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When the Westwood Borough Council looked into banning downtown parking garages last year, it faced a dilemma: What was more important, parking or downtown's visual appeal? Westwood voters had already [...]

NEWARK Lucas Sanchez of Englewood said immigrant rights and the Iraq war were among his reasons for braving Saturday's daunting heat at a peace rally in the city's Lincoln Park. [...]

This article discusses the book "Speak So You Can Speak Again: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston," by Zora Neale Hurston. Hurston's is the voice of someone with true affection for the world. It rings with excitement, pride and joy. Her love for the songs is audible, but, more importantly, one can hear her love for the country, the region and the culture that birthed both her and the folk customs to which she dedicated her life and her studies. The book covers territory already familiar to scholars of modern American literature, historians of the Black Renaissance and Zora devotees.

The article focuses on an innovative new website and opened up a scholarship competition to help urban high school students on the road to college. Eva Ostrum, who taught in the Boston public school system for nearly ten years, saw first-hand the troubles these students have. High school seniors from urban schools who plan on attending four-year colleges next year can apply for the scholarship. The article also reports that Bronx Community College's Student Government Association will hold a "Rock the Vote Initiative" music concert to encourage students, faculty and staff to register to vote. INSET: Your vote can make a difference.

The article presents information about the Fleet week held in Amsterdam as of June 2004. Lance Corporal Bryan Taylor, 18, speaks of the Medium Tactical Vehicle Replacement, a seven ton truck he has been trained to drive, with the excitement teenage boys usually reserve for video games. Taylor was one of thousands of sailors who docked in New York last week for the 17th annual Fleet Week. Centered on Memorial Day, Fleet Week gives sailors from Marines, Navy and the Coast Guard a chance to see New York, as well as giving New Yorkers an opportunity to show their appreciation for their armed service.

The city of Brooklyn, New York has been buzzing since December when Bruce Ratner announced he wanted to buy the Nets Arena and build a stadium in Brooklyn. Ratner wants to take 24 acres of land in downtown Brooklyn running from Flat-bush and Atlantic avenues all the way up the rail yards, an area he claims is ripe for development, and build a $2.5 billion development featuring high-rise housing and office buildings and, of course, the stadium. Ratner claims only 100 people would be displaced, while activist Patti Hagan and her allies claim closer to 800 people, including 400 people who live in a homeless shelter located within the boundaries of the footprint, would lose their homes and businesses, while 200 people would lose their jobs.

Djema Imports, a New York City neighborhood store, does not look like the Rockwellian general store of yesteryear. But one can find neighborhood children scrambling through the aisles carrying their homework, locals gathering to gossip and a perpetually smiling store owner. These staples of the fabled neighborhood store can be found at shopkeeper Moctar Yarba's shop at 71 W. 125th Street in New York City. Yarba arrived in New York City with eighty dollars and a suitcase, unable to speak English and knowing no one. At the airport, he overheard a man speaking a language he recognized from home and asked for help finding the African community in New York. The stranger volunteered to drop Yarba where many African immigrants worked.

This article presents information related to initiatives undertaken by organisations to promote African American motion pictures. The Simmons Lathan Media Group (SLMG) and the New York University Kanbar Institute of Film and Television announced the creation of the Alumni Def Filmmaker Award. The Alumni Def Filmmaker Award offers up to $300,000 for feature film funding and up to $150,000 for a documentary film. SLMG deals exclusively in urban and hip-hop media content. This includes production, distribution and acquisition of movies, theatrical productions and television, radio and the Internet programming.

The article presents information about Wave Hill, New York City. Each year, 11,000 students and teachers visit Wave Hill, often to participate in the School Partnerships Program, which offers a series of multi-session programs to students from kindergarten through eight grade that cover topics like changing seasons and land formations. Wave Hill also offers training for teachers, as well as summer internship programs for qualified high school students. The children who utilize Wave Hill's education programs receive much of the benefits of Wave Hill's philosophy.

The article reports on skating lessons for girls of Harlem, New York. Ice skates covered Figure Skating in Harlem (FSH) Executive Director Sharon Cohen's office on a recent Thursday evening. Cohen and her small army of academic counselors, ice-skating instructors and interns will fit 74 girls before the eighth season of FSH begins later this month. Started by Cohen in 1997, FSH teaches both ice skating and life skills to young women ages 6 to 16 from the Harlem area, some of whom have never been on the ice and some who have skated with her for years. According to data from the Department of Education in 2000, more than 8 million children are left alone and unsupervised after school, which is the time children are most likely to either commit crimes or be the victims of crimes.

This article focuses on the Urban Divers Estuary Conservancy. Ludger Balan is the founder and executive director of the Urban Divers Estuary Conservancy (UDEC). Balan's office at the Roberto Clemente State Park on the Harlem River in the Bronx bears witness to his passion. Water pollution in urban areas is the reason UDEC exists. Balan started UDEC in 1998 to bring environmental education and community activism to urban neighborhoods in the New York City area. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency sponsored Contamination Assessment and Reduction Project calls the New York/New Jersey harbor one of the most contaminated estuarine systems in the U.S.

This article presents information about the revamping the school building of the Mount Carmel/Holy Rosary School. When students returned to East Harlem's Mount Carmel/Holy Rosary Parish Elementary School earlier this month, they were greeted with freshly painted hallways and classroom doors and stairwells in cheery primary colors, but teachers, students and parents were thankful they had a school to come back to after the Archdiocese of New York granted a last-minute reprieve last spring on an order to close the school after the 2003-2004 academic year.

The article provides information about African Americans voting behavior in the U.S. For the generations of African Americans who became active voters after the Civil Rights movement, it is surprising that the Republican Party once was the party of choice for them. But when 83 year-old Lugenia Gordon left Selma, Alabama and first registered to vote in 1939, the Republican Party, the one of Abraham Lincoln, former U.S. President, and the other Republicans who voted to free her grandparents from slavery, was the only choice for her. Speaking in the unhurried, melodic accent that her years in Brooklyn and New Hampshire have not diminished, Gordon still looks back to that lesson as the moment she knew that she would vote for the party who gave her people the right to vote after the Civil War. Although around 80% of African American voters vote Democratic Party , Gordon still recalls the days when Democrats prevented African Americans from voting in the South.

The article provides information about Major Broadcasting Network (MBC), the U.S. only African Americans-owned and-operated cable network, which will make its debut in New York in October. MBC promises to bring wholesome, positive television to African Americans. Currently, the cable network, founded by famed trial attorney William Gary in 1999, offers televised ministries, talk shows and sports coverage to an urban audience. Retired baseball player Cecil Fielder, heavyweight champion Evander Holyfield, entertainer Marion Jackson and broadcasting veteran Alvin James were principle investors in the network along with Gary, who sought to provide an alternative for African Americans. Bringing in Newberger, the long-time Managing Director of Vanguard Media Corporation, which helped launch the Golf and Sci-Fi channels, is the latest in a series of major overhauls that have occurred at MBC in recent months.

After nearly two years of restoration and renovation, the Harlem Library will reopen with a ribbon-cutting ceremony on August 17, 2004. Tuesday's ceremony will feature Paul LeClerc, the president of the New York Public Library. Stephen Foster, President and chief executive officer of the Overbrook Foundation, which adopted the Harlem library. The Harlem Library has been an area institution since 1825, when its founders paid $150 for a tiny building on the Harlem village commons. The library moved twice, in 1874 and 1892, before being incorporated into the New York Public Library system in 1909.

This article presents information on the education in the U.S. An education program "Say Yes" that pays for post-secondary education for all participants who graduate from high school, is making its way into five elementary schools in Harlem. Say Yes is a comprehensive program, beginning in elementary school and following students through middle school and high school. Harlem Hospital will offer medical care to participants, with Say Yes working in conjunction with the public school system and the Columbia Teachers' College to provide services including tutoring, summer school, and counseling, as well as age-specific programs such as on-site reading specialists at the elementary level and SAT preparation and college-advisement during high school.

This article presents information on the reported involvement of parents in schools in the U.S. Local education experts weighed in with opposing views on a report released last month by Public Advocate Betsy Gotbaum criticizing parent coordinators in New York City public schools. From June 14 to June 16, 2004, the Public Advocate's office called a random selection of parent coordinators from 99 schools across the five boroughs to test both the availability of parent coordinators and their knowledge of their individual schools and Department of Education policy.

Mindless, laugh-so-hard-it-hurts comedies are sometimes a tough sell for jaded, post-millennial audiences. In the 1970s, it was easier — ungroomed chest hair, shellacked hairdos and talking dogs were enough to make people laugh. Those were simpler times and if "Anchorman" is any indication, a helluva lot funnier, too. "Anchorman," co-written by its star, Will Ferrell, with director Adam McKay, is the story of Ron Burgundy, a vapid, loveable pig of a broadcaster. Set in San Diego in the 1970s, "Anchorman" tells the story of an all-male news team.

Kehinde Wiley is an artist, a portraitist who paints Black men in poses taken from the works of classic painters. Although only 27, his portraits have hung in galleries in Los Angeles, Chicago and Prague, as well as in the Studio Museum and the Deitch Projects in New York and will be exhibited at the recently renovated Brooklyn Museum in October 2004. Wiley meets most of his subjects on 125th Street, although he has done some work with men from his native South Central Los Angeles and currently is preparing to work with Black men from the U.S. military academies.

With the Republican National Convention just two months away, the four-day conference that will bring an estimated 50,000 visitors to the city is an issue at the forefront for all New Yorkers. Harlem in New York City lies nearly one hundred blocks north of 34th Street, but Harlemites on 125th Street and in Marcus Garvey Park still expressed concern over everything from potential terrorist attacks to the influx of conservative politicians. Though the Republicans, who will name U.S. President George W. Bush as their candidate for the November election, no doubt will address current affairs from war to the economy, many uptown residents expressed the greatest concern over how the convention will interrupt their daily lives.

Medical professionals, social workers, clergy members and community activists gathered for an all-day conference on mental health care for minorities at Borough Hall in Brooklyn, New York, on June 16, 2004. The conference, titled "Bridging the Gap in Mental Health Care: Adapting Best Practices to Communities of Color," was sponsored by the Institute for Community Living, a nonprofit agency that sponsors treatment, rehabilitation and support systems in Brooklyn, Manhattan and the Bronx. The symposium sought to draw awareness to an issue that goes largely unaddressed amongst minorities.

Russell Simmons looks oddly out of place in his own office. Set against the backdrop of obvious success, Simmons, dressed in a pink-striped Phat Farm polo shirt and matching hat, with his omnipresent bemused half-grin and speaking with the adolescent slang that inevitably creeps into his vocabulary, bares more resemblance to the teenagers from Brooklyn's Metro Corps Academy who crowded his office Tuesday afternoon than the multi-hyphenate tycoon that he really is. The meeting was the brainchild of Junior Achievement of New York in conjunction with Simmons' own Rush Impact Mentorship Initiative. Since then Simmons has tried his hand at clothing, movie and television production, and even financial services through the Rush Card, which provides credit cards to people with credit problems.

As the June 25th closing date draws nearer, the New York City Department of Education has entered the fight to keep Harlem's Reisenbach Charter School open. The 432-student school, which houses kindergarten through fourth grade and eighth grade, was one of the original charter schools formed after the state passed a law allowing charter schools five years ago. The announcement that the school would close at the end of this academic year came on February 25th after SUNY received a report from the Charter School Institute that Reisenbach suffered from administrative problems, as well as under-performance on standardized tests by fourth and eighth graders. The renewed efforts to keep the school open have come on the heels of an announcement that test scores have improved drastically since last year.

Qualified recipients now can sign up for Medicare Prescription Drug Discount Cards, which can save users up to 15% on costly prescription drugs. The discount cards are part of the Medicare Prescription Drug Improvement and Modernization Act, which was passed in December. Under the act, the discount cards offer temporary discounts until a drug benefit program goes into effect on January 1, 2006. Additionally, low-income Medicare recipients may be exempt from the annual fee and are eligible to receive up to $600 annually for prescription drug costs. Although Medicare offers cards from over 70 private companies, recipients can only have one card at a time.

This Sunday, ten of thousands of New Yorkers will gather with a sense of community and hope in Central Park in New York City for the city's 19th annual AIDS Walk. AIDS fund-raising/activism is a popular cause. Last year, over 45,000 people raised 5 million dollars in the AIDS Walk, which is put on by Gay Men's Health Crisis. Harlem's Gay Men of African Descent (GMAD) will be amongst the participants in the 10 kilometer walk. As one of the oldest organizations catering to gay Black men in the country, GMAD feels strongly about its support of AIDS Walk.

It has been almost a year since Suzanne Cutter, a research fellow in plastics and reconstructive surgery moved to New York City, New York, and she still finds her urban lifestyle incredibly busy. And there is a good reason for it. Cutter works long hours at Sloan-Kettering Memorial Hospital, and her busy work schedule combined with the pace of New York leaves little time for volunteer work, something Cutter has enjoyed in the past. This is why Cutter volunteered when Sloan-Kettering Memorial became the newest site for Big Brothers Big Sisters of New York City's Workplace Mentoring Program earlier this month.

The offices of HarlemLive look like a real newsroom. Mismatched couches form the waiting area in front of the office manager's desk and there is a small conference table in the corner across from the door. The newsroom desks face inward so that the Macs and their users virtually ignore the view of Old Navy and HMV outside the wall of windows overlooking 125th Street. Two bookshelves filled with poetry, fiction and how-to books crowd the entryway to the third-floor room and a small television pulled too close to a lonely couch sits on a stand in the back by the kitchen.

Afternoons at Harlem, New York City's Police Athletic League are loud. Giggling, squealing and the general sounds of children can be heard outside the friendly red-and-blue building on 119th Street and Manhattan Avenue as kids engage in after-school activities from basketball to music lessons. However, down in the basement tucked away in the back corner of a poorly lit hallway lined with a honeycomb-like row of offices and activity centers, there is a room where students bounce on trampolines and walk a plank of wood like a balance beam. This is the Empowered Learning Center and despite its resemblance to a miniature gym, it is one of the PAL's most innovative programs.