Congratulations to our winner Angela B!!!  She won a pair of tickets to the Super Bowl on Feb. 5 at Lucas Oil Stadium courtesy of Super Bowl Gospel. Thanks to everyone that participated.

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The world body moved the crisis from the top step of a five-point scale – based on the death rate – to the fourth step, formally reducing it from a “famine” to a “humanitarian emergency”.

However, the U.N. said that 2.3 million people remain in a food crisis situation in Somalia and still need assistance. That represents 31 percent of the country’s population. Across the Horn of Africa region the total is 9.5 million who need help.

The international body declared famine in Somalia last July after successive failed rains. Hundreds of thousands of Somalis fled to refugee camps in Kenya, Ethiopia and the Somali capital Mogadishu in search of food.

The famine was exacerbated by the Somali militant group al-Shabab, which has let few aid agencies into the area it controls in south-central Mogadishu.

Jose Graziano da Silva, the director general of the U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization, warned that without assistance in the region over the next three months “those people will not survive.”

“The Horn of Africa will be for FAO the most important region and we’ll be doing our best here to improve food security,” he said. “We do believe it is possible to have a Horn of Africa free of hunger.”

Mark Bowden, the U.N.’s humanitarian coordinator for Somalia, said that a massive increase in assistance last year helped lift Somalia out of famine conditions. But he said the international community needed to keep helping.

“The gains are considerable but they are also very fragile and one of the things I want to highlight is we have a temporary respite in terms of addressing the crisis in Somalia,” Bowden said.

He later added: “The years of conflict and poor rains have left millions of Somalis vulnerable. The mortality rates in southern Somalia are still among the highest in the world.”

The militant group al-Shabab this week banned the international Red Cross from operating in southern Somalia. Bowden said any reduction in assistance “is of critical concern to us,” and he urged all sides of the conflict not to impede humanitarian aid.

The U.N. does not have a death toll from Somalia’s famine and will say only that it knows tens of thousands of people died, mostly between April and September last year. A study will be commissioned to look at the death toll in more detail, one U.N. official said Friday.

Senait Gebregziabher, the head of Oxfam in Somalia, lauded the gains against hunger but said that Somalia “is still in the throes of its worst humanitarian crisis in decades” and said that insecurity is disrupting aid supplies, warning the world not to turn its back on the crisis.

“We are seriously concerned that if people do not have the security to tend their crops and animals, or the freedom to access clean water and food in the markets, the humanitarian situation will deteriorate once again,” Gebregziabher said.

After months without rainfall across the region, the U.N. on July 20 declared several parts of Somalia a famine zone. Exhausted, rail-thin women were stumbling into refugee camps in Kenya and Ethiopia with dead babies and bleeding feet.

The journeys sometimes took weeks, and weaker family members – children and the elderly – were left behind on the way to die alone. The U.N. expanded Somalia’s famine zone a couple weeks later, defined as when two adults or four children per 10,000 people die of hunger each day and a third of children are acutely malnourished.

Aid groups quickly sent in planes and boats full of food, though a critical report written by two prominent aid agencies has found that government and aid groups were much too slow to respond despite early warnings of impending disaster. The crisis was the worse since 1991-92, when hundreds of thousands of Somalis starved to death.

This time, the British government estimates that between 50,000 and 100,000 people died, most of them children. Kenya, Ethiopia and Djibouti were all badly affected, but the famine hit hardest in areas of Somalia suffering from a toxic mixture of drought, war, high taxes levied by armed groups, and rising food prices.

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In the video, he shares his understanding of the plight of everyday Americans and juxtaposes it with emotional — or so he hopes — references to the Civil Rights Movement and slavery and urges Black voters to “keep making history”:

This month we are announcing the 2012 launch of African Americans for Obama. I don’t think there’s a better time than African-American history month to consider the tremendous progress that we’ve made through the sacrifices of so many, or a better time to commit to meeting the very real challenges we face right now.

Every day I think of the generations of African-American men and women who overcame slavery and oppression, risked their own safety to cast a ballot, even gave up their lives to help build a country that lived up to its founding principles. Their extraordinary hope, their unwavering determination changed this country. Their efforts made it possible for somebody like me to be here today.”

Beginning in November, when Obama surprised attendees of the first African-American Policy In Action Leadership Conference, and gaining momentum with the White House release of “The President’s Agenda and the African-American Community,” the president has quietly tried to staunch the flow of resentment that many in the Black community feel for his seemingly blatant lack of disregard for the nearly 16 percent unemployment rate – nearly double the national average — and his continued focus on the middle-class while an estimate 27.4 percent of African-Americans are living below the poverty line.

Still, according to a statement on BarackObama.com, that shouldn’t stop African-Americans from coming out in droves in November in support of the president:

In some ways this election is more important than the last for our community. If we fail to re-elect President Obama, some people will say everything we’ve accomplished since 2008 was a fluke. That’s why we’ve got to speak loudly about his accomplishments and make sure that, throughout the campaign, we’ve got President Obama’s back.”

For many in the African-American community, that decision hinges upon clear evidence that Obama has ours.

To learn more about the campaign, click here.

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Activist Sello Mokhalipi of the Treatment Action Campaign, an organization that advocates for people with HIV/AIDS, said that complaints of the condoms and their defects have been reported.

We had people flocking in, coming to report that the condoms had burst while they were having sex, said Mokhalipi.

In the judicial capital province of Free State, health department spokesperson Jabu Mbalula said that his department recalled all 1,350,000 condoms but urged that there was no need for alarm –although he was unable to quote a direct number of used or recovered condoms.

Mr. Mokhalipi also added that some of the users who complained of the defective and reportedly porous condoms were infected with AIDS and concerned that they may have infected their partners.

We want the department to go out and tell people about these faulty condoms, Mokhalipi said. How can they say people should not panic if there are still clearly people out there in possession of these condoms?

In 2007, 20-million defective condoms were recalled by the government, and the following year, 5-million condoms had to be taken off the market due to faulty manufacturing. In 2009, a reported 5.6-million people were living with AIDS and HIV in South Africa, an infection rate that is more than any other country.

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“It’s probably the most hallowed record out there, as far as I’m concerned, but it’s now in the hands of somebody else,” said Aaron, who retired in 1976. “My hope today…is the achievement of this record will inspire others to chase their own dreams.”

Aaron congratulates Barry Bonds:

Aaron – born Henry Louis Aaron in Mobile, AL – knows plenty about dreams. He quit high school in 1951 to play for the Indianapolis Clowns in the Negro League. He started in the major league’s in 1954. He broke Babe Ruth’s record in 1974.

“I thought, we’ve come along way baby,” Aaron said in an interview regarding breaking’s Ruth’s record, “From Mobile, Ala., to breaking the most prestigious record in baseball. I feel very proud of myself like I had shown everybody that I could play major league baseball.”

Breaking Ruth’s record not only showed the world that Aaron could play major league baseball, but it was another signpost of what would become African-Americans’ domination of professional sports.

Aaron on breaking Ruth’s record:

A few notable achievements:
• Aaron made the All-Star team every year from 1955 until 1975.
• Won three Gold Glove Awards.
• Won the National League Most Valuable Player Award in 1957

Read Aaron’s bio here.

Read Newsone’s black 3,000 hitmakers. Read the full story.

James Langston Hughes was born February 1, 1902, in Joplin, Missouri. His parents divorced when he was a small child, and his father moved to Mexico. His grandmother raised him until he was thirteen, when he moved to Lincoln, Illinois, to live with his mother and her husband, before the family eventually settled in Cleveland, Ohio. It was in Lincoln, Illinois, that Hughes began writing poetry. Following graduation, he spent a year in Mexico and a year at Columbia University. During these years, he held odd jobs as an assistant cook, launderer, and a busboy, and traveled to Africa and Europe working as a seaman. In November 1924, he moved to Washington, D.C. Hughes’s first book of poetry, The Weary Blues, was published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1926. He finished his college education at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania three years later. In 1930 his first novel, Not Without Laughter, won the Harmon gold medal for literature.

Hughes, who claimed Paul Lawrence Dunbar, Carl Sandburg, and Walt Whitman as his primary influences, is particularly known for his insightful, colorful portrayals of black life in America from the twenties through the sixties. He wrote novels, short stories and plays, as well as poetry, and is also known for his engagement with the world of jazz and the influence it had on his writing, as in Montage of a Dream Deferred. His life and work were enormously important in shaping the artistic contributions of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. Unlike other notable black poets of the period—Claude McKay, Jean Toomer, and Countee Cullen, Hughes refused to differentiate between his personal experience and the common experience of black America. He wanted to tell the stories of his people in ways that reflected their actual culture, including both their suffering and their love of music, laughter, and language itself.

Langston Hughes died of complications from prostate cancer in May 22, 1967, in New York. In his memory, his residence at 20 East 127th Street in Harlem, New York City, has been given landmark status by the New York City Preservation Commission, and East 127th Street has been renamed “Langston Hughes Place.”

In addition to leaving us a large body of poetic work, Hughes wrote eleven plays and countless works of prose, including the well-known “Simple” books: Simple Speaks His Mind, Simple Stakes a Claim, Simple Takes a Wife, and Simple’s Uncle Sam. He edited the anthologies The Poetry of the Negro and The Book of Negro Folklore, wrote an acclaimed autobiography, The Big Sea and co-wrote the play Mule Bone with Zora Neale Hurston.

A Selected Bibliography

Poetry

Ask Your Mama: 12 Moods for Jazz (1961)
Collected Poems of Langston Hughes (1994)
Dear Lovely Death (1931)
Fields of Wonder (1947)
Fine Clothes to the Jew (1927)
Freedom’s Plow (1943)
Montage of a Dream Deferred (1951)
One-Way Ticket (1949)
Scottsboro Limited (1932)
Selected Poems (1959)
Shakespeare in Harlem (1942)
The Dream Keeper and Other Poems (1932)
The Panther and the Lash: Poems of Our Times (1967)
The Weary Blues (1926)

Prose

Good Morning, Revolution: Uncollected Social Protest Writings by Langston Hughes (1973)
I Wonder as I Wander (1956)
Laughing to Keep From Crying (1952)
Not Without Laughter (1930)
Remember Me to Harlem: The Letters of Langston Hughes and Carl Van Vechten, 1925-1964 (2001)
Simple Speaks His Mind (1950)
Simple Stakes a Claim (1957)
Simple Takes a Wife (1953)
Simple’s Uncle Sam (1965)
Something in Common and Other Stories (1963)
Tambourines to Glory (1958)
The Arna Bontemps-Langston Hughes Letters (1980)
The Big Sea (1940)
The Langston Hughes Reader (1958)
The Ways of White Folks (1934)

Drama

Black Nativity (1961)
Collected Works of Langston Hughes, vol. 5: The Plays to 1942: Mulatto to The Sun Do Move (2000)
Don’t You Want to Be Free? (1938)
Five Plays by Langston Hughes (1963)
Little Ham (1935)
Mulatto (1935)
Mule Bone (1930)
Simply Heavenly (1957)
Soul Gone Home (1937)
The Political Plays of Langston Hughes (2000)

Poetry in Translation

Cuba Libre (1948)
Gypsy Ballads (1951)
Selected Poems of Gabriela Mistral (1957)

Translation

Masters of the Dew (1947)

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In an interview with The Associated Press, Michel Martelly pledged to respect the independence of the judge expected to rule within days whether Duvalier should face trial on corruption and human rights violations. Duvalier was driven into exile in 1986 and returned to Haiti a year ago.

But Martelly suggested he has little appetite for a trial that could be explosive for the Caribbean nation, recovering from decades of political turmoil and a devastating earthquake two years ago.

“My way of thinking is to create a situation where we rally everyone together and create peace and pardon people, to not forget about the past – because we need to learn from it – but to mainly think about the future,” he said, adding: “You cannot forget those who suffered in that time, but I do believe that we need that reconciliation in Haiti.”

Duvalier assumed power in 1971 at age 19 following the death of his notorious father, Francois “Papa Doc” Duvalier. The two presided over a dark period in which their private militia of thugs in sunglasses, known as the Tonton Macoute, tortured and killed opponents. The younger Duvalier has been accused of stealing millions of dollars from public funds; he denies the accusations.

Martelly said any decision on a possible pardon would come only with “a consensus among all leaders, all political parties.”

Martelly also pledged to build a new Haitian security force to maintain order without the U.N. peacekeepers – about 11,000 foreign military and police officers have patrolled Haiti since 2004. They have recently come under fire for allegations of sexual abuse and suspicion of being the source of a cholera outbreak that has killed nearly 7,000 people and sickened a half-million.

The president refused to blame the United Nations for the problems, saying individual troops should be held accountable for their own misdeeds. But he said he will replace the peacekeepers with a Haitian security force that will create jobs for 3,000-5,000 Haitian youths and help Haiti become self-sustaining.

Martelly said he’ll need foreign cooperation to fund and train the security force, but pledged to have it at least partially in place by the end of his term in 2016. He has run into opposition from donor countries that criticized earlier pledges to build a new Haitian army – disbanded in disgrace in 1995 – and he acknowledged Thursday that a new army wasn’t realistic.

He refused to put a time frame on an exit for the peacekeepers.

“We are working with them to establish a calendar where they can retreat,” he said. “I don’t want to force the peacekeeping nations to feel like I’m pushing them out.”

The Haitian president spoke on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum, an annual gathering of global power brokers at the Swiss ski resort of Davos, where he came to meet with potential investors.

Martelly, a popular musician sworn in as president in May, said he has already provided new homes to thousands of earthquake refugees, sent nearly 1 million more children to free schools and made progress on rebuilding the airport and the ports. Investment, he said, is booming.

His main priority, he said, is to create jobs so Haiti can support itself without being dependent on foreign aid.

“The Haiti that has been waiting for help and not moving no longer exists,” he said. “Enough handouts; we need hands up. Enough aid; we need trade.”

Part of that mission will involve helping Haitians to take over the earthquake reconstruction work, which has been dominated by foreigners working for non-governmental organizations.

“When I came in, Haiti was not governed by Haitians anymore. Probably mostly by NGOs. And that has done what to Haiti? It has weakened our institutions,” he said. “We need to focus on the plan that Haiti has today. We have a plan. When we want to go somewhere we are going to have them accompany us. … We need to organize and better use that aid.

A key part of that will be drawing home well-educated Haitians who have abandoned their country amid corruption and lack of opportunity. This week the foreign affairs minister in Paris appealed to Haitians abroad to return.

“The diaspora will be put back to work. We need them,” Martelly said.

But he said he wouldn’t be offering them specific incentives: “It’s not we have anything to offer. They need to have something to offer too. They need to come back and understand that Haiti is their country. By going away…” He broke off and sighed.

“Don’t they always come back?”

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Taylor has been charged with murder, rape and using child soldiers by the Special Court Of Sierra Leone. A former military commander of Taylor also accused him of forcing his soldiers to use cannibalism to terrorize his enemies.

The BBC reports:

Rumors of CIA ties were fueled in July 2009 when Mr Taylor himself told his trial, at the UN-backed Special Court for Sierra Leone in the Hague, that US agents had helped him escape from a maximum security prison in Boston in 1985.

The CIA at the time denied such claims as “completely absurd”.

But now the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Pentagon’s spy arm, has disclosed that its agents – and those of the CIA – did later use Mr Taylor as an informant, the Globe reports.

Read More At The BBC

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