Black Star Power was in full effect when some of the best and brightest in entertainment came out to help Tyler Perry celebrate the grand opening of his new studio in Atlanta. The guests at this sophisticated soirée including Oprah, Ruby Dee, Sydney Poitier, Stedman Graham, Gayle King, Will Smith, LA Reid, Tracey Edmonds, Boris and Nicole Ari Kodjoe, Kirk Franklin, Tasha Smith, Eva Pigford, Star Jones, Patti Labelle, Gladys Knight, and a host of other people.
Tyler hosted the party with his girlfriend, 24 year old supermodel Gelila Bekele of Ethiopia.
Check out pics of the guest arrivals after the jump.
Tyler Perry unveils new studio in Atlanta
By JONATHAN LANDRUM Jr.
ATLANTA (AP) — Tyler Perry unveiled a new multimillion-dollar TV and film studio Saturday on 30 acres in southwest Atlanta.
His renewed commitment to the city came after he once flirted with departing. Perry said he had considered leaving Atlanta for good after neighbors complained about noise and traffic at his old studio in a neighborhood close to downtown.
“Even though it was a studio there for 15 years, there was a lot of resistance in everything I was doing,” Perry said in a telephone interview with The Associated Press earlier in the week. “I was thinking about leaving at one point, but this is home for me.”
His new Tyler Perry Studios contains more than 200,000 square feet of studio and office space in an area that once housed Delta Air Lines’ finance, reservation and computer center. It was vacant when Perry found it.
The guest list included Will Smith and his wife, Jada Pinkett Smith, Oprah Winfrey, Forest Whitaker, Hank Aaron and Whitney Houston. R&B singer Mary J. Blige was to perform.
Perry, 39, said the studio features five sound stages that will be named after Quincy Jones, Sidney Poitier, Ruby Dee and Cicely Tyson — with one still unnamed. He will shoot his TBS sitcoms “House of Payne” and “Meet the Browns” along with other film projects at the studio.
Perry said he knew the new location would be an improvement. His old building was on property zoned commercial, but the street next to it is residential.
“I knew spiritually I was in the wrong place,” said Perry, whose projects include “Tyler Perry’s the Family That Preys.”
“You can never be upset with the people who forced you into your dream or up higher,” he said. “They forced me out into a higher situation. It’s worked out much better for me.”
Perry drew criticism from the Writers Guild of America, West, after Perry fired four writers from “House of Payne” earlier in the week. A guild spokeswoman said in an e-mail Saturday that the four, along with supporters, planned to picket Sunday morning at Perry’s Atlanta home.
Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) on Monday will launch a multimedia campaign to draw attention to the involvement of Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) in the “Keating Five” savings-and-loan scandal of 1989-91, which blemished McCain’s public image and set him on his course as a self-styled reformer.
Retaliating for what it calls McCain’s “guilt-by-association” tactics, the Obama campaign is e-mailing millions of supporters a link to a website, KeatingEconomics.com, which will have a 13-minute documentary on the scandal beginning at noon Eastern time on Monday. The overnight e-mails urge recipients to pass the link on to friends.
The Obama campaign, including its surrogates appearing on radio and television, will argue that the deregulatory fervor that caused massive, cascading savings-and-loan collapses in the late ‘80s was pursued by McCain throughout his career, and helped cause the current credit crisis.
Obama-Biden communications director Dan Pfeiffer said: “While John McCain may want to turn the page on his erratic response to the current economic crisis, we think voters will find his involvement in a similar crisis to be particularly interesting. His involvement with Keating is a window into McCain’s economic past, present, and future.”
Obama’s offensive comes after McCain’s running mate, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, spent two days telling voters, donors and reporters that Obama showed poor judgment in his relationship with the former radical William Ayers.
McCain’s campaign has vowed to make a major issue of Obama’s Chicago relationships in coming days, with a senior McCain official telling Politico that they are “the vehicle that allows us to question Obama’s truthfulness about his past and his plans for the future.”
The McCain campaign also plans to invoke money launderer Tony Rezko. Officials say they will not bring up Obama’s former minister, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, because McCain has forbade his campaign from using that as an attack. But the officials said outside groups supporting McCain might highlight Wright.
Responding to the Keating blast from the past, a Republican official said the Obama team seemed “frantic” at “the mere mention of the word ‘Ayers.'”
“The fact that the Obama team is recycling this old garbage 24 hours after Bill Ayers entered the race is a testament to how worried the Obama camp is of an unfettered airing of his associations,” the official said. “Obama is a clever enough politician to know that his unexplored relationships with terrorists and felons are a serious liability in a race this close.”
The Obama website says: “The current economic crisis demands that we understand John McCain’s attitudes about economic oversight and corporate influence in federal regulation. … The Keating scandal is eerily similar to today’s credit crisis, where a lack of regulation and cozy relationships between the financial industry and Congress has allowed banks to make risky loans and profit by bending the rules.”
In 1991, the Senate Ethics Committee cleared McCain of corruption charges but cited him for “poor judgment” in meeting with federal regulators on behalf of Charles H. Keating Jr., a political patron who went to prison for fraud in connection with the collapse of the California-based Lincoln Savings and Loan Association, which at the time was one of the biggest financial failures in the nation’s history.
A trailer for the campaign-produced documentary features William K. Black, a former bank regulator who McCain met with in the Keating case, saying: “The Keating Five involved all the things that have brought the modern crisis. Senator McCain has not learned the lesson, and has continued to follow policies that are going to produce a disaster.”
The Obama website has news clips and a narrative explaining the scandal and McCain’s involvement for voters and reporters.
The Keating episode took a searing toll on the senator and his wife, Cindy. Robert Timberg, in his 1999 biography “John McCain: An American Odyssey,” wrote that the trouble began with the senator “carelessly choosing his friends.”
“McCain had stumbled into a scandal of immense proportions,” Timberg wrote. “Charles Keating, it turned out, had built his financial empire on the life savings of elderly retirees, men and women who watched helplessly as their dreams were snuffed out along with the assets of Keating’s Lincoln Savings and Loan Association.
“The story was complicated, but the press found a tag line that simplified it. McCain and four other senators with ties to Keating were dubbed ‘the Keating Five.’ The label stuck, imputing to all the same degree of guilt even though it soon became evident that at least two, McCain and former astronaut John Glenn of Ohio, were far less culpable, if they were culpable at all.”
Rep. Rahm Emanuel (D-Ill.), a close Obama adviser who is the fourth-ranking House Democratic leader, brought up McCain’s association with Keating on CNN’s “Late Edition” on Sunday. “John McCain got admonished by the Senate Ethics Committee for that,” Emanuel said.
Years of conflict in Somalia have left large parts of the country in the hands of warlords while its capital, Mogadishu, is contested by Ethiopian TPLF-backed government forces and armed insurgents.
The city has been abandoned by at least half of its residents. The BBC’s World Affairs Correspondent, Mark Doyle, sent this report from a war zone few Western journalists dare to visit.
The bombed-out buildings are shocking enough.
There are street after ruined street of them in the centre of Mogadishu.
Some have been reduced by shellfire to rubble. Others retain a building-like shape – the rough skeletons of once-ornate Italian colonial apartment blocks or shopping arcades.
But the really eerie side to many parts of Mogadishu is the lack of people.
The last 18 months of fighting have seen the population plummet in a way that even the infamous Black Hawk Down year – 1993 – did not achieve.
According to the United Nations, at least half of Mogadishu’s population – perhaps 500,000 people – have fled.
In 1993 a joint United States/United Nations aid effort descended into war. Somali warlords resisted the international force partly because it reduced their racketeering of food aid.
The Americans then fell into the trap of thinking the flip flop-wearing “Skinnies”, as the Marines disparagingly called Somalis, would be a pushover.
However, the “Skinnies” could fight, and fight well. The US and the UN withdrew in disarray.
But even back then – when tracer fire lit up the sky every night – the streets were still full of people.
Not any more. Parts of Mogadishu are now a ghost city.
The new situation has an intensity of street shelling and military atrocities that even this veteran war city has never seen before.
The latest conflict is between a weak, though internationally-recognized Somali government, backed by troops from neighboring Ethiopia – and armed insurgents who are a mixture of Islamists and nationalists.
The United States is still a key player, backing the Ethiopians Woyane. It accuses the Islamists of having links to al-Qaeda.
“Its getting worse and worse,” said Sophia Hussein, a housewife turned refugee. “Now foreign governments are involved” – a reference to the Ethiopian Woyane presence.
Mrs Hussein was speaking in a Kenyan refugee camp, surrounded by nine children she had rescued from Mogadishu.
Grafted onto the traditional clan wars in Somalia are new disputes that pit Islamists and nationalists against the Ethiopians TPLF and their US allies.
These new wars may explain why Mogadishu has been emptied of people like never before.
The political landscape began changing in 2005 when armed Islamists joined forces with businessmen to oust a chaotic collection of warlords from Mogadishu.
By 2006 the Islamists/businessmen had won and a group known as the Union of Islamic Courts ran the capital.
“They were efficient; they ran the city quite well,” said a senior Somali official with an international aid agency who requested anonymity.
In late 2006, the army of neighbouring Ethiopia Dictator Meles Zenawi intervened to oust the Courts and install the internationally-recognised government in Mogadishu.
It is widely believed that the US encouraged or participated in this move because of fears that the Courts had links to al-Qaeda.
Certainly, there was a long-range US missile attack at the time on fleeing Courts officials. The US later mounted other attacks on what it said were al-Qaeda operatives, and American drones still regularly buzz the skies of Somalia.
The Ethiopian Woyane army easily routed the Courts regime. But, in an echo of the early US military success in Baghdad, the Ethiopians TPLF Donkeys then appeared unsure what to do next.
Gradually, the Islamists and nationalists regrouped.
There was a traditional clan aspect to the new war. But what might be called the “Islamist/nationalist clan” to some extent transcended this in the face of what many Somalis saw as “Ethiopian Woyane occupation”.
‘Indiscriminate reprisals’
Today the remnants of the Courts administration, backed by Islamist fighters known as al-Shabaab (Somali for “The Lads”), have made much of south and central Somalia a no-go area for the government and the Ethiopians TPLF.
Al-Shabaab and related fighters mount hit-and-run attacks aimed at government forces but which often also kill civilians.
However, a more common complaint among ordinary Somalis I spoke to is that the Ethiopians TPLF thugs are “indiscriminate” in their reprisals – and that this is why Mogadishu has been emptied of people.
Stuck in the middle, and trying to inject some sanity into the situation, is the small and beleaguered 2,700-strong African Union Dictators Union peacekeeping Mission in Somalia, Amisom.
Its commander is Ugandan Major General, Francis Okello.
“I need more troops, I need more equipment,” he said, repeating the common refrain of peacekeeping commanders.
But the diplomat-general was wise enough to add: “I also need more political support, I need more diplomatic support. You cannot impose a solution on Somalis, you can only encourage peace”.
Tentative peace talks are taking place under a UN initiative but – as so often with peace processes – the talks are dominated by the moderates, not the radicals on all sides who are fighting on the ground.
NEWCASTLE, ENGLAND – Tsegaye Kebede of Ethiopia led all the way to win the Great North Run half marathon on Sunday, and Gete Wami earned the title in a closer women’s race.
Kebede, who won the Olympic bronze medal in the marathon at the Beijing Games, won the annual road race in 59 minutes, 45 seconds. He was the only runner to complete the 13.1-mile race in less than an hour.
Gebre Gebremariam of Ethiopia finished second in 1:01:29, and American runner Abdi Abdirahman was third in 1:01:33.
Wami, a two-time Berlin Marathon champion, held off Magdalene Mukunzi of Kenya by a second to complete an Ethiopian double in 1:08.51.
EDITOR’S NOTE: What about Woyanne officials who murdered unarmed pro-democracy protectors in Ethiopia following the 2005 elections? Why doesn’t the U.S. impose travel ban on them? Head of the notorious Federal Police, Gebeyehu Workneh, who had carried the June and November 2005 massacres, was in Washington DC just a few months ago.
By TOM ODULA
NAIROBI, Kenya (AP) — A diplomatic dispute was brewing Friday between America and Kenya over a potential visa ban for Kenyan officials who oversaw last year’s catastrophic elections.
More than 1,000 died in clashes following Dec 27’s disputed vote, which returned the incumbent president to power by a narrow margin after the opposition’s wide lead suddenly evaporated.
Foreign Minister Moses Wetangula says Kenya’s 22 electoral commissioners have been threatened with a visa ban after they refused to resign as recommended by a government commission.
“The government will not tolerate what seems now to be a pattern of activism being practiced in Nairobi by a few ambassadors under the guise of conducting their normal diplomatic engagements,” Wetangula said.
The U.S. embassy issued a statement Friday saying it did not comment on visa applications. However, the same statement said Kenyans had lost confidence in the commissioners and urged the government to replace the entire electoral board as recommended by a commission of inquiry chaired by a South African judge. The commission was set up as part of a peace deal that brought former opposition leader Raila Odinga into President Mwai Kibaki’s government.
The Electoral Commission of Kenya announced Kibaki had won the polls after riot police forcibly ejected journalists from the tallying center. He was hurriedly sworn in less than an hour later as flames and gunfire erupted from angry opposition supporters protesting in the slums. By the time the smoke cleared two month later, over 1,000 people were dead and 600,000 displaced.
“The ECK was responsible for oversight of this process and therefore bear responsibility for way in which it was handled,” said the embassy’s statement. “Fundamental changes, in every respect, are necessary.”
But Wetangula accused the foreign missions of using “shameless blackmail” and having a “colonial mind-set.”
Despite the diplomatic spat, Kenya is a strong ally of the U.S., which provides counter terrorism training for its military. American troops are stationed in northern Kenya near the border with Somalia and Kenya is a major recipient of U.S. aid.
… related story
U.S. urges Kenyan gov’t to implement recommendations in polls report
NAIROBI (Xinhua) — The United States on Friday called on the Kenyan government to speed up the implementation of recommendations of the Kriegler report, particularly the reforms in the Electoral Commission of Kenya (ECK).
In a statement from the U.S. embassy in Nairobi, Washington insisted that the electoral commissioners have lost the confidence of the Kenyan people following the manner in which they conducted the December 2007 presidential elections and must be held accountable.
The United States said the ECK was responsible for the electoral process and therefore bears responsibility for the way in which the whole exercise was handled.
“The U.S. government reiterates that lack of transparency and accountability in the 2007 election vote tallying process seriously compromised the credibility of the results,” the statement said.
“The U.S. notes that Kenyans have lost confidence in the ECK Commissioners, who must now be held accountable,” it said a day after Kenyan Foreign Minister Moses Wetangula accused some western ambassadors of practicing activism under the guise of conducting diplomatic business..
Kenyans, including the Kriegler Commission, have blamed the ECK for bungling the results of last December’s general elections, which left over 1,000 people dead and about 350,000 displaced.
“It is unacceptable for an ambassador accredited to Kenya to physically walk into an office of a holder of a constitutional office and directly confront him with the aim of attempting to force his resignation,” Wetangula said.
“Such shameless blackmail, applied through open disregard of established norms of conduct of diplomats, in favour of a style and tone reminiscent of colonial mindset, is an insult to the Kenyan public.”
Pressure has been mounting for the overhaul of the ECK, with the latest calls coming from the European Commission.
French Ambassador to Kenya Elisabeth Barbier said the public, according to the Kriegler report, had lost confidence in the electoral body and its staff, and therefore, the need for urgent reforms.
But in a statement issued late Thursday, all the 21 members of ECK said they will not resign despite local and international pressure for them to step down. The commissioners said their fate should be decided by the president of Kenya who appointed them.
The United States has reportedly imposed a travel ban on the commissioners. But a statement from the embassy declined to comment on the saga, saying “as a matter of policy the embassy does not discuss visa applications.”
This followed reports by a section of the press that the ECK officials have been banned from visiting the United States and some EU countries.
“The focus now is to fully implement as quickly as possible the recommendations of the Kriegler report. The report speaks for itself and makes clear that fundamental changes, in every respect, are necessary,” the statement said.
ECK chief Samuel Kivuitu indicated that he may soon leave office due to enormous pressure that has been coming from Kenyans including senior government officials who accuse him of mismanaging the elections.
He said he will not run the next general elections neither will he preside over the constitutional referendum expected next year.
Pirates aren’t picky. Armed with Kalashnikovs and rocket launchers and using skiffs mounted with high-powered engines launched from “motherships” disguised as fishing boats, the buccaneers who prowl the waters off the Somali coast pick their prey from the passing shipping traffic like lions selecting a kill: the slower and more defenseless, the better. “We hijack every ship we can,” Sugule Ali, a pirate captain, told TIME by satellite phone this week.
The MV Faina fitted the bill. Slow, low-sided and sailing under a Belize flag, the freighter seemed no different from any of the 60 other ships attacked by pirates this year in the same waters. And Ali and his men had no reason to believe the outcome of this hijacking would be any different. In a well-established routine, a vessel is typically held for a few days or weeks while the pirates negotiate a ransom with the ship’s owners, usually netting between $500,000 and $2 million. Then ship and crew are then released unharmed. This year, according to a new report by the British think tank Chatham House, the Somali pirate industry has raked in as much as $30 million.
But the Faina’s cargo surprised Ali and his men and sent alarm bells ringing around the world — the unprepossessing freighter was carrying 33 Russian T-72 tanks and a host of other armaments that had originated in Ukraine. By the end of this week, U.S. frigates and a Russian warship were bearing down on the pirates, the European Union had decided to launch a multinational antipiracy patrol, and Ukraine and Kenya found themselves embroiled in an arms scandal.
The U.S. — together with allies such as France — has taken the lead in providing security in a vital shipping lane leading to and from the Suez Canal. Somalia has been convulsed by civil war since 1991, and as an attendant humanitarian disaster involving millions of refugees has spread chaos and lawlessness across the land, piracy at sea has rocketed. The primary strategic concern of the U.S. in the region appears to be rooting out al-Qaeda, which is why the U.S. military backed an Ethiopian invasion of Somalia to prevent a popular Islamist movement from taking power. But the Islamists remain powerful, and the still violent stalemate clouds any prospect of restoring law and order onshore. Although the pirates lack the quays to take the tanks ashore, and their clan affiliations make connections to the Islamists unlikely, the U.S.S. Howard sailed to within three miles of the Faina to ensure that the tanks did not fall into Islamist hands.
The fate of the cargo is also rapidly becoming a hot potato for other reasons. Russia responded to the hijacking by announcing it was sending a warship to the area — three of the crew being held hostage are Russian, and Sudan’s government has called on Moscow to attack the pirates. That’s because while the government of Kenya claims to be the intended recipient of the tanks, many — like Andrew Mwangura, the Mombasa-based coordinator for the Seafarers Assistance Programme, and Lieutenant Nathan Christensen, press liaison of the U.S. Navy’s 5th Fleet in Bahrain — believe the weapons were headed elsewhere. “We are aware that the actual cargo was destined for Sudan, not Kenya,” Christensen told the Associated Press. Christenen’s press releases have since dried up, and Mwangura has been arrested by Kenyan police for issuing “alarmist statements.”
Diplomats in Nairobi, speaking on condition of anonymity, made clear that they shared the suspicion that the tanks were destined for south Sudan, where Kenya has supported a secessionist resistance movement oppossed to the northern Sudanese–dominated government in Khartoum. The fact that such a shipment might contravene international arms embargoes might help explain why the Faina, traveling with minimal security on board, presented itself as an unremarkable cargo freighter — to fool officials along its route as well as pirates. Of more concern to East Africa’s regional security, recent reports from north and south Sudan have suggested both sides are currently re-equipping their militaries. A revival of the decades-long north-south civil war would reopen one of Africa’s bloodiest and most intractable wars — 2 million died in the fighting between 1972 and 2005 — and jeopardize hopes for a solution to the crisis in Darfur.
For Ali and his men, piracy is a business: realizing the value of the Faina’s cargo, he demanded $35 million, although that figure was later reduced to $20 million. But he likes to cast it as also a protest. “We were forced into this work,” he argues, speaking from the Faina’s bridge at anchor off the village of Hobyo. “We were fishermen. I used to work in the sea every day. But ships from other countries fish our coasts illegally, destroy our nets and fire on whoever approaches them. We were refused the right to fish. They even dump toxic waste. We couldn’t work. So we decided to defend ourselves.” Ali insists that piracy would stop if the pirates’ fundamental grievances were addressed. “If the world stops stealing our property and harming us, we have a solution,” he said. “We will stop the piracy and go back to our normal jobs.”
That seems unlikely. On Thursday, French Defense Minister Herve Morin announced that at least eight European countries had agreed to contribute to an international naval antipiracy patrol in the Gulf of Aden, in addition to the U.S. and Russian naval presence already there. Faced with such overwhelming force, Ali said his men would fight to the last. “If someone attacks you in your home, you need to defend yourself,” he said. “Whatever weapons they have, you must fight. A person in his home cannot be afraid. Whoever attacks, we will defend ourselves.”
— With reporting by Abdiaziz Hassan Ahmed Dhoore / Nairobi
