be just

My Name Is Ed. I’m a Racist : Information Clearing House - ICH : "In my first 14 years of school I had only two black classmates; despite over 18 years of schooling I never had a black teacher. I was 19 before I had a personal conversation with a black person. My early college days were spent in a lovely ivy enclave set off by walls and rent-a-cops from the black and brown ghetto at its gate. Demoralized by the irrelevance of my courses, I dropped out. Thanks not only to family connections, but also to the sixties building boom in my hometown, I could work construction. In Syracuse’s 15th Ward, “urban renewal” drove thousands of blacks out of what was becoming prime real estate. The forced relocation demolished a vibrant black ghetto. Despite that boom, few blacks could break into the construction trades; there wasn’t a single black in our union local. None of us challenged the arrangement. Forty-five years later not much has changed here: few black contractors can bid on even...

The Daily Star - Politics - Somali forces 'inefficient' and 'corrupt' - UN NAIROBI: Despite international assistance the Somali government’s military forces are ineffective and corrupt, and it remains dependent on foreign troops for survival, a UN group concluded in a report. “Despite infusions of foreign training and assistance, government security forces remain ineffective, disorganized and corrupt,” the UN’s Monitoring Group on Somalia said in a report to be presented to the Security Council this week. Somalia’s internationally backed Transitional Federal Government has been boxed into a tiny perimeter in the capital Mogadishu by an insurgency launched in May 2009 by the Al-Qaeda-inspired Al-Shabaab group and its more political Hizbul-Islam allies.