The leader of the Nation of Islam is said to be preparing to deliver a fiery oratory at a "statesman-like" Los Angeles funeral for an executed gang founder lauded as a role model for urban African-American youth.
Stanley "Tookie" Williams was killed by lethal injection in San Quentin Prison on San Francisco Bay early on Dec. 13, despite pleas to keep him alive so he could discourage other youths from following in his violent footsteps.
Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan and rapper Snoop Dogg will take part in a grand memorial service for Williams in Los Angeles on Tuesday, according to LaNiece Jones, a spokeswoman for the failed "SaveTookie" campaign.
Speakers at the memorial service are to include Farrakhan, civil rights activist Reverend Jesse Jackson, human-rights advocate Bianca Jagger, Snoop Dogg and Bruce Gordon of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
A celebrity-rich crusade to get Williams' sentence changed to life in prison grew to one of the biggest US anti-execution campaigns in decades.
More than 2,000 people -- including Hollywood actor Sean Penn and folk singer Joan Baez -- gathered outside the prison during Williams' execution to protest and call for an end to the death penalty.
Williams, 51, was sentenced to death in 1981 after being convicted of four shotgun murders but became an anti-violence crusader on death row.
While on death row, Williams insisted he was innocent of the murders but admitted being a founder of the Crips gang that terrorized Los Angeles from the 1970s through to the 1990s. It has been blamed for hundreds of killings.
Williams helped orchestrate a peace deal between rival gangs and wrote books urging children to steer clear of gangs. He was nominated several times for the Nobel Peace Prize.
Nearly half of China’s major cities are suffering “moderate to severe” levels of subsidence, putting millions of people at risk of flooding, especially as sea levels rise, according to a study of nationwide satellite data released yesterday. The authors of the paper, published by the journal Science, found that 45 percent of China’s urban land was sinking faster than 3mm per year, with 16 percent at more than 10mm per year, driven not only by declining water tables, but also the sheer weight of the built environment. With China’s urban population already in excess of 900 million people, “even a small portion
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Beijing is continuing to commit genocide and crimes against humanity against Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities in its western Xinjiang province, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in a report published on Monday, ahead of his planned visit to China this week. The State Department’s annual human rights report, which documents abuses recorded all over the world during the previous calendar year, repeated language from previous years on the treatment of Muslims in Xinjiang, but the publication raises the issue ahead of delicate talks, including on the war in Ukraine and global trade, between the top U.S. diplomat and Chinese