In many ways, basketball superstar Dwyane Wade leads a double life. By day, the Miami Heat guard is an NBA legend, but by night, Wade is a single father to his two young sons and his nephew. Moms dropping their kids off at school didn’t know what to make of him at first.
“I was like one of the only dads,” Wade said. “Everybody was looking at me, it was kind of weird. They called me ‘Mr. Mom’ for a while.”
It’s an apt nickname for a man who is on a mission to bring back a bedrock U.S. value: family. Wade is reaching out to fathers and sons through community groups and his non-profit organization, Wade’s World Foundation, to combat the jaw-dropping statistic that 72 percent of African-American kids are being raised by a single parent, mostly women. Even President Obama has asked Wade to come on as a kind of ambassador-at-large for fatherhood.
He is also determined to let his kids know that despite a bruising three-year custody battle, they have two loving parents, a lesson he draws from his own fractured childhood.
“It is not about the money I have or don’t have,” Wade said. “It is about the time I am willing to sit down across the table from my kids and if they don’t get something right, helping them get it right.”
Earlier this year Dru Ha (co-owner of Duck Down Music) lost his Father to a 10 year battle with Alzheimer’s. In his Father’s honor, Dru Ha announced that he will be running the INGNew York City Marathon on November 6th in an effort to raise donations & awareness about the horrific disease that affects over 5 million people in the United States alone. To date, Dru Ha has raised over $11,000 in donations. Duck Downartists, Buckshot, Smif N Wessun, Promise & Double-O, of Kidz In The Hall, dedicated their time to creating an originalsong, “Run To Remember,” in recognition of Dru Ha running the NYC Marathon. Double-O produced the track. The song was recorded at Rubber Tracks in Brooklyn, NY. The song is available exclusively at iTunes for only 99 cents. Proceeds from the sales will be donated to the Alzheimer’s Research foundation.
Patrice O’Neal, a fixture in the New York comedy scene for two decades who was most recently seen in the Comedy Central Roast Of Charlie Sheen, has passed away according to sources close to the comedian.
Talk show host Opie of the Opie & Anthony Radio Show tweeted this morning, “Yes, it’s true that our pal Patrice O’Neal has passed away. The funniest and best thinker I’ve ever known PERIOD.”
O’Neal suffered a stroke in October after a long battle with diabetes. The announcement about his condition was made by a group of his comedian friends and peers on the popular Sirius radio show, but few details have been made known since then at the wishes of his family.
Update: 2:40 p.m. O’Neal’s manager Matt Frost released this statement today:
It is with terrible sadness we must report that Patrice O’Neal has passed away this morning at 7:00am due to the complications of the stroke he suffered on October 19. Many of us have lost a close and loved friend; all of us have lost a true comic genius. His mother, who was also his best friend, was at his side. Patrice is survived by his wife, Vondecarlo; his step daughter Aymilyon, sister Zinder, and his mother Georgia. The family wishes to thank all of the fans and friends who have expressed an outpouring of love and support for Patrice these past weeks. We ask that you please respect the family’s request for privacy at this difficult time.
Previously: O’Neal was best known for his darkly playful sense of humor and for saying exactly what was on his mind. While O’Neal was a polarizing voice who was often as disliked as much as he was beloved, he was revered by peers and audiences alike for his fearlessness, a characteristic that was in bold relief during the Sheen Roast.
Emily’s emancipation party played like an MMA cage match. In the aftermath, everyone tries to make sense of it. But battle lines are beginning to emerge. Yandy gives Chrissy a self-help book aimed at troublesome mother-in-laws. The book instantly creates more problems than it solves. Somaya has a big showcase coming up but she’s not getting much support from her manager Maurice who books ballerinas instead of B-Boys for back-up dancers. When she finally does make it to the stage, the dancers are perfect … her wardrobe, not so much.
Episode 3 Below…
A Toast To Kimbella
The battle between Chrissy and Yandy escalates after Yandy expresses interest in managing Somaya. Feeling disrespected, Yandy goes AWOL and Jim Jones misses a show AND a big pay day. Emily gets the keys to her new place and has her first house guest, good friend and recording artist Teairra Mari. Teairra wants to help Emily transition to the single life and drags her to an industry event; turns out it’s a party to celebrate Kimbella’s cover photo on “Black Men’s Magazine.”
Many startups and app developers today are needlessly breaking laws and pulling in too much data, which will send them head-first into a battle with the Federal Trade Commission.
“We’re seeing in our lab apps pulling in data things that are wholly unrelated to functionality,” said David Vladek, the FTC director for the Bureau of Consumer Protection.
“If you don’t want to see us, don’t collect data you don’t need, don’t collect data that’s unrelated to your app. Don’t collect information you don’t know what you’ll use or what you need.”
Vladek said many apps pull in geolocation data and other data points that might not even be useful to the app maker. Normally that’s a privacy concern, but if the app is pulling in data for a minor it is breaking the law, unless a parent has given explicit permission.
The FTC entered into a large civil penalty with employee benefits company Ceridian because the company held onto data for “way longer than they needed it,” Vladek said. Ceridian was eventually breached and hackers stole information about tens of thousands of users.
“If you don’t come up with that novel use for that data, it’s an albatross that will come back and bite you,” he said. “You don’t want to see us, we don’t want to see you, let’s just work together to keep it that way.”
00 square kilometers of lush floodplains in central Mozambique, packed with wild animals. But 15 years of civil war took a heavy toll – many species were almost completely wiped out for meat. Today, conservationists battle to restore the park to its former glory, and save it from present-day threats that could destroy it forever.
What do you do when the love in a relationship conflicts with who you are as a being?
Well, I don’t know how to answer this question but recently I have been experiencing this battle of hearts and internal battles with myself and significant other. The battle of hearts comes when a significant other wants me to change. When I change I am still held accountable for my past faults and errors. No matter what I do, try, or say I am still a lustful, power driven sociopath in their eyes. What’s the point of being with me if you’ll always degrade who I am now with my past faults? Why don’t you just leave if I am such a monster; go be happy with another. All this irrational strain on my mind and heart only makes my love for you callous and bleak. That honestly defeats the purpose of changing for your significant other, this only saddens me. Discussions after discussions about change but I only see change is only a one way street in this relationship. It’s positive to be so irrational towards a person that’s growing as a man; that’s fair in the significant others eyes. As long there are trust issues there is a reason for the significant other to be irrational, great logic. It sucks when my heart is already yours but you still push me back to the sociopath of my past. The relationship self reflects on the ego maniac, lustful sociopath and tries to run away from that man. The sociopath reflects on the weak, callous little man as a wasted of person and time. The internal battle begins with the raging feelings of disappointment and failure of the relationship self. There are feelings of betrayal because the rules were followed for once and everything is disregarded with mistakes from my past. How can a person change or grow if they’re still reminded of the man of yesteryear? The whispers of the sociopath echoes in the growing man’s mind, echoes of doubt mix with a growing raging lust. There are few days I try to keep the sociopath at bay and not relapse back to the sounds of moans and panting in a room of darkness and snitch of sweat in the air. The sociopath whispers, “Just leave” but the growing man has hope and want to work pass the irrational treatment from his significant other. Confusion clouds the mind with bits of lust, trust, love, hate, rage, happiness, and comfort. I just want someone to believe in me sometime because I don’t believe in anything all the time. Too attached with feelings to leave but refuse to be abase so I can convert back to a sociopath.
I guess my answer is: We have a paradox on our hands.
The Turtles and the Shredder battle once again, this time for the last cannister of the ooze that created the Turtles, which Shredder wants to create an army of new mutants.
[AUTHENTICITY CERTIFIED: Text version below transcribed directly from audio.]
Mr. President, Mrs. Clinton, members of Congress, Ambassador Holbrooke, Excellencies, friends:
Fifty-four years ago to the day, a young Jewish boy from a small town in the Carpathian Mountains woke up, not far from Goethe’s beloved Weimar, in a place of eternal infamy called Buchenwald. He was finally free, but there was no joy in his heart. He thought there never would be again. Liberated a day earlier by American soldiers, he remembers their rage at what they saw. And even if he lives to be a very old man, he will always be grateful to them for that rage, and also for their compassion. Though he did not understand their language, their eyes told him what he needed to know – that they, too, would remember, and bear witness.
And now, I stand before you, Mr. President — Commander-in-Chief of the army that freed me, and tens of thousands of others — and I am filled with a profound and abiding gratitude to the American people. “Gratitude” is a word that I cherish. Gratitude is what defines the humanity of the human being. And I am grateful to you, Hillary, or Mrs. Clinton, for what you said, and for what you are doing for children in the world, for the homeless, for the victims of injustice, the victims of destiny and society. And I thank all of you for being here.
We are on the threshold of a new century, a new millennium. What will the legacy of this vanishing century be? How will it be remembered in the new millennium? Surely it will be judged, and judged severely, in both moral and metaphysical terms. These failures have cast a dark shadow over humanity: two World Wars, countless civil wars, the senseless chain of assassinations (Gandhi, the Kennedys, Martin Luther King, Sadat, Rabin), bloodbaths in Cambodia and Algeria, India and Pakistan, Ireland and Rwanda, Eritrea and Ethiopia, Sarajevo and Kosovo; the inhumanity in the gulag and the tragedy of Hiroshima. And, on a different level, of course, Auschwitz and Treblinka. So much violence; so much indifference.
What is indifference? Etymologically, the word means “no difference.” A strange and unnatural state in which the lines blur between light and darkness, dusk and dawn, crime and punishment, cruelty and compassion, good and evil. What are its courses and inescapable consequences? Is it a philosophy? Is there a philosophy of indifference conceivable? Can one possibly view indifference as a virtue? Is it necessary at times to practice it simply to keep one’s sanity, live normally, enjoy a fine meal and a glass of wine, as the world around us experiences harrowing upheavals?
Of course, indifference can be tempting – more than that, seductive. It is so much easier to look away from victims. It is so much easier to avoid such rude interruptions to our work, our dreams, our hopes. It is, after all, awkward, troublesome, to be involved in another person’s pain and despair. Yet, for the person who is indifferent, his or her neighbor are of no consequence. And, therefore, their lives are meaningless. Their hidden or even visible anguish is of no interest. Indifference reduces the Other to an abstraction.
Over there, behind the black gates of Auschwitz, the most tragic of all prisoners were the “Muselmanner,” as they were called. Wrapped in their torn blankets, they would sit or lie on the ground, staring vacantly into space, unaware of who or where they were – strangers to their surroundings. They no longer felt pain, hunger, thirst. They feared nothing. They felt nothing. They were dead and did not know it.
Rooted in our tradition, some of us felt that to be abandoned by humanity then was not the ultimate. We felt that to be abandoned by God was worse than to be punished by Him. Better an unjust God than an indifferent one. For us to be ignored by God was a harsher punishment than to be a victim of His anger. Man can live far from God — not outside God. God is wherever we are. Even in suffering? Even in suffering.
In a way, to be indifferent to that suffering is what makes the human being inhuman. Indifference, after all, is more dangerous than anger and hatred. Anger can at times be creative. One writes a great poem, a great symphony. One does something special for the sake of humanity because one is angry at the injustice that one witnesses. But indifference is never creative. Even hatred at times may elicit a response. You fight it. You denounce it. You disarm it.
Indifference elicits no response. Indifference is not a response. Indifference is not a beginning; it is an end. And, therefore, indifference is always the friend of the enemy, for it benefits the aggressor — never his victim, whose pain is magnified when he or she feels forgotten. The political prisoner in his cell, the hungry children, the homeless refugees — not to respond to their plight, not to relieve their solitude by offering them a spark of hope is to exile them from human memory. And in denying their humanity, we betray our own.
Indifference, then, is not only a sin, it is a punishment.
And this is one of the most important lessons of this outgoing century’s wide-ranging experiments in good and evil.
In the place that I come from, society was composed of three simple categories: the killers, the victims, and the bystanders. During the darkest of times, inside the ghettoes and death camps – and I’m glad that Mrs. Clinton mentioned that we are now commemorating that event, that period, that we are now in the Days of Remembrance — but then, we felt abandoned, forgotten. All of us did.
And our only miserable consolation was that we believed that Auschwitz and Treblinka were closely guarded secrets; that the leaders of the free world did not know what was going on behind those black gates and barbed wire; that they had no knowledge of the war against the Jews that Hitler’s armies and their accomplices waged as part of the war against the Allies. If they knew, we thought, surely those leaders would have moved heaven and earth to intervene. They would have spoken out with great outrage and conviction. They would have bombed the railways leading to Birkenau, just the railways, just once.
And now we knew, we learned, we discovered that the Pentagon knew, the State Department knew. And the illustrious occupant of the White House then, who was a great leader — and I say it with some anguish and pain, because, today is exactly 54 years marking his death — Franklin Delano Roosevelt died on April the 12th, 1945. So he is very much present to me and to us. No doubt, he was a great leader. He mobilized the American people and the world, going into battle, bringing hundreds and thousands of valiant and brave soldiers in America to fight fascism, to fight dictatorship, to fight Hitler. And so many of the young people fell in battle. And, nevertheless, his image in Jewish history — I must say it — his image in Jewish history is flawed.
The depressing tale of the St. Louis is a case in point. Sixty years ago, its human cargo — nearly 1,000 Jews – was turned back to Nazi Germany. And that happened after the Kristallnacht, after the first state sponsored pogrom, with hundreds of Jewish shops destroyed, synagogues burned, thousands of people put in concentration camps. And that ship, which was already in the shores of the United States, was sent back. I don’t understand. Roosevelt was a good man, with a heart. He understood those who needed help. Why didn’t he allow these refugees to disembark? A thousand people — in America, the great country, the greatest democracy, the most generous of all new nations in modern history. What happened? I don’t understand. Why the indifference, on the highest level, to the suffering of the victims?
But then, there were human beings who were sensitive to our tragedy. Those non-Jews, those Christians, that we call the “Righteous Gentiles,” whose selfless acts of heroism saved the honor of their faith. Why were they so few? Why was there a greater effort to save SS murderers after the war than to save their victims during the war? Why did some of America‘s largest corporations continue to do business with Hitler’s Germany until 1942? It has been suggested, and it was documented, that the Wehrmacht could not have conducted its invasion of France without oil obtained from American sources. How is one to explain their indifference?
And yet, my friends, good things have also happened in this traumatic century: the defeat of Nazism, the collapse of communism, the rebirth of Israel on its ancestral soil, the demise of apartheid, Israel‘s peace treaty with Egypt, the peace accord in Ireland. And let us remember the meeting, filled with drama and emotion, between Rabin and Arafat that you, Mr. President, convened in this very place. I was here and I will never forget it.
And then, of course, the joint decision of the United States and NATO to intervene in Kosovo and save those victims, those refugees, those who were uprooted by a man, whom I believe that because of his crimes, should be charged with crimes against humanity.
But this time, the world was not silent. This time, we do respond. This time, we intervene.
Does it mean that we have learned from the past? Does it mean that society has changed? Has the human being become less indifferent and more human? Have we really learned from our experiences? Are we less insensitive to the plight of victims of ethnic cleansing and other forms of injustices in places near and far? Is today’s justified intervention in Kosovo, led by you, Mr. President, a lasting warning that never again will the deportation, the terrorization of children and their parents, be allowed anywhere in the world? Will it discourage other dictators in other lands to do the same?
What about the children? Oh, we see them on television, we read about them in the papers, and we do so with a broken heart. Their fate is always the most tragic, inevitably. When adults wage war, children perish. We see their faces, their eyes. Do we hear their pleas? Do we feel their pain, their agony? Every minute one of them dies of disease, violence, famine.
Some of them — so many of them — could be saved.
And so, once again, I think of the young Jewish boy from the Carpathian Mountains. He has accompanied the old man I have become throughout these years of quest and struggle. And together we walk towards the new millennium, carried by profound fear and extraordinary hope.
Tens of thousands of students and schoolchildren marched through London on Wednesday against plans to triple university tuition fees. Violence erupted as thousand of protesters battled police and stormed the headquarters of the governing Conservative Party. Over 50,000 students, lecturers and supporters demonstrated against plans to raise the cost of studying at a university to £9,000 a year, three times the current rate, in the largest street protest yet against the ConDem government’s sweeping austerity measures.
I did an interview with Ness a little while back when he was talking about this coming up. I actually got a preview of some of his new stuff when we were in the studio with Tox B.u.r.n.e.r. I havent watched this yet but Im sure I know how it turned out.
For a tiny Toronto software manufacturer nestled in the city’s grimy garment district, winning a $290 million court judgment against Microsoft is more than simply a long-awaited victory.
“It’s a battle cry for the entrepreneur and every small company,” trumpets Loudon Owen, i4i’s chairman, just hours after learning of the U.S. federal appeals court‘s decision.
That cry was closer to a whimper two years ago when i4i, a 30-person document collaboration firm, sued Microsoft (MSFT, Fortune 500), claiming it violated a patent with features found in Word 2003 and Word 2007. The offending technology lets users edit XML, a computer programming language that customizes the way a document’s contents are interpreted and displayed. (more…)
