Organizer

It was around this point in August 1963, in the sweltering days before the March on Washington, that Eleanor Holmes Norton was waiting for someone to say something really nasty about her boss. She was a march volunteer. The boss was Bayard Rustin, the march's chief organizer and the man widely viewed as the only civil rights activist capable of pulling off a protest of such unprecedented scale. And he was gay. Openly gay. That year again? 1963. "I was sure the attacks would come because...

NEW YORK — Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer Ron Chernow was honored by his peers this weekend and in turn shared a few tips about his craft. Chernow, 64, received the BIO award from the Biographers International Organization, a nonprofit established in 2010. During a lunchtime gathering Saturday at the Roosevelt Hotel in midtown Manhattan, Chernow spoke about some of his most famous subjects, from John D. Rockefeller to George Washington, and how their public reputations often concealed a far more...

Richard L. Grossman, a community organizer who sought to curtail big business by raising public awareness about what he regarded as corporate abuse of power, died Nov. 22 at a hospital in New York City. He was 68 and had metastatic melanoma, said his daughter, Alyssa Grossman. Mr. Grossman worked on a variety of progressive causes during his four-decade career. In the 1970s, while living in the Washington area, he founded Environmentalists for Full Employment, a group that sought to unite...

The Consumer Electronics Association, organizer of the annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, has revealed it expects this coming January's event to play host to the launch of "30 to 50 new ultrabooks. " In spite of the downbeat global economy and the fact we already have  five   ultrabooks  from the major manufacturers, Shawn DuBravac from the CEA have informed PC Pro that a deluge of new laptops is yet to come. We've already seen some evidence of  Fujitsu  and  Lenovo's ...

This is the last time we write about this, promise. But it turns out that a week before the super-liberal TED crowd was shocked by comedian Sarah Silverman's repeated use of the word "retarded" on stage (so much so that TED organizer Chris Anderson tweeted how "god-awful" she was ), she had agreed to donate her time to a fundraiser for children with Down syndrome .She was ridiculing Sarah Palin's whole argument that the word "retard" can't be used. The crowd, mostly bay area wine and cheese liberals, should have been...

The students stood silently on the Howard University quad Thursday night and grasped red bags of Skittles high over their heads in memory of Trayvon Martin . Martin, a 17 year-old African American teen, was fatally shot in Sanford, Fla., last month by George Zimmerman , a neighborhood watch volunteer who said he suspected Martin of mischief. Martin was unarmed, carrying a bag of Skittles and a bottle of iced tea. Martin's shooting has sparked nationwide furor, a federal civil rights...

About 150 people marched from Dupont Circle to the headquarters of the International Monetary Fund yesterday, waving signs and chanting slogans to condemn what they consider the unjust policies of the IMF and the World Bank. Sweat dripping off their foreheads on an unusually hot April day, the protesters made their way down Connecticut Avenue, chanting "World Bank, IMF, Stop the war, drop the debt!" as a handful of D.C. police officers on bicycles pedaled alongside them. ...

Judith and David Pryor are accustomed to being the strong ones. Their only son, Hampton, was born 16 years ago with a severe genetic disorder called Mowat-Wilson syndrome, a rare condition that makes him unable to walk, talk or use his hands. And while Judith credits her friends and family with providing an excellent support system, the couple — married for 20 years this May — describe themselves as fiercely independent. "I think I'm pretty notorious for not asking for help," says...

Ruth Lugar, a teller from 1974 to 1981 for what is now Bank of America, died May 20 of ovarian cancer at Homewood at Crumland Farms, a nursing home in Frederick. She was 94. Mrs. Lugar, who worked at the bank's White Oak branch, had previously spent several years as a paid fundraiser for the Montgomery County Heart Association and American Lung Association. Ruth Swomley, a Frederick native, graduated from Frederick High School in 1933 and from Frederick's Hood College in 1937.

BEIJING — China is phasing out its reliance on executed prisoners for donated organs, but an architect of the country's transplant system said Friday that ingrained cultural attitudes are impeding the rise of donations among the general population. Almost all donated organs in China used to come from executed prisoners. A growing proportion now come from ordinary people, but the government is seeking to eliminate prisoner donations altogether. However, former vice health minister...

GENEVA — The World Health Organization says a yellow fever booster vaccination given 10 years after the initial shot isn't necessary. The U.N.'s global health agency said Friday that its expert group on immunization believes a single dose of vaccination is sufficient to confer lifelong immunity against the disease. The Geneva-based body says only 12 known cases of yellow fever after vaccination have ever been identified. Some 600 million doses have been...

WASHINGTON — The organic food industry is gaining influence on Capitol Hill, prompted by its entry into traditional farm states and by increasing consumer demand. That's not going over well with everyone in Congress. Tensions between conventional and organic agriculture boiled over this week during a late-night House Agriculture Committee debate on farm legislation that for decades has propped up traditional crops and largely ignored organics. When Rep....

BUENOS AIRES, Argentina — A plan to get Argentines to pull their undeclared U.S. dollars from under their mattresses and out of illegal tax havens, and deposit them in the banking system is eliciting warnings that it will turn the country into a magnet for money launderers and organized crime. The government of President Cristina Fernandez dismisses those concerns, saying the proposal to accept these dollars without charging taxes or asking whether they...

More than four dozen media organizations joined forces Tuesday to sharply rebuke the Justice Department for secretly gathering the phone records of Associated Press journalists , calling on the department to promptly return the records and disclose all other pending subpoenas related to the news media. "The scope of this action calls into question the very integrity of Department of Justice policies toward the press and its ability to balance, on its own, its police powers...

Scott Wilson's Nov. 2 article on the Obama administration's foreign-policy outlook ["Shared interests define Obama's world"] raised serious questions with the first sentence: "President Obama is applying the same tools to international diplomacy that he once used as a community organizer on Chicago's South Side, constructing appeals to shared interests and attempting to bring the government's conduct in line with its ideals. " I don't know how successful Mr. Obama's community-organizing work in Chicago was; the media (except for some...

Trying to get the school year off to a good start at home? Professional organizer Lea Schneider shares this advice: -- Take the time to go through your child's clothing with them and weed out things that don't fit or they don't like, as well as pieces that are too worn. -- Plan a week at a time. Map out seven days' worth of menus for dinner and shop for them once a week. Line up outfits for Monday through Friday. -- To create a "launchpad" for your kids to organize their daily stuff, put a row of hooks in your foyer or mudroom or...

UNITED NATIONS — Brazilian Ambassador Roberto Azevedo won approval Tuesday as the next director-general of the U.N. World Trade Organization and will become the first Latin American to hold the top trade post when he takes over on Sept. 1. U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon welcomed Azevedo's endorsement by the WTO General Council, calling his selection "important and timely at this critical juncture in the world economy. " Azevedo won consensus support from the organization's 159 members on...

President Obama's supporters are discovering that winning a national election is easier than winning over Congress. Organizing for Action , an advocacy group born from the remnants of Obama's victorious 2012 reelection campaign, has struggled in its attempts to help the president push through legislation on the economy, guns and other issues central to his second-term agenda. The fledgling nonprofit group has spent its first four months staging rallies and generating local news...