Al-Awda: Third International Convention in Los Angeles
Empowering the Palestine Right to Return Movement
Fri-Sun, April 15-17
UCLA Campus, Los Angeles

Confirmed and invited speakers include a representative from Ein el-Hilweh refugee camp in Lebanon, representatives from Addameer Prisoner Solidarity Group in Ramallah, and numerous individuals with expertise and experiences in the Palestinian struggle and Right to Return.

Purchase tickets from ANSWER LA, 323-464-1636 or online. And here’s the program

Forum on Lebanon, Syria & U.S. Intervention in the Middle East
Tues, April 19, 7:00 pm
ANSWER LA office
1800 Argyle Ave, #410

Featuring: Jaber Suleiman, co-founder of Aidoun (Returnees) Group in Lebanon and Syria

Jaber Suleiman is a Palestinian refugee who lives in Ein el-Hilweh, Lebanon. He has been engaged in the Palestinian struggle in Lebanon for many years. He was a researcher and writer with the Palestinian Planning Center in Beirut, Lebanon through the seventies and eighties. Suleiman has been with the international coalition for the Right of Return since its founding.

Rex Weyler, Co-founder Of Greenpeace International speaks on “Sustaining Activism”
Wed., April 20, 2005, 7 pm 
Sponsored by Los Angeles Greens
Peace Center
8124 W. 3rd St. (near Crescent Heights)

Rex Weyler, author of the newly published Greenpeace: How a Group of Ecologists, Journalists and Visionaries Changed the World, will speak about sustaining our commitment to the Earth, organizing and staying active. He will share lessons he learned from his experience with Greenpeace, how he dealt with a variety of views and internal struggles, and how we can engage the public and media in the defense of our fragile ecology.

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It happened too much and in too many places for it to be mere isolated instances of rogue priests.In my view, it’s systemic. Something is rotten to the core. 

Sex-abuse scandals have taken their toll on the Catholic Church from Canada to Australia. But nowhere has been harder hit than Ireland, which specialised in exporting priests worldwide until the 1980s.

The church’s moral standing, Mass attendance and enrolments to the priesthood have plummeted in Ireland since 1994, when the first major scandal involving a paedophile priest triggered the collapse of the government of then-Prime Minister Albert Reynolds.

Since then, both church and state have struggled to come to terms with the scale of abuse being committed by parish priests and in church-run schools, orphanages and workhouses.

From Arianna (emphasis added)

Over 11,000 children were sexually abused and close to $1 billion in settlement money has been paid out, but the pope did not go much beyond decrying “the sins of some of our brothers.” He never met with any victims, he never offered practical solutions to dealing with the problem, he never addressed the decades-long cover-up of the abuse. He even rejected a “zero tolerance” policy calling for the immediate removal of molester-priests, concerned that it was too harsh.

Too harsh?! This is a man who wouldn’t allow a priest to become a bishop unless he was unequivocally opposed to masturbation, premarital sex and condoms. So, in his perversion pecking order, you had to be dead-set against “self-love” but when it came to buggering little kids, there was some wiggle room.

Victims of priest win $1.9 million in punitive damages, the first time such damages have been awarded in California. 

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Johnnie Johnson, the pianist who gave Chuck Berry his first break and who Berry wrote ‘Johnnie B. Goode’ about, has died at age 80.

One of Berry’s best-known songs, “Johnny B. Goode,” was written as a salute to Johnson, whose dynamic keyboard work often played equal partner on recordings with Berry’s stinging guitar licks.

“When I heard he’d died, I put on the record of ‘Sweet Little Sixteen,’ and when I listened to his solo, I just began to weep,” Chicago-bred keyboardist Barry Goldberg, a prominent blues-rock player since the 1960s, said Wednesday. “What he did was so mind-blowing for that time.”

Goldberg continued: “Johnnie incorporated the boogie-woogie style into rock ‘n’ roll. He had all those percussive licks and he did that slide thing [up and down the keyboard]. The combination was really amazing.”

Another pioneer was Bo Diddley, I mean, people like Chuck Berry and Jerry Lee and Bo, invented rock and roll out of what they knew. Go back and listen to Bo Diddley. His backing musicians included some of the best Chicago bluesmen around. He was a bluesman, we just didn’t know it. And Johnnie Johnson briought boogie-woogie to the then emerging genre of rock and roll.

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