Free Republic

WASHINGTON – Vice President Joe Biden won’t be coming to Dallas on Friday after all. A fundraising reception he was supposed to headline for Senate Democrats – with the embattled majority leader, Nevada Sen. Harry Reid – has been postponed until late March, Democratic operatives said. The invitation from the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee asked for donations up to $30,400, and offered a chance to spend some time with Biden, Reid, Senate Finance Chairman Max Baucus of Montana, who has shepherded the health care bill, and Sen. Mary Landrieu of Louisiana. On Thursday, President Barack Obama asked Biden to visit...

SUPPORTING President Bush is not just socially suicidal in this town — it can endanger your career and cost you big bucks, as one cabby discovered the hard way. Haitian-born Etzer Jerome was fined $500 and had his license suspended three weeks — a loss of some $5,000 — simply because, he says, he committed a new kind of infraction: Backing Bush While Black. "I'm a Bush man," Jerome, 49, told me while recounting a story that couldn't happen anyplace else. [snip] Elizabeth Grainger asked for a ride to 116th Street. He dropped his sandwich, and they drove off....

ORLANDO, Fla. (Reuters) - Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry, condemned by some Republicans as "French looking," promised on Monday to help Haitian immigrants in Florida, saying: "Je vais aider les Haitiens." The Massachusetts senator, who has French relatives and is fluent in the language, has rarely spoken it in public on the campaign trail. His political adversaries have tried to capitalize on anti-French sentiment created by Paris' staunch opposition to the Iraq war and to portray Kerry as aloof and opposed to U.S. interests. But in Florida, a critical battleground state in the Nov. 2 presidential election where many many...

GOP courts Haitian Americans BY LESLEY CLARK AND JACQUELINE CHARLES lclark@herald.com Haitian Americans, who have seen their clout rise in the Democratic Party over the past decade, are now being wooed by Republicans, a sign of the community's burgeoning political power. Republican National Committee Chairman Ed Gillespie, accompanied by boxing promoter Don King, on Thursday swooped into North Miami -- the largest city in the country governed by a Haitian American -- to tout President Bush's record and urge Haitian Americans to the polls. ''I do think there is an opportunity here to get a good chunk of the Haitian-American...

The North Miami police department dropped a swimming requirement for applicants, saying they need new officers and want to encourage blacks to sign up. North Miami police say they are dropping the requirement for a year. They say few departments require swimming and their officers rarely save people in water. Officials also believe the requirement discourages African-Americans and Haitian Americans from applying. The issue surfaced a year ago when a Haitian-American city councilman asked police to drop the requirement because he said blacks historically can't swim. The request fizzled at the time. Critics say race and ethnicity are not factors...

<p>BELLE GLADE, Fla. — Southeast Fifth Street and Northwest Avenue D in Belle Glade is the Third World.</p> <p>The denizens of this squalor hang from the balcony over Bobby's Market, sit on stoops in front of the Family Food Market and lean against Brown's Soul Food, all of them looking at a sun-bleached, treeless city block-size square of concrete that was, in another life, a town square.</p>

<p>NORTH MIAMI, Fla. — Leaders of South Florida's Haitian community met behind closed doors over the weekend and denounced some members of the Congressional Black Caucus for their ties to departed Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide.</p> <p>"We have to wonder if some of the Congressional Black Caucus may have profited from their relationship with Aristide," said Carlo Jean-Joseph, an immigration lawyer from Lauderhill in neighboring Broward County.</p>

CARACAS, VENEZUELA – Whether Washington is a hero or hangman of democracy in Latin America may be a matter of political perspective. Haitians watched last week as US agents whisked leftist President Jean-Bertrand Aristide off to the heart of Africa in what Mr. Aristide describes as a kidnapping. In Venezuela, President Hugo Chavez, another leftist who has antagonized Washington, has harshly accused the White House of backing coup-plotters against him. Critical of US action in Haiti, he warned the US on Friday to "get its hands off Venezuela." The Caribbean Community, or CARICOM, an organization of mostly English-speaking nations, is...

MIAMI - Haitian-Americans and immigrants advocates criticized the Bush administration Friday for sending more than 500 Haitian migrants back to face a violent uprising in their homeland, with one saying "we could be returning people to their death." The U.S. Coast Guard said it returned 531 people, including infants, near the capital of Port-au-Prince on Friday. That was the total number of Haitians who had been intercepted at sea near their nation's coast since Feb. 21. "It is our intention, upon rescuing Haitian migrants from peril at sea aboard grossly overloaded and unseaworthy vessels, to immediately repatriate them in...

<p>February 25, 2004 -- Democratic presidential candidate Al Sharpton said yesterday that both Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide and opposition leaders have accepted his offer to travel to Haiti to help broker a peace agreement after a U.S.-backed proposal was rejected.</p>

WASHINGTON - Democratic presidential candidate Al Sharpton (news - web sites) is making plans to meet with both the Haitian president and rebel leaders in an effort to help stem the violent unrest in the country. Sharpton said Tuesday the Haitian consul general told him the president is willing to meet with him. "If by the end of the day there's no agreement between the rebels and the government, I'm definitely going," Sharpton said in a telephone interview shortly before meeting with the consul general, Harry Fouche, at the Haitian consulate in New York. Sharpton, a minister who has advocated...

When opponents of Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide gather this weekend in yet another rally to demand his resignation from office, Haitian Americans won't be the only ones voicing their contempt for the embattled leader. Joining them will be Cubans, Peruvians, Argentines and Venezuelans -- all of whom are pressing for a variety of political agendas in their home countries. ''We want to send a message: We don't want any more dictators. We want liberty in the Americas,'' said Samir Mourra, a South Florida Haitian-American businessman and Aristide opponent who today will announce the formation of the Coalition of the Americas....

<p>By 4 p.m. Saturday, more than 600 Haitian-Americans had passed through the doors of Temple Salem Seventh Day Adventist Church to pray for their homeland, where armed rebels have tried to wrest control of the government from President Jean-Bertrand Aristide.</p>

<p>MIAMI (AP) -- Gov. Jeb Bush's Democratic rival and hundreds of Haitian-Americans called on lawmakers to help the more than 200 Haitian migrants who remained detained Thursday, two days after the nation watched them jump from a crowded freighter and struggle ashore.</p>

Sunshine state overtakes Ontario in number of francophones Graeme Hamilton National Post MONTREAL - Quebec is often described as an island of French in an English sea but new census data reveal the emergence of a second island, and this one has palm trees. Florida, long the recipient of a Speedo-clad French-Canadian diaspora, has overtaken Ontario as the North American jurisdiction with the most French-speakers outside Quebec. The dramatic increase in the number of people speaking French at home in Florida is largely attributable to a recent influx of Haitian immigrants, but French-Canadians still account for a large part of...

Reuters U.S. Haitians to picket over computer game Thursday December 11, 12:36 pm ET By Michael Christie MIAMI, Dec 11 (Reuters) - Haitian community leaders vowed to proceed with plans to picket retailers selling a video game in which players are exhorted to "kill all the Haitians," saying the manufacturer's pledge to change future editions did not solve the problem with games on store shelves now. ADVERTISEMENT After an outcry from the Haitian community over the game "Grand Theft Auto: Vice City," and to a lesser extent from leaders of the Cuban American community that players of the game are...