Jim Brown Hoping to Score Social Change

Jim Brown was once considered the greatest running back in the history of football.

He's so much more than that now. Actor and athlete Jim Brown says 'his dream is to 'be a catalyst for social change.'

Brown, an NFL Hall-of-Famer turned actor turned social activist, spoke in front of an attentive crowd at Williams College's Chapin Hall on Thursday night. The lecture, "A Night with a Legend: Jim Brown in His Own Words," was sponsored by the Williams College athletic department, the Griffin Society, leadership studies and the Office of Strategic Planning and Institutional Diversity.

The football legend gave students, faculty members and local residents a little history of his life and a big dose of what he believes in. Always known as a controversial figure, Brown said that in the United States, "if you're too outspoken, you're going to be controversial."

Brown's message on Thursday night was mostly uplifting, although he still was able to splash in a few humorous moments mixed in between some tough talk about racism. Introduced by Ephs baseball player Jamaal Johnson as a "legend in sports excellence and a true role model for social justice," Brown quickly corrected Johnson when he also called him "the greatest athlete of all time."

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Dr. Boyce Money: Do Entrepreneurs Need an MBA? Probably Not!

I am going to say some things that will take money out of the pockets of people like myself. But darn it, it has to come out. I have taught MBA and undergraduate business students for the last 16 years, at many major universities. I believe strongly in the value of black entrepreneurship and I believe in the power of compassionate capitalism. The problem, however, is that there are times when I wonder about the power of an MBA.

Fenorris Pearson, a successful black entrepreneur, has shared the same concerns, and I can't say I disagree with him completely. Here's the deal. An MBA can be a powerful tool to learn how to manipulate your way through the complexities of corporate America. Most programs teach you how to analyze charts, create spreadsheets and do all the little things that your boss is going to ask you to do. The problem, however, is that the vast majority of professors teaching MBA courses at major institutions have never actually done the work they are teaching you to do. An MBA student at an Ivy League institution recently told me that when he asked his professors how to actually implement the strategies that they were teaching on the chalk board, the responses from professors were always disappointing.


- By Dr. Boyce Watkins, a Finance Professor at Syracuse University and author of the forthcoming book, "Black American Money."


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Mother, Wife and Businesswomen: How do you Balance?

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In this episode of Financial Lovemaking, Dr. Boyce and Tia talk with Towanna Freeman, an author, speaker, wife and mother on how to balance love, life, and success.

Man Shoots Boy for Having Sex with His Step Daughter

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Major Protests Planned in Heather Ellis Walmart Case – Student Faces 15 Years in Prison for Cutting Line

from Your Black World, SaveHeatherEllis.com

Kennett, MO. – Heather Ellis, a young college student out of Kennett, MO is now facing 15 years in prison if she is sentenced after being accused of cutting line at a local Walmart. Her case has gotten the attention of the nation, and has been the subject of extensive online protests.

Heather was in a Walmart store 3 years ago with her cousin. The two split up to find the shortest line. Since her cousin was in the shorter line, Heather joined him. That’s when the clerk accused Heather of cutting in front of the other customers. An argument ensued, leading to the manager and security guard being called, and finally the police.

The incident left Ellis, an honor student on her way to medical school, charged with disturbing the peace, trespassing and two counts of assaulting a police officer. After Heather refused to sign a plea agreement, Stephen Sokoloff, the town’s prosecutor, filed felony charges against Heather.

 

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Your Black News – 10/19/09

black healthy living: did you know there are natural ways to cure the swine flu?

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Categories: Black Health, african american bloggers and black bloggers
Tags: dr elaina george, swine flu

In this episode of Medicine on Call, Dr. Elaina George speaks with Dr Maiysha Clairborne of Mind, Body, Spirit, Wellness.  we spoke about natural approaches to prevent and treat swine flu. Overall natural remedies to reduce stress and promote overall wellness.

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19

Oct

09

black news – racism? boy gets set on fire by his classmates

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Categories: african american bloggers and black bloggers
Tags: black legal issues, black youth

Date: Wednesday, July 15, 2009, 5:23 am
By: Denise Stewart, BlackAmericaWeb.com

A black Missouri teen, who last month was doused with gasoline and set afire by two white schoolmates, now faces charges himself as he recovers from burns over most of his body.

Walter Currie Jr., a 15-year-old in Poplar Bluff, Mo., was burned on June 13 after an exchange with two teens with whom he reportedly had a previous altercation.

The youth who allegedly doused him with the gasoline and lit the fuel has been charged with assault as a juvenile, Currie’s parents said. 
On July 6, several weeks after the incident, authorities gave Currie and his parents notice that he is being charged in connection with another incident where a teen related to the youth who set him afire was hit in the face, said Winonia Currie, Walter’s mother.

“All of a sudden, they decided to charge him with something that happened on June 10, but Walter said he didn’t have anything to do with it,” she said.

Because all of the people involved are juveniles, court officials in Butler County, Missouri said they can give only limited details on the incidents and cannot discuss names.

“I can tell you that there are charges against everyone involved,” Lesi Smith, chief juvenile officer for Butler County, told BlackAmericaWeb.com.

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19

Oct

09

balloon boy busts his parents on national tv

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The “Balloon Boy” hoax was revealed on CNN, as the boy blurts out the truth on national TV – his parents appear to be embarrassed.

19

Oct

09

dr boyce: is serena going to get banned?

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Categories: african american bloggers and black bloggers
Tags: Black Scholar, Dr. Boyce Watkins

by Dr. Boyce Watkins, Syracuse University, AOL Black Voices

Serena Williams has been listed as a headliner for this year’s Australian Open. The problem is that it’s not clear whether she’ll be allowed to play.

Because of a recent outburst in which she threatened a line judge, Williams may be banned from at least one Grand Slam tournament. According to published reports, Williams told the judge, “You don’t know me. You better be right. I swear to God I’m going to take this ball and shove it down your throat.”Given that a ball going down your throat might actually kill you, the judge felt that Serena had threatened her life. Then again, Serena’s from Compton, a town that has become famous for finding creative ways to kill people. Serena does not, however, need to take “the hood” with her all the way to Australia.

To make matters more interesting, Serena recently got naked for the cover of ESPN magazine, certifying her status as an iconic and thought-provoking figure for the early 21st century. These two events, plus the fact that she just happens to be one of the most dominant female tennis players in history, makes her the kind of woman we’ll all be talking about for the next 100 years. Our great-grandkids won’t be talking much about the boring apolitical figure called Michael Jordan. We’ll congratulate Tiger Woods for being the first incredibly rich black man to consistently beat the crap out of the arrogant guys at the country club. Serena Williams’ name, though, will come up in classes on feminist theory, history and sociology. Like Muhammad Ali, Serena is becoming bigger than her sport, and my greatest hope is that her ability to transcend tennis is guided by a desire to serve all humanity, and not just herself. Her nude body on the cover of ESPN is her way of yelling to the world that she is more than a tennis player. I agree that she is.

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18

Oct

09

baby survives being run over by a train

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A baby’s stroller falls under a train and the baby survives!

15

Oct

09

method man arrested for taxes, but not nicolas cage?

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Method Man was arrested for tax evasion, but not Nicolas Cage – What’s up with that?

15

Oct

09

heather ellis on cnn: faces 15 yrs for cutting line at walmart

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The KKK has threatened Heather Ellis,who faces 15 years for cutting line at Walmart.

Dr Boyce Watkins: Woman Faces 15-Years for Jumping Line at Walmart

by Dr. Boyce Watkins, Syracuse University, AOL Black Voices 

In case you haven’t heard, there is a young woman in Kennett, Missouri who has gone through one of our worst nightmares.  Three years ago, Heather Ellis was in a local Walmart shopping with her cousin.  The two cousins decided to go in separate directions to find the shortest line.  After seeing that her cousin’s line was shorter, Heather went to join him.  That’s when things got strange.

Heather was accused of cutting line and the security guard was notified.  According to Heather, she and her cousin repeatedly informed the guard that they were together, but that didn’t seem to matter.  The police affidavit claims that Ellis was loud, belligerent and cursing when she was told to leave the store. 

After police arrived, Ellis was taken to jail in front of her family.  Her aunt, Lily Blackmon, arrived on the scene after receiving a call from her son about the incident.  According to Blackmon, her niece’s head was being slammed against the police car and the officer only said “she cursed,” when asked why she was being treated so harshly.

Ellis was charged with disturbing the peace, trespassing, resisting arrest and two counts of assaulting a police officer.  The young college student was then offered a plea bargain from Dunklin County Prosecutor, Stephen Sokoloff.  The felony counts were reduced to one misdemeanor of disturbing the peace.  However, Heather’s aunt believes that the offer was made so the family would not sue the police department.

Heather refused to take the plea deal, since she says she’d be lying if she admitted to committing a crime that day.  Eleven months after the incident, the misdemeanor was surprisingly dropped.  While this might seem to be good news, it wasn’t.  The misdemeanors have been replaced by felony assault charges, carrying a maximum sentence of 15-years in prison.

Heather believes that the pending felonies have cost her two jobs and the chance to get into medical school.  She still refuses to sign the plea deal.  Either way, she has a reason to fight, and I want to fight with her.   Heather’s case speaks to all of us: most of us have jumped the line at Walmart to be with a relative, and most of us know what it’s like to experience police abuse of authority.   No matter how much cursing Heather might have done that day, she doesn’t deserve to go to prison.  Also, if the prosecutor can reduce major felonies to one tiny misdemeanor, he could have dropped all the charges and let this woman go on with her education.

 

Dr. Boyce Watkins is a Professor at Syracuse University and founder of The Your Black World Coalition.  To follow Dr Boyce on Twitter, please click here.

Black Health News: 76 Children Die from Swine Flu in the US

From Yahoo News

Health officials said Friday that 76 U.S. children have died of swine flu, including 19 new reports in the past week — more evidence the new virus is unusually dangerous for the young.

The regular flu kills between 46 and 88 children a year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That suggests deaths from the new H1N1 virus could dramatically outpace children's deaths from seasonal flu, if swine flu continues to spread as it has.

CDC officials say 10 more states, a total of 37, now have widespread swine flu. A week ago, reports suggested that cases might be leveling off and even falling in some areas of the country, but that did not turn out to be an enduring national trend.

"We are seeing more illness, more hospitalizations, and more deaths," the CDC's Dr. Anne Schuchat said at a press conference Friday.

The new virus, first identified in April, is a global epidemic. The CDCdoesn't have an exact count of all swine flu deaths and hospitalizations, but existing reports suggest more than 600 have died and more than 9,000 have been hospitalized. Health officials believe millions of Americans have caught the virus.

The virus is hitting young people harder. Experts believe older people are suffering from it less, perhaps because they have a bit of immunity from exposure over the years to somewhat similar viruses.

 

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Dr Elaina George: Is the Swine Flu Vaccine Safe?

by Dr. Elaina George, Your Black World 

I have had several patients ask me whether or not they should get the swine flu (H1N1) vaccine. My response has been the same. I will not be getting the vaccine because I don’t think it is safe.

I am an MD who was trained to practice medicine the old fashioned way. My education was based on understanding and treating disease. As a surgeon, I was taught that in some cases surgical correction is the most efficient and expedient way to fix a problem or cure a disease. In short, I have a healthy respect for the standard medical care that is practiced in this country.

However, over the past 10 years since I have been in practice, I have seen a disturbing trend that has become increasingly more common. Although we have the most advanced medical system in the world, the best trained physicians, and access to new and ever evolving medications, we as a nation and particularly the minority population are getting sicker at a younger age, and our quality of life is suffering. There are more people suffering from depression, anxiety, and learning disabilities than at any time in our history. Unfortunately, we have learned to manage diseases by taking a pill everyday instead of doing what it takes to prevent the illness in the first place. It is past time to look to good nutrition and prevention as a means of preventing and curing chronic diseases such as diabetes, hypertension, obesity and some cancers which have risen to epidemic levels.

When I made the personal decision to ask questions about the Swine flu vaccine, the answers that I discovered contradicted the mantra that has been championed by the media, government officials, and the vaccine manufacturers. What we are being told simply does not make any sense. The most important question that I have learned to ask (from the politics of healthcare to every other facet of our society that affects us as individuals) is - who stands to gain?

I will not be getting the swine flu vaccine because:

1. The vaccine makers have been given immunity from being sued for any bad outcome

After the deaths and injuries associated with the Swine flu vaccination campaign in 1976, the vaccine manufacturers lost billions of dollars in civil suits. That cannot happen this time around. Congress has since passed two bills that shield vaccine makers from civil suits. The first in 1986 protects vaccine makers from civil suits filed by people who have been injured by a vaccine due to ‘unavoidable side effects’. In 2006 another iteration of the shield law (The Epidemic Preparedness Act) was passed as part of the Patriot Act and extends the shield to include protection if the drug maker has ‘no willful knowledge’ that a vaccine may cause injury. In short, a maker of the Swine flu vaccine simply has to say they didn’t know the vaccine was going to cause harm then they cannot be sued. This won’t be hard to do since they have not fully tested the vaccine.

1. There are many ingredients in vaccines called adjuvants that are put in to stimulate the immune response

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Your black health: High Vaccine Costs Lead Some Doctors to Stop Giving them

Parents who bring their kids to Dr. G. Andrew McIntosh for the chicken pox vaccine are out of luck.

The family physician, who has a solo practice in Uniontown, Ohio, doesn't offer that shot because he can't afford it. Most insurers won't sufficiently cover the cost.

"It doesn't do me any good. I am losing money on [them]," he said. The chicken pox vaccine runs about $115, but insurers only cover between $68 to $83 of that.

McIntosh has also cut back on a handful of other critical childhood vaccines for the same reason -- including the measles, mumps and rubella, known as the MMR vaccine.

It costs him about $58 to buy an MMR shot, he said, while insurers pay about about $40.

 

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Study: What Makes Women Want to have Sex?

From CNN

What makes a woman want to have sex? Is it physical attraction? Love? Loneliness? Jealousy? Boredom? Painful menstrual cramps?

Many women interviewed were having sex purely because they wanted the experience.

It turns out that woman have sex for all of these reasons and more, and that their choices are not arbitrary; there may be evolutionary explanations at work.

Psychologists Cindy Meston and David Buss, both professors at the University of Texas at Austin, decided that the topic of "why women have sex" deserved a book of its own. They've woven scientific research together with a slew of women's voices in their new collaborative work, "Why Women Have Sex," published September 29 by Times Books.

"We do bring in men occasionally by way of contrast, but we wanted to focus exclusively on women so that the complexity of women's sexualpsychology was not given the short shrift, so to speak," said Buss, a leading evolutionary psychologist.

The authors conducted a study from June 2006 to April 2009 that asked women whether they had ever had sex for one of 237 reasons, all of which had emerged in a previous study. About 1,000 women contributed their perspectives. Watch women answer The Question »

It turns out that women's reasons for having sex range from love to pure pleasure to a sense of duty to curiosity to curing a headache. Some women just want to please their partners, and others want an ego boost.

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Managing Multiple Baby's Mamas: What Does that mean?

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How do you deal with the challenge of having multiple children in multiple households?

EBONY NEEDS SOME INVESTORS

The outlook for the grand dame of black-owned publishing companies, Johnson Publishing, looks dimmer by the day.
Speculation began earlier this year that the company behind Ebony and Jet magazines was on the ropes.

Then came the news came earlier this month that the Ebony Fashion Fair traveling fashion show -- a flamboyant staple of black women's fund raising efforts since 1958 -- was being canceled for the first time in its history. Now comes a Newsweek.com article that says the company is is putting its flagship title, Ebony, up for sale.

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Technorati Tags: sale,ebony magazine,jet magazine,black celebrity gossip,black gossip

THE DEATH PENALTY

In theory, the death penalty for capital crimes should work.

An accused killer takes the life of an innocent and is put to death to protect the rest of society.

The only problem is that theory has little to do with real life.

Prejudicial prosecution; coerced confessions; corrupted informants; botched lawyering; and, yes, even racism, have turned the death penalty, as it is now applied in the United States, into a very dirty, inaccurate business.

Let's cross our fingers and pray that with a little luck, a death knell for the death penalty will soon be sounded, especially in light of the sad case of Romell Broom, who would have been executed in Ohio's death chamber on Sept. 15 but for his weak veins.

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Technorati Tags: death penalty,black celebrity gossip,black gossip

THE DEALTH PENALTY

In theory, the death penalty for capital crimes should work.

An accused killer takes the life of an innocent and is put to death to protect the rest of society.

The only problem is that theory has little to do with real life.

Prejudicial prosecution; coerced confessions; corrupted informants; botched lawyering; and, yes, even racism, have turned the death penalty, as it is now applied in the United States, into a very dirty, inaccurate business.

Let's cross our fingers and pray that with a little luck, a death knell for the death penalty will soon be sounded, especially in light of the sad case of Romell Broom, who would have been executed in Ohio's death chamber on Sept. 15 but for his weak veins.

read more click here

Technorati Tags: death penalty,black celebrity gossip,black gossip

BABY DANCES TO BEYONCE

 

WATCH A CUTE BABY DANCE TO BEYONCE!

IT’S A MUST SEE!

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Technorati Tags: baby dancing,black celebrity gossip,black gossip

MAN ARRESTED FOR SPREADING HIV

News that for the first time an HIV vaccine has had some success in protecting people from the disease is severely tempered by news out of St. Louis County that a 40-year-old African American male is being held on $200,000 cash bond on six counts of recklessly risking infection of another with HIV. The news of the vaccine shows how far we've come in the battle against HIV, but the arrest of this St. Louis County man shows how much further we have to go in educating the public.

Prosecutors say that Orlando A. Hadley had numerous sexual encounters with a woman and did not reveal his HIV status to her. The woman later tested positive for HIV. Now, police are polling the public to see who else may have had sexual contact with Hadley.

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Technorati Tags: Orlando A Hadley,HIV,black gossip

ARRESTED FOT SPREADING HIV

News that for the first time an HIV vaccine has had some success in protecting people from the disease is severely tempered by news out of St. Louis County that a 40-year-old African American male is being held on $200,000 cash bond on six counts of recklessly risking infection of another with HIV. The news of the vaccine shows how far we've come in the battle against HIV, but the arrest of this St. Louis County man shows how much further we have to go in educating the public.

Prosecutors say that Orlando A. Hadley had numerous sexual encounters with a woman and did not reveal his HIV status to her. The woman later tested positive for HIV. Now, police are polling the public to see who else may have had sexual contact with Hadley.

read more click here

Technorati Tags: Orlando A Hadley,HIV,black gossip