Wednesday, February 27 2008 Sydney Entertainment Centre, Sydney, NSW, Australia

• Anthony Mundine vs Nader Hamdan (WBA super middleweight championship).

Thursday, February 28 2008 Roseland Ballroom, New York City

• Dimitri Kirilov vs Cecilio Santos (IBF junior bantamweight championship).
• Dmitriy Salita vs TBA (lightweight).

Friday, February 29 2008 Bell Centre, Montreal, Canada

• Lucian Bute vs William Joppy (IBF super middleweight championship).

by Contessa Abono

Yolanda López’s Portrait of the Artist as the Virgin of Guadalupe

Acts of war make people behave in action, seek shelter and some speak out while some are silenced. Women on War art exhibition will feature images of war, not just the Iraq war but of all wars past and present seen through women’s eyes.

Also with Yolanda Lopez Exhibition: “Women’s work is Never Done.” The Promises of the Border.

Yolanda López emerged from the Third World Strike at SFSU helping establish the Ethnic Studies Program. She states that era was when she began to understand how she works as an artists. Ms. Lopez has lived in the Mission District for 35 years and is the 2008 recipient for the Women’s Caucus for Art Lifetime Achievement Award. Exhibition is open Feb. 15 through March 29. Admission $5. For more information visit www.Missioncultralcent.org.

Televisions switch over to digital

At midnight on Feb. 17, all full-power television stations in the United States stopped broadcasting in analog and switch to 100 percent digital broadcasting.

Digital broadcasting promises to provide a clearer picture and more programming options and will free up airwaves for use by emergency responders.

Congress created the TV Converter Box Coupon Program for households wishing to keep using their analog TV sets after Feb. 17. The Program allows U.S. households to obtain up to two coupons, each worth $40, that can be applied toward the cost of eligible converter boxes.

A TV connected to cable, satellite or other pay TV service does not require a TV converter box from this program.

Consumers have a variety of options. Options to explore includes keep your existing analog TV and purchase a TV converter box. A converter box plugs into your TV and will keep it working after Feb. 17, or connect to cable, satellite or other pay service, or purchase a television with a digital tuner.

Requirement for analog cellular service expires in February

Broken TV

Beginning Feb. 18, cellular telephone companies will not be required to provide analog service. While most wireless telephone users will not be affected by this transition, some users may be affected.  In addition, the transition could affect some alarm systems and some users of OnStar in-vehicle communications service.

­Wireless Telephone Service.  The analog cellular sunset will not affect anyone using a digital-only handset including subscribers to wireless service from Sprint/Nextel or T-Mobile.

It might affect those using a handset that can receive analog service from a cellular telephone company, including AT&T Mobility, Verizon Wireless, Alltel, US Cellular, and Dobson and other companies that market their services as “Cellular One”.

For more information about this issue or any other telecommunications-related issues, visit the FCC’s Consumer & Governmental Affairs Bureau Consumer Inquiries and Complaints Division 445 12th Street, SW Washington, DC 20554.

Corazon Del Barrio: open House

Mission Cultural Center for Latinos Arts invites the community to celebrate in the continued spirit of Valentine’s Day with music, dance, refreshments, videos and more. Sat. Feb. 23, 1 to 4 p.m. free admission.

by José de la Isla

HOUSTON – Last summer a friend invited me to step out into the patio during a dinner party in a tony neighborhood. The dinner was at one of those places that predates gated communities, a throwback to kinder, gentler, genteel days. It was a classical set up to find out about some indiscretion, a rumor, preferably a confession, the stuff behind the headlines. Indeed it was.

My friend Anabelle wanted to share some details about what a young European woman she met at her yoga class had told her. The gracious European was the wife of an international banker, and she had a run-in with immigration authorities, something about her documentation.

Her point in telling me this is that there was something undignified about how the young wife felt about the U.S. treatment after arriving from Spain. Other people were talking who felt the same way. What’s up, Anabelle wanted to know?

Now, it seems, the hoity-toity are feeling the squeeze many working-class people endure. They are joining the ranks of the suspicious class. Fewer of us who cross borders are exempt from the suspicions presumed reserved for the less connected.

This fits in with what an Australian friend revealed about his experience on reentering the country after a business meeting abroad. Evidently Malcolm (not his real name) fits the ID of a homologue and underwent a body search and interrogation before the authorities decided they had the wrong guy. They released him after four hours without so much as an apology. The indignity of it all, he said to me.

A real estate agent at a reception held at the Junior League tells me her son was out one night and a patrolman stopped him and his friends. The officer said he wanted to see his “citizenship papers.” Liz tells me her son answered back, “And I want to see your Homeland Security badge.”

The cop let him go after that crack. Evidently a real “illegal” would cower. But the point is made when your appearance puts you in the suspicious class, when the presumed protections that go with education, bearing or class simply just go away. Welcome to the suspicious class.

Eventually, when too many people smart-ass back like that, sooner or later an incident is going to occur.

Frankly, most of us think we will never fall under the gaze and become part of the suspicious class. All those others didn’t either. But it happened. Still, that’s not the main point. Elite U.S citizens are also becoming part of the suspicious class. That’s what happened to Nena.

Her story is not unlike what happens to many others.

Nena and her husband Vicente pondered a dream vacation to Europe and they applied for passports at the post office. They know even routine trips across the border into Mexico, which at least 700,000 people do daily, now require a passport. Getting one seemed like a good, practical idea.

But after applying, Nena received a notice saying she needed to answer a questionnaire. All this was quite confusing because she was born in Edinburgh, Texas, in the 1950s. She had a certified birth certificate.

Her parents, because of economic necessity, raised the children in Mexico. This is something retirees living in Mexico understand all too well. You go to the nearby places where living is affordable. With six children, this was an understandable family solution in those times.

But she said too much in the questionnaire, and the information she volunteered evidently was used against her. Some brothers and sisters are Mexican and others U.S. nationals.

You can just imagine the bureaucrat, in charge of making the decision, looking at the document that came in the mail, already once before rejected. His job is to think every document is false, every life story full of holes, seeking the needle in the haystack, the 19 among 300 million.

And so Nena—and all the well-meaning others—fall into the dragnet that now makes them part of a suspicious class.

For Nena, an upstanding citizen with proof where she was born, even after her congressman’s intervention and the passing of a year, still does not have a passport because, it seems, her life story isn’t conventional enough.

[José de la Isla, author of “The Rise of Hispanic Political Power” (Archer Books, 2003) writes a weekly commentary for Hispanic Link News Service. E-mail joseisla3@yahoo.com]. © 2008

by José de la Isla

HOUSTON– Comedian Bill Mahr had it right—did no one notice Obama was black before South Carolina?

Up to that primary, the contenders handled race rather responsibly. But in the heat of competition, the race factor came up in a nuanced, inexplicit way. Defensive sensitivities then surged forward.

Hillary Clinton simply over-credited Lyndon Johnson by saying Martin Luther King’s dream didn’t get realized until Johnson passed the civil rights act. Of course it took a movement to get him and Congress to that point.

But when Obama said Clinton’s statement was “unfortunate” and “ill-advised” to say it that way, he leveraged sensitivities that cast Clinton in the wrong light. He could have said instead she gave a flawed version of those historic events.

The lesson to take away is not who won but how voters get used in the situation. Neither candidate was completely wrong, nor fully correct, either.

But the subliminal message was that Obama was the injured party because he has more authority to know what those events meant because he is black. There I disagree.

At some point claims on the events and the brave deeds leading up to a resolution that won people civil rights have to go into the public domain. They are not the exclusive province of any single group but belong to those who were there, who did something useful, who supported and who saw it through.

That’s why giving credit or wanting it, as if this were a rubber-chicken awards banquet, doesn’t cast either Clinton or Obama in a favorable light.

In terms of how he played it, Barack Obama reached out to his African American affinity group and they helped push him to a solid win in the South Carolina primary.

­He was not so much right on the substance of the matter as he was correct to avoid throwing the first punch.

The public easily gets derailed from the main focus this way, which I think is happening here. Race and gender are considerations when those are the basis for infringing on people’s rights. Otherwise our attention, it seems to me, ought to go into discerning who proposes a clear policy path from the country we are to the one the candidate thinks we ought to have.

Also, what unimpeachably qualifies this person not just to lead but to lead in the right direction? We have had it with toxic leaders. And here race and gender can be part of the leader’s identity. The twenty-first century lesson for us to have clearly in our minds is that because they have one different from us does not deny us ours.

Gender is a foregone conclusion. The United States is no leader when it comes to selecting a female chief of state. As for race, the issue to decide is which race? The monopoly dialogue which narrow casts a black and white nation is long past. In fact, figures show our nation might be a lot more different than how we portray it.

A survey by the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry reports black and white intermarriages increased 400 percent (and a thousand percent for white and Asian marriages) in the last 30 years. Meanwhile 47 percent of white, 60 percent of black, and 90 percent of Hispanic teens reported dating someone of “another race.”

So what are we going to call the progeny of our new society? And will future politicians have a race card to play?

There’s a lesson from history to guide us. John Charles Chasteen the distinguished University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, history professor, in his excellent book “Americanos: Latin America’s Struggle for Independence,” says it in his prologue.

Before this continent’s independence struggles that began in 1807-08, mostly against Spain, the term “americano” used to mean exclusively people of European descent.

By 1825, when the struggles ended, “Americanos” were all the people of this continent — of European, indigenous, African and mixed descents — who formed the majority of the population.

What’s evidently lacking now is our own Americano perspective. It’s a term to think about, nearly 200 years later, as a way to denote the formation of a new population that doesn’t have the hang ups of the past.

[José de la Isla, author of “The Rise of Hispanic Political Power” (Archer Books, 2003) writes a weekly commentary for Hispanic Link News Service. E-mail joseisla3@yahoo.com].  ©2008

por Marvin J Ramirez

Consciousness about what we eat has become more than a trend and fad, it’s now an increasing part of our eating culture. Driving has also become part of that concern to protect our environment through the invention of fuel-alternative vehicles and solar buildings.

However, when it comes to what we wear, less people are aware of the health consequences if the products were made from contaminated products and materials.

Most are unaware that benefits exist when we choose to purchase products with organic and sustainable material as products, according to an statement from The White Pebble, an online retail destination and community website dedicated to organic and sustainable products for the family.

The chemicals in cotton, for example, have an impact in our health. And these are some of the things to consider.

Cotton crops are typically rotated to maintain soil quality, and peanuts that are grown for people to eat are commonly grown in place of cotton for that purpose, explains the statement. Cotton seed is also used to produce food for livestock that are part of the food supply chain. So, many of our food and clothing products are inextricably linked.

The skin is the largest and most absorbent organ in a human body. Studies have shown that the pesticides and herbicides used to produce cotton, for example, contain carcinogens and allergy-causing agents.

An estimated 200,000 workers in California, alone, suffered from chronic diseases link to industrial chemical exposure in 2004, especially farm workers. So, be aware of what you wear, in addition to watching what you eat, Organic tends to be more expensive to buy, but if you can afford a few more dollars for better and less-contaminated food for your family, go for it. Start thinking organic, it could be the way that will help you be healthier than most of those who don’t care or don’t know about it.