After taking Mississippi in Democratic primary on Tuesday, Senator Barack Obama is now just 429 delegates short of the required 2025 delegates to secure the Democratic Party’s nomination for the November 4 presidential election.

Obama beat Senator Hillary Clinton by 61 to 37 percent, a margin of 24 percent, continuing the trend of wide margin victories. Mississippi accounted for 33 delegates of which Obama won 19 and Clinton 14, nullifying Clinton’s delegate net gain from her Texas and Ohio wins. Obama continues lead, now with a total 1,598 delegates 111 more than Clinton’s 1,487.

The front running democratic candidate’s win with 90 percent of Mississippi’s Black votes and 27 percent of its white, has become the subject of many of political analysts, some of whom see it as a potential danger sign – that he was being cast as the candidate for Blacks.

However, as Cindy Rhoden, a native of Jackson, Mississippi, told the National Weekly, “These commentators seem to forget the history of Mississippi. My state was among the most racially divided states in the south. They hung Black people from trees there just for looking at or talking back to white people. So it is most natural for Blacks in the state to support such an outstanding Black candidate as Obama, and for whites, many of whom are direct descendants of raving racists, not to vote for him.”

ROSEAU - Minister for National Security Rayburn Blackmoore says a suggestion that Dominica may be joining forces with Venezuela to form a military alliance against the United States is laughable.

Venezuela President Hugo Chavez has made a call for member states of the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas (ALBA), which Dominica joined in January, to use military force against the US.

Critics here, including the main opposition have battered the government on its decision to join ALBA, given the strong anti-US posture of Chavez.

Minister Blackmoore said on state radio Saturday that the Dominica government cannot be held accountable for statements made by the Venezuelan leader.

After a night dubbed Hillary Clinton’s big comeback, amidst massive media hoopla, jubilation of Clinton supporters and confetti raining down on the candidate, the Democratic Party, which may have been looking for some clarity to their nomination, find themselves in a dilemma, ending up right where they were before Tuesday’s primaries.

Clinton, after being shut out by Obama in the previous 11 primaries, was destined for victories in Ohio and Texas to keep her hopes alive. For Obama, winning those two states would have most likely put an end to the race. But when the night was over, Clinton took Rhode Island, Ohio and Texas to Obama’s Vermont for a net gain of about four delegates.

Among the more influential contributor to Black history, in general, was Jamaican, Marcus Mosiah Garvey, born in 1887. A printer by profession, and a proponent for worker’s rights, he became involved in trade union activities in Jamaica in 1907, when he was elected vice president of the printer’s union, which after a strike from 1908 to 1909 folded.

On attending Birbeck College in England in 1911, Garvey met and was influenced by other Blacks who were pushing for English colonies with large Black populations to be independent of Britain. Fully inspired, Garvey returned to Jamaica where he formed the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), and initiated the publication of the pamphlet, The Negro Race and its Problems. Garvey, widely read, kept close track of the progress of Blacks in the United States.

WASHINGTON – The Inter-American Commission of Women (CIM) is celebrating its 80th anniversary on Monday acknowledging that it has made a significant contribution towards the political, economic and civic development of women in the Americas.

But CIM has also noted that while the gender gap has been addressed and amended in many respects, women throughout the Americas were still victims of "pervasive and persistent discrimination".