Guitarist Ernest Ranglin is an elder statesman of Jamaican music. A self-styled composer and improviser, he has traveled and collaborated widely during his 80 years. In California last year, he teamed up with three much younger musicians from South Africa, the U.S. and Israel. The four musicians bonded and quickly recorded an album, named for the San Francisco street where they rehearsed: Avila.
Originally published on Wed October 3, 2012 2:52 pm
Looking to see and hear what the fact checkers are saying during and after tonight's presidential debate about the claims made by President Obama and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney?
Love songs are like the meat and potatoes of most rock and pop music, but sometimes you need something different. For the band Delta Rae from Durham, N.C., inspiration for new material comes from stuff like graveyards and being stuck in the wrong job.
Delta Rae is a six-piece band that includes three siblings: Ian, Eric and Brittany Holljes. Their music is like a kind of modern folklore.
Originally published on Wed October 3, 2012 2:22 pm
Federal prosecutors in Brooklyn say they have broken up a ring that allegedly exported sensitive electronic technology to Russia.
Eight people were arrested today in Houston, including Alexander Fishenko, an immigrant from Kazakhstan who built a multi-million dollar export firm called Arc Electrics.
On a farm in Waitsfield, Vt., in 1945, a Merchant Marine cook named Ralph Ellison was resting after his tour of duty.
"One morning scribbling, I wrote the first sentence of what later became The Invisible Man: 'I am an invisible man,' " Ellison recalled in an interview for National Educational Television.
He wrote that his protagonist — a Negro, as Ellison always put it — was young, powerless and ambitious for the role of leadership, a role at which he was doomed to fail.
More than three decades have passed since Catalina Aguado and her husband discovered a monarch butterfly sanctuary in a Mexican forest — and helped solve the mystery of the monarch's migration.
A young boy in Canada wondered where butterflies go in the winter — and spent 40 years trying to answer that question.
In 1973, Dr. Fred Urquhart — all grown up by then — placed an ad in a newspaper in Mexico looking for volunteers to tag and observe butterflies and find their destination. A woman named Catalina Aguado and her American husband, Kenneth Brugger, answered that ad. They spent two years searching in remote parts of Mexico.
The Panthers were fundamentally a political party. Here, Panther Chief of Staff David Hilliard calls for a new U.S. Constitution from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington on June 19, 1970, to guarantee all Americans the rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness — rights they say blacks had been denied.
Bobby Seale, Panther chairman and co-founder, campaigns on a rush-hour bus in Oakland, Calif., on April 13, 1973, to be Oakland's mayor. He lost, coming in a close second place, showing the strength of the party in the city where they formed.
On May 2, 1967, Black Panthers amassed at the Capitol in Sacramento brandishing guns to protest a bill before an Assembly committee restricting the carrying of arms in public. Self-defense was a key part of the Panthers' agenda. This was an early action, a year after their founding.
Huey Newton co-founded the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense in 1966 in Oakland, Calif., with Bobby Seale. This 1970 photo shows Newton in Philadelphia.
Black Panther members stage a protest outside the Canadian Consulate in San Francisco on June 27, 1977. The Canadian government detained Huey Newton as he returned from self-imposed exile in Cuba to stand trial for a 1964 murder. He was not convicted.
Police display guns and ammunition seized by officers on April 16, 1974, when 14 Black Panther Party members were arrested at the party's precinct headquarters. Bobby Seale called the raid a plot to discredit them, timed to hurt the organization's chances of winning a majority of seats in next year's City Council.
The iconic panther symbol was first used by Eldridge Cleaver as part of a Lowndes County Freedom Organization, a political party organized to represent African-Americans in central Alabama. In the picture is Jesse Favor, a candidate for Lowndes County sheriff in 1966.
Chicago police remove the body of Fred Hampton, leader of the Illinois Black Panther Party, who was slain in a gunbattle with police in Chicago on Dec. 4, 1969, when police tried to search the group's office. Hampton was one of several Black Panthers who were killed in shootouts with police.
Two young men are shown at a May 1, 1970, rally in support of Black Panther Party Chairman Bobby Seale and other Panthers in New Haven, Conn., who were being tried for the murder of a fellow Panther who confessed to being a police informant.
Originally published on Wed October 3, 2012 1:27 pm
In an interview with Vanity Fair's contributing editor, President Obama said if Osama bin Laden was captured alive, he would have favored putting him on trial in a federal courtroom.
