A teenage girl risks everything when she falls in love with a vampire.
New Moon
Bella once again finds herself surrounded by danger as Seattle is ravaged by a string of mysterious killings and a malicious vampire continues her quest for revenge. In the midst of it all, she is forced to choose between her love for Edward and her friendship with Jacob — knowing that her decision has the potential to ignite the struggle between vampire and werewolf. With her graduation quickly approaching, Bella is confronted with the most important decision of her life.
Eclipse
After Bella recovers from the vampire attack that almost claimed her life, she looks to celebrate her birthday with Edward and his family. However, a minor accident during the festivities results in Bella’s blood being shed, a sight that proves too intense for the Cullens, who decide to leave the town of Forks, Washington for Bella and Edward’s sake. Initially heartbroken, Bella finds a form of comfort in reckless living, as well as an even-closer friendship with Jacob Black. Danger in different forms awaits.
Breaking Dawn Part 1
The Quileute and the Volturi close in on expecting parents Edward and Bella, whose unborn child poses different threats to the wolf pack and vampire coven.
Facebook launched a new chat feature that enables people to confidentially chat with a counselor if friends report them as a suicide risk, reports the AP.
Friends will be able to report content on the site by selecting “suicidal content” inside of the “harmful behavior” menu.
At that point, Facebook sends the person an email that encourages him to call the National Suicide Prevention Hotline and even includes a link to chat with a counselor online.
John Draper, project director for Lifeline, a suicide prevention organization that has been working with Facebook since 2006, said in a release that ”although the Lifeline on average handles 70,000 calls per month, we have heard from our Facebook fans and others that there are many people in crisis who don’t feel comfortable picking up the phone. This new service provides a way for them to get the help they need in the way they want it.”
A new study paints a bleak portrait of the unemployment landscape faced by young black men in New York City.
The headline of the report, filed by the Community Service Society of New York reads, “Only One in Four Young Black Men in New York City Have a Job.”
The study finds that the unemployment rate for African-American men in New York, between the ages of 16 and 24, was 33.5 percent from January 2009 through June 2010.
By comparison, the jobless rate amongst all New Yorkers in that age range was 24.6 percent.
But the real startling figure is that employment-population ratio, the percentage of working-age population who have a job, for young black men decreased from 29% in 2006-2007 to 25% in 2009-2010, meaning that one in four black men were employed. For those without a high school diploma, the numbers spiked alarmingly — this group‘s unemployment rate was 52%, with 86% percent of these men out of the labor force (essentially that 1 in 10 were employed in 2009-2010).
From the New York Times:
“The recession has created a landscape of the unemployed and underemployed with particular catastrophic consequences for young African-American men,” said David R. Jones, president of the Community Service Society, an advocacy group for New York’s low-income residents. “Now young black men between 16 and 24 years have become the banner of hopelessness, particularly here in New York City.”
The Times also notes that close to 40 percent of blackNew Yorkers who had held a job previously were unemployed for more than 12 months during the recession and early part of the recovery. That compared with 24 percent for whites, 27 percent for Latinos and 26 percent for Asians.
If you have ever watched wrestling, then you should be familiar with#RapBeef. #RapBeef is one of the leading causes of wack rappers getting their careers ended… example below..
The U.S. government seized the domain of a small but influential music blog a year ago under charges that look pretty bogus, then kept it under lock and key for more than a year, according to this completely outrageous story by Mike Masnick at Techdirt.
Around Thanksgiving2010, the Department of Homeland Security seized more than 70 domains with no trial, accusing them of copyright infringement, and put up the alarming graphic seen at the right here.
One of the seized sites, Dajaz1.com, was a hip-hop blog.
According to Techdirt, the feds listed a bunch of songs that were supposedly there without permission. But in fact, the report says, the musicians and their reps sent the songs to Dajaz1 and asked for them to be publicized.
So apparently the seizure was based on totally false premises to begin with.
But that’s not the really scary part.
Under the law, the feds have 60 days to inform the owner of seized property why they took it. The owner can then file a claim asking for it back. Once that happens, the government has 90 days to explain why the owner should forfeit the property permanently
The government reportedly missed the 90 day deadline.
Or at least that’s what the owner assumed when he heard nothing. Then the court told him that the government got an extension.
But the owner couldn’t see the extension because all the filings in the case were sealed, and was not allowed to testify in court to ask for his property back, says TechDirt.
This sounds like the kind of law enforcement tactics that might (maybe) be justified for a hardcore terrorist investigation. But for a copyright infringement case?
It went on like this for about a year, until the government finally returned the blog to its rightful owner yesterday, according to the report.
TechDirt concludes, “This whole thing has been a disgrace by the USgovernment, starting with a bogus seizure, improper and illegal censorship, followed by denial of due process and unnecessary secrecy.”
The housing crisis hit Hispanics and blacks much harder than it did whites!
As Congress and the White House wrestle whether to raise taxes for the wealthiest Americans, a new analysis of Census data shows that the wealth gaps between whites and blacks and Hispanics widened dramatically during the recession.
The analysis by the Pew Research Center, released on Tuesday, found that from 2005 to 2009, inflation-adjusted median wealth fell 66 percent among Hispanic households and 53 percent among black households, compared with a 16 percent decline among white households.
Those declines increased the wealth gap between white and minority households to the largest since the census began collecting such data in 1984. The ratio of wealth for whites to blacks, for instance, is now roughly 20 to 1, compared to 12 to 1 in the first survey 25 years ago and 7 to 1 in 1995, when a booming economy lifted many low-income Americansinto the middle class.
The wealth ratio for whites to Hispanics was 18 to 1 in 2009, also up from 7 to 1 in 1995, the Pew analysis found.
The declines from the recession left the median black household with $5,677 in wealth (assets minus debts, where assets include items like a car, a home, savings, retirement funds, etc.) and the typical Hispanic household with $6,325. White households, by comparison, had $113,149, the study found.
Sliced another way, the data from the Census Bureau’s Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP), showed that 35 percent of black households and 31 percent of Hispanic households had zero or negative net worth in 2009. The comparable rate for white households was 15 percent.
The SIPP income questionnaire is considered to provide the most comprehensive snapshot of household wealth by race and ethnicity.
The Pew analysis said the housing crisis was largely to blame for the widening gulf. The median level of home equity held by Hispanic homeowners declined by half from 2005 to 2009, from $99,983 to $49,145 it found. By comparison, white homeowners saw their median equity decline from $115,364 in 2005 to $95,000 in 2009. Black homeowners’ median equity fell from $76,910 to $59,000 over the same period.
The study said the sharper decline among Hispanics happened because a large share of Hispanics live in California, Florida, Nevada and Arizona, which were among the states hardest hit by the housing crisis.
Other studies have noted that blacks and Hispanics lost so much more home equity because they were far more likely to be sold a high-cost, sub-prime loan, regardless of their credit histories. Those mortgages now have the highest foreclosure rates.
It also noted that because whites are more heavily invested in the recovering stock market than blacks or Hispanics, the former had recovered a higher percentage of the wealth lost to the recession.
National Urban LeaguePresident and CEO Marc Morial called the report a “wake-up call” that minority communities need more investment in long-term job creation.
“A paramount issue for this nation for the 21st century is to ensure the narrowing and closing of the racial wealth gap,” Morial told the Associated Press on Tuesday, a day before the National Urban League opens its annual convention in Boston. “It has deep social implications. It has deep political implications.”
In Washington, the wealth gap has been a major point of friction in talks about raising the debt ceiling and putting the nation on sounder fiscal footing. President Barack Obama and Democrats have sought a variety of ways to increase revenue, all aimed at those in the upper income bracket.
The president has proposed closing loopholes in the tax code, such as breaks for owners of private jets and for oil companies as well as higher income tax rates on wealthier individuals and families. Republicans have made resistance to any tax increases a focal point in the debate, arguing that raising taxes in a recession is an impediment to creating jobs. Neither plan currently under consideration contains any tax increases.
AfricanAmerican scholarships are out there, as are AfricanAmerican college grants. A college education isn’t confined to what is contained in your textbook or how much extra credit you can get for completing side projects or doing research for a professor. A postsecondary education allows students to step out of their hometown comfort zone and to develop relationships they may not have otherwise developed. You could learn a lot from someone who comes from a different culture, a different background. This experience can be as valuable as the academic knowledge and career preparation and training you had in mind when you enrolled. This is one of the reasons why colleges offer financial aid packages designed to fill campuses with students of different cultures, economic backgrounds and life experiences. Like students who belong to other minority groups, AfricanAmericanstudents can benefit from this search for diversity. Numerous scholarships for minorities exist, and many more scholarship awards are available specifically for AfricanAmericanstudents seeking a postsecondary degree.
Check out some of the awardsbelow for information about a few of the many AfricanAmerican scholarships that may be found at Scholarships.com. Mind you, there are often other criteria, in addition to ethnicity, for qualifying for these and most other scholarships, which is why you should conduct a free college scholarship search at Scholarships.com to get a list of scholarship opportunities tailored to your specific situation and qualifications. This will save time searching so you can spend that time applying for and, hopefully, winning scholarships!
Boxer Floyd MayweatherJr. (Grand Rapids) was sentenced today to 90 days in jail after pleading guilty to reduced battery domestic violence and harassment charges before a Las Vegas judge.
The 34-year-old Mayweather also was ordered to complete 100 hours of community service and pay a $2,500 fine.
The plea deal avoids trial on felony allegations that he hit his ex-girlfriend and threatened two of their children during an argument at her home in September 2010.
Prosecutor Lisa Luzaich told Judge Melissa Saragosa that Mayweather has been in trouble before and hasn’t been punished.
“He just continually gets himself into trouble, and he is able to get himself out of it as well,” she said. “Essentially, it is because he is who he is and is able to get away with everything.
“The only thing that’s going to get this man’s attention is incarceration.”
Mayweather stood still in a striped olive vest and made no reaction when the judge imposed the sentence. He was told to report to jail on Jan. 6.
Mayweather and his manager, Leonard Ellerbe, declined to comment outside the courtroom.
Attorney Karen Winckler had argued that the public would benefit more if Mayweather performs 100 hours of community service with children. Winckler said she wanted to confer with Mayweather before deciding whether to appeal.
The judge said she was swayed by Mayweather’s admission that he hit Harris and twisted her arm, and that two of their children, ages 9 and 10, witnessed the attack.
Saragosa noted that police reported Mayweather threatened to kill or make Harris “disappear,” and that their 10-year-old son ran from the house and jumped a back gate to fetch security. Mayweather had taken cellphones belonging to Harris and the two boys, she said.
“Punishment is appropriate,” Saragosa said. “No matter who you are, you have consequences to your actions when they escalate to this level of violence.”
This interview was originally broadcast on 010. Decodedis now available in paperback.
Long before he sold 50 million records worldwide — and before he appeared alongside Warren Buffett on the cover of Fortune magazine, accumulated 10 Grammy Awards and became the CEO of his own record label — Jay-Z was living with his mom in the Marcy Houses housing project in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, just trying to survive day by day.
“It was a very intense and stressful situation,” he tells Fresh Air‘s Terry Gross. “There was playing in the Johnny-pump (an opened fire hydrant) and the ice-cream man coming around and all of these games that we’d play, and suddenly it would turn just violent and there would be shootings at 12 in the afternoon on any given day. It was a weird mix of emotions. One day, your best friend could be killed. The day before, you could be celebrating him getting a brand-new bike.”
Now 40, Jay-Z hasn’t forgotten his past — or the lyrics he’s written over the years about his childhood in the projects. In his new bookDecoded, he unpacks the detailed riffs and lyrics that make up 36 of his songs — while examining both his own life and the growth of hip-hop over the last two decades.
He also talks candidly, both in the book and on Fresh Air, about the period in his life when he was a teenager selling crack cocaine on the streets.
“At 14 [or] 15 years old, you’re thinking about sneakers or you’re thinking about some sort of relief from all of the pain you’re feeling,” he says. “You’re thinking about buying some food for the house. You’re thinking about paying the extra light bill. So at that young age, you’re not thinking about the destruction you’re causing your own community.”
At the time he was selling, Jay-Z was also coming up with rhymes. He normally wrote down his material in a green notebook he carried around with him — but he never took the notebook with him on the streets, he says.
“I would run into the corner store, the bodega, and just grab a paper bag or buy juice — anything just to get a paper bag,” he says. “And I’d write the words on the paper bag and stuff these ideas in my pocket until I got back. Then I would transfer them into the notebook. As I got further and further away from home and my notebook, I had to memorize these rhymes — longer and longer and longer. … By the time I got to record my first album, I was 26, I didn’t need pen or paper — my memory had been trained just to listen to a song, think of the words, and lay them to tape.”
Since his first album, he says, he’s never written down any of his lyrics.
“I’ve lost plenty of material,” he says. “It’s not the best way. I wouldn’t advise it to anyone. I’ve lost a couple albums’ worth of great material. … Think about when you can’t remember a word and it drives you crazy. So imagine forgetting an entire rhyme. ‘What’s that? I said I was the greatest something?’ ”
Hard-Knock Life
One of the songs Jay-Z writes about extensively in the book is “Hard Knock Life (Ghetto Anthem),” a single from his third album Vol. 2 … Hard Knock Life. It samples music from the musical Annie, which Jay-Z says he watched repeatedly as a child.
“When the TV version [of Annie] came on, I was drawn to it,” he says. “It was the struggle of this poor kid in this environment and how her life changed. … It immediately resonated.”
Twenty years later, Jay-Z was on a Puff Daddy tour in the late ’90s, when he heard a DJ play an instrumental version of “It’s the Hard Knock Life” from Annie.
“It immediately brought me back to my childhood and that feeling,” he says. “I knew right then and there that I had to make that record, and people would relate to the struggle and the aspiration in it, as well.”
To get the rights for “Hard Knock Life,” Jay-Z says he “exaggerated a touch” in his letter to the original songwriters, Charles Strouse and Martin Charnin. He told them how much Annie meant to him growing up, because he won an essay contest as a child and got to see the musical on Broadway, cementing his love for the show. But, he says with a laugh, that actually never happened.
“I wrote a letter about how much Annie meant to me growing up and how I went to a Broadway play — which was an exaggeration,” he says. “I saw it on TV. It was a bad lie … for a good reason.”
Jay-Z has sold more than 50 million albums worldwide. He is the former CEO of Def Jam Recordings and the founder of Roc Nation. He was ranked the 5th top male solo artist of the 2000s by Billboard magazine. He has also received a great deal of recognition from the American Music Awards, the BET Awards, and the MTV Video Music Awards.
“I grew up in Marcy Projects in Brooklyn, and my mom and pop had an extensive record collection, so Michael Jackson and Stevie Wonder and all of those sounds and souls of Motown filled the house,” he says. “So I was very familiar with the song when Kanye [West] brought me the sample. It had been used in hip-hop previously, but it was just such an interesting and fresh take on it that I was immediately drawn to it.”
0s
“They have a saying, ‘It takes a village to raise a child.’ It changed the authority figure. Crack cocaine was done so openly, and the people who were addicted to it, the fiends, had very little self-respect. It was so highly addictive that they didn’t care how they obtained it and they carried that out in front of children, who were dealing at the time. So the relationship of that respect, ‘I have to respect my elders’ … that dynamic shifted and it broke forever. It just changed everything from that point on.
“I was very aware of the dangers involved because there were people dying [and] there were people going to jail and it wasn’t a one-off. It wasn’t an occurrence where everyone was shocked. It wouldn’t be a shock like, ‘How could that happen in this neighborhood?’ It was really a weekly or monthly occurrence.”
On Danger Mouse‘s Grey Album, Which Samples Both Jay-Z And The Beatles Without Copyright Permission
“I think it was a really strong album. I champion any form of creativity. And that was a genius idea to do, and it sparked so many others like it. It’s really good. … I was honored someone took the time to mash those records up with Beatles records. I was honored to be on quote-unquote the same song with The Beatles.”
On The Song ‘December 4th’
One of the songs Jay-Z writes about extensively in the book is “December 4th” from The Black Album; the song is heavily autobiographical and features riffs by Jay-Z’s own mother, Gloria Carter.
“I tricked her [into appearing on that],” he says. “I told her to meet me down at the studio and we were going to go to lunch. She came down to the studio, and I just brought the track up and I said, ‘I just want you to talk on it.’ Because I knew if I told her [she was going to be on the song], she’d get really nervous. [She said], ‘What do you want me to say?’ And the rest is history.”
On Crotch-Grabbing In Rap Music
“In hip-hop, the music leads first. So usually, you have a hit record and then [the record executives] throw this person on stage who has never been on stage before. So they don’t have any experience on how to perform in front of people, hold the mic — all these different things you need to know as a performer. So you get up there, you feel naked. So when you feel naked, what’s the first thing you do? You cover yourself. So that bravado is an act of, ‘I am so nervous right now. I am scared to death. I’m going to act so tough that I am going to hide it, and I have to grab my crotch.’ That’s just what happens.”
On Misogynistic Rap Lyrics
“A lot of these albums are made when artists are young, 17 or 18 years old, so they’ve never had any real relationships. And if you come from the neighborhoods we’re in, we have low esteem ourselves. And the women, well, the girls — they have low self-esteem as well. These are all dysfunctional relationships at a young age. The poet is pretty much [giving] his take on his dealings with girls at that time. He’s not in a stable relationship; he’s on the road. He’s seeing girls who like him because he makes music. They spend one night together; he gets a phone number. He leaves for the next town and does the same thing over again.”
On Using The Word ‘Bitch’ In ’99 Problems’
“That was the writer in me being provocative, because that’s what rap music should be at times. That was really directed to all of the people who hear buzz words in rap music — they hear ‘bitch’ or ‘ho’ or something and immediately dismiss everything else that takes place. And everything has to be put in context. And when you put it in context, you realize that I wasn’t calling any female, besides a female dog, a ‘bitch’ on this song.”
Children who live with smokers miss more school due to illness than those who live in households with non-smokers, according to a new study published in the journal Pediatrics.
Researchers analyzed data from the 2005 National Health Interview Survey that tracked, among other things, how many days of schoolchildren aged 6 to11 missed and the reason for their absence.
They found children living with one or more smokers in the home missed one to two more days of school per year on average, than those who lived with non-smokers. The research suggests that families could reduce absenteeism by 24 to 34 % if smoking was eliminated from their households.
According to the study, about one third of children in the United States live with a smoker. Among children aged 3 to 11, at least 56% have detectable levels of a chemical called serum cotinine, an indication of tobacco smoke exposure. Cotinine is a breakdown of nicotine and can be measured by analyzing levels in the blood, urine or saliva. Researchers say this establishes a link between household smoking and two specific respiratory illnesses.
“Kids living with people smoking in the home were more likely to have ear infections and chest colds,” Dr. Douglas Levy, the study’s principal investigator and Assistant in Health Care Policy at the Mongan Institute for Health Policy said. “Among kids who were living with smokers, a quarter to one-third of the days they missed from school can be attributed to the fact that they live with someone who smokes in the home.”
The study found that having multiple smokers in the home resulted in more illnesses reported and days of school missed. For example, a child living with 2 or more adult smokers had more ear infections- three or more-in a year, than a child living with no smokers or even just one smoker.
An increase in illness was not the only consequencesmoking at homr. Levy says there is a financial burden as well because parents or other caregivers must take off work to care for sick children.
“When kids are home from school, particularly young kids, the cost overall is $227 million dollars per year. All due to the extra days that we see kids missing school because of secondhand smoke exposure,” said Levy.
Adults in non-smoking households were more educated, had higher incomes and were more likely to be Hispanic the study found. Homes with 2 or more smokers also had higher incomes but were more often white. About half the kids in the study that lived with a smoker were from low-income households Levy said. His advice to parents? “If you are a smoker do not smoke around your kids whether it be at home or in the car. Even better advice is to try to quit smoking.”
The study was not without limitations. Children over 12 were excluded from the study because of the possibility that exposure could be due to their own smoking. And study authors acknowldege their measure of tobacco smoke exposure was not precise and they were not able to measure exposure that might have happened outside of the home.
Hundreds of supporters of the imprisoned journalist Mumia Abu-Jamal gathered on Friday in Philadelphia to mark the 30th anniversary of his arrest for the killing of a white police officer. The event occurred just two days after Philadelphia prosecutors announced they will no longer seek the death penalty for Abu-Jamal. On Friday, Abu-Jamal, a former Black Panther, called it to the event to make his first public remarks since the prosecutor’s decision was announced.
Mumia Abu-Jamal: “I am for the first time, in almost 30 years, I’m not on death row physically. I’m in a new block, called an AC block. The cells are somewhat identical to death row but no one on this block is on death row, including myself. It takes some getting used to, you see, I’m still acclimating myself.”
Abu-Jamal was also asked about his reaction to having his death sentence converted to life without parole.
Mumia Abu-Jamal: “I must admit to some surprise because I was expecting the hearing–by that I mean a sentencing hearing–even though many friends and supporters and even lawyers said there probably wouldn’t be one. I believed there would be one. And I continued to feel this way until I heard the news. I will be talking to my lawyers in a matter of days and we will be going over precisely those kinds of questions. Because there will not be a hearing there is some disappointment because we thought we could make some things happen in that hearing and really give a good fight, but we’ll have to fight in other ways. I want to thank everybody that really supported us for so many years.”
