Students at Chestnut Ridge Middle School participated Friday in the school’s eighth annual King for a Day Martin Luther King Jr. oratorical contest.

As Randi Weiner wrote in a story in Saturday’s publication of The Journal News, the students at the school make a point of celebrating Black History Month and the legacy of King.

The work of the slain civil rights leader is often discussed at this time of year, when the nation is actively remembering black history and achievement. Just a few weeks ago, the nation paused to commemorate King’s birthday.

An annual service marking the occasion at Pilgrim Baptist Church drew hundreds of people from the community. They reminisced about King’s legacy and through song and sermon. Listen to a podcast about the event. Download:

Locals of Asian descent were this weekend celebrating the Chinese Lunar New Year of the Rat, which was on Thursday.

The Chinese New Year is a festive occasion. Key parts of the celebration include the eating of fish for luck and dumplings for prosperity. Adults give their children red envelopes containing lucky money.

Like the Western calendar, the Chinese lunar calendar is a yearly one, but its start is based on the moon’s cycles. The beginning of the year can fall anywhere between late January and the middle of February. A complete cycle takes 60 years and is made up of five cycles of 12 years each.

The lunar calendar names each of the 12 years after an animal.

Legend has it that Buddha summoned all the animals to come to him before he left the Earth. Only 12 animals bade him farewell, and as a reward, he named a year after each one in the order in which they arrived.

The Chinese believe the animal ruling the year in which a person is born has a profound influence on that person’s character.

In addition to the rat, other animals in the cycle are the pig (also known as the boar), ox, tiger, rabbit, dragon, snake, horse, sheep, monkey, dog and rooster.

Local efforts over the years have aimed to help victims of the flood-ravaged nations of the Dominican Republic and Haiti, which share one island in the Caribbean Sea.

Earlier this month, the Haverstraw Relief Task Force shipped a 40-foot container of supplies to the Dominican Republic.

Today, reports from the other side of the island reveal that rising energy costs are hitting Haitians particularly hard.

With food prices skyrocketing due to increases in cultivation and transportation costs, Haiti’s poorest can’t afford even a daily plate of rice. Some take extreme measures to fill their bellies, and are eating cookies made of dirt, salt and vegetable shortening, the Associated Press says.

The dirt comes from the country’s central plateau and apparently is prized by pregnant women as an antacid and a source of calcium, the report said. Now, the mud cookies, which remain much cheaper than the most basic food items, have become a regular meal for the most indigent and desperate.

A reporter sampling a cookie found that it had a smooth consistency and sucked all the moisture out of the mouth as soon as it touched the tongue. For hours, an unpleasant taste of dirt lingered.

Assessments of the health effects are mixed. One expert said the dirt may contain deadly parasites or toxins, but also may strengthen fetal immunity to diseases.

Haitian doctors say depending on the cookies for sustenance risks malnutrition, the report added.

Haiti is the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere. Its struggling economy has been devastated by the effects of natural disasters, rampant crime and political strife. Of the 8 million people who live in the country, more than half are illiterate, and unemployment is widespread.

As the nation debated the electability of a black man or a white woman to the White House, the race for the Democratic presidential nomination took center stage in Rockland over the weekend.

The campaigns of Sens. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton courted local supporters in the county.

A rally for Clinton was set for 3 p.m. yesterday at the Quisqueya Sports Club in Haverstraw village, organizers said. The event was to feature appearances by Rep. Jose Serrano, D-N.Y., and Bronx Borough President Adolfo Carrion Jr.

On Saturday night, Obama supporters gathered at the Nyack Center as he captured a significant win the South Carolina Democratic primary.

State Sen. Bill Perkins, D-West Harlem, and Rockland County Legislator Bill Darden, were among the scheduled speakers.

Today is Martin Luther King Jr. Day, when the nation pauses to reflect on the slain civil rights leader’s life and legacy.

But while King Day commemorations unfold in churches and other venues across the country, one gathering on the streets of Jena, La., today will take the form of a protest to express an anti-King message.

The Nationalist Movement, a Mississippi-based group that is reputed to be a white supremacy organization, pledged to have its “No to Jena Six, No to MLK� parade following the march on Jena last year, according to published reports.

The group’s members had been asked to carry firearms and nooses at the protest, but the organization’s administration has since asked that the weapons and nooses be left at home.

Counter-protests are planned.

Civil rights advocates across the country had expressed strong concerns about a white supremacist backlash in the wake of the September march on Jena that drew an estimated 20,000 people.

The marchers had gathered to support of six black Louisiana teens whose prosecutions have drawn charges of racism and Jim Crow-era injustice.

The six students were accused in the 2006 beating of a white student in an incident that was the culmination of months of racial unrest at Jena High School in north Louisiana.

The 10th anniversary of the Rockland County Drug Court took place with the traditional rites of ceremony for the latest batch of graduates, complete with songs from the all-male choir of St. Christopher’s Inn, a substance abuse treatment center in Garrison, N.Y.

Karen M. Carpenter-Palumbo, commissioner of the state’s Office of Alcoholism and Substance Abuse, gave the keynote address. She told scores of attendees that the state needed to focus its preventive measures more upon younger adolescents.

“We have to know that last month in this state, kids in grades seven through 12 had a drink. Fifty percent of the kids in your state had a drink last night, seventh-graders, eighth-graders, ninth-graders, we can’t forget that,� she said at the Jan. 10 event that took place at the county Legislature in New City.

Carpenter-Palumbo reminded the audience that substance abuse crossed all social barriers, saying everyone who was in the room knew someone who had been touched by the problem.

This year’s seven Drug Court graduates were white and black, older and younger, male and female, and affluent and working class.

Click on the “audio” icon to listen to a podcast of the event that includes reaction from Drug Court graduates and others involved with the program. Download:

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Sens. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton have found themselves steeped in racially tinged bickering just as they’re gearing up for the South Carolina Democratic primary — a race viewed as a good measurement of which presidential candidate has the strongest support from African-Americans, who make up half the vote there.

Shortly before the New Hampshire primary last week, the former First Lady was quoted as saying Martin Luther King’s dream of racial equality was realized when President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Since then, she’s been engaged in damage control, including on Sunday when she appeared on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

On the show, Clinton suggested that Obama’s campaign injected racial tension into the presidential contest, saying he distorted her comments about Martin Luther King’s role in the civil rights movement for political gain.

Obama later called Clinton’s accusations “ludicrous,� and said he found Clinton’s comments about King to be ill-advised and unfortunate.

Here is some of the back-and-forth:

On “Meet the Press,” Clinton said,

This is an unfortunate story line the Obama campaign has pushed very successfully … I don’t think this campaign is about gender, and I sure hope it’s not about race.

Later, Obama who was campaigning in Las Vegas, said,

She made an ill-advised statement about Dr. King, suggesting that Lyndon Johnson had more to do with the Civil Right Acts … I did not make the statement. I haven’t commented on the statement. For them to suggest that we’re injecting race as a consequence of a statement she made that we haven’t commented on is pretty hard to figure out.

John Edwards, another presidential hopeful in the Democratic primary, joined the conversation. On Sunday, he told more than 200 people gathered at a predominantly black Baptist church in Sumter, S.C.,

I must say I was troubled recently to see a suggestion that real change came not through the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King but through a Washington politician. I fundamentally disagree with that.

Here’s a clip of Clinton’s comment on YouTube. Tell us your thoughts on what she had to say.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

If you haven’t heard already, Golf Channel anchor Kelly Tilghman was suspended for two weeks yesterday after making a racially sensitive comment during last Friday’s telecast of the Mercedes-Benz Championship in Honolulu.

The Golf Channel said in its statement,

While we believe that Kelly’s choice of words was inadvertent and that she did not intend them in an offensive manner, the words were hurtful and grossly inappropriate … Consequently, we have decided to suspend Kelly for two weeks, effective immediately.

Tilghman, who became golf’s first female anchor last year, was bantering with analyst Nick Faldo about how young players could challenge Tiger Woods when Faldo suggested they gang up on Woods. Tilghman replied, “Lynch him in a back alley.”

Since then, Read more of this entry »

The general elections are 11 months away, but political fervor is already at fever pitch.

The issue that has captured the attention of pundits, pollsters and Joe and Jane Public is whether America will select a white woman or a black man as the next Democratic nominee for president.

The Democratic front-runners, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, have opened up meaningful debates about race and gender issues in today’s America.

Gone are the days when women or black candidates for their parties’ presidential nominations were considered long shots.

So far in America, though, the issue has been tackled only in fiction. We’ve watched Geena Davis as President Mackenzie Allen in the short-lived ABC drama, “Commander In Chief,â€? and Dennis Haysbert’s President David Palmer in FOX’s “24.â€?

Only time will tell if life will imitate art.

In other parts of the world, women have served as presidents, premiers and prime ministers.

Recently in this country, Carol Mosley Braun and Elizabeth Dole both sought their parties’ nomination for president, but Clinton, a senator from New York, is seen as savvy enough and politically powerful enough to actually get it.

Jesse Jackson has run for president, but Obama is widely seen as the first truly viable black potential presidential candidate.

Obama’s biracial heritage also is fueling some interesting questions about racial identity. With his white American mother and black Kenyan father, many Americans wonder how to view him. The Illinois senator has always self-identified as African-American.

If you have thoughts on this, readers, please feel free to share.

A Muslim civil rights and advocacy group is trying to increase American Muslims’ participation in the political process with a new Web site and handbook to encourage voting in state and national elections.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations, a Washington-D.C. based group, announced the effort on Wednesday.

The civic participation handbook provides tips on how to contact elected representatives, register to vote, conduct voter registration drives, organize candidate forums, and manage political action committees and nonprofit organizations, among other topics. See the handbook here.

CAIR also has launched a Web site to provide information on election developments that may be of interest or concern to the American Muslim community. Visit it here.

There are an estimated 1.2 billion Muslims worldwide, about 7 million of whom reside in the United States. About 6,000 Muslims live in Rockland.