Blacks In Criminal Justice Appreciate Color Scope
Editor:
On behalf of the National Association of Blacks in Criminal Justice and the Colorado Chapter, the Host Chapter, I would like to thank you and your news agency for the generous donation of Color Scope.This publication enabled us to showcase the city and its multicultural scenes and activities. This edition was not only extremely helpful but was beautifully laid out. The conference attendees found it a wonderful guide.
Again, thank you so very much for your support and generosity.
L. Elaine Neal
Conference Liaison

Learning Center Seeks Help
Learn and Play Learning Center is a childcare provider for low-income, inner-city families, and we need your help. Our mission is to provide a safe and fun-loving atmosphere for children that the community can trust. Our goal is to help children reach their full potential. We are here to give love and meet the needs of each child individually without prejudices of any kind.
We are asking you for sponsorship of our children to assist with the purchase of educational materials, computers, classroom equipment and playground equipment. Your contribution will be used to increase the quality of childcare and get our children ready for school.
Learn and Play Learning Center is a center-based childcare provider licensed by the State of Colorado and has fiscal agreements with the Denver Department of Human Services to provide childcare to low-income families. Our learning center has had a positive impact on the quality of life for parents and children in the neighborhood
We sincerely hope you will respond favorably to our request to donate to our cause.
Thank you and God bless you.
For more information, call Linda Mitchell or Catrina Benjamin at 303-363-9590 or 303-915-8117, or e-mail mitchell462@msn.com.
Linda Mitchell, Executive Director
Catrina Benjamin, Director

Mayor Lauded For Stance On Discrimination
Editor:
It's easy to criticize officials when they do the wrong thing. It's rarer to give thanks when they do right; but thanks are in order to Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper for taking steps to confront discrimination against women and people of color in the city's business contracting programs.
The right-wing political attacks on affirmative action in recent years, with flames fanned by anti-civil rights politicians like Governor Owens and State Senator Ed Jones, have led to the denial of broad scale educational and economic opportunities for women and people of color in Colorado.
The City of Denver's study of its contracting program revealed that despite the city's growing diversity, opportunities for women and people of color-owned businesses were shrinking dramatically. To his credit, Mayor Hickenlooper's administration has taken a bold step in introducing a new initiative to aggressively confront this.
We thank the Mayor for his work to confront discrimination and encourage the City Council to approve this plan. After all, women are a majority of the city's population, as are people of color.  Both pay their fair share of taxes. Shouldn't they -- and their businesses -- share in the city's prosperity?
Bill Vandenberg,
Co-Executive Director
Colorado Progressive Coalition

Why Genocide Matters
Editor:
When I spoke at Cornell University recently, a woman asked why I always harp on Darfur.
It's a fair question. The number of people killed in Darfur so far is modest in global terms:
estimates range from 200,000 to more than 500,000.
In contrast, four million people have died since 1998 as a result of the fighting in Congo, the most lethal conflict since World War II. And malaria annually kills one million to three million people – meaning that three years' deaths in Darfur are within the margin of error of the
annual global toll from malaria.
You can make an argument that Darfur is simply one of many tragedies and that it would be more cost-effective to save lives by tackling diarrhea, measles and malaria.
But I don't buy that argument at all. We have a moral compass within us, and its needle is moved, not only by human suffering, but also by human evil. That's what makes genocide special - not just the number of deaths but the government policy behind them. And that, in turn, is why stopping genocide should be an even higher priority than saving lives from AIDS or malaria.
Even the Holocaust amounted to only 10 percent of World War II casualties and cost far fewer lives than the AIDS epidemic. But the Holocaust evokes special revulsion because it wasn't just tragic but also monstrous, and that's why we read Anne Frank and Elie Wiesel. Teenage girls still die all the time, and little boys still starve and lose their parents - but when this arises from genocide, the horror resonates with all humans.
Or it should. But for whatever reason, Sudan's decision to kill people on the basis of tribe and skin color has aroused mostly yawns around the globe. Now Sudan is raising the stakes by starting a new military offensive in Darfur - and by eliminating witnesses.
The government charged Paul Salopek, an ace Chicago Tribune correspondent, with espionage in an effort to keep foreign reporters away. (It released him after a month in prison). Even African Union peacekeepers may be forced out of Darfur by the end of this month.
Twelve aid workers have been killed since May, more than in the previous three years. These killings are forcing aid groups to pull back, and the U.N. warns that if the humanitarian operation collapses, the result will be "hundreds of thousands of deaths." If all foreign witnesses are pushed out, the calamity is barely imaginable.
We urgently need U.N. peacekeepers, even over Sudan's objections. (If Sudan sees them coming, it will hurriedly consent.) The U.S. should also impose a no-fly zone from Chad and work with France to keep Chad and the Central African Republic from collapsing into this maelstrom.
President Bush showed an important flash of leadership on Darfur early this year, but lately he has fallen quiet again. He should appoint a special envoy for Darfur and use his bully pulpit to put genocide on the international agenda, for starters, by employing his speech to the U.N.
General Assembly this month to remind the world of the children being tossed onto bonfires in Sudan. He could also announce that the U.S. will choose candidates to support for U.N. secretary general based, in part, on their positions on Darfur.
You can see how your member of Congress does on Darfur at www.darfurscores.org. Information about Darfur rallies next Sunday in New York and other cities worldwide is at www.savedarfur.org.
If we don't act, the slaughter may end up claiming more than one million lives, but this is about more than body count. This time the teenagers are not named Anne and Elie, but Fatima and Ahmed, yet the horror is the same.
Nicholas D. Kristof

Reader Critical Of Activists’ Condemnations
Editor:
I regret that I must respond to the following: Urban Spectrum, Sept., 2006, p. 37: “Black Activists Condemn Rice Cartoons in Palestinian Press.” Unfortunately, the Project 21ers do not “condemn” what Rice condones and represents; the U. S. military and monetary support of the “democratic” Israeli government’s policies of apartheid, displacement, genocide, imprisonment, murder, occupation, starvation and terrorization of the walled-out-of-their-land Palestinian people, as well as their destruction of Lebanon and the U. S.’s destruction of Afghanistan and Iraq. (By the way, the multiskin-toned Palestinians, like the Lebanese are Shi’a/Sunni/Druse Muslim and Roman Catholic Christian and Eastern [Greek] Orthodox Christian). The African American poet, musician, and civil/human rights activist, Gil Scott-Heron repeats in his piece titled “Work for Peace:” “The military and the monetary – they get together whenever they think it’s necessary; they are turning our brothers and sisters into mercenaries; they are turning the planet into a cemetery.”
Except, for example, Maria Callas and Dr. Gi’orgios Papanikol’aou (who invented what’s called in the U. S. “the Pap smear”) and many others, I learned long ago that when “my people” (Hellenic Americans/PanHellenes – aka “Greeks” – e.g., the former V.P. Spiro Agnew, the former head of the CIA George Tenet, and Aristotle Onassis) hold prominent positions, they are not the most decent, generous, honest, honorable, intelligent, just, kind, moral or virtuous people in the world. Hopefully, Project 21ers will someday learn the same lesson, as well as the fact that, far from being just a “talking head” and “former entertainer,” Mr. Harry Belafonte has been a lifelong civil/human rights activist, and for decades has worked for UNICEF and UNESCO while Dr. “Conoco”leeezza Rice has been working for her own interests which reflect the U. S. elitist, war-&-suffering mongering, Christocapitalist, white supremacist agenda.
Even Adolf Schickelgruber (aka “Hitler”) admired and borrowed U. S. policies used against African, Native and Asian Americans; i.e., “plantations,” “reservations” and “internment” i.e. “concentration” camps.
Yes, the verbal and visual criticisms of Rice (and her political associates) are ugly, but the heinous onslaughts on human beings of color around the world perpetrated by U. S. leaders are much uglier.
Evlal’ia P. Theodorop’oulou (Theodore), a regular reader of the Urban Spectrum.