CNN Presents: BLACK IN AMERICA, a six-hour television event that examines the complex issues, successes and struggles of black men, women and familes in America. Airing July 23rd & 24th at 9pmET/PT. Get More info. here

Barack celebrated Father’s Day today by speaking at the Apostolic Church of God in Chicago. He began by quoting the Sermon on the Mount, in which Jesus closes by saying, “Whoever hears these words of mine, and does them, shall be likened to a wise man who built his house upon a rock.” Read the full transcript of the speech here

Read The Full Transcript Here

By Lande Yoosuf

New York’s African-American community expressed deep outrage on Friday after learning that the two officers on trial for Sean Bell’s murder were acquitted. Three of the five officers who were undercover detectives the night of the shooting were facing 25 years on charges of manslaughter, reckless endangerment, and assault. But Justice Arthur J. Cooperman, a former cop, found all three accused officers not guilty on all counts. Some activist groups speculate that the decision to have a judge rule instead of a jury placed them at an automatic advantage. Justice Cooperman reached his decision after seven weeks of testimony from witnesses, who he concluded were not credible from the prosecution’s side. New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg made a statement soon afterwards asking New Yorkers to respect the judge’s decision and not engage in any violent backlashes or protests.

The police department is investigating a supposed prank call that was made to Nicole Paultre-Bell’s home on Friday afternoon after the verdict. The caller said ha ha ha, laughing into the phone. The caller ID was tracked down to a major police union facility in Manhattan.

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Senator Hillary Clinton came out on top in last week’s Pennsylvania primary. Her win was expected by most, including senator Obama. Clinton had a ten-point lead, winning 55 percent of votes, while Obama gained about 45 percent. Critics are suggesting that she drop out of the race and allow Obama to win the primary, Clinton refuses and believes the Pennsylvania primary revamped her campaign that some thought would eventually fizzle. Both candidates are preparing for their next election in Indiana, which is scheduled for May 6th.

In related news, Barack Obama’s Pastor Wright addressed the press to explain his rants that were distributed with the intention to hurt Obama’s campaign. Do you think it was a wise choice for him to speak up?

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Diabetes is on the rise in America, but expectant mothers should especially be careful according to a California study. The amount of pregnant females with diabetes before their pregnancy has doubled over a seven-year period. The highest group increase was teenage girls ranging from ages 13 to 19. Also, women who are overweight should take serious caution in monitoring their blood sugar while pregnant since there are at a much higher risk of acquiring diabetes. Expectant mothers also face a serious risk of having a stillbirth and/or birth defects.

To find out if one is at risk for diabetes, get a blood sugar screening, check for family history, and measure your waistline. A waistline over 33 inches is at serious risk for contracting the disease along with other health problems linked to obesity.

O Lawd!
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Check out this article from the usatoday.com celebrating Maya Angelou turning 80.

NEW YORK — In the dining room of her elegantly restored Harlem town house, beneath painted clouds on a light blue ceiling, Maya Angelou is asked how it feels to be turning 80.
“Exciting!” she says with a broad smile, then adds: “The body knows. The bones don’t let you forget.”

The woman who defies a simple label — Angelou has been a memoirist, poet, civil rights activist, actress, director, professor, singer and dancer — is getting an early birthday gift.

Two longtime friends and her niece, who is Angelou’s archivist, have collaborated on an illustrated book, Maya Angelou: A Glorious Celebration (Doubleday, $30), a tribute and scrapbook, that will be published Tuesday.

On her birthday, April 4, she’ll be treated to a party thrown by one of her best friends, Oprah Winfrey, who tends to think big. When Angelou turned 70, Winfrey hosted a week-long Caribbean cruise for 150 of Angelou’s friends.

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If Angelou knows what’s planned next week, she’s not talking. Neither is Winfrey, who wrote a foreword to the new book. Angelou’s niece, Rosa Johnson Butler, says all she knows is the party is in Florida, is top secret and “will be magnificent.”

Butler says, “When we went on the cruise (in 1998), word got out, and there were crowds and helicopters and all. Dr. A is a celebrity, but she doesn’t like that sort of thing.”

What she does like is to be called Dr. Angelou. Although she never went to college, she has been awarded more than 30 honorary degrees. Since 1981, she has been a professor of American Studies at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, N.C.

She’s an American study herself. “I created myself,” she says. “I have taught myself so much.”

She was raised by her grandmother, “the greatest person I ever met,” in racially segregated Stamps, Ark. She has written about being raped at 7 and becoming an unwed mother at 17, and about the friends who changed her life, Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X and James Baldwin, whom she knew as “Jimmy.”

Now, she’s a great-grandmother. She has an 18-room house in Winston-Salem and two town houses in Harlem, black America’s unofficial capital, which is enjoying a real estate renaissance. One she rents out, the other she uses as an urban getaway, perfect for dinner parties.

“The people have taken Harlem back,” she says. “I see a flowerbox in a window, and that tells me, ‘Someone is house-proud.’ ”

Famous friends

Her 12-room town house, which she gutted and restored four years ago, is filled with art she collected in Africa and works by African-American artists Phoebe Beasley and Romare Bearden. In her parlor is a 4-by-7-foot quilt by Faith Ringgold, commissioned for Angelou’s 60th birthday by Winfrey.

Angelou’s birth date coincides with the anniversary of King’s assassination in 1968. For years she didn’t celebrate her birthday. She and King’s widow, Coretta Scott King, who died in 2006, would “meet or talk or send each other flowers” on April 4. Each year, she continues to say a birthday prayer, “a prayer for the country.”

Angelou met Winfrey about 30 years ago in Baltimore when Winfrey was a local TV anchor begging for a five-minute interview.

In the tribute book, compiled by Butler, Marcia Ann Gillespie, the former editor of Essence and Ms., and Richard Long, a historian at Emory University in Atlanta, Winfrey describes that first encounter:

“I was careful not to take a second more than I asked for. At the end of the five minutes, she inquired with a quizzical smile, ‘Who are you, girl?’ ”

Angelou remembers Winfrey “really listened, and we had a real conversation.”

Later, after Winfrey moved to Chicago in 1984, Angelou happened to see her there on the street. She walked up and said, “Hello, Oprah Winfrey.”

Angelou says, “She couldn’t believe I remembered her name.” Angelou invited Winfrey for a weekend at her North Carolina home. They’ve been friends ever since.

In 1997, Winfrey chose Angelou’s The Heart of a Woman, the fourth of her six memoirs, for her book club. They discussed it at a televised pajama party.

They both call their relationship a “sister-mother-daughter friendship.”

Angelou had only one child, a son (writer Guy Johnson, 62), “but she treats me and Oprah as the daughters she never had,” Butler says.

A life of wonder

Angelou and Winfrey, 54, have gone separate ways in the Democratic presidential campaign. Winfrey drew large crowds when she campaigned for Barack Obama. Angelou has done radio ads and online videos for Hillary Clinton.

Angelou says their political differences haven’t affected their friendship: “We’ve laughed about it. I told her someone complained, ‘Our queen isn’t backing Obama.’ ” (Some blacks think of Angelou as a kind of uncrowned royalty.)

Angelou says she has admired Clinton since the early ’80s when she was the young wife of the young governor of Arkansas. She has met Obama once, briefly in Washington, D.C.

“I grew up in Arkansas,” she says. “I know what it was like. Mean and hopeless. I know how hard the Clintons worked to change all that.”

After he was elected president in 1992, Bill Clinton asked Angelou to write and deliver an inaugural poem — something that hadn’t been done since Robert Frost played that role for President Kennedy in 1961.

Angelou doesn’t question or criticize Obama.

His speech in Philadelphia last week was “brilliant,” she says. “The best speech I’ve ever heard on race relations in the U.S. The problems and answers. What we’ve learned and haven’t learned.”

She sidesteps a question about the Democrats’ choice between a woman and a black man. “The question is: Who’s the best person to be president?” And that Obama and Clinton “are going toe-to-toe, I think it’s wonderful.”

Angelou, who is 6 feet tall, relies on a cane and is unsteady on her feet.

But her favorite word remains “joy.” When she signs her books — she has written 31, poetry, children’s and even one cookbook — she adds in artfully old-fashioned penmanship, “Joy!”

She talks about her life in quiet exclamations: “I’ve conducted the Boston Pops! Imagine that! Me! Maya Angelou! I’ve sang and danced at La Scala!”

She could go on, but doesn’t, merely shakes her head at the wonder of it all.

Her first and best-known book, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, describes how, at 7, she was raped by her mother’s boyfriend, who was then murdered by her uncles. Angelou felt responsible and stopped talking to anyone but her brother for five years.

Work and play

Nearly 70 years later, she recalls what her grandmother said about her silence: ” ‘Sister’ — she called me sister — ‘Momma don’t care what other people say about you. Momma knows when you and the Lord are ready, you goin’ to be a teacher.’ ”

Now, she adds, “I’m not a writer who teaches. I’m a teacher who writes. But I had to work at Wake Forest to know that.”

She describes the joy she finds in a classroom: “I see all those little faces and big eyes. Black and white. They look like sparrows in the nest. They look up, with their mouths wide open, and I try to drop in everything I know.”

She has no plans to retire. She teaches one course each semester at Wake Forest. (Currently it’s World Poetry and Drama Performance.) She composed a poem for the Summer Olympics, is working on a collection of essays, and hosts a weekly satellite radio show on the Oprah & Friends channel.

She writes on yellow legal pads and says that even after all these years, a clean sheet of paper scares and thrills her: “I see a yellow pad, and my knees get weak, and I salivate. I know that sounds like coyness, but I have less coyness than modesty, and I have none of that.” She laughs.

After eight decades, any regrets?

“Oh, yeah,” she says, drawing out yeah, as if it were four syllables.

“Regret is a very strong word. I hate it. But I wish I had more time. I would have liked to spend six months on a Greek island, living with the people, laughing and singing and dancing.”

But “I work all the time. I don’t know how not to work. I’m not complaining. I play hard, too.”- source

Check out this article from msnbc.com. We need to educate ourselves, our younger sisters, nieces and every other woman we know on this EPIDEMIC.

Startling government research on teenage girls and sexually transmitted diseases sends a blunt message to kids who think they’re immune: It’s liable to happen to you or someone you know.

In the first study of its kind, researchers at the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found at least one in 4 teenage American girls has a sexually transmitted disease.

The most common one is a virus that can cause cervical cancer, and the second most common can cause infertility. Nearly half the black teens in the study had at least one sexually transmitted infection, versus 20 percent among both whites and Mexican-American teens.

The study, released Tuesday at an STD prevention conference, has adolescent-health specialists pointing to possible reasons and offering potential solutions.

Blame is most often placed on inadequate sex education, from parents and from schools focusing too much on abstinence-only programs. Add to that a young person’s sense of being invulnerable.

“This is pretty shocking,” said Dr. Elizabeth Alderman, an adolescent medicine specialist at Montefiore Medical Center’s Children’s Hospital in New York.

“To talk about abstinence is not a bad thing,” but teen girls — and boys too — need to be informed about how to protect themselves if they do have sex, Alderman said.

Only about half of the girls in the study acknowledged having sex. Some teens define sex as only intercourse, yet other types of intimate behavior including oral sex can spread some diseases.

Among those who admitted having sex, the rate was even more disturbing — 40 percent had an STD.

“Those numbers are certainly alarming,” said sex education expert Nora Gelperin, who works with a teen-written Web site called sexetc.org.

“Sexuality is still a very taboo subject in our society,” she said. “Teens tell us that they can’t make decisions in the dark and that adults aren’t properly preparing them to make responsible decisions.”

Cecile Richards, president of Planned Parenthood Federation of America, said the study shows that “the national policy of promoting abstinence-only programs is a $1.5 billion failure, and teenage girls are paying the real price.”

Similar claims were made last year when the government announced the teen birth rate rose between 2005 and 2006, the first increase in 15 years.

The overall STD rate among the 838 girls in the study was 26 percent, which translates to more than 3 million girls nationwide, the CDC said.

HPV most common
The study by CDC researcher Dr. Sara Forhan is an analysis of nationally representative data on 838 girls aged 14 to 19 who took part in a 2003-04 government health survey. Teens were tested for four infections: human papillomavirus, or HPV, which can cause cervical cancer and affected 18 percent of girls studied; chlamydia, which affected 4 percent; trichomoniasis, 2.5 percent; and genital herpes, 2 percent.

Dr. John Douglas, director of the CDC’s division of STD prevention, said the results are the first to examine the combined national prevalence of common sexually transmitted diseases among adolescent girls. He said the data likely reflect current prevalence rates.

HPV can cause genital warts but often has no symptoms. A vaccine targeting several HPV strains recently became available, but Douglas said it likely has not yet had much impact on HPV prevalence rates in teen girls.

Chlamydia can cause an abnormal discharge and painful urination, but often has no symptoms. Signs of trichomoniasis are similar, and both diseases can be treated with antibiotics. Genital herpes can cause blisters but also is often symptomless. It can’t be cured but medicine can help.

The CDC recommends annual chlamydia screening for all sexually active women under age 25. It also recommends the three-dose HPV vaccine for girls aged 11-12 years, and catch-up shots for females aged 13 to 26.

The CDC’s Dr. Kevin Fenton said that given the potential complications from STDs, “screening, vaccination and other prevention strategies for sexually active women are among our highest public health priorities.”

Douglas said screening tests are underused in part because many teens don’t think they’re at risk, but also, some doctors mistakenly think: “Sexually transmitted diseases don’t happen to the kinds of patients I see.”

Teens need to hear the dual message that STDs can be prevented by abstinence and condoms — and hear them often, said Dr. Ellen Kruger, an obstetrician-gynecologist at Ochsner Medical Center in New Orleans. - source

Twin brothers were arrested Wednesday in connection with robbing dozens of stores in Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Delaware.

Keyontyli and Taleon Goffney allegedly broke in through the roof at night, police said.

Rite Aid at Front and Snyder streets was robbed on Monday.

Police said the two men are suspected in at least 35 break-ins.

The brothers were caught in Philadelphia, but Delaware County police have filed burglary charges against them, too.

Police in South Jersey said they think the pair is behind a string of break-ins in the Garden State.

Investigators said they believe the brothers break in through the roof, and climb down from a rope.

“Just over there, they made the hole right here,” Young Moon said.

The hole Moon pointed out was how the burglars came into Moon’s beauty supply store at 9th and Washington.

Police said the 25-year-old twins emptied out an ATM machine and the cash register. source

To add to this the twins are gay porn stars!

Posted Feb 14th 2008 10:00AM by Madison J. Gray
Filed under: BlackSpin

Look, I already know dozens of you are going to try to tear me a new one for this post, so I’m ready for the negative backlash, the accusations, the curses and the declarations that I’m going to hell.

That’s cool. Not the first time, won’t be the last.

Anyway, this wire story about gays in Jamaica coming under attack freaks me out. I mean, it is 2008, right? Not that I’m dissing Jamaica, but since when does a modern republic turn a blind eye to an egregious hate crime, like the murder of a human being for being a homosexual.

In fact, since when does a modern republic keep a law on its books that says it is illegal to be gay?

But we’re looking at a culture where some of the most popular dancehall artists, like Buju Banton and Elephant Man write vehemently anti-gay lyrics, where gay activists are murdered for speaking their minds, and where even police will join a gay hate crime.

So the call has gone out for Jamaican authorities to protect gays and lesbians from such violence, but activists and the gay community itself on the island fear that their call will not be heard because of an overwhelming homophobic sentiment. In fact, despite 68 percent of all HIV/AIDS transmissions occurring between straight sex partners in Jamaica, a majority still blame the disease on homosexuals.

The activist group Human Rights Watch in late January released a report called “Jamaica: Hated to Death” which categorizes the violence and discrimination that has traditionally victimized gay people there. It’s really unimaginable to think that you live in a country where at the whim of a a self-righteous mob you can be killed, like the victims in the report, just on suspicion. It’s not really that far a throw from the Salem Witch Trials.

In fact, to tell you the truth, violent homophobia is more extreme in some places than others depending on where you go, but throughout the black world, it’s pretty safe to say it is a norm, and a pointless one at that. People use the Bible to justify hatred for gays and lesbians, calling it an “abomination” (Leviticus 18:22).

However, at the same time, so is eating any seafood that doesn’t have scales (Leviticus 11:10); and apparently God also doesn’t dig getting tattoed (Leviticus. 19:28); shaving (Leviticus. 19:27); or vegetable gardens (Leviticus 19:19). The Holy Scriptures even tell you to kill yourself for overeating (Proverbs 23:2).

And if you want to be really literal about it, the verse from the Bible says: “You shall not lie with a male as one lies with a female; it is an abomination.” So technically speaking, lesbians should be off the hook.

Okay, listen … I know about half of you reading this are pissed off, and the other half are praying that lightning struck me the second I finished writing this. But this isn’t about offending the religious. It’s just that personally I’m big on another Biblical passage which I think is far more important:

A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another (John 13:34).

No I’m not a Bible thumper by any stretch, but if I would ever cite the Bible as philosophy, then a commandment of love for my fellow human beings would trump anything referring to gay sex, getting tatted up, or eating at Red Lobster.

So Jamaica, where we Bob Marley taught us “One Love,” where Peter Tosh called for “Equal Rights” and where we understand we must utilize “all de herbs of de herth,” show the rest of the world that you practice what you preach. - source

It was lunchtime in one of Haiti’s worst slums, and Charlene Dumas was eating mud. With food prices rising, Haiti’s poorest can’t afford even a daily plate of rice, and some take desperate measures to fill their bellies. Charlene, 16 with a 1-month-old son, has come to rely on a traditional Haitian remedy for hunger pangs: cookies made of dried yellow dirt from the country’s central plateau.

The mud has long been prized by pregnant women and children here as an antacid and source of calcium. But in places like Cite Soleil, the oceanside slum where Charlene shares a two-room house with her baby, five siblings and two unemployed parents, cookies made of dirt, salt and vegetable shortening have become a regular meal.

“When my mother does not cook anything, I have to eat them three times a day,” Charlene said. Her baby, named Woodson, lay still across her lap, looking even thinner than the slim 6 pounds 3 ounces he weighed at birth.

Though she likes their buttery, salty taste, Charlene said the cookies also give her stomach pains. “When I nurse, the baby sometimes seems colicky too,” she said.

Food prices around the world have spiked because of higher oil prices, needed for fertilizer, irrigation and transportation. Prices for basic ingredients such as corn and wheat are also up sharply, and the increasing global demand for biofuels is pressuring food markets as well.

The problem is particularly dire in the Caribbean, where island nations depend on imports and food prices are up 40 percent in places.

The global price hikes, together with floods and crop damage from the 2007 hurricane season, prompted the U.N. Food and Agriculture Agency to declare states of emergency in Haiti and several other Caribbean countries. Caribbean leaders held an emergency summit in December to discuss cutting food taxes and creating large regional farms to reduce dependence on imports.

At the market in the La Saline slum, two cups of rice now sell for 60 cents, up 10 cents from December and 50 percent from a year ago. Beans, condensed milk and fruit have gone up at a similar rate, and even the price of the edible clay has risen over the past year by almost $1.50. Dirt to make 100 cookies now costs $5, the cookie makers say.

Still, at about 5 cents apiece, the cookies are a bargain compared to food staples. About 80 percent of people in Haiti live on less than $2 a day and a tiny elite controls the economy.

Merchants truck the dirt from the central town of Hinche to the La Saline market, a maze of tables of vegetables and meat swarming with flies. Women buy the dirt, then process it into mud cookies in places such as Fort Dimanche, a nearby shanty town.

Carrying buckets of dirt and water up ladders to the roof of the former prison for which the slum is named, they strain out rocks and clumps on a sheet, and stir in shortening and salt. Then they pat the mixture into mud cookies and leave them to dry under the scorching sun.

The finished cookies are carried in buckets to markets or sold on the streets.

A reporter sampling a cookie found that it had a smooth consistency and sucked all the moisture out of the mouth as soon as it touched the tongue. For hours, an unpleasant taste of dirt lingered.

Assessments of the health effects are mixed. Dirt can contain deadly parasites or toxins, but can also strengthen the immunity of fetuses in the womb to certain diseases, said Gerald N. Callahan, an immunology professor at Colorado State University who has studied geophagy, the scientific name for dirt-eating.

Haitian doctors say depending on the cookies for sustenance risks malnutrition.

“Trust me, if I see someone eating those cookies, I will discourage it,” said Dr. Gabriel Thimothee, executive director of Haiti’s health ministry.

Marie Noel, 40, sells the cookies in a market to provide for her seven children. Her family also eats them.

“I’m hoping one day I’ll have enough food to eat, so I can stop eating these,” she said. “I know it’s not good for me.”- source

Kendrick Williams, 32

A man who was living in his car was arrested Tuesday on suspicion of killing a woman who disappeared last spring on a trip to Florida to celebrate her sister’s birthday, police said Tuesday.

Kendrick Williams, 32, was expected to be charged with second-degree murder in the death of Stepha Henry, who was last seen alive just before Memorial Day last year, authorities said. No body has been found.

The arrest came after a team of detectives, including two from Florida, found Williams asleep in a car near a Brooklyn pier, police said. Authorities believe he had been living in the vehicle.

Police said they had forensic evidence, including blood of the woman found in the black sedan that Williams was driving the night the woman disappeared. No other details were released.- more

here