Baltimore, Oct. 1, 2014….A major conference bringing together leaders in the fields of health care, law and social services will kick off a national campaign against human trafficking which has been described as a “horrible form of modern day slavery.”

The summer of 2014 was a summer of protest: African-Americans took to the streets with a simple but ambitious demand: “Treat us like human beings.”
NEW YORK, United States, Monday September 29, 2014, CMC – Cuba’s Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez Parrilla has called for “profound reform” of the United Nations, starting with the 15-member Security Council, saying that the Secretary-General should be “an advocator and guarantor of international peace and security.”
As governments and the civil society movement prepare for a major conference on reparations in idyllic Antigua next month, the Jamaicans have not surprisingly fired the first salvo in the battle over the amount that nations such as Britain would have to pay for their role in the brutal trans-Atlantic slave trade.

Profiteers and their political allies don’t give up the ship without mobilizing all their resources for the fight. They will grant small concessions, window dress their past practice, even invite their most intransigent enemies into the tent, but they will not change unless a political force emerges that compels them to do so.

Above: Tear gas rains down on a woman kneeling in the street after a demonstration in Ferguson on August 17.

People protested. People marched. A good cop who blew the whistle ended up thrown in a mental hospital. Mayor Bloomberg refused to back down. Civil liberties and civil rights groups filed a lawsuit. The stop-and-frisk numbers started falling, finally, while the lawsuit moved forward. The judge then ruled the program unconstitutional. The next mayoral campaign turned on one candidate’s vocal rejection of stop-and-frisk. The good guys won. Don’t ever let anyone tell you that activism doesn’t matter.
Americans are so accustomed to speaking about civil rights as an historical era

General view of the Island of Gorée, Senegal, which was from the 15th to the 19th century, the largest slave-trading centre on the African coast.
Ferguson Police Chief Tom Jackson on Thursday issued a video apology to the family of Michael Brown…

First shipment of the ramped-up U.S. military response to Ebola arriving in Liberia. (Credit: US Army Africa/CC-BY-2.0)