and he had bloody scrape marks on his face. He didn’t say anything, he just looked at me hard and fierce, like he might have been disoriented. I saw his zipper was open and there was blood on his clothing and also on his (private parts). I didn’t feel frightened, I felt something important had happened. I tried to get him to sit down. But he motioned me to follow him back down the hall to where Dr. Pay was. “You must see,” he said. He went into the toilet and I went into a kind of little room there, where the cot was. The light was fairly good, reflected off the tin roof from where the walls stopped. I saw Dr. Pay lying on the cot in a peaceful appearance. She was lying straight, her clothing was to some extent different but her legs were together. I was glad to see that. Her blouse was pulled up and I saw there was a cut or incision on her abdomen. The blood was coming out there, or it had been coming out there, Like a mouth. It wasn’t moving at this time. Also her throat was cut open. I returned to the office. Mayor Blount was sitting down, looking very tired. He had cleaned himself off. He said, “I did it for you. Do you understand?” He seemed like my father. I can’t say it better than that. I realized he was under a terrible strain, he had taken a lot on himself for me. He went on to explain how Dr. Fay was very dangerous, she was what they calls cripto-female (crypto?), the most dangerous kind. He had exposed her and purified the situation. He was very straightforward, I didn’t feel confused at all, I knew he had done what was right. We discussed the book, how man must purify himself and show God a clean world. He had some people raise the question of how can man reproduce without women but such people miss the point. The point is that as long as man depends on the filthy animal way God won’t help him. When man gets rid of his animal part which is woman, this is the signal God is awaiting. Then God will reveal the new true clean way, maybe angels will come bringing new souls, or maybe we will live forever, but it is not our place to speculate, only to obey. He said some men here had seen an Angel of the Lord. This was very deep, it seemed like it echoed inside me, I felt it was an inspiration. Then the medical party drove up and I told Dr. Premack that Dr. Fay had been taken care of and sent away, and I got in the car to drive them out of the Liberated Zone. However four of the six soldiers from the roadblock refused to leave. Capt. Parr tried to argue them out of it but finally agreed they could stay to guard the oil-drum barrier. I would have liked to stay too, the place was so peaceful, but they needed me to drive the car. If I had known there would be all this hassle I never would have done them the favor. I am not crazy and I have not done anything wrong and my lawyer will get me out. That is all I have to say. In Cuyapán the hot afternoon rain had temporarily ceased. As Alan’s fingers let go of Sgt. Willard Mews’s wretched document he caught sight of pencil-scrawled words in the margin. Barney’s spider hand. He squinted. “Man’s religion and metaphysics are the voices of his glands. Schönweiser, 1878.” Who the devil Schönweiser was Alan didn’t know, but he knew what Barney was conveying. This murderous crackpot region of McWhosis was a symptom, not a cause. Barney believed something was physically affecting the Peedsville men, generating psychosis, and a local religious demagogue had sprung up to “explain” it. Well, maybe. But cause or effect. Alan thought only of one thing: eight hundred miles from Peedsville to Ann Arbor. Anne should be safe. She had to be. He threw himself on the lumpy cot, his mind going back exultantly to his work. At the cost of a million bites and cane cuts be was pretty sure he’d found the weak link in the canefly cycle. The male mass-mating behavior, the comparative scarcity of ovulant females. It would be the screwfly solution all over again with the sexes reversed. Concentrate the pheromone, release sterilized females. Luckily the breeding populations were comparatively isolated. In a couple of seasons they ought to have it.’ Have to let them go on spraying poison meanwhile, of course; damn pity, it was slaughtering everything and getting in the water, and the caneflies had evolved to immunity anyway. But in a couple of seasons, maybe three, they could drop the canefly populations below reproductive viability. No more tormented human bodies with those stinking larvae in the nasal passages and brain. . . . He drifted off for a nap, grinning. Up north, Anne was biting her lip in shame and pain. Sweetheart, I shouldn’t admit but your wife is scared a bit jittery. Just female nerves or something, nothing to worry about. Everything is normal up here. It’s so eerily normal, nothing in the papers, nothing anywhere except what I hear through Barney and Lillian. But Pauline’s phone won’t answer out in San Diego; the fifth day some strange man yelled at me and banged the phone down. Maybe she’s sold her house–but- why wouldn’t she call? Lillian’s on some kind of Save-the-Women committee, like we were an endangered species, ha-ha—you know Lillian. It seems the Red Cross has started setting up camps. But she says, after the first rush, only a trickle are coming out of what they call “the affected-areas.” Not many children, either, even little boys. And they have some air photos around Lubbock showing what look like mass graves. Oh, Alan, so far it seems to be mostly spreading west, but something’s happening in St. Louis, they’re cut off. So many places seem to have just vanished from the news, I had a nightmare that there isn’t a woman left alive down there. And nobody’s doing anything. They talked about spraying with tranquilizers for a while and then that died out. What could it do? Somebody at the UN has proposed a convention on–you won’t believe this—femicide. It sounds like a deodorant spray. Excuse me, honey, I seem to be a little hysterical. George Searles came back from Georgia talking about God’s Will—Searles the lifelong atheist. Alan, something crazy is happening. But there aren’t any facts. Nothing. The Surgeon General issued a report on the bodies of the Rahway Rip-Breast Team—I guess I didn’t tell you about that. Anyway, they could find no pathology. Milton Baines wrote a letter saying the present state of the art we can’t distinguish the brain of a saint from a psychopathic killer, so how could they expect to find what they don’t know how to look for? Well, enough of these jitters. It’ll be all over by the time you get back, just history. Everything’s fine here, I fixed the car’s muffler again. And Amy’s coming home for the vacations, that’ll get my mind off faraway problems. Oh, something amusing to end with—Angie told me what Barney’s enzyme does to the spruce budworm; It seems it blocks’ the male from turning around after he connects with the female, so he mates with her head instead. Like clockwork with a cog missing. There’re going to be some pretty puzzled female spruceworms. Now why couldn’t Barney tell me that? He really is such a sweet shy old dear. He’s given me some stuff to put in, as usual. I didn’t read it, Now don’t worry, my darling, everything’s fine, I love you, I love you so. Always, all ways your Anne Two weeks later In Cuyapán when Barney’s enclosures slid out of the envelope, Alan didn’t read them either. He stuffed them into the pocket of his bush jacket with a shaking hand and started bundling his notes together on the rickety table, with a scrawled note to Sister Dominique on top. The hell with the canefly, the hell with everything except that tremor in his fearless Anne’s handwriting. The hell with being five thousand miles away from his woman, his child, while some deadly madness raged. He crammed his meager belongings into his duffel. If he hurried he could catch the bus through to Bogota and maybe make the Miami flight. He made it to Miami but the planes north were jammed. He failed a· quick standby; six hours to wait. Time to call Anne. When the call got through with some difficulty he was unprepared for the rush of joy and relief that burst along the wires. ‘”Thank God—I can’t believe it—oh, Alan, my darling, are you really—I can’t believe—” He found he was repeating too, and all mixed up with the canefly data. They were both laughing hysterically when he finally hung up. Six hours. He settled in a frayed plastic chair opposite Aerolineas Argentinas, his mind half back at the clinic, half on the throngs moving by him. Something was oddly different here, he perceived presently. Where was the decorative fauna he usually enjoyed in Miami, the parade of young girls in crotch-tight pastel jeans? The flounces, boots, wild hats and hairdos, and startling expanses of newly tanned skin, the brilliant fabrics barely confining the bob of breasts and buttocks? Not here—but wait; looking closely, he glimpsed two young faces hidden under unbecoming parkas, their bodies draped in bulky nondescript skirts. In fact, all down the long vista he could see the same thing: hooded ponchos, heaped-on clothes and baggy pants, dull colors. A new style? No, he thought not. It seemed to him their movements suggested furtiveness, timidity. And they moved in groups. He watched a lone girl struggle to catch up with others ahead of her; apparently strangers. They accepted her wordlessly. They’re frightened, he thought. Afraid of attracting notice. Even that gray-haired matron in a pantsuit resolutely leading a flock of kids was glancing around nervously. And at the Argentine desk opposite he saw another odd thing; two lines had a big sign over them: MUJERES. Women. They were crowded with the shapeless forms and very quiet. The men seemed to be behaving normally; hurrying, lounging, griping, and joking in the lines astray kicked their luggage along. But Alan felt an undercurrent of tension, like an irritant in the air. Outside the line of store-fronts behind him a few isolated men seemed to be handing out tracts. An airport attendant spoke to the nearest man; be merely shrugged and moved a few doors down. To distract himself Alan picked up a Miami Herald from the next seat. It was surprisingly thin. The international news occupied him for a while; he had seen none for weeks. It too had a strange empty quality, even the bad news seemed to have dried up. The African war which had been going on seemed to be over, or went unreported. A trade summit meeting was haggling over grain and steel prices. He found himself at the obituary pages, columns of close-set type dominated by the photo of an unknown defunct ex-senator. Then his eye fell on two announcements at the bottom of the page. One was too flowery for quick comprehension, but the other stated in bold plain type: THE PORSETTE FUNERAL HOME REGRETFULLY ANNOUNCES IT WILL NO LONGER ACCEPT FEMALE CADAVERS Slowly he folded the paper, staring at it numbly. On the back was an item headed Navigational Hazard Warning, in the shipping news. Without really taking it in, he read: AP/Nassau: The excursion liner Carib Swallow reached port under tow today after striking an obstruction in the Gulf Stream off Cape Hatteras. The obstruction was identified as part of a commercial trawler’s seine floated by female corpses. This confirms reports from Florida and the Gulf of the use of such seines, some of them over a mile in length. Similar reports coming from the Pacific coast and as far away as Japan indicate a growing hazard to coastwise shipping. Alan flung the thing into the trash receptacle and sat rubbing his forehead and eyes. Thank God he had followed his impulse to come home. He felt totally disoriented, as though he had landed by error on another plane four and a half hours more to wait. . .. At length he realized the stuff from Barney he had thrust in his pocket, and pulled it out and smoothed it. The top item seemed to be from the Ann Arbor News. Dr. Lillian Dash, together with several hundred other members of her organization, had been arrested for demonstrating without a permit in front of the White House. They had started a e in a garbage can, which was considered particularly heinous. A number of women’s groups had participated; the total struck Alan as more like thousands than hundreds. Extraordinary security precautions were being taken, despite the fact that the President was out of town at the time. The next item had to be Barney’s acerbic humor. UP/Vatican City 19 June. Pope John IV today intimated that he does not plan to comment officially on the so-called Pauline Purification cults advocating the elimination of women as a means of justifying man to God. A spokesman emphasized that the Church takes no position on these cults but repudiates any doctrine involving a “challenge” to or from God to reveal His further plans for man. Cardinal Fazzoli, spokesman for the European Pauline movement, reaffirmed his view that the Scriptures define woman as merely a temporary companion and instrument of man. Women, he states, are nowhere defined as human, but merely as a transitional expedient or state. “The time of transition to full humanity is at hand,” he concluded. The next item appeared to be a thin-paper Xerox from a recent issue of Science: SUMMARY REPORT OF THE AD HOC EMERGENCY COMMITTEE ON FEMICIDE The recent worldwide though localized outbreaks of femicide appear to represent a recurrence of similar outbreaks by groups or sects which are not uncommon in world history in times of psychic stress. In this case the root cause is undoubtedly the speed of social and technological change, augmented by population pressure, and the spread and scope are aggravated by instantaneous world communications, thus exposing more susceptible persons. It is not viewed as a medical or epidemiological problem; no physical pathology has been found. Rather it is more akin to the various manias which swept Europe in the seventeenth century, e.g., the Dancing Manias, and, like them, should run its course and disappear. The chiliastic cults which have sprung up around the affected areas appear to be unrelated, having in common only the idea that a new means of human reproduction will be revealed as a result of the “purifying” elimination of women. We recommend that (1) inflammatory and sensational reporting be suspended; (2) refugee centers be set up and maintained for women escapees from the focal areas; (3) containment of affected areas by military cordon be continued and enforced; and (4) after a cooling-down period’ and the subsidence of the mania, qualified mental-health teams and appropriate professional personnel go in to undertake rehabilitation. SUMMARY OF THE MINORITY REPORT OF THE AD HOC COMMITTEE The nine members signing this report agree that there is no evidence for epidemiological contagion of femicide in the strict sense. However, the geographical relation of the focal areas of outbreak strongly suggest that they cannot be dismissed as purely psychosocial phenomena. The initial outbreaks have occurred around the globe near the 30th parallel, the area of principal atmospheric downflow of upper winds coming from the Intertropical Convergence Zone. An agent or condition in the upper equatorial atmosphere would thus be expected to reach ground level along the 30th parallel, with certain seasonal variations. One principal variation is that the downflow moves north over the East Asian continent during the late winter months, and those areas south of it (Arabia, Western India, parts of North Africa) have in fact been free of outbreaks until recently, when the downflow zone moved south. A similar downflow occurs in the Southern Hemisphere, and outbreaks have been reported along the 30th·parallel running through Pretoria and Alice Springs, Australia. (Information from Argentina is currently unavailable.) This geographical correlation cannot be dismissed, and it is therefore urged that an intensified search for a physical cause be instituted. It is also urgently recommended that the Sate of spread from known focal points be correlated with wind conditions. A watch for similar outbreaks along the secondary down-welling zones at 600 north and south should be kept. (signed for the minority) Barnhard Braithwaite Alan grinned reminiscently at his old friend’s name, which seemed to restore normalcy and stability to the world. It looked as if Barney was on to something, too, despite the prevalence of horses’ asses. He frowned, puzzling it out. Then his face slowly changed as he thought how it would be, going home to Anne. In a few short hours his arms would be around her, the tall, secretly beautiful body that had come to obsess him. Theirs had been a late-blooming love. They’d married, he supposed now, out of friendship, even out of friends’ pressure. Everyone said they were made for each other, he big and chunky and blond, she willowy brunette; both shy, highly controlled, cerebral types. For the first few years the friendship had held, but sex hadn’t been all that much. Conventional necessity. Politely reassuring each other, privately—he could say it now—disappointing. But then, when Amy was a toddler, something had happened. A miraculous inner portal of sensuality had slowly opened to them, a liberation into their own secret unsuspected heaven of fully physical bliss. . .. Jesus, but it had been a wrench when the Colombia thing had come up. Only their absolute sureness of each other had made him take it. And now, to be about to have her again, trebly desirable from the spice of separation—feeling-seeing-hearing-smelling-grasping. He shifted in his seat to conceal his body’s excitement, half mesmerized by fantasy. And Amy would be there, too; he grinned at the memory of that prepubescent little body plastered against him. She was going to be a handful, all right. His manhood understood Amy a lot better than her mother did; no cerebral phase for Amy . . . But Anne, his exquisite shy one, with whom he’d found the way into the almost unendurable transports of the flesh . . . First the conventional greeting, he thought; the news, the unspoken, savored, mounting excitement behind their eyes; the half touches; then the seeking of their own room, the falling clothes, the caresses, gentle at first—the flesh, the nakedness-the delicate teasing, the grasp, the first thrust— A terrible alarm bell went off in his head. Exploded from his dream, he stared around, then finally down at his hands. What was he doing with his open clasp knife in his fist? Stunned, he felt for the last shreds of his fantasy, and realized that the tactile imageshad not been of caresses, but of a frail neck strangling in his fist, the thrust had been the plunge of a blade seeking vitals. In his arms, legs, phantasms of striking and trampling bones cracking. And Amy== O God, Oh God– Not sex, blood lust. That was what he had been dreaming. The sex was there, but it was driving some engine of death. Numbly he put the knife away, thinking only over and over, it’s gotme. It’s got me. Whatever it is, it’s got me. I can’t go home. After an unknown time he got up and made his way to the United counter to turn in his ticket. The line was long. As he waited, his mind cleared a little. What could he do, here in Miami? Wouldn’t it be better to get back to Ann Arbor and turn himself in to Barney? Barney could help him, if anyone could. Yes, that was his best. But first he had to warn Anne.. The connection took even longer this time. When Anne finally answerd he found himself blurint unintelligibly, it took awhile to make her understand he wasn’t talking about a plane delay. “I tell you, I’ve caught it. Listen, Anne, for God’s sake. If I should come to the house don’t let me come near you. I mean it. I mean it. I’m going to the lab, but I might lose control and try to get to you. Is Barney there?” “Yes, but darling–” “Listen. Maybe he can fix me, maybe this’ll wear off. But I’m not safe. Anne, Anne, I’d kill you, can you understand? Get a–get a weapon. I’ll try not to come to the house. But if I do, don’t let me get near you. Or Amy. It’s a sickness, it’s real. Treat me–treat me like a fducking wilde animal. Anne, say you understand, say you’ll do it.” They were both crying when he hung up. He went shaking back to sit and wait. After a time his head seemed to clear a little more. Doctor, try to think. The first thing he thought of was to take the loathsome knife and throw it down a trash slot. As he did so he realized there was one more piece of Barney’s material in his pocket. He uncrumpled it; it seemed to be a clipping from Nature. At the top was Barney’s scrawl: “Only guy making sense. UK infected now Oslo, Copenhagen out of communication. Damn fools still won’t listen: Stay put.” Communication from Professor Ian MacIntyre, Glasgow Univ. A potential difficulty for our species has always been implicit in the close linkage between the behavioral expression of aggression/predation and sexual reproduction in the male. This close linkage involves (a) many of the same neuromuscular pathways which are utilized both in predatory and sexual pursuit, grasping, mounting etc., and (b) similar sites of adrenergic arousal which are activated in both. The same linkage is seen in the males of many other species; in some, the expression of aggression and copulation alternate or even coexist; an all-too-familiar example being the common house cat. Males of many species bite; claw, bruise, tread, or otherwise assault receptive female during the act of intercourse; indeed, in some species the male attack is necessary for female ovulation to occur. In many if not all species it is the aggressive behavior which appears first, and then changes to copulatory behavior when the appropriate signal is presented .(e.g. the three-tined stickleback and the European robin). Lacking the inhibiting signal, the male’s fighting response continues and the female is attacked or driven off. It seems therefore appropriate to speculate that the present crisis might be caused by some substance, perhaps at the viral or enzymatic level, which effects failure of the switching or triggering function in the higher primates. (Note: Zoo gorillas and chimpanzee have recently been observed to attack or destroy their mates; rhesus not.) Such a dysfunction could be expressed by the failure of mating behavior to modify or supervene over the aggressive/predatory response; i.e., sexual stimulation would produce attack only, the stimulation discharging itself through the destruction of the stimulating object. In this connection it might be noted that exactly this condition is a commonplace of male functional pathology, in those cases where murder occurs as a response to, and apparent completion of, sexual desire. It should be emphasized that the aggression/copulation linkage discussed here is specific to the male; the female response (e.g., lordotic reflex) being of a different nature. Alan sat holding the crumpled sheet a long time; the dry, stilted Scottish phrases seemed to help clear his head, spite the sense of brooding tension all around him. Well, if pollution or whatever had produced some substance, it would, presumably, be countered, neutralized. Very very carefully, he let himself consider his life with Anne, his sexuality. Yes; much of their loveplay could be viewed as genitalized, sexually gentled savagery. Play-predation . . . He turned his mind quickly away. Some writer’s phrase occurred to him: ”The panic element in all sex” Who? Fritz Leiber? The violation of social distance, maybe; another threatening element. Whatever, it’s our weak link, he thought. Our vulnerability . . . The dreadful feeling of rightness he had experienced when he found himself knife in hand, fantasizing violence, came pack to him. As though it was the right, the only way. Was that what Barney’s budworms felt when they mated with their females wrong-end-to? At long length, he became aware of body need and sought a toilet. The place was empty, except for what he took to be a heap of clothes blocking the door of the far stall. Then he saw the red-brown pool in which it lay, and bluish mounds of bare, thin buttocks. He backed out, not breathing, and fled into the nearest crowd, knowing he was not the first to have done so. Of course. Any sexual drive. Boys, men, too. At the next washroom he watched to see men enter and leave normally before he ventured in. Afterward he returned to sit, waiting, repeating over and over to himself: Go to the lab. Don’t go home. Go to the lab. Don’t go home. Go straight to the lab. Three more hours; he sat numbly at 26o N, 810 W, breathing, breathing . . . Dear Diary. Big scene tonite, Daddy came home!!! Only he acted so funny, he had the taxi wait and just the doorway, he wouldn’t touch me or let us come near him. (I mean funny weird, not funny ha ha.) He said, I have something to tell you, this is get worse not better. I’m going to sleep in the lab but I want you to get out, Anne, Anne, I can’t trust myself. First thing in the morning you both get on for Martha’s and stay there. So I thought he had to be joking, I mean with the dance next week and Aunt Martha lives in Whitehorse where there’s nothing nothing nothing. So I was yelling and Mother was yelling and Daddy was groaning, Go now! And then he started crying. Crying!!! So I realized, wow, this is serious, and I started to go over to him but Mother yanked me back and then I saw she had this big knife! And she shoved me in back of her and started crying too: Oh Alan, Oh Alan, like she was insane. So I said, Daddy, I’ll never leave you, it felt like the perfect thing to say. And it was thrilling, he looked at me real sad and deep like I was a grown-up while Mother ruined it raving. Alan the child is mad, darling go. So he ran out of the door yelling. Be gone, Take the car, get out before I come back. Oh I forgot to say I was wearing what but my gooby with my curltites still on, wouldn’t you know of all the shitty luck, how could I have known such a scene was ahead we never know life’s cruel whimsy. And Mother is dragging out suitcases yelling, Pack your things hurry! So she’s going I guess but I am not not going to spend the fall sitting in Aunt Martha’s grain silo and lose the dance and all my summer credits. And Daddy was trying to communicate with us, right? I think their relationship is obsolete. So when she goes upstairs I am splitting. I am going to go over to the lab and see Daddy. Oh PS Diane tore my yellow jeans she promised me I could use her pink ones ha-ha that’ll be the day. *** I ripped that Page out of Amy’s diary when I heard the squad car coming. I never opened her diary before but when I found she’d gone I looked. . . . Oh, my darling little girl. She went to him, my little girl, my poor little fool child. Maybe if I’d taken time to explain, maybe— Excuse me, Barney. The stuff is wearing off, the shots they gave me. I didn’t feel anything. I mean, I knew somebody’s daughter went to see her father and he killed her. And cut his throat. But it didn’t mean anything. Alan’s note, they gave me that but then they took it away. Why did they have to do that! His last handwriting, the last words he wrote before his hand, picked up the, before he— I remember it. “Sudden and light as that, the bonds gave way. And we learned of finalities besides the grave. The bonds of our humanity have broken, we’re finished. I love—” I’m all right, Barney, really. Who wrote that, Robert Frost? The bonds gave. . . . Oh, he said, tell Barney: The terrible rightness. What does that mean? You can’t answer that, Barney dear. I’m just writing this to stay sane, I’ll put it in your hidey-hole, Thank you, ‘thank you, Barney dear. Even as blurry as I was, I knew it was you. All the time you were cutting off my hair and rubbing dirt on my face, I knew it was right because it was you. Barney, I never thought of you as those horrible words you said. You were always Dear Barney. By the time the stuff wore off I had done everything you said, the gas, the groceries. Now I’m here in your cabin. With those clothes you made me put on—I guess I do look like a boy, the gas man called me “Mister.” I still can’t really realize, I have to stop myself from rushing back. But you saved my life, I know that. The last trip in I got a paper, I saw where they bombed the Apostle Islands refuge. And it had about those three women stealing the Air Force plane and bombing Dallas, too. Of course they shot them down, over the Gulf. Isn’t strange how we do nothing? Just get killed by ones and twos. Or more, now they’ve started on the refugees. . . . Like hypnotized rabbits. We’re a toothless race. Do you know I never said “we” meaning women before? “We” was always me and Alan, and Amy of course. Being killed selectively encourages group identification. . . . You see how sane-headed I am. But I still can’t really realize. My first trip in was for salt and kerosene. I went to that little Red Deer store and got my stuff from the old man in the back, as you told me—you see, I remembered! He called me “Boy” but I think maybe he suspects. He knows I’m staying at your cabin. Anyway, some men and boys came in the front. They were all so normal, laughing and kidding. I just couldn’t believe, Barney. In fact I started to go out past them when I heard one of them say, “Heinz saw an angel.” An angel. So I stopped and listened. They said it was big and sparkly. Coming to see if man is carrying out God’s will, one of them said. And he said, Moosenee is now a liberated zone, and all up by Hudson Bay. I turned and got out the back, fast. The old man had heard them, too. He said to me quietly, I’ll miss the kids. Hudson Bay, Barney, that means it’s coming from the north too, doesn’t it? That must be about 600. But I have to go back once again, to get some fishhooks. I can’t live on bread. Last week I found a deer some poacher had killed, just the head and legs.. I made a stew. It was a doe. Her eyes; I wonder if mine look like that now. I went to get the fishhooks today. It was bad, I can’t ever go back. There were some men in front again, but they were different. Mean and tense. No boys. And there was a new sign out in front, I couldn’t see it; maybe it says Liberated Zone, too. The old man gave me the hooks quick and whispered to me, “Boy, them woods’ll be full of hunters next week.” I almost ran out. About a mile down the road a blue pickup started to chase me. I guess he wasn’t from around there, I ran the VW into a logging draw and he roared on by. After a long while I drove out and came on back, but I left the car about a mile from here and hiked in. It’s surprising how hard it is to pile enough brush to hide a yellow VW. Barney, I can’t stay here. I’m eating perch raw so nobody will see my smoke, but those hunters will be coming through. I’m going to move my sleeping bag out to the swamp by that big rock, I don’t think many people go there. Since the last lines I moved out. It feels safer. Oh, Barney, how did this happen? Fast, that’s how. Six months ago I was Dr. Anne Alstein. Now I’m a widow and bereaved mother, dirty and hungry, squatting in a swamp in mortal fear. Funny if I’m the last woman left alive on Earth. I guess the last one around here, anyway. Maybe some are holed up in the Himalayas, or sneaking through the wreck of New York City. How can we last? We can’t. And I can’t survive the winter here, Barney. It gets to 400 below. I’d have to have a fire, they’d see the smoke. Even if I worked my way south, the woods end in a couple hundred miles. I’d be potted like a duck. No. No use. Maybe somebody is trying something somewhere, but it won’t reach here in time . . . and what do I have to live for? No. I’ll just make a good end, say up on that rock where I can see the stars. After I go back and leave this for you. I’11 wait to see the beautiful color in the trees one last time. Good-bye, dearest dearest Barney. I know what I’ll scratch for an epitaph. HERE LIES THE SECOND MEANEST PRIMATE ON EARTH I guess nobody will ever read this, unless I get the nerve and energy to take it back to Barney’s. Probably won’t. Leave it in a Baggie, I have one here; maybe Barney will come and look. I’m up on the big rock now. The moon is going to rise soon, I’ll do it then. Mosquitoes, be patient. You’ll have all you want. The thing I have to write down is that I saw an angel, too. This morning. It was big and sparkly, like the man said; like a Christmas tree without the tree. But I knew it was real because the frogs stopped croaking and two blue jays. gave alarm calls. That’s important. It was really there. I watched it, sitting under my rock. It didn’t move much. It sort of bent over and picked up something, leaves or twigs. I couldn’t see. Then it did something with them around its middle, like putting them into an invisible sample pocket. Let me repeat—it was there. Barney, if you’re reading this, there are things here. And I think they’ve done whatever it is to us. Made us kill ourselves off. Why? Well, it’s a nice place, if it wasn’t for people. How do you get rid of people? Bombs, death-rays—all very primitive. Leave a big mess. Destroy everything, craters, radioactivity, ruin the place. This way there’s no muss, no fuss. Just like what did to the screwfly. Pinpoint the weak link, wait a bit while we do it for them. Only a few bones around, make good fertilizer. Barney dear, good-bye. I saw it. It was there. But it wasn’t an angel. I think I saw a real estate agent.

SOURCE

BLACK WOMEN IN AMERICA: CLEMENTINE HUNTER

“At bottom, every man knows perfectly well that he is a unique being, only once on this earth; and by no extraordinary chance will such a marvelously picturesque piece of diversity in unity as he is, ever be put together a second time.” -Friedrich Nietzsche, philosopher (1844-1900)

Her artwork is considered folk art, whimsical and eclectic. But, for many people, little is known of the artist herself. Her name is Clementine Hunter.

Ms. Hunter (late December, 1886 or early January, 1887 – January 1 , 1988), was a self-taught artist renowned for her folk paintings of Black life in northern Louisiana.

“If Jimmy Carter wants to see me, ke knows where I am. He can come here.” This reply to President Jimmy Carter’s invitation that she come to Washington for the opening of an exhibition of her work is vintage Clementine Hunter. Her disregard for fame and the famous was part of her special charm and did not change, even after she became known worldwide for her colorful folk paintings of Black life in the Cane River region of northern Louisiana.

Ms. Hunter was born on Hidden Hill Plantation, near Cloutierville, Louisiana. her mother, Mary Antoinette Adams, was the daughter of a slave who was brought to Louisiana from Virginia. her father, John Reuben, had an Irish father and a Native American mother. Ms. Hunter considered herself a Creole. When she was a teenager, she moved with her family from Hidden Hill to Yucca Plantation, which was renamed Melrose, seventeen miles south of Natchitoches, Louisiana. Melrose was created by a former slave, Marie Therese Coincoin and her family in the late 1770s. (The plantation was later sold to John Hampton and Carmelita Garritt Henry in 1898). Ms. Hunter lived and worked at Melrose until 1970, when the plantation was sold; then she moved to a small trailer a few miles away, where she lived until her death.

Her first husband was Charles Dupree, the father of her first two children–Joseph (Frenchie) and Cora–died about 1914. In January 1924, Ms. Hunter married Emmanuel Hunter, by whom she had five children: Agnes, King, Mary (called Jackie), and two who died at birth. Emmanuel Hunter died in 1944. Clementine Hunter outlived all her children except Mary.

Like many Black women of her time, Ms. Hunter created exquisite quilts in beautiful colors, as well as handmade dolls and clothes for children. Her paintings included works done on the following: oil on paper, cardboard and canvas, art board, even some paintings done on glass bottles, such as her work Painted Bottle, done on a nine-inch tall bottle.

Ms. Hunter’s mentor was Francois Mignon, a French writer who lived on Melrose Plantation from 1938 to 1970. According to Mignon, Ms. Hunter did her first painting in 1939. From then until a few months before her death, she painted continually, on any surface she could find. Her output was prodigious; estimates are that she completed more than five thousand paintings. Like many folk artists, however, Ms. Hunter painted the same scenes over and over. Her works roughly fall into five thematic categories:  work scenes from plantation life; recreation scenes; religious scenes; flowers and birds; and abstracts. The quality of her work varies greatly, but her paintings are prized for their vibrant colors and whimsical humour.

Wash Day,c. 1970, oil on rigid pasteboard, 18″ x 24″.

Canasta Players, c. mid-1960s, oil on rigid pasteboard, 24″ x 16″.

Bowl of Zinnias, c. 1939. Oil on corrugated board, 20-1/2″ x 16-3/4″.

The first exhibit of Ms. Hunter’s work was at the New Orleans Arts and Crafts show in 1949.She was the first Black American artist to have a solo exhibition at the Delgado Museum (now the New Orleans Museum of Art).  A Look Magazine article published in June 16, 1953 gave her national attention. After three exhibits in the 1950s, her work received little attention until the early 1970s, when it was shown at the Museum of American Folk Art in New York City (1973) and in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s exhibit “Two Centuries of Black American Art” (1976). In the last fifteen years of her life, Ms. Hunter had many one-woman shows at colleges and galleries throughout Louisiana, She was featured on local and national television shows and was included in two oral Black-history projects (Fisk University, 1971; Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College, 1976). She also was part of the photographic exhibition “Women of Courage by Judith Sedwick,” shown in 1985 in New York and Boston. That same year, Ms. Hunter was awarded an honorary doctor of fine arts degree from Northwestern State University of Louisiana in Natchitoches. Although the quality of Ms. Hunter’s paintings may be uneven, the historical value of her work is beyond question. Her artworks now command prices that range between a few thousand dollars to over $20,000 a painting.

Ms. Hunter died in Louisiana at the age of 101.

REFERENCES:

“Clementine Hunter”, by Anne Hudson Jones, from Black Women in America, by Darlene Clark Hine, et. al.

Clementine Hunter, the Artist

1.

Clementine Hunter: American Folk Artist by James L. Wilson (Hardcover – Oct 31, 1988) (2)

2.

Art From Her Heart by Kathy Whitehead and Shane Evans (Hardcover – Sep 18, 2008)

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IN REMEMBRANCE: 6-26-2011

PETER FALK, ‘COLUMBO’ ACTOR

Peter Falk as Lieutenant Columbo. More Photos »

By BRUCE WEBER

Published: June 24, 2011

 

Peter Falk, who marshaled actorly tics, prop room appurtenances and his own physical idiosyncrasies to personify Columbo, one of the most famous and beloved fictional detectives in television history, died on Thursday night at his home in Beverly Hills, Calif. He was 83.

 

Multimedia

Slide Show

Peter Falk’s Career

 

June 25, 2011

Universal Pictures, via Reuters

Peter Falk as Lieutenant Columbo. More Photos »

His death was announced in a statement from Larry Larson, a longtime friend and the lawyer for Mr. Falk’s wife, Shera. He had been treated for Alzheimer’s disease in recent years.

Mr. Falk had a wide-ranging career in comedy and drama, in the movies and onstage, before and during the three and a half decades in which he portrayed the unkempt but canny lead on “Columbo.” He was nominated for two Oscars; appeared in original stage productions of works by Paddy Chayefsky, Neil Simon and Arthur Miller; worked with the directors Frank Capra, John Cassavetes, Blake Edwards and Mike Nichols; and co-starred with the likes of Frank Sinatra, Bette Davis and Jason Robards.

But Mr. Falk’s prime-time popularity, like that of his contemporary Telly Savalas, of “Kojak” fame, was founded on a single role.

A lieutenant in the Los Angeles Police Department, Columbo was a comic variation on the traditional fictional detective. With the keen mind of Sherlock Holmes and Philip Marlowe, he was cast in the mold of neither — not a gentleman scholar, not a tough guy. He was instead a mass of quirks and peculiarities, a seemingly distracted figure in a rumpled raincoat, perpetually patting his pockets for a light for his signature stogie.

He drove a battered Peugeot, was unfailingly polite, was sometimes accompanied by a basset hound named Dog, and was constantly referring to the wisdom of his wife (who was never seen on screen) and a variety of relatives and acquaintances who were identified in Homeric-epithet-like shorthand — an uncle who played the bagpipes with the Shriners, say, or a nephew majoring in dermatology at U.C.L.A. — and who were called to mind by the circumstances of the crime at hand.

It was a low-rent affect that was especially irksome to the high-society murderers he outwitted in episode after episode. In the detective-story niche where Columbo lived, whodunit was hardly the point; the murder was committed and the murderer revealed in the show’s opening minutes. How it was done was paramount. Typically, Columbo would string his suspects along, flattering them, apologizing profusely for continuing to trouble them with questions, appearing to have bought their alibis and, just before making an exit, nailing them with a final, damning query that he unfailingly introduced with the innocent-sounding phrase, “Just one more thing ….” It was the signal to viewers that the jig was up.

It was also the title of Mr. Falk’s anecdotal memoir, published in 2006, in which he summarized the appeal of the show.

“What are you hanging around for?” he wrote, referring to the viewer. “Just one thing. You want to know how he gets caught.”

Mr. Falk had a glass eye, resulting from an operation to remove a cancerous tumor when he was 3. The prosthesis gave all his characters a peculiar, almost quizzical squint. And he had a mild speech impediment that gave his L’s a breathy quality, a sound that emanated from the back of his throat and that seemed especially emphatic whenever, in character, he introduced himself as Lieutenant Columbo.

Such a deep well of eccentricity made Columbo amusing as well as incisive, not to mention a progenitor of later characters like Tony Shalhoub’s Monk, and it made him a representative Everyman too. Off and on from 1968 to 2003, Mr. Falk played the character numerous times, often in the format of a 90-minute or 2-hour television movie. Each time Columbo, the ordinary man as hero, brought low a greedy and murderous privileged denizen of Beverly Hills, Malibu or Brentwood, it was an implicit victory for the many over the few.

“This is, perhaps, the most thoroughgoing satisfaction ‘Columbo’ offers us,” Jeff Greenfield wrote in The New York Times in 1973: “the assurance that those who dwell in marble and satin, those whose clothes, food, cars and mates are the very best, do not deserve it.”

Peter Michael Falk was born in Manhattan on Sept. 16, 1927, and lived for a time in the Bronx, near Yankee Stadium, but grew up mostly in Ossining, N.Y, where his father owned a clothing store and where, in spite of his missing eye, he was a high school athlete. In one story he liked to tell, after being called out at third base during a baseball game, he removed his eye and handed it to the umpire.

“You’ll do better with this,” he said.

After high school Mr. Falk went briefly to Hamilton College, in upstate New York, before dropping out and joining the Merchant Marine as a cook. He later returned to New York City, where he earned a degree in political science from the New School for Social Research before attending Syracuse University, where he received a master’s degree in public administration.

He took a job in Hartford as an efficiency expert for the Connecticut budget bureau. It was in Connecticut that he began acting, joining an amateur troupe called the Mark Twain Masquers in Hartford and taking classes from Eva Le Gallienne at the White Barn Theater in Westport. He was 29 when he decided to move to New York again, this time to be an actor.

He made his professional debut in an Off Broadway production of Molière’s “Don Juan” in 1956. In 1957 he was cast as the bartender in the famous Circle in the Square revival of “The Iceman Cometh,” directed by José Quintero and starring Jason Robards; he made his first splash on screen, as Abe Reles, a violent mob thug, in the 1960 film “Murder, Inc.” That performance earned him an Oscar nomination for best supporting actor and a moment of high embarrassment at the awards ceremony. When the winner was announced — it was Peter Ustinov for “Spartacus” — Mr. Falk heard the first name and stood, only to have to sit back down again a moment later.

“When I hit the seat, I turned to the press agent and said, ‘You’re fired!’ ” Mr. Falk wrote in his memoir. “I didn’t want him charging me for another day.”

The next year, newly married to a Syracuse classmate, Alyce Mayo — they would have two daughters and divorce in 1976 — Mr. Falk again earned a supporting-actor Oscar nomination for playing a mobster, though this time with a more light-hearted stripe, in the final film to be directed by Frank Capra, “Pocketful of Miracles,” starring Bette Davis and Glenn Ford.

From then on Mr. Falk, who was swarthy, squat (he was 5-foot-6) and handsome, had to fend off offers to play gangsters. He did take such a part in “Robin and the 7 Hoods,” alongside Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Bing Crosby and Sammy Davis Jr., but fearful of typecasting, he also took roles in comic films like “It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World” and “The Great Race.”

He returned to the stage as well, as Stalin, the title role, in Paddy Chayefsky’s “Passion of Josef D,” which earned him solid reviews in spite of the show’s brief run (less than two weeks). Mr. Falk played Stalin “with brilliant, unsmiling ferocity,” Howard Taubman wrote in his largely positive review in The Times.

His life was forever changed in 1967 when, reportedly after both Bing Crosby and Lee J. Cobb turned down the role, he was cast as Columbo in the television film “Prescription: Murder.” The story, about a psychiatrist who kills his wife with the help of one of his patients, was written by Richard Levinson and William Link; they had adapted it from their stage play, which opened in San Francisco and Boston in 1964, and which itself was an adaptation. Mr. Levinson and Mr. Link first wrote the story in 1960 for a series called “The Chevy Mystery Show.” It was in that show — the episode was titled “Enough Rope” — that Columbo made his debut as a character, played by Bert Freed.

But it was Mr. Falk who made him a legend. During the filming it was he who rejected the fashionable attire the costume shop had laid out for him; it was he who chose the raincoat — one of his own — and who matched the rest of the detective’s clothes to its shabbiness. It was he who picked out the Peugeot from the studio motor pool, a convertible with a flat tire and needing a paint job that, he reflected years afterward, “even matched the raincoat.”

And as the character grew, the line between the actor and the role grew hazier. They shared a general disregard for nattiness, an informal mode of speech, an obsession with detail, an irrepressible absent-mindedness. Even Columbo’s favorite song, “This Old Man,” which seemed to run through his mind (and the series) like a broken record, was one that Mr. Falk had loved from childhood and that ended up in the show because he was standing around humming it one day, in character, when Columbo was waiting for someone to come to the phone.

Three years passed between the first “Columbo” movie and the second, “Ransom for a Dead Man,” which became the pilot that turned the show into a regular network offering. It was part of a revolving wheel of Sunday night mysteries with recurring characters that appeared under the rubric “NBC Mystery Theater.” The first set included “McCloud,” with Dennis Weaver, and “McMillan and Wife,” with Rock Hudson and Susan Saint James.

In between, Mr. Falk made “Husbands,” the first of his collaborations with his friend Cassavetes. The others were “A Woman Under the Influence,” in 1974, a brutally realistic portrayal of a marriage undermined by mental illness, directed by Cassavetes, for which Mr. Falk’s co-star and Cassavetes’s wife, Gena Rowlands, was nominated for an Academy Award; and “Mikey and Nicky” in 1976, a dark buddy film directed by Elaine May in which the two men played the title roles.

In 1971 he once again returned to Broadway, in Neil Simon’s angry comedy “The Prisoner of Second Avenue.”

In later years Mr. Falk starred in several notable films — among them “Murder by Death” (1976), “The In-Laws” (1979), “The Princess Bride” (1987), “Tune In Tomorrow” (1990) and “Wings of Desire” (1987), in which he played himself, contemplating his acting career — and in 1998 he opened Off Broadway in the title role of Arthur Miller’s play “Mr. Peters’ Connections,” a portrait of an older man trying to make sense out his life as it comes to an end. By that time, however, Mr. Falk and Columbo had become more or less interchangeable as cultural references. Mr. Peters, Ben Brantley wrote in his review of the play in The Times, “is as genuinely perplexed as Columbo, his aggressively rumpled television detective, only pretends to be.”

Mr. Falk, who began sketching as a way to while away time on movie sets, had had many gallery shows of his charcoal drawings and watercolors. He is survived by his second wife, the former Shera Danese, and his two daughters, Jackie and Catherine.

For all the mysteries Columbo solved, one remains. Many viewers claim that in one or more episodes Columbo’s police identification is visible with the first name “Frank” visibly scrawled on it. However, the character was initially created without a first name; an exhaustive book about the television show, “The Columbo Phile,” does not give a first name, and Mr. Falk, for his part, was no help in this regard. Whenever he was asked Columbo’s first name, his response was the same.

“Lieutenant,” he said.

SOURCE

Lt. Columbo.

He was always dismissed as nondescript and insignificant in the eyes of the accused he was investigating, but, Lt. Columbo had a sharp and calculating mind that no criminal could match.

As played by Peter Falk, Columbo went up against various criminals, many of whom thought they had committed the perfect murder, until they did or said something that Columbo caught that incriminated them.

With his ancient Peugeot, his sad-eyed Bassett hound named Dog, rumpled clothes and trench coat, Columbo was never taken too seriously, until it was too late for those he got the evidence on.

Mr. Falk is very well-known for his famous character, but, he also gave many memorable performances through the decades, as in the following where he played an amoral hood who strikes fear in those who cross him, in Murder, Inc.:

But, one scene that has stayed with me these many years is Mr. Falk’s role as a dictator who looks in a mirror and begins to see everyone as his enemy–even those who helped him bump off the previous dictator. The classic Twilight Zone episode “The Mirror” was chilling in how too much power not only can go to one’s head, but it can corrupt with horrific consequences:

Mr. Falk was a great actor who left an enduring legacy for his many fans.

He will be missed.

Oh, there’s just one more thing. . . .

Rest in peace, Mr. Falk.

Rest in peace.

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DON DIAMOND, CHARACTER ACTOR

By DANIEL E. SLOTNIK

Published: June 25, 2011

 

Don Diamond, a character actor on radio, television and film who was best known for playing supporting roles on TV westerns, died on Sunday en route to a hospital in Los Angeles. He was 90.

June 25, 2011

Everett Collection

Don Diamond in an appearance on the show “F Troop.”

 

The cause was heart failure, his wife, Louisa, said.

Mr. Diamond, a New Yorker of Russian Jewish heritage, often played ethnic minorities because he had mastered several accents. During his nearly 40-year career he played El Toro, a Mexican sidekick, on “The Adventures of Kit Carson”; Corporal Reyes on “Zorro”; and Crazy Cat, Chief Wild Eagle’s inept subordinate, on the comedy “F Troop.”

Donald Alan Diamond was born on June 4, 1921, in New York City. He received a degree in drama and studied Spanish at the University of Michigan before he enlisted during World War II. He served stateside in the Army Air Corps because his myopia had made him unfit for combat.

While awaiting induction in New York, Mr. Diamond began developing his accents on radio shows like “The March of Time.” He continued studying Spanish while stationed in the Southwest, and acted on the radio after the war.

Mr. Diamond also appeared on nonwestern shows like “Get Smart” and “Mission: Impossible” and in several movies, including the crime drama “Borderline” (1950), the Elvis Presley vehicle “Fun in Acapulco” (1963) and “The Carpetbaggers” (1964). He also did voice-over work in commercials and in cartoons like the “Tijuana Toads” shorts.

In addition to his wife, Mr. Diamond is survived by a brother, Neil (not the singer); a sister, Muriel Krems; a daughter, Maxine Roxanne Diamond; two stepdaughters, Emily and Fortuna Israel; two step-grandchildren; and two step-great-grandchildren.

SOURCE

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FREDERICH CHILUBA, FORMER PRESIDENT OF ZAMBIA

By BARRY BEARAK

Published: June 19, 2011

 

Frederick Chiluba, the first democratically elected president of Zambia, a man whose image as a defender of civil liberties was later tarnished by his efforts to suppress political opposition and accusations that he used millions of dollars of public money on his wardrobe and other extravagances, died Saturday in Lusaka. He was 68.

June 20, 2011

Salim Henry/Associated Press

Frederick Chiluba’s presidency did little to address Zambia’s poverty.

June 20, 2011

Mariella Furrer for The New York Times

Mr. Chiluba was accused of stealing to support shopping sprees, said to involve suitcases full of cash, for items like shoes.

He suffered from chronic heart problems. His death was confirmed by his spokesman, Emmanuel Mwamba.

The son of a copper miner, Frederick Jacob Titus Chiluba — a diminutive man barely five feet tall — was Zambia’s president from 1991 to 2002. His ascent to high office was for a time considered a heartening success story in a poor, landlocked nation of 13 million people in southern Africa.

He left secondary school before graduation and was working as a low-paid bookkeeper when he joined a union, rising through the ranks in the labor movement until he became chairman of the Zambia Congress of Trade Unions in 1974.

The nation had won independence 10 years earlier. Kenneth Kaunda, a hero of the liberation struggle, was Zambia’s first president, but his single-party, socialist rule was an economic failure. In 1981, he jailed Mr. Chiluba and other labor leaders without charges after they instigated wildcat strikes.

A judge ruled the detentions unconstitutional, and after three months behind bars, Mr. Chiluba emerged emboldened. He would eventually forge a coalition of unions, civic groups and churches to form the Movement for Multi-Party Democracy to challenge Mr. Kaunda at the polls.

A personable man with oratorical gifts, Mr. Chiluba was a born-again Christian and often used biblical references in his speeches. He was also a passionate advocate of democracy, and in 1991, when Mr. Kaunda finally agreed to multiparty elections, Mr. Chiluba won the presidency with nearly 76 percent of the vote.

In his first address, the new president said, “The Zambia we inherit is destitute — ravaged by the excesses, ineptitude and straight corruption of a party and a people who have been in power for too long.” He lamented that after 27 years of Mr. Kaunda’s leadership, “Now the coffers are empty. The people are poor. The misery endless.”

Mr. Chiluba was indeed inheriting a fiscal mess, and though he steered the country toward a free-market economy, the government remained dependent on foreign aid, and the average Zambian was still mired in poverty.

The remarkable transformation seemed to come in Mr. Chiluba rather than in his nation.

The Chiluba government was notably corrupt, and the president appeared to regard himself as irreplaceable. In 1996, he barred Mr. Kaunda from running against him, changing the Constitution to preclude candidates born outside Zambia. He even attempted to deport Mr. Kaunda to Malawi.

In 2001, Mr. Chiluba again toyed with rewriting the law, this time to allow himself a third term in office. But by then, the president’s reputation as a reformer had been replaced by one far less flattering. Civic groups and churches rose up in opposition and thwarted the plan. Instead, Mr. Chiluba anointed his former vice president, Levy Mwanawasa, as his successor, presuming that incriminating secrets would remain concealed.

But the new president, narrowly elected, instead decided to shine a light on public corruption. Mr. Chiluba would soon be charged with stealing $500,000 of public funds. He additionally was sued in a civil action by Zambia’s attorney general, who decided to try the case in Great Britain, where the former president was said to have laundered millions of dollars he plundered while in office.

Testimony in the civil matter was astonishing. Zambia’s anti-corruption task force had seized much of Mr. Chiluba’s wardrobe, including 349 shirts, 206 jackets and suits, and 72 pairs of size-6 shoes, many of them personalized with his initials affixed in brass. The heels added two inches to his stature.

Mr. Chiluba spent more than $500,000 in a single clothing store, Boutique Basile, in Geneva. Its owner testified that garments were sometimes paid for with suitcases full of cash.

“The president,” unlike the emperor, “needs to be clothed,” Justice Peter Smith of the High Court said in 2007, ruling that Mr. Chiluba owed Zambia $57 million. Much of the money, Justice Smith said, had been funneled into an intelligence agency bank account in London “set up primarily to steal government money.” Justice Smith said the former president “should be ashamed,” pointing out that while he was accumulating handmade shoes and silk pajamas, many Zambians “could not afford more than one meal a day.”

Mr. Chiluba, who never appeared in court, refused to recognize Justice Smith’s verdict, calling it “racist” and “obscene.”

The criminal proceedings, held in Lusaka, were less sensational. They dragged on for six years, frequently delayed by Mr. Chiluba’s ill health. The former president denied stealing any public funds, saying instead that he had received millions in gifts from “corporate interests” and “well-wishers” whose identities he would not reveal because of “the golden rule of anonymity.”

In 2009, a magistrate acquitted Mr. Chiluba, ruling that however large his fortune, the money could not be traced to missing government funds. Celebrating the news, the former president said, “The devil has tried to put the stigma of a thief on me, but God has dealt with the devil.”

By then, Levy Mwanawasa had died in office. His successor, Rupiah Banda, has since disbanded much of the nation’s anticorruption apparatus. Mr. Banda has referred to Mr. Chiluba as a “damn good president” and credited him with bringing political freedoms to the country.

Mr. Chiluba will be accorded a state funeral, the government announced. He is survived by his wife, Regina, and, according to local reports, 10 children.

SOURCE

INTERNATIONAL DAY AGAINST DRUG ABUSE AND ILLICIT TRAFFICKING: JUNE 26, 2011

INTERNATIONAL DAY AGAINST DRUG ABUSE AND ILLICT TRAFFICKING

Quick Facts

The United Nations’ (UN) International Day Against Drug Abuse and Illicit Trafficking raise awareness about the dangers of illicit drugs.

Local names

Name	Language
International Day Against Drug Abuse and Illicit Trafficking	English
Día Internacional de la Lucha contra el Uso Indebido y el Tráfico Ilícito de Drogas	Spanish

International Day Against Drug Abuse and Illicit Trafficking 2011

Sunday, June 26, 2011

International Day Against Drug Abuse and Illicit Trafficking 2012

Tuesday, June 26, 2012
List of dates for other years

The United Nations’ (UN) International Day Against Drug Abuse and Illicit Trafficking falls on June 26 each year to raise awareness of the major problem that illicit drugs represent to society. This day is supported by individuals, communities and various organizations all over the world.

This photo is used for illustrative purposes only. It does not imply the attitudes, behaviour or actions of the model in this photo. ©iStockphoto.com/Robert Back

What do people do?

The UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) has, over the years, been actively involved in launching campaigns to mobilize support for drug control. The UNODC often teams up with other organizations and encourages people in society to actively take part in these campaigns.

Governments, organizations and individuals in many countries, including Vietnam, Borneo and Thailand, have actively participated in promotional events and larger scale activities, such as public rallies and mass media involvement, to promote the awareness of dangers associated with illicit drugs.

Public life

The International Day Against Drug Abuse and Illicit Trafficking is a global observance and not a public holiday.

Background

According to the UNODC, nearly 200 million people are using illicit drugs such as cocaine, cannabis, hallucinogens, opiates and sedative hypnotics worldwide. In December 1987 the UN General Assembly decided to observe June 26 as the International Day against Drug Abuse and Illicit Trafficking. The UN was determined to help create an international society free of drug abuse. This resolution recommended further action with regard to the report and conclusions of the 1987 International Conference on Drug Abuse and Illicit Trafficking.

Following the resolution, the years 1991 to 2000 were heralded as the “United Nations Decade Against Drug Abuse”. In 1998 the UN General Assembly adopted a political declaration to address the global drug problem. The declaration expresses UN members’ commitment to fighting the problem.

Symbols

The United Nations’ logo is often associated with marketing and promotional material for this event. It features a projection of a world map (less Antarctica) centered on the North Pole, enclosed by olive branches. The olive branches are a symbol for peace, and the world map represents all the people of the world. It has been featured in colors such as white against a blue background or gold against a light purple background.

International Day Against Drug Abuse and Illicit Trafficking Observances

Weekday	Date	Year	Name	Holiday type	Where it is observed
Sun	Jun 26	1988	International Day Against Drug Abuse and Illicit Trafficking	United Nation day
Mon	Jun 26	1989	International Day Against Drug Abuse and Illicit Trafficking	United Nation day
Tue	Jun 26	1990	International Day Against Drug Abuse and Illicit Trafficking	United Nation day
Wed	Jun 26	1991	International Day Against Drug Abuse and Illicit Trafficking	United Nation day
Fri	Jun 26	1992	International Day Against Drug Abuse and Illicit Trafficking	United Nation day
Sat	Jun 26	1993	International Day Against Drug Abuse and Illicit Trafficking	United Nation day
Sun	Jun 26	1994	International Day Against Drug Abuse and Illicit Trafficking	United Nation day
Mon	Jun 26	1995	International Day Against Drug Abuse and Illicit Trafficking	United Nation day
Wed	Jun 26	1996	International Day Against Drug Abuse and Illicit Trafficking	United Nation day
Thu	Jun 26	1997	International Day Against Drug Abuse and Illicit Trafficking	United Nation day
Fri	Jun 26	1998	International Day Against Drug Abuse and Illicit Trafficking	United Nation day
Sat	Jun 26	1999	International Day Against Drug Abuse and Illicit Trafficking	United Nation day
Mon	Jun 26	2000	International Day Against Drug Abuse and Illicit Trafficking	United Nation day
Tue	Jun 26	2001	International Day Against Drug Abuse and Illicit Trafficking	United Nation day
Wed	Jun 26	2002	International Day Against Drug Abuse and Illicit Trafficking	United Nation day
Thu	Jun 26	2003	International Day Against Drug Abuse and Illicit Trafficking	United Nation day
Sat	Jun 26	2004	International Day Against Drug Abuse and Illicit Trafficking	United Nation day
Sun	Jun 26	2005	International Day Against Drug Abuse and Illicit Trafficking	United Nation day
Mon	Jun 26	2006	International Day Against Drug Abuse and Illicit Trafficking	United Nation day
Tue	Jun 26	2007	International Day Against Drug Abuse and Illicit Trafficking	United Nation day
Thu	Jun 26	2008	International Day Against Drug Abuse and Illicit Trafficking	United Nation day
Fri	Jun 26	2009	International Day Against Drug Abuse and Illicit Trafficking	United Nation day
Sat	Jun 26	2010	International Day Against Drug Abuse and Illicit Trafficking	United Nation day
Sun	Jun 26	2011	International Day Against Drug Abuse and Illicit Trafficking	United Nation day
Tue	Jun 26	2012	International Day Against Drug Abuse and Illicit Trafficking	United Nation day
Wed	Jun 26	2013	International Day Against Drug Abuse and Illicit Trafficking	United Nation day
Thu	Jun 26	2014	International Day Against Drug Abuse and Illicit Trafficking	United Nation day
Fri	Jun 26	2015	International Day Against Drug Abuse and Illicit Trafficking	United Nation day

SOURCE

UNITED NATIONS PUBLIC SERVICE DAY: JUNE 23, 2011

PUBLIC SERVICE DAY

Quick Facts

The United Nations’ Public Service Day celebrates the idea that democracy and successful governance depend on a competent civil service.

Local names

Name	Language
Public Service Day	English
Día de las Naciones Unidas para la Administración Pública	Spanish

Public Service Day 2011

Thursday, June 23, 2011

Public Service Day 2012

Saturday, June 23, 2012
List of dates for other years

The United Nations’ Public Service Day is held on June 23 each year. It recognizes that democracy and successful governance are built on the foundation of a competent civil service. The day aims to celebrate the value and virtue of service to the community.

Public servants are recognized and praised for their efforts on Public Service Day. ©iStockphoto.com/Jacob Wackerhausen

What do people do?

The United Nations (UN) holds a Public Service Awards ceremony each year. It rewards the creative achievements and contributions of public service institutions worldwide. This event promotes the role, professionalism and visibility of public service. At the same time, Africa Public Service Day is celebrated in Africa to coincide with the United Nations Public Service Day.

Many public service organizations and departments around the world celebrate this day by holding various events to recognize the valuable role that public servants play in making improvements in society. Activities include: information days featuring stalls and booths about the public service; organized lunches with guest speakers; internal awards ceremonies within public service agencies or departments; and special announcements to honor public servants.

Public life

Public Service Day is a global observance and not a public holiday.

Background

On December 20, 2002, the United Nations General Assembly designated June 23 of each year as United Nations Public Service Day (resolution 57/277). It encouraged member states to organize special events on that day to highlight the contribution of public service in the development process.

This day was created to: celebrate the value and virtue of public service to the community; highlight the contribution of public service in the development process; recognize the work of public servants; and encourage young people to pursue careers in the public sector.

Symbols

The United Nations Public Administration Network (UNPAN) uses a special logo for Public Service Day. It features two columns, one on the left side and one on the right side, and in between are a pair of hands outlined in orange in a flame-like manner. These hands surround three blue human figures. The figure in the middle depicts a woman and the two other figures, one on each side of the woman, are male. The word “Public”, which joins the two columns, is written above the heads of the figures, which are standing on or supported by the word “Service” in capital letters, which joins the two columns. A smaller version of UNPAN’s main logo is located above the word “Public”.

UNPAN’s main logo, in blue and white, is similar to the logo on the UN flag. It features a projection of a world map (less Antarctica) centered on the North Pole, enclosed by olive branches. The olive branches are a symbol for peace, and the world map represents all the people of the world.

Public Service Day Observances

Weekday	Date	Year	Name	Holiday type	Where it is observed
Mon	Jun 23	2003	Public Service Day	United Nation day
Wed	Jun 23	2004	Public Service Day	United Nation day
Thu	Jun 23	2005	Public Service Day	United Nation day
Fri	Jun 23	2006	Public Service Day	United Nation day
Sat	Jun 23	2007	Public Service Day	United Nation day
Mon	Jun 23	2008	Public Service Day	United Nation day
Tue	Jun 23	2009	Public Service Day	United Nation day
Wed	Jun 23	2010	Public Service Day	United Nation day
Thu	Jun 23	2011	Public Service Day	United Nation day
Sat	Jun 23	2012	Public Service Day	United Nation day
Sun	Jun 23	2013	Public Service Day	United Nation day
Mon	Jun 23	2014	Public Service Day	United Nation day
Tue	Jun 23	2015	Public Service Day	United Nation day

SOURCE

SKYWATCH: NEAR-EARTH ASTEROID MONDAY, KUIPER BELT AT HOME, AND MORE

News Observing Photo Gallery Magazine Archive Shop at Sky

News

Ice Hunters 2011 and the New Horizons Mission

Bulletin at a Glance News Observing This Week’s Sky at a Glance Community

Icehunters: Crowdsourcing the Kuiper Belt

June 24, 2011 | In the latest citizen science project, you can help NASA hunt new objects in the Kuiper Belt — and perhaps even steer the New Horizons probe toward your lucky find. > read more

Three Great Old Magazines on DVD

June 21, 2011 | The complete collections of The Sky, The Telescope, and Night Sky magazines are now available as DVD-ROMs. > read more

The Star That Changed Our Universe

June 23, 2011 | Modern observers have revisited a dim variable star in the Andromeda Galaxy whose discovery in 1923 rocked the astronomical world. > read more

A Comet Worth Waiting For?

June 16, 2011 | Observers using the automated Pan-STARRS 1 telescope in Hawaii have found a new comet. As of right now, it might brighten to 1st magnitude in early 2013, but it’s far too early to be certain of that. > read more

Odd Couple: Phobos and Jupiter

June 22, 2011 | Recently two very different bodies made a joint appearance, as viewed by the stereo camera aboard the European orbiter Mars Express. > read more

Sky & Telescope August 2011

June 13, 2011 | Sky & Telescope‘s August 2011 issue is now available to digital subscribers. > read more

Observing

Peter Birtwhistle / Great Shefford Obs.

Asteroid To Buzz Earth Monday, June 27th

June 23, 2011 | Asteroid 2011 MD is expected to pass less than 8,000 miles above Earth’s surface around 1 p.m. EDT (17:00 UT) on Monday. > read more

Supernova Erupts in Whirlpool Galaxy

June 3, 2011 | Supernova 2011dh in M51 seems just past its peak at around magnitude 12.7. With the Moon now gone from the evening sky, the next clear nights are your best chance. It should be visible through an 8-inch telescope in any but the worst skies. > read more

Tour June’s Sky by Eye and Ear!

May 31, 2011 | Saturn stands nearly motionless in Virgo all month, as other zodiacal constellations parade to its left and right on these early summer evenings. > read more

Interactive Sky Chart is Unavailable

June 3, 2011 | Our popular Interactive Sky Chart will be unavailable for an indeterminate period. > read more

Saturn’s New Bright Storm

December 27, 2010 | A massive new storm in the ringed planet’s northern hemisphere is bright enough to see in small telescopes. > read more

This Week’s Sky at a Glance

Sky & Telescope diagram

This Week’s Sky at a Glance

June 24, 2011 | The supernova in the Whirlpool Galaxy is peaking at magnitude 12.6. Saturn and Porrima are pulling apart after dusk. And a tiny asteroid skims right by Earth. > read more

Community

Laurentiu Alimpie

June 15th Lunar Eclipse Observed

June 18, 2011 | Many people in the Eastern Hemisphere enjoyed a long, satisfying, and extraordinarily dark lunar eclipse on June 15, 2011. > read more

Is Asteroid 2011 MD Space Junk?

June 24, 2011 | It’s quite possible that the “asteroid:” that will buzz Earth on Monday is actually the upper stage of a rocket. > read more

Let the Star Parties Begin!

April 14, 2011 | Want to gaze at the Milky Way all night or peer into the eyepiece of a 12-foot-tall telescope? Then escape the city lights and head for the nearest “star party.” > read more

COLORLINES: WAL-MART VS. WOMEN OF COLOR

June 23, 2011 Colorlines.com Direct | Published by the Applied Research Center Wal-Mart Gets a Free Pass For Bias From the Supreme Court Even when bias is unconscious, Rinku Sen writes, the result is the same. Remedies have to be intentional; discrimination doesn’t just check itself. Also: Wal-Mart and the Supreme Court v. Women of Color Top Songs on Our Colorlines.com Summertime Soundtrack The Colorlines.com team brings you a list of songs to help get your summer started off right. Urban Foodies Look to Their Past and Find Recipes for Healthy Futures Rae Gomes spends time with food revolutionaries in immigrant neighborhoods that are reclaiming the healthy foods of their ancestors. Also: Check out more food stories in Colorlines’ “How We Eat” series Jose Antonio Vargas Came Out as Undocumented, NOT “Illegal” So why do so many of his journalism colleagues still insist on using the slur to describe him. Monica Novoa explains why it is long past time for news media to Drop the I-Word. Disaster Capitalism in Haiti Leaves Displaced With Few Good Choices Isabel Macdonald’s dispatch from Port-au-Prince. Evaluating the Drug War on Its 40th Birthday, by the Numbers Forty years and $1 trillion in, the war on drugs hasn’t worked—unless locking up a massive number of black and brown people was the plan all along. An Open Address to 2011 Graduates: It’s OK to Follow, Say No and Get Hurt Go forth as joiners, says Rinku Sen, with the clarity that lets you say no on the way to yes, and with an open heart. Midwest Rappers Show Love for Their Indigenous Ojibwe Language Point of Contact is a hip-hop group based in Southside Minneapolis. And they’re slowly trying to revive their indigenous language.     COLUMNS Dispatches Movement Notes Global Justice Gender Matters HOT TOPICS Rihanna’s “Man Down” HIV/AIDS at 30 ACTION CELEBRATE LOVE Colorlines.com on Facebook and Twitter Colorlines.com is published by the Applied Research Center   Take the Colorlines.com Reader Survey–and Get Kamau Bell’s Comedy Album In just 5-7 minutes, you can help Colorlines.com continue to improve. Your free gift for completing the survey is a download of the hilarious, award-winning album “Face Full of Flour” by W. Kamau Bell.

WILL LATINO GANG ARRESTS DEEPEN BLACK-BROWN DIVIDE?

The numerous hate crimes over the decades that have occurred due to racist Latino gangs against Blacks has created a wide chasm of fear and distrust between Blacks and Latinos.

The following article by Earl Ofari Hutchinson addresses how this divide has escalated from the enmity between Latino and Black prison gangs, to the gang members who seek to drive Blacks from neighborhoods they have lived in all their lives, and how “the hatred that was learned in the streets, reinforced in the jails and prisons, explodes into violence against blacks in the streets especially if there’s the perception that blacks pose a threat to their lucrative racket and drug trade in poor communities.”

***********************************************************************************

Will Latino Gang Arrests Deepen Black-Brown Divide?

By Earl Ofari Hutchinson8:20 AM on 06/08/2011

Law enforcement detains a suspected member of a Azusa, Calif. gang following an early-morning raid, at the at Irwindale Speedway in Irwindale, Calif., Tuesday, June 7, 2011. (AP Photo/Jason Redmond)

I could almost set my clock to it. The “it” was a call I’d get from an anguished African-American parent every several months pleading with me and other writers and activists in Los Angeles that speak out against crime, gang and police violence to take action after they, a black neighborhood or one of their children was physically or verbally assaulted and harassed by Latino gang members.In some cases, the attacks were not simply verbal or physical assaults but murders. We held press conferences, candle light vigils, and even marches for the victims, and challenged city and federal officials to take action. The action the parents and neighbors demanded was gang crackdowns, sweeps and prosecutions.

Federal and local law enforcement officials moved cautiously at first but in 2009, federal prosecutors brought drug, murder and racketeering charges against the violent Latino street gang, The Avenues, whose sworn mission was to drive blacks out of one South Central Los Angeles neighborhood.

The charges were announced with much media fanfare, but it did not stop the attacks and harassment. Black families fled their homes in terror in several other neighborhoods in and around Los Angeles. In each case, the alleged perpetrators of the terror attacks and vandalism were Latino gang members.

The recent bust of a Latino gang in the Los Angeles bedroom community of Azusa pretty much follows the same pattern. A violent Latino gang has a long and sordid history of harassing, assaulting, and terrorizing blacks in that community. And after loud protests from black groups, federal officials finally hit back with sweeps and arrests. But will it also be a repeat of the pattern of the past? That is a big gang sweep, arrests, lots of media attention, but racial attacks and tension continue. That’s tough to answer. The fed action is certainly welcome. But one thing that’s certain, the cause of the violence and the terror by some Latino gangs won’t magically vanish with the fresh round of arrests.

There are several reasons for this less than optimistic view that hate can be arrested away. Much of the hate violence in Los Angeles, which has been well documented by successive annual reports by the Los Angeles County Commission on Human Relations, is no longer white on black, but Latino on black, and to a much less extent black on Latino. That violence is just enough to harden the racial battle lines between some violence prone Latino and black gangs in and around Los Angeles.

This points to yet another problem. And that’s that blacks and Latinos can be racist, maybe even more racist than whites, toward each other. When that racism translates into physical violence whether in the jails or in the streets, the gang targets are almost always the weakest, most vulnerable and innocent. The victims of the Latino gang violence in Azusa, for instance, were either students or home owners. The gang attacks are deliberately designed by the gang hate purveyors to send the message to blacks that, “This is our turf, and you’re an interloper.”

The prisons and jails have also been a virtual perpetual battleground between violent Latino and black gang members. There have been pitched battles at local jails between black and Latino inmates, and police and prison officials have had their hands full trying to maintain order in the jails. They have even resorted in many jail facilities to imposing a rigid system of segregation between black and Latino prisoners.

Any encroachment by an inmate on the other’s “jail turf” will be met with instant attack, and in some cases murder. In Los Angeles County jails, officials have set up special isolation units exclusively to keep Mexican mafia leaders from issuing orders for hits on gang rivals and blacks. In fact, in the federal indictment of the Azusa street gang, the feds alleged that drug proceeds from the neighborhood were funneled to the Mexican Mafia.

Eventually most of these gang members will hit the streets again and when they do in more cases than not the hatred that was learned in the streets, reinforced in the jails and prisons, explodes into violence against blacks in the streets especially if there’s the perception that blacks pose a threat to their lucrative racket and drug trade in poor communities.

The violence is also fueled by the changing racial demographics in many neighborhoods in Southern California and increasingly other parts of the country. Neighborhoods that were once exclusively or predominantly African-American, are they are either now majority Hispanic or they are close to being a majority of the residents. The recent Pew Hispanic Center report confirmed the drastic change in numbers. Hispanics now number more than 50 million in America, and are the fastest growing segment of the American population.

The fed crackdown on the Azusa street gangs by itself won’t stop hate attacks on blacks. But it does stop it cast an ugly glare on the terror of Latino on black hate violence. And that’s a good thing.

SOURCE

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. He is an associate editor of New America Media. He is host of the weekly Hutchinson Report Newsmaker Hour on KTYM Radio Los Angeles streamed on ktym.com podcast on blogtalkradio.com and internet TV broadcast on thehutchinsonreportnews.com Follow Earl Ofari Hutchinson on Twitter: http://twitter.com/earlhutchinson

HATEWATCH: GANG MEMBERS, ASSOCIATES ARRESTED IN RASH OF ANTI-BLACK HATE CRIMES

Five more members of Latino gangs in North County, Calif., have been arrested today in connection with a wave of anti-black hate crimes in California, this time dating back as far as April.

I am sure there are White racists who sit back and watch this carnage unfold, thinking that racist Latino gangs will eventually sweep across the country and do what the KKK, neo-Nazis, White nationalists, Knights of the White Camellia, etc. did not finish–the utter annihilation of Black citizens through ethnic cleansing.

But, not to worry.

Those same gang murderers will destroy the racist Whites, and anyone who gets in their way.

Any racist White who thinks that these murderers will stop only at Black people will be in for a nightmarish rude awakening. Those same murderers who killed Blacks will go for the throats of racist Whites.

Happens all the time when you dig a ditch for someone else to fall into.

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OCEANSIDE: Gang Members, Associates Arrested in Rash of Anti-Black hate Crimes

By BRANDON LOWREY blowrey@nctimes.comNorth County Times | Posted: Tuesday, June 21, 2011 5:00 pm |

Oceanside police have arrested five Latino gang members and associates suspected of a rash of violent hate crimes against blacks in the Crown Heights neighborhood dating back to early April, authorities said Tuesday.

Two of those arrested were documented gang members, while the other three were associates of the same Crown Heights-area gang, said Oceanside police acting Capt. Leonard Mata.

More arrests might be pending, Mata said.

Jesus Palacios, 25, was named in a gang injunction ordered in May 2010. It was not clear which other suspect was a documented gang member.

 

Palacios was arrested on suspicion of attacking a 43-year-old black man on June 3 at Cesar Chavez Park on Division Street, according to the Oceanside police statement.

 

He was booked into the Vista jail Friday on charges of assault with a deadly weapon, committing a violent hate crime, and participation in a gang-related felony. He remained jailed with bail set at $100,000, according to sheriff’s records.

 

Eduardo Lopez, 19, was arrested on suspicion of attacking a 25-year-old black man at Grant and Division streets.

Lopez was booked into Vista jail May 25 on charges of possession of a switchblade knife, trespassing and second-degree robbery. He remained jailed with bail set at $130,000.

Brian Arroyo, 18, and a 17-year-old boy were arrested on suspicion of attacking and robbing a 31-year-old black man. The attack occurred April 4 in the 1200 block of Division Street.

Arroyo was booked into the Vista jail Monday night on charges of robbery, committing a violent hate crime, and assault with a deadly weapon. He remained jailed with bail set at $100,000.

Details about the juvenile were not released.

Jose Garcia, 30, was arrested on suspicion of assaulting a 57-year-old black man in the 200 block of North Tremont Street.

Garcia was booked into Vista jail on May 31 on charges of drug possession, committing a violent hate crime and assault with a deadly weapon. He remained jailed with bail set at $145,000.

Call staff writer Brandon Lowrey at 760-740-3517.​

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