8118 - Martin Luther King Day
Jan. 16th, 2006 07:35 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
scottobear
– Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
» Americans to Celebrate King Holiday By Serving Others
» View 2006 MLK Day of Service Project Listings
» Click here to register your MLK Day of Service Project
» National Service Agency Announces Grants to Support Service
Projects on 2006 Martin Luther King, Jr. Holiday
» View the 2005 MLK Day of Service Photo Gallery
During his lifetime, Dr. King sought to forge the common ground on which people from all walks of life could join together to address important community issues. Working alongside individuals of all ages, races and backgrounds, Dr. King encouraged Americans to come together to strengthen communities, alleviate poverty, and acknowledge dignity and respect for all human beings. Service, he realized, was the great equalizer.On January 16, 2006, as we celebrate the 20th anniversary of the Martin Luther King Jr. federal holiday, Americans across the country will celebrate by honoring the life and work of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Hundreds of thousands of Americans will remember and memorialize Dr. King by participating in service projects in their communities. Together, they will honor King’s legacy of tolerance, peace, and equality by meeting community needs and making the holiday “A day ON, not a day OFF.”
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2006-01-16 03:34 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-01-16 03:41 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-01-16 08:35 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-01-16 09:11 pm (UTC)I wonder what it was like, to have such solid convictions about making the world a better place?
no subject
Date: 2006-01-16 06:48 pm (UTC)New era begins in Liberia and Chile
with first elected women presidents
Presidents gather for Sirleaf’s swearing in
MONROVIA: Ellen Johnson Sirleaf was set to be sworn in to office in Liberia on Monday as Africa’s first female elected head of state, in a ceremony many hope will mark the start of a new era of peace and democracy after years of war and tyranny.
Senior figures from across Africa and further afield are due to attend the inauguration, among them United States first lady Laura Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.
“We’re really, really excited to be at such a historic inauguration,” Laura Bush told reporters Sunday while traveling to Monrovia.
Bush went on to describe the president-elect as a “shining example for all of us, for women around the world, not just for women on her continent, but women everywhere.”
A US warship has been stationed off the west African country’s coast.
Presidents Thabo Mbeki of South Africa, Abdoulaye Wade of Senegal, John Kufuor of Ghana, Laurent Gbagbo of Ivory Coast and Sierra Leone’s Ahmad Tejan Kabbah are also among the expected guests, as is Chinese Foreign Minister Li Zhaoxing, who is on a tour of west Africa.
Sirleaf, 67, won a second round runoff election on November 8. Her swearing-in ceremony is scheduled for 7 p.m., Manila time.
She faces the mammoth task of rebuilding one of the world’s most failed states, one ruined by civil wars that raged from the 1989 rebellion launched by Charles Taylor until 2003, when Taylor, by then the elected president, stepped down and went into exile as part of a UN-brokered peace process.
A quarter of a million people were killed in the conflicts.
On the eve of her inauguration, Sirleaf vowed to restore hope to her country’s people, half of whom have known nothing but war.
“We will make our children smile again, we will give them back their youth and their future. We will make, like and be proud of Liberia,” she said.
More than 15,000 UN peacekeeping troops are stationed in Liberia and the mission has stepped up security along main roads and at the airport serving Monrovia.
Sirleaf “ran on a platform of reconciliation and reconstruction and it’s going to take the help of a lot of countries, including the United States, which has a special relationship with Liberia, for her and the people of Liberia to be able to do the reconstruction they need,” she said.
no subject
Date: 2006-01-16 06:48 pm (UTC)Bachelet propelled by leftists, centrists
SANTIAGO: Michelle Bachelet is a socialist, an agnostic and a single mother—hardly the traditional profile for a leader of Chile, a conservative Catholic bastion in South America.
Yet Bachelet, 54, became the country’s first woman president after a runoff vote on Sunday, in which she garnered 53.5 percent of the vote and defeated conservative billionaire Sebastian Pinera.
Bachelet ran as the candidate for the Center-Left Concertacion, the coalition of leftist and centrist parties that has governed Chile since the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet ended in 1990.
“I am just a Chilean woman no more and no less than millions of other Chileans,” Bachelet said. “I work, I take care of my home and I drop my daughter off at school. But I’m also a Chilean that feels a calling to fight for justice and for public service.”
According to people who work with her, Bachelet is a workaholic who still manages to enjoy parties and dancing.
Bachelet is separated from her husband—divorce only became legal in 2004—and has three children from two different relationships.
A pediatrician, she served as health minister before becoming Latin America’s first female defense minister in 2002.
Born September 29, 1951, in Santiago, Bachelet studied medicine and joined the Socialist Youth as a teenager. Her father, Air Force General Alberto Bachelet, was a close adviser to the socialist president Salvador Allende, who was toppled by Augusto Pinochet on September 11, 1973.
Tortured while in prison, Bachelet’s father died six months later.
Secret police whisked her and her mother off to Villa Grimaldi, a known torture center, in January 1975.
“Torture is terrible, especially from the psychological point of view, because it is so humiliating,” she said of her experience.
The two women were later freed and fled, first to Australia and then to East Germany, where Bachelet completed her medical studies.
Bachelet, already the mother of a young son, Sebastian, returned to Chile in 1979 but was prevented from practicing as a doctor by the dictatorship.
She continued studying, specializing in pediatrics and public health. Then in 1984 she gave birth to a daughter, Francesca.
But Bachelet also became aware of the isolation of the Chilean military after Pinochet finally ended his dictatorship in 1990.
She studied military strategy in Santiago and later at the Inter-American Defense College in Washington.
In 2000 President Ricardo Lagos made her health minister to carry out a major reform of the sector.
Two years later, Bachelet became defense minister and on the 30th anniversary of Pinochet’s coup called for a national reconciliation with the military.
The speech was the launch pad for her rise to power.
Bachelet has won over Chileans like Andres Chellew, the son of an officer who took part in Pinochet’s coup. He says Bachelet represents the end of a political and economic era in Chile.
“She represents the middle class, Chile’s reconciliation with its military, she is opening a new chapter in our history. The country is going to change a lot in the next four years even if some people do not want this,” he said.