This Just In

Human-rights campaigner to tour Maine

Ending poverty

By DEIRDRE FULTON | April 1, 2009

On the heels of news that Maine's unemployment rate is on the rise (2600 jobs were lost here in February), and a Kids Count report that one in five Maine children is living in poverty, the state will host one of the nation's most powerful speakers on economic human rights this week.

Cheri Honkala, a single mother from Pennsylvania who used to be homeless herself, will tour Maine starting on Thursday, and she'll be at Portland's Immanuel Baptist Church (156 High Street) on Monday, April 6, at 6 pm.

The national coordinator of the Poor People's Economic Human Rights Campaign will talk about health care, living wages, labor unions, affordable housing, education, and nutrition from the perspective that these are essential human rights. Earlier in the day, she'll visit the offices of Maine's congressional delegation to talk about homelessness.

With luck, these appearances will end with fewer fireworks than many of Honkala's do. The anti-poverty activist has been arrested close to 100 times; in 2004, when she erected a tented "Bushville" under a Central Park bridge during the Republican National Convention, she told New York Magazine: "The point is that you can be homeless in America and rot in any park, but the moment you put up a sign, they can get rid of you."

Africans suffer while the world stands by
Raised on a steady diet of “Never Again,” members of Brown University’s Darfur Action Network found it infuriating to watch the international community stand idly by as murder and rape in Darfur continued unabated.
Letters to the Portland editor, June 20, 2008
We would like to thank and congratulate Jeff Inglis for his vivid and thoughtful account of his night in the replica of a cell from Guantánamo that was placed in Portland’s Monument Square.
Corrections changes
Like a movie hero, the NAACP’s new, young national president, Benjamin Jealous, swept into the 900-inmate Maine State Prison in Warren on Monday, quelling protests among the prisoners and, at least temporarily, rescuing the organization’s prison chapter from being snuffed out by state corrections officials.
Hope for young homebuyers
Good news if you're in a sufficiently stable financial situation to think of bailing from greater Portland's rental-housing morass.
Amnesty International liberates City Hall
Old-school Jamaica Plain and Cambridge hippies had better step up their game.
Secret, unaccountable, and co-opted
The state prison in Warren has been hammered in recent months by an inmate murder and other violence, a prisoner hunger strike, legislative investigations exposing mismanagement and poor guard morale, and a request by human-rights groups for a federal probe of prisoner mistreatment.
Less than equal
This story has a bias. It’s in favor of human rights for all people.
State should protect inmates’ rights
As Lance Tapley points out, denying prisoners access to human-rights protections is a mistake (see "Less Than Equal," October 2).
Instead of cuts: guts
Let’s assume, reader, that you’re concerned about economic and social justice. For those in real need — people who are poor, sick, old, mentally ill, addicted, disabled — you want decent care. You’re concerned, too, about proper funding of schools, community colleges, and university campuses.
Promoting human rights at home
“We have a holier-than-thou” attitude in the United States about human-rights violations abroad, said Bart Carhart, a student organizer of the new Amnesty International chapter at the University of Southern Maine.
Federal investigation requested
Stirred into action by the murder of a wheelchair-bound prisoner, human-rights activists have asked the federal Department of Justice to investigate the treatment of Maine State Prison inmates.
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