I already pretty much thought so already, I mean George did say that poor black people make him uncomfortable..at least he was being honest..this is horrible and very embrassing to our country..watch

During their first joint visit to Haiti this week, George W. Bush appears to have wiped his hand on Bill Clinton’s shirt after shaking hands with a crowd of Haitians.

If that is what happened — Breitbart.TV first raised the question after seeing the video below — it builds on Barack Obama’s story of Bush’s compulsive need for hand sanitizer. But whatever Bush’s reason, it looks pretty bad.

The rescue was captured on camera. As you’ll see below, Kiki’s older sister, Sabrina, was pulled out first. Seven-year-old Kiki comes out next, looking a bit dazed. However, after seeing the crowd, the survivor immediately smiles and extends his arms in triumph. A photographer from the New York Post described the scene and the crowd’s reaction.

After so much heartbreak and tragedy, this was a rescue that inspired the masses. When asked why he smiled so broadly, Kiki responded, “I smiled because I was free, I smiled because I was alive.”

After being treated for their injuries and dehydration, the two children were reunited with their parents. No doubt the children were happy. In time they’ll understand just how happy they’d made everyone else.

Watch the incredible moment below, and learn how you can donate to Haiti here.

In many ways, Lou Jing is a typical young woman from Shanghai. Pretty and confident, she speaks Mandarin heavily accented with the lilting tones of the Shanghai dialect and browses the malls of this huge city for the latest fashions.

But there is one thing that distinguishes this 20-year-old from her peers, something that has made her the unwitting focus of an intense public debate about what exactly it means to be Chinese: the color of her skin. Born to a Chinese mother and an African-American father whom she has never met, the theater student rocketed into the public consciousness last month when she took part in an American Idol–esque TV show, Go! Oriental Angel. (See pictures of modern Shanghai.)

The marketing gurus for the series could hardly have dreamed of a better promotional gimmick when they started to investigate the backgrounds of the dozens of pop-star wannabes to root out the competitors’ mushy stories of triumph over adversity that are a well-worn staple of the genre. Here was a tale guaranteed to attract eyeballs: a girl of mixed race, brought up by a single Chinese mother, struggling to gain acceptance in a deeply conservative, some would say racist, society.

The strategy worked — perhaps too well. In August, Lou’s appearance on the show not only boosted viewer numbers but also sparked an intense nationwide debate about the essential meaning of being Chinese. Over the past month on Internet chat rooms, where modern China’s sensitive issues are thrashed out by netizens long before they reach the heavily censored mainstream media, Lou’s ethnicity has been the subject of a relentless barrage of criticism, some of it crudely racist. Many think she should not have been allowed to compete on a Chinese show, or at least not selected to represent Shanghai in the national competition. She doesn’t have fair skin, which is one of the most important factors for Chinese beauty. What’s more, her mother and her biological father were never married; morally, the argument goes, this kind of behavior shouldn’t be publicized, so she shouldn’t have been put on TV as a young “idol.”

As recently as the 1970s, foreigners were largely barred from living in China, let alone marrying a local. China does not easily accept mixed-race children as true-blooded Chinese: as soon as a child is born, the parents are required to register with the authorities as to which of the 56 government-approved ethnic groups their child belongs; there are no mixed-race categories. Lou feels she is very much Chinese. “When I meet somebody for the first time, they’d often ask me how I can speak Chinese so well, and I tell them, ‘Because I’m a Chinese — of course I can speak my mother tongue well,’ ” Lou says defiantly. “I don’t like to be treated differently.”

As China undergoes an astonishing demographic shift and more foreigners make their homes in the Middle Kingdom, Lou is by no means the only one being treated differently. Recent decades have seen a surge in the number of mixed-race couples. According to the data offered by Shanghai Civil Affairs Bureau, from 1994 to 2008, each year there have been about 3,000 more mixed-race marriages in Shanghai. But as the children of that first generation of mixed-race marriages come of age, their moves to gain acceptance in society — like Lou’s participation in the TV show — have exposed a deep-running vein of xenophobia in Chinese society. Last year, Ding Hui, a young man of African-Chinese ethnicity, caused a stir when he was called up to the national volleyball team, prompting much soul-searching about whether the athlete should be allowed to represent China alongside pure-blooded Chinese competitors. Eventually, Ding Hui did go on to play for the national team.

“As China continues to open up, this kind of phenomenon will become ever more prevalent,” says David Zweig, a professor of humanities and social sciences at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. “This is part of the process of internationalization, but we can only hope that Chinese people, including netizens and the people whose views tend towards extremism, can come to accept that there are many mixed-race people, both in China and worldwide.”

As for Lou, she found the whole experience more than a little disturbing. She did well in the show, ranking in the top 30 contestants before she was eliminated. Now she’s back to her normal life as a college junior — with a little new insight into her home. “Through this competition, it’s really scary to find out how the color of my skin can cause such a big controversy.”

Smiling Despite a Scandal
The makeover proved to be a learning experience for Semenya, 18, who admits she doesn’t know how to put on makeup. The photo shoots also gave her the rare opportunity to get dressed up, something a girl who’s in school and race training doesn’t get the chance to do very often. Says Semenya, “I didn’t do this to prove a point but rather to have fun. I don’t give a damn what people say about me. I like me the way I am, and who cares what other people say?”

Regardless of the controversy, South Africa has embraced its daughter since she took gold in the 800-meter race at the World Championships in Germany last month, She even met with Nelson Mandela, who praised her.

Semenya may suffer from a rare chromosomal disorder that causes her body to produce too much testosterone. This isn’t the first time an athlete’s gender has been questioned or a genetic condition has wreaked havoc on qualifying tests. Whether or not that extra dose of testosterone gives her an edge over her competitors will have to be decided.

The results of the medical test will not be made public, since they warrant patient confidentiality. Regardless of what the results say, there’s at least one teenage girl out there who likes herself just the way she is — and we love that.

First lady Michelle Obama continued to charm Russia on Tuesday, where she and the president attended a graduation ceremony at the New Economic School and a President Medvedev-hosted lunch at the Kremlin. President Obama did a bunch of business as well.

Mrs. Obama wore a black and white dress with a black flower brooch on Tuesday. She had also worn a black and white frock on the Fourth of July, and the same color combination to dinner with the Medvedevs on Monday night.

See the photos of Michelle Obama with Russian First Lady Svetlana Medvedeva, Sasha, Malia and others!

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In a rehash of a tasteless and ignorant sentiment shared by few Americans, a Canadian comedy program, shown on the French-language Radio-Canada network, recently came under fire for joking about the possible assassination of President Barack Obama. Oddly enough, the show (“Bye-Bye 2008″) took place on New Year’s Eve, nearly six months ago. But due to hundreds of complaints, something is finally being done about it.

The radio segment featured a slew of offensive statements in which the hosts seemed to revel in their own banter. At one point, one of the hosts stated, “We’re not racists. It will be good to have a Negro in the White House. It will be practical. Black on white, it will be easier to shoot him.”

To its credit, the Canadian Broadcasting Standards Council said it found, “nothing redeeming in the allegedly comedic notion that an American president should be shot, still less that this would be easier to achieve because of the color of the president’s skin. It was a disturbing, wounding, abusive racial comment.”

On another segment of the show, an Obama impersonator was featured in a faux interview in which the host said, “The blacks, you all look alike,” and then warned viewers to hide their purses. Talk About It: Is It Ever Funny To Joke About Killing the President?

The council added that the comments and sketches breached regulations, saying they “went too far in terms of Canadian broadcast standards.” Which is kind of a given, provided that they probably went too far as far as global broadcasting standards are concerned, save for, of course, those ever-resilient neo-Nazis and maybe the Klan on close-frequency ham radios.

Not surprisingly, the producers of the show actually denied the skits had been racist, saying they had meant to mock the characters making the offensive remarks, which is akin to saying Rush Limbaugh isn’t a racist… total BS.

The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) is supposedly conducting a probe of the show. And although it doesn’t have the power to fine Radio-Canada, it can issue a public reprimand.

According to a spokeswoman for the commission, such reprimands could cause problems for the network when it comes time to renew its broadcasting license. Radio-Canada is due to apply for a license renewal in 2011.

And amid all this is the fact that Canadians, like much of the world, overwhelmingly love President Obama. Polls regularly show that Canadians like Obama far more than they do their own leaders. Tens of thousands turned up to cheer him when he made a brief visit to Ottawa in February. That makes it even more mind-boggling that a radio station would think it was appropriate to air something so belligerent.

The 48-year-old mayor will govern the town and surrounding district of Valceresio, on the border of Varesotto and the Swiss canton of Ticino.

The daughter of an American soldier and a woman from Viggiu who emigrated to northern France, Cane was born in Springfield in the US state of Massachusetts.

She told Adnkronos that the Northern League had “welcomed her warmly” and that she “was in love with Viggiu”.

“In Italy I have been insulted for the colour of my skin only once, by a drunk guy in a nightclub,” she said.

Cane was backed by the Northern League and prime minister Silvio Berlusconi’s People of Freedom coalition, elected with 28.2 percent of the vote.

“I am very happy to have been elected, even though it has been a tough fight – I won by 38 votes,” she said.

“I became a candidate because I love Viggiu, for me it is fantastic, it is my city.”

Cane spent the first ten years of her life in the United States and moved to Viggiu in 1971 after her parents divorced.

“As a child it was fantastic because I could go everywhere, not like Springfield,” she said. “I always lived in Viggiu until about five or six years ago when I had to move for work reasons.”

Now she said the town which she described as “the pearl of the Varesotto” province was dirty and did not attract any visitors any more.

“I want to bring it back to life,” Cane said. “The first thing I want to do is clean the town and then little by little create shows and tours to rediscover Viggiu.”

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Bush AIDS Fund Credited With Saving Lives
$15 Billion Fund Made U.S. President Popular Across Africa
By JOHN HENDREN
DAR ES SALAAM, Tanzania, Feb. 17, 2008

President Bush may be struggling at home, but he remains surprisingly popular here in Africa, where his face adorns everything from billboards of thanks, to women’s dresses.

U.S. President George W. Bush hands a mosquito net as part of efforts to combat malaria during a tour of Meru District Hospital in Arusha, Tanzania, Monday, Feb. 18, 2008.
(AP Photo/Charles Dharapak)The main reason for his popularity is that the fund to combat AIDS, which he created in 2003, has spent more than $15 billion on the continent over the past five years.

“It was incumbent upon us to help deal with this pandemic that … could have literally wiped out an entire generation of Africans,” Bush told reporters in the Tanzanian capital today.

The fund is the largest international health initiative ever to fight a single disease, and Bush wants to double that amount to $30 billion over the next five years.

“Different people may have different views about you and your administration and your legacy,” Tanzanian President Jikaya Kikwete said. “But we, in Tanzania, if we are to speak for ourselves, and for Africa, we know for sure that you, Mr. President, and your administration, have been good friends of our country, and have been good friends of Africa.”

Critics want even more funding and fewer strings, like the requirement that some money go to abstinence programs. But even critics concede what is obvious to thousands of HIV-positive patients, like James Kan, a patient at a clinic in the capital — the program has saved lives.

“I would have died,” Kan said. “Yeah, that is exactly what could have happened.”
continue reading the full story

In 2006, the Chinese Association of South Africa sued the government, claiming that its members were being discriminated against because they were being treated as whites and thus failed to qualify for business contracts and job promotions reserved for victims of apartheid. The association successfully argued that, since Chinese-South Africans had been treated unequally under apartheid, they should be reclassified in order to redress wrongs of the past.

Jacob Zuma, President of the African National Congress, with Hu Jintao in Beijing last week (Reuters)
This is not the first time the classification of Chinese in South Africa has changed. In fact, the racial status of Chinese-South Africans has often shifted with the nation’s political climate and its international relations.

The first significant group of Chinese came to South Africa in the early 20th century, before a formal system of apartheid existed, to work in the gold mines. They were not encouraged to settle permanently and by 1910 almost all the mine workers had been repatriated. Those who remained struggled with racism and lived in separate communities based on language, culture and socio-economic status.

As apartheid became enshrined in law with the ascendancy of the Afrikaner government in the late 1940s, the Chinese were classified as “colored,” forced to live apart from whites, and were denied educational and business opportunities along with the right to vote. But after South Africa established an economic alliance with Taiwan in the 1970s, Taiwanese immigrants were welcomed as “honorary whites,” and other Chinese in South Africa began to be treated more like whites. Although they never attained the formal “honorary white” status of Taiwanese, Koreans and Japanese in South Africa and couldn’t vote, Chinese-South Africans were no longer required to use segregated facilities, and in the early 1980s they were exempted from some of the discriminatory laws that applied to other non-whites.

After apartheid ended in the early 1990s, the legal status of Chinese has remained in a gray area, though they’ve generally been lumped together with whites and denied the post-apartheid benefits available to other non-white groups.

South Africa has seen waves of immigrants and investment from China since 1994, and today there are as many as 300,000 Chinese living in the South Africa. But the new court decision is unlikely to benefit most of them or trigger another mass migration– it applies only to those Chinese who were South African citizens before 1994 (and their descendants), a much smaller number of around 10,000 to 12,000.

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Lucian Freud’s one-time muse was paid £20 a day to sit for a painting expected to fetch more than £17m. But Londoner Sue Tilley said she did not do it for the money and had “lovely lunches” with the artist. Freud’s 1995 work, Benefits Supervisor Sleeping, looks set to become the most expensive painting by a living artist when it is sold in New York next month.

Ms Tilley – who is now a job centre manager – joked she had now become a broadsheet pin-up.
Ms Tilley – nicknamed Big Sue – told the BBC’s Today programme: “I can’t quite believe it, to be honest.

“I only found out on Thursday afternoon. You know, I didn’t have any idea it was going to happen, so I’m a bit in shock.

“I was reading on the internet…all the things about it. And I was just going ‘Oh my god’, I could hardly believe it was about me.”

‘Lovely lunches’

Referring to her portrait gracing the front-page of Saturday’s Financial Times, she said: “Am I the first naked pin-up in the history of the FT?

“Half the time I don’t really think it’s me. But then this morning I was looking at it again and I was going: ‘that’s my funny little face!’

 
Ms Tilley recreates her pose on the Today programme sofa

“The painting took nine months, but that was about two or three days a week.

“When I started I got £20 a day. I don’t mind though.

“The best thing was I got lovely lunches. I got taken to the River Cafe most weekends. It was worth it for that.

“It was the experience, it wasn’t the money at all.

“It was just fantastic. You know, so many people would love to have that experience, to work with such a great artist, and chat to them, find out about them and see what they were doing.

  I don’t worry too much, because I think even the thin girls look odd

Sue Tilley

“Because you see the painting every day, you know moving along and what he’s doing and how he works on it.

“And also what I used to love was there were other paintings there as well, of other people.

“He [Lucian Freud] has about four on the go at the same time, so each time you went you’d see how far he’s moved along on the other paintings as well.”

When Ms Tilley was complimented by the Today presenter on being more attractive in the flesh than in the painting, she replied: “I think all his models are, it’s not just me. That’s why I don’t worry too much, because I think even the thin girls look odd.”

‘Scabs and spots’

Ms Tilley has modelled for Lucian Freud on several occasions. She recalled a time overhearing a critique of her in another Freud painting.

“The man was so mortified. It was the Whitechapel Gallery. There’d been a big exhibition on and my painting had just been finished, so they put it in for the last week.

“So I went with my friends to see it, and there was this man – you know those so-called art lecturers who think they know everything – ‘yes, this painting was painted because Lucian hated women, so he put the dog high up and the woman was lying on the floor. The poor thing with all her scabs and spots’.

“I started laughing. He was going ‘excuse me madam’ and I said, ‘well actually that’s me’.

“Poor man, he thought was going to fall through a hole in the floor.

“He said: ‘oh but you’re really pretty in real life.’”

The painting is on show at Christie’s in London before being auctioned in New York.