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February 22 - February 28, 2010 • MN Metro Vol. 36 No. 8 • The Journal For Community News, Business & The Arts • www.insightnews.com
Artspeak:
Education is the gift that keeps on giving By Irma McClaurin, PhD Today’s youth are bombarded by technology. They consider YouTube a primary news source. And, they are exposed to violence (up close and/or via the media) at unprecedented levels. Black History month provides an opportunity to share knowledge with today’s youth which, hopefully, will provoke them to reflect, remember, and reconsider. They are, after all, our future, our tomorrow, our leaders and our visionaries. I dedicate this column to Nokomis Montessori Magnet School of St. Paul who invited me to share my thoughts during
Q and A with Minnesota gubernatorial candidates
Tom Foley
Irma McClaurin, PhD
Black History Month. Dear Nokomis Montessori Magnet School students, You are too young, and perhaps you have not read
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Metro State student
Yia Lo honored for academic achievements A Ham Lake man who has long been a Hmong community activist has been selected an outstanding student at Metropolitan State University. Yia Lor, chosen as fall semester outstanding graduate student in the university’s College of Management, was among 920 students receiving bachelor’s and master’s degrees during Metropolitan State’s 95th commencement exercises on December 15. “I’m honored and humbled by my selection,” said Lor, who was selected student commencement speaker. He earned a Master of Public and Nonprofit Administration. For the past six years, Lor has been an academic advisor for the TRiO Educational Talent Search, a national nonprofit that promotes higher education to middle- and high school students. Lor assists more
Aviation website explores chapter in American History
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Yia Lo
than 200 students. Lor’s long history of helping the Hmong community is inspired by the eight years he and his Laotian family spent in a Thailand refugee camp. “I witnessed a lot of
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Black leaders finally meet
with Obama on jobs By Pharoh Martin NNPA National Correspondent WASHINGTON (NNPA) - Civil rights leaders met with President Barack Obama last week to discuss the president’s jobs strategy and to voice their concerns about the disproportionate effect of the jobs crisis on the African American community. Even while the federal government was officially shut down due to the severe snow storm that was incapacitating the Washington, D.C. area, the president still welcomed the Rev. Al Sharpton, NAACP President Benjamin Jealous and National Urban League President Marc Morial into the Oval Office for their first formal meeting since Obama became the country’s first Black president. “The assumption is that because the president is AfricanAmerican he should be up for representing African American interests,” Sharpton said. “That’s like saying because you’re from the labor union you should represent labor interests.” Described as a “very candid
Suluki Fardan
B. Smith
Metropolitan State University
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Brand excellence By Al McFarlane and B.P. Ford, The Editors B. Smith personifies gracious persistence, elegant relentlessness and unbending intent. She has created herself as a national consumer brand that is synonymous with beautiful, sensible style. She was in the Twin Cities last week to keynote the annual Black History Month program put on by the Black Leadership
Network at SuperValu, the nation’s leading grocery retailer and wholesaler which is based here. A native of Pennsylvania, PA, B. (Barbara) Smith began her career as a fashion model. She shattered the beauty industry’s color barrier by appearing on the cover of Mademoiselle in July 1976. She has been on the cover of 15 magazines and now can be seen on Betty Crocker and Pillsbury products, in Mercedes-Benz TV commercials, and as spokesperson
for Colgate Palmolive Oxy products. She told the attentive SuperValu employee group that she was the product of a military household that placed a high premium on education and accomplishment. When she decided she wanted to go to a modeling school, her father wouldn’t hear it. It took repackaging the idea to make it pass muster, be acceptable to her goal-focused dad.
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Obama, rights leaders discuss jobs
New film star Nate Parker: the next Denzel Washington
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By Hazel Trice Edney NNPA Editor-in-Chief Part 1 in a series
President Barack Obama and open” dialog, the leaders met for more than an hour exploring a framework for reducing the excessive job loss numbers in the nation’s inner-cities, according to a telephone conference with reporters after the meeting. “Our meeting with the president was a positive conversation,” Morial said. “We support very strongly the president’s 2010 focus on jobs and job creation. We certainly share with him the great challenges that our communities are facing as the
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PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti (NNPA) - A traffic jam in the streets of Downtown Port-au-Prince makes it barely impossible to navigate the van from block to block. People walk along the edges of the streets, seemingly defying the moving vehicles only inches away. Some sit on chairs or upside down buckets on the sidewalk, selling goods or cooking in large pots. Others - in sweltering 90-degree temperatures - balance large baskets and bundles on their heads with great poise. For an American in Haiti for the first time, it’s momentarily difficult to tell what’s normal and what is due to the devastating earthquake that only occurred a month earlier. But, then it’s made starkly clear
Photos: Hazel Trice Edney/NNPA
Several early morning food lines stretch into thousands of people. at the sight of a heap of rubble. What was once a building is now a mountain of cinder blocks and metal. In some areas a shifting breeze brings the sudden whiff of a putrid odor, a reminder of mass graves holding thousands of bodies
not far outside the city. A young woman walks topless and exposed in the streets, turning heads and exacerbating the confusion. The Haitian driver
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Olympic skater Shani Davis, prickly competitor
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