Monday, June 30, 2008

June 16- "SOWETO UPRISING" YOUTH DAY

The Southern West Township is burning!!

JUNE 16- Celebrating YOUTH DAY in South Africa

By Warren Bright



“When you see your friends being shot at for just walking in the street, it does something to you. And therefore, you would look around; what are the alternatives? Do I become like my mother, forever under the yoke of apartheid? The alternative was for me to not be like my mom, great as she was, but to go and fight. ”Thandi Modise, on Soweto uprising .

Thirty two years ago, the uprising of a group of schoolchildren changed South Africa forever.
For decades, the whites-only government of South Africa had brutally enforced a policy of racial segregation known as apartheid -- and just as ruthlessly crushed any opposition. By the 1970s, an entire generation of anti-apartheid fighters had been silenced. Many were killed. Others, like Nelson Mandela, were in prison or in exile.

But on June 16, 1976, students in Soweto township outside Johannesburg decided to hold a protest against a government policy mandating that all classes be taught in Afrikaans, the language of South African whites.What started as a student demonstration exploded across South Africa, helping to change the course of the nation's history by galvanizing the struggle to dismantle apartheid.
A student protest by children in the poor township of Soweto proved to be a watershed moment in the fight to dismantle apartheid in South Africa.

The Soweto uprising or Soweto riots were a series of clashes in Soweto, South Africa on June 16, 1976 between black youths and the South African authorities. The riots grew out of protests against the policies of the National Party government and its apartheid regime.
June 16 is now celebrated in South Africa as Youth Day.


It was a picture that got the world's attention: A frozen moment in time that showed 13-year-old Hector Peterson dying after being struck down by a policeman's bullet.

The origin of the protests are traced back to 1949 and the Eiselen Commission's enquiry into the edification of non-whites. The commission recommended drastic changes, which were implemented through the Bantu Education Act of 1953. The legislation caused many mission schools, through which the majority of black children were educated, to lose government aid and close. Funding for black schools was drawn from taxes paid by black people, who were generally impoverished. The result was a very uneven distribution of teaching resources in black and white schools.

More than 500 people are killed over the next eight months, a quarter of them under age 18. Keystone/Getty Images


Similarly, the Coloured Person's Education Act of 1963 made coloured education the responsibility of the Department of Coloured Affairs and barred coloured children from white schools. In 1965 the Indian Education Act consigned Indian education to the Department of Indian Affairs.


The funding available for bantu education was diverted to building schools in bantustans between 1962 and 1971, and no new schools were constructed in urban areas for non-white students during this time. In 1972 the state committed itself to generating better qualified labourers by improving the education system and between 1972 and 1976 forty new schools were built in Soweto. The learning population in the township multiplied threefold, but still only one in five Soweto children attended schools.



The uprising.
On the morning of June 16, 1976, thousands of black students walked from their schools to Orlando Stadium for a rally to protest against having to learn through Afrikaans in school. Many students who later participated in the protest arrived at school that morning without prior knowledge of the protest, yet agreed to become involved. The protest was intended to be peaceful and had been carefully planned by the Soweto Students’ Representative Council’s (SSRC) Action Committee[5], with support from the wider Black Consciousness Movement.

Teachers in Soweto also supported the march after the Action Committee emphasized good discipline and peaceful action.Tsietsi Mashininini led students from Morris Isaacson High School to join up with others who walked from Naledi High School [6]. The students began the march only to find out that police had barricaded the road along their intended route. The leader of the action committee asked the crowd not to provoke the police and the march continued on another route, eventually ending up near Orlando High School.[7]

The crowd of between 3,000 and 10,000 students made their way towards the area of the school. Students sang and wove placards with slogans such as, "Down with Afrikaans", "Viva Azania" and "If we must do Afrikaans, Vorster must do Zulu".[8] A 2006 BBC/SABC documentary corroborated the testimony of Colonel Kleingeld, the police officer who fired the first shot, with eyewitness accounts from both sides. In Kleingeld's account, some of the children started throwing stones as soon as they spotted the police patrol, while others continued to march peacefully. Police attempts to calm the crowd verbally, or to disperse the students using dogs and tear gas had no effect. One of the police dogs was caught, set alight and beaten to death. When police saw they were surrounded by the students, they fired shots into the crowd, and pandemonium broke out.[4]

Colonel Kleingeld drew his handgun and fired a shot, causing panic and chaos. Students started screaming and running and more gunshots were fired. The first person to be shot was Hastings Ndlovu, followed by 12-year-old Hector Pieterson. The photograph taken of his body became a symbol of police brutality. The rioting continued and 23 people, including two white people, died on the first day in Soweto. Among them was Dr Melville Edelstein who had devoted his life to social welfare among blacks.[9] He was stoned to death by the mob and left with a sign around his neck proclaiming 'Beware Afrikaaners'.

The violence escalated as the students panicked; bottle stores and beerhalls were targeted as many believed that alcohol was used by the government to control black people. The violence abated by nightfall. Police vans and armored vehicles patrolled the streets throughout the night.
Emergency clinics were swamped with injured and bloody children. It is not known how many injured children sustained bullet wounds because doctors refused to collect such details for fear that police would target the families of such children. In many cases bullet wounds were indicated on hospital records as abscesses.[4]

Emotions ran high after the massacre on June 16. Hostility between students and the police was intense, with officers shooting at random and more people joining the protesters. The township youth had been frustrated and angry for a long time and the riots became the opportunity to bring to light their grievances.

The 1,500 heavily armed police officers deployed to Soweto on June 17 carried weapons including automatic rifles, stun guns, and carbines.[4] They drove around in armoured vehicles with helicopters monitoring the area from the sky. The South African Army was also order on standby as a tactical measure to show military force. Crowd control methods used by South African police at the time included mainly dispersement techniques, and many of the officers shot indiscriminately, killing many people.

Casualties
The accounts of how many people died vary from 200 to 600[10], with Reuters news agency currently reporting there were "more than 500" fatalities in the 1976 riots. The original government figure claimed only 23 students were killed. The number of wounded was estimated to be over a thousand men, children, and women.

********"Success Comes when we focus on it"*********

Friday, June 27, 2008

"Hureeeeeee The Power Pipe is Free"


Jury acquits R. Kelly of all counts

By Warren Bright, & MICHAEL TARM, Associated Press Writer Fri Jun 13, 7:56 PM ET CHICAGO -

R. Kelly was acquitted of all charges Friday after less than a day of deliberations in his child pornography trial, ending a six-year ordeal for the R&B superstar. Kelly dabbed his face with a handkerchief and hugged each of his four attorneys after the verdict — not guilty on all 14 counts — was read. The Grammy award-winning singer had faced 15 years in prison if convicted.

Minutes later, surrounded by bodyguards, he left the courthouse without comment. Dozens of fans screamed and cheered as he climbed into a waiting SUV."All I heard (from Kelly) while those 14 verdicts were being read was 'Thank you, Jesus. Thank you, Jesus. Thank you, Jesus,'" said Sam Adam Jr., one of his attorneys.
Prosecutors had argued that a video tape mailed to the Chicago Sun-Times in 2002 showed Kelly engaged in graphic sex acts with a girl as young as 13 at the time. Both Kelly, 41, and the now 23-year-old alleged victim had denied they were the ones on the tape. Neither testified during the trial.

"Robert said all along that he believed in our system and he believed in God — and that when all the facts came out in court, he would be cleared of these terrible charges," according to a statement from his publicist, Allen Mayer. "But he never dreamed it would take six and a half years. This has been a terrible ordeal for him and his family and at this point all he wants to do is move forward and put it behind him."

Jurors said that fact that neither the alleged victim nor her parents testified weakened the prosecution. But the real key was the woman herself: One juror said he just was not sure the female was who prosecutors said she was — or that she was a minor when the tape was made.

Another said that while he was convinced it was Kelly on the tape, he had doubts about the female. "What we had wasn't enough," said the juror, who declined to give his name.Prosecutors relied in part on a star witness who said she engaged in three-way sex with Kelly and the girl. Defense attorneys labeled that woman an extortionist, claiming she sought hundreds of thousands of dollars from Kelly in exchange for her silence and stole his $20,000 watch at one point.

Testimony in the monthlong trial centered on whether Kelly was the man who appears on a sexually graphic, 27-minute videotape at the heart of the case, and whether a female who also appears on it was underage.Over seven days presenting their case, prosecutors called 22 witnesses, including several childhood friends of the alleged victim and four of her relatives who identified her as the female on the video.

In just two days, Kelly's lawyers called 12 witnesses. They included three relatives of the alleged victim who testified they did not recognize her as the female on the tape.Assistant Cook County State's Attorney Shauna Boliker said she believed the female on the tape was a victim, not a prostitute as the defense had contended."This shows the world how difficult this crime is to prosecute," she said. "It also takes the soul of the victim, the heart of the victim."

Kelly won a Grammy in 1997 for "I Believe I Can Fly," and is known for such raunchy hits as "Bump N' Grind," "Ignition," and for "Trapped in the Closet," a multipart saga about the sexual secrets of an ever-expanding cast of characters.
Of the 12 jurors, nine were men and three were women; eight were white and four were black. They included the wife of a Baptist preacher from Kelly's Chicago-area hometown, Olympia Fields, as well as a compliance officer for a Chicago investment firm and a man in his 60s who emigrated from then-Communist Romania nearly 40 years ago.

Despite his legal troubles, Kelly — who rose from poverty on Chicago's South Side to become a star singer, songwriter and producer — still retains a huge following, and his popularity has arguably grown in recent years.
The singer has released more than half a dozen albums, most of them selling over a million copies. He's also had a multitude of hits and gone on tours. Kelly has a new song, "Hair Braider," out now, and is due to release a new album in July.
Kelly, always meticulously dressed in a suit and tie, appeared tense at times during the trial, furrowing his brow. He seemed particularly ill at ease when prosecutors played the sex tape in open court after opening arguments. In the video, entered into evidence as "People's Exhibit No. 1," a man has sex with a young female, who is naked for most of the recording. She is often blank-faced. The man speaks to her in a hushed voice, and she calls him "Daddy."

In one scene, alluded to in one count of the indictment, the man urinates on the female. The issue of whether there was or wasn't a fingernail-sized mole on the man's lower was a subject of hours of testimony.
A defense witness told jurors there was no mole on his back, proving it's not Kelly, who has such a mole. But a prosecution witness displayed freeze frames of the video where a dark spot seemed to appear as the man turns to take off his pants. Jurors later said the issue of whether Kelly had a mole was not a decisive factor.

One surreal moment came when a defense expert played a segment of the tape he doctored showing two headless bodies engaging in sex. The defense said that backed their argument that Kelly's likeness could have been computer-generated. Cross examination was often heated.
Several witnesses cried on the stand. The star prosecution witness, Lisa Van Allen, became teary eyed as she told jurors she engaged in several three-way sexual encounters with Kelly and the alleged victim, including once on a basketball court. Kelly videotaped the trysts, she said.

Van Allen also claimed Kelly used to carry a duffel bag stuffed full of his homemade sex tapes.
The defense called several witnesses in a bid to discredit Van Allen, accusing her of trying to extort money from Kelly. Under cross-examination, Van Allen admitted she once stole Kelly's $20,000 diamond-studded watch from a hotel.
Recording artist R. Kelly arrives at the Cook County Criminal Courthouse for a verdict in his child pornography trial in Chicago June 13, 2008
Recording artist R. Kelly (L), flanked by a security guard, arrives at the Cook County Criminal Courthouse in Chicago June 13, 2008.
In this June 13, 2008 file photo, R&B singer R. Kelly leaves the Cook County Criminal Court Building Friday, June 13, 2008, in Chicago after a jury found him not guilty on all counts in his child pornography trial.

R&B singer R. Kelly leaves the Cook County Criminal Court Building Friday, June 13, 2008, in Chicago after a jury found him not guilty on all counts in his child pornography trial.

Supporters cheer as R&B singer R. Kelly leaves the Cook County Criminal Court Building Friday, June 13, 2008, in Chicago after a jury found him not guilty on all counts in his child pornography trial.

Singer R. Kelly, seen in April, broke down and wept Friday as a jury cleared him of 14 charges of child pornography. The Chicago-based artist had consistently denied the charges since his arrested in 2002 after an incriminating video tape was sent to the Chicago Sun-Times.

Associated Press writers Mike Robinson and Maria Danilova contributed to this report.

Temptations Fashion Show!!


The Tanzania's Top Super Male Models Break the silence!

Richard (Model)

Warren Bright (Model)

Chanchou (Model)


Super models,Richard and Warren Pose together before the show
BY Cyprian Van der Merwe

The world of modelling is rather a diverse place, and to make it all happen there has to be other people working with models and photographers to achieve that elusive perfect shot. This allows for many other careers in the modelling industry aside from models and photographers.
Warren Bright wins Roosta male model crown 2006 Cape Town
The amount of administration and organisation involved in setting up and photo shoot or even a catwalk show in incredible and these events only come together thanks to the hard work of teams of many individuals.

Raqee The Profession Photographer

Other careers in the modelling industry include the many personal assistants, model bookers and event organisers who work closely together to create the smallest photo shoot to a large scale catwalk event. These are some of the other careers in the modelling industry that are open to all people, although an interest in the modelling industry is always a plus. Locations are also essential for any photo shoot or event, and working as a locations manager is hard but rewarding work, and allows you to travel to some of the most stunning places in the world.

Richard TZ Super Model

Working with model agents can present very rewarding careers, with many opportunities to travel the work and enjoy a client's hospitality, as well as working with some of the best photographers and creatives in the industry, not to mention the models themselves.Other careers in the modelling industry also feature a strong team of creatives that develop both the look of the model and the location or set to help photographers create a truly stunning image. Three careers fall into the creatives category; Hair Stylists, Make Up Artists and Stylists.

Warren Bright S.A Super Model

A hair stylist is often an very creative and talented expert in hair, with many years of experience in all kinds of hair styling. Hair Stylists can specialise in a particular area for example working as an expert colourist or have particular skills with Afro-Caribbean hair. Some Hair Stylists may also concentrate on more natural styles whilst others are skilled with extravagant hair art. Working as a hair stylist in the modelling industry offers superb careers options, which combines long hours with travel around the world with models and photographers along with a very fair wage.

O.J TZ Super Model

The level or artistic license given to the stylist depends on many factors, one being the ideas that the photographers have about the shoot. Many will hand the reigns over to the hair stylist and allow them to create their most stunning designs. Either way, careers as hair stylists in the modelling industry are highly sought after and are enjoyed by the best in their field.Similarly, those choosing careers as Make Up Artists work along side hair stylists to create a range of looks for every model they work with.
Mwinyi TZ Super Model

Make Up Artists in the modelling industry have tremendous talent and are able to change a models looks in minutes, and when working closely with the Hair Stylist and Stylists turn a beautiful model into a stunning work of art.
Chanchou TZ Super Model

Like Hair Stylists, Make Up Artists may have the freedom to create the look as they wish, which many other careers do not offer, but may also be directed by photographers and other creatives in order to create the perfect look. This is one of the top careers in the modelling industry and also enjoys the global travel if you are at the top of your game.

A stylist is on of the many careers in the modelling industry, working closely with the other creatives to set both the scene and models appearance for a photo shoot. Stylists can either work solely on the models clothing and appearance or with the set too, creating the perfect environment for a photo shoot. Stylists are very creative people with a natural flair for fashion, and maintain this by keeping a close eye on the latest fashions throughout the world; and not just in clothing but in design as a whole.

Temptations audience

Enjoyable careers in the modelling industry such as this are perfect for creative people.These other careers in the modelling industry like the ones above usually require several years of training and experience before you can work on the best modelling assignments, but it is certainly worth climbing that career ladder.
Solo artist perfom during the temptations fashion show event
Careers in the modelling industry are enjoyed by many people the world over, and with the variety of work and perks of travel and hospitality it is easy to see why many want to break into this world.


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Different Types of Modelling

By Sibongile Bongani
Cape Town,South Africa



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