Sometimes when your young and dumb you make bad decisions…especially sexually. But, when your young, dumb, and working as a coach at a high school you can’t make those same silly mistakes.

At my old high school one of the football/track coaches messed around with a senior and got her pregnant. Then, he and his girlfriend paid for the girl to have an abortion. I don’t know what to say except for “It’s a wrap”…if it is all true. I’m going to reserve judgment until everything comes out and after he goes to trial but when you are working with students you can’t let it get to this level. Even if the girl (highschooler) was throwing herself at him, and 1 day away from 18, you still can’t go there.

A former Las Vegas High School track coach impregnated one of his team members and then helped her get an abortion, Las Vegas police allege….

Craig worked as a substitute teacher for the Clark County School District from May 2003 to May 2007. He also was a track coach at Las Vegas High School from February to May 2006. His arrest report said that he was an assistant track coach for boys and girls at the school.

Police have recovered hundreds of pages of electronic correspondence between Craig and the then-17-year-old senior from a computer that the girl used. They subpoenaed Craig’s MSN hotmail subscriber information. Some of the messages indicated that Craig feared discovery and knew that the relationship could have criminal consequences, police said.

In one message, Craig talked about the possibility of facing jail time and losing his job, police said.

In another message, sent to the teen on May 26, 2006, Craig wrote, “You forget although track is over your still in school … which means if I get caught at your house … that is MY ASS,” according to his arrest report.

He then told the girl that he was willing to meet her at night because it was less risky, the report said. He also reminded her to keep their relationship on the “DL,” down low, the police report said.

The former Las Vegas High student told police that she and Craig first had sex in March 2006 in her parents’ home, according to Craig’s arrest report. Medical records obtained by police through an Oct. 15 grand jury subpoena showed the victim had an abortion on June 22, 2006…..

When police talked to the former student, she said Craig and Riddle accompanied her to an abortion clinic.

She said that “Deanna paid approximately $500 cash for the abortion and obtained the paperwork from the clinic,” Detective Paul Slaninka wrote in the police report.

Police interviewed Riddle in May.

“I asked Deanna if she drove (the teen) and Kenneth Craig to an abortion clinic and Deanna stated that she drove her to a doctor’s office and was unaware if it was an abortion clinic,” Slaninka wrote in the report.

“She also stated that she gave Kenneth Craig money on numerous occasions and is unaware if he used those monies to pay for an abortion.”

Electronic correspondence between Craig and the track team member make several references to her pregnancy and the abortion, according to the arrest report. Craig urged the student to save money because “we still have to go to the clinic in a couple of weeks,” according to the police report.

Article Link

Like I said…if this is all true, it is a wrap for him and they will probably give him as much time as allowed by law. Paying for the abortion is just icing on the cake to make this just a train wreck.

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The young Mississippi college student has been found dead in North Jackson, Miss. Stanley Cole, her ex-boyfriend who had recently been reported as abusive to her, lead police to the body. She went missing on Nov. 14 and the body was found Nov. 29th. Jackson State University Alumni Association has set up a way to support her family if anyone is interested. They have a paypal link where you can donate to the fund set up in her name.

I just don’t understand what goes through the mind of some men. It is so cowardly to hit a women, especially if you ’supposedly’ love her, but then to take it to this level. Over that past 5 years it seems like there has been more and more cases where an ex or a husband kills his wife. When I first read about the story I had a feeling it was going to be her ex because in the article it said he had just hit her about a month ago and then she had a new boyfriend. I would like to see the stats on the number of women murdered by a partner…is it just that we have so many news outlets to cover these cases (24 hr. media and internet even though the coverage for this is just a drop in the bucket compared to a Natalie Halloway) or are people just crazier then ever? Hopefully it is the prior. ..

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While everyone has heard about Stacey Peterson and the search for her another young women has been missing for two weeks, with little media coverage. Latasha Norman, a 20 year old Jackson State University student, has not been seen on campus and her family do not have any knowledge of her location. Her car was found on campus but there are no suspects and no arrests have been made.

Like most of these cases there is an ex-boyfriend who has been abusive. He allegedly hit her a month ago but she has a new boyfriend now. Both of them are not suspects…yet. Hopefully this story will start getting more national attention.

Article Link

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A commentor in the original thread posted an interesting rebutal of the research conducted by a University of Arizona professor on the role Haiti played in the spread of HIV. This has been an interesting topic to read about. I never knew that the CDC labeled Haitians (and Haiti) as high risk for HIV and how it effected the Haitian economy by carrying a stigma of being linked to aids.

Article Link:

October 30, 2007
Empire State Medical Association Denounces Incomplete Research Claims made by Dr. Gilbert and Dr. Worobey on “HIV Coming from Haiti”

Empire State Medical Association Denounces Incomplete Research Claims made by Dr. Gilbert and Dr. Worobey on “HIV Coming from Haiti” (www.nyesma.org) The Empire State Medical Association is highly concerned about the claims by Michael Worobey that “AIDS virus invaded the United States in about 1969 from Haiti, carried most likely by a single infected immigrant who set the stage for it to sweep the world in a tragic epidemic”. We reject the comments that “researchers think an unknown single infected Haitian immigrant arrived in a large city like Miami or New York, and the virus circulated for years — first in the U.S. population and then to other nations.” Gilbert and Worobey, analyzed samples from only five of these Haitian immigrants dating from 1982 and 1983. They also looked at genetic data from 117 more early AIDS patients from around the world. This genetic analysis allowed them to calibrate the molecular clock of the strain of HIV that has spread most widely, and calculated when it arrived first in Haiti from Africa and then in the United States. The researchers virtually ruled out the possibility that HIV had come directly to the United States from Africa, setting a 99.8 percent probability that Haiti was the steppingstone. For Haiti, the history of HIV/AIDS represents stigma, discrimination, and racism. In 1982, scientists at the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) incorrectly inferred that Haitians were at increased for acquiring HIV as a racial group (1). HIV/AIDS therefore became known as the “4H Disease”, affecting homosexuals, heroin addicts, hemophiliacs, and Haitians.

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This week’s online publication for the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences has is a new article describing the origins of the HIV virus. Michael Worobey, PhD from University of Arizona, and his team basically deduce that the HIV strain that is widespread in America spread from Central Africa to Haiti by Haitian emigrants working in Congo.

It seems that the basic theory is that the virus went from the animal population (chimps) to humans in Africa, developed into different strains of the virus, and made it’s way through the majority of the world through Haiti. There are two additional theories that carry on the story: a) Some of these infected migrants made their way to Miami and introduced it to America there or b) homosexual sex travelers went to Haiti and Trindad, caught the virus and spread it through the homosexual community in America.

This is an abstract of the original article:

The Emergence of HIV/AIDS in the Americas and Beyond
Gilbert MTP, Rambaut A, Wlasiuk G, Spira TJ, Pitchenik AE & Worobey M
(2007) PNAS In press

HIV-1 group M subtype B was the first human immunodeficiency virus discovered and is the predominant variant of AIDS virus in most countries outside of sub-Saharan Africa. However, the circumstances of its origin and emergence remain unresolved. Here we propose a geographic sequence and timeline for the origin of subtype B and the emergence of pandemic HIV/AIDS out of Africa. Using HIV-1 gene sequences recovered from archival samples from some of the earliest known Haitian AIDS patients, we find that subtype B likely moved from Africa to Haiti in or around 1966 [1962-1970] then spread there for some years before successfully dispersing elsewhere. A ?pandemic? clade, encompassing the vast majority of non-Haitian subtype B infections in the US and elsewhere around the world, subsequently emerged after a single migration of the virus out of Haiti in or around 1969 [1966-1972]. Haiti appears to have the oldest HIV/AIDS epidemic outside sub-Saharan Africa and the most genetically diverse subtype B epidemic, which might present challenges for HIV-1 vaccine design and testing. The emergence of the pandemic variant of subtype B was an important turning point in the history of AIDS but its spread was likely driven by ecological rather than evolutionary factors. Our results suggest that HIV-1 circulated cryptically in the US for approximately twelve years before the recognition of AIDS in 1981.

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Article Link: Civil rights activists offer new voice

A group of Spelman graduates have formed a group asking for support as they march against the injustice in the Megan Williams case as well as other crimes against women…

The recent mass rally in Jena, La., protesting alleged racial injustice has led some pundits to ask whether it signaled the dawning of a modern civil rights movement.

Now that the Jena headlines have subsided, a group of Spelman graduates and others are asking different questions: What about cases in Logan, W.Va., or West Palm Beach, Fla.? Where are the rallies, calls to justice and media blitzes in those cases, which involved alleged crimes both horrific in their detail and with strong racial and sexual overtones.

But within those questions posed by the young women lies a more provocative one: Isn’t it time for a modern civil rights movement to protest intra-racial violence just as vigorously as inter-racial violence? Particularly when it’s a crime against women.

The young women hope to start changing that. They’ve launched a vigorous Internet campaign and blog, “Be Bold, Be Brave, Be Red.” They’ve made a YouTube-style video about the two cases, and others, on their Web site (www.documentthesilence.wordpress.com). And they’re encouraging people nationwide to wear red Wednesday and to hold observances to draw attention to the Florida and West Virginia cases. Their message is that violence against women of color is worthy of protest regardless of the perpetrator’s race.

“If it’s going to be about nooses,” said organizer Fallon Wilson, referring to the genesis of the Jena case, “it’s also got to be about other forms of violence too. You cannot just advocate for race alone. Things are more complicated than that.”

“A lot of young black women organized for Jena, but where are they for Megan Williams and others?” said Bailey.

Article Link: Ministers meet opposition for decision not to march.

A march has been scheduled for November 3rd for Megan Williams and there is a new wrinkle in that some people are not happy that the former chairman of the New Black Panther party is providing legal assistance to the family and has organized the march…

Members of the Charleston Black Ministerial Alliance are facing opposition to the group’s reluctance to join in a protest march organized by a controversial black lawyer.

The alliance held a meeting Sunday at New Covenant Missionary Baptist Church to explain its position to community members.

Instead of support, the group was met with outbursts of anger.

Some in the audience became confrontational with the black ministers, accusing them of perpetuating the perceived bigotry that will be the target of the planned protest.

At the meeting, Rev. Lloyd Hill, who heads up the alliance, denounced the organizer of the Nov. 3 march, Malik Shabazz, co-founder of Black Lawyers for Justice and a former chairman of the New Black Panther Party for Self Defense.

Shabazz’s group is providing legal assistance to the family of Megan Williams, the young Charleston woman who says she was raped and tortured for days by six Logan County residents.

Article Link: W.Va. Woman Speaks About Torture Ordeal

Megan Williams thought she was going to a party. That’s why she tagged along with a woman she hardly knew, up a remote southern West Virginia hollow to a run-down trailer surrounded by beer cans and broken-down furniture.

“But there wasn’t no party,” Williams said. “I realized I’d made a bad mistake.”

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This one is a long time coming. Genarlow Wilson, the Douglas County teen convicted of child molestation charges for receiving oral sex from a 15 year old girl, is finally out of jail after almost 4 years. He was stuck under the Georgia Child Protection Act of 1995 that made it a felony for having sex with someone under the age of consent, which is 16 in Georgia. The act made the crime a mandatory 10 year sentence.

I have never condoned what they did that night at a New Year’s Eve party. They filmed a small party where multiple guys had sex with the 15 year old girl and another 17 year old girl at the party. What they did was ridiculous and even worse because they had the bright idea to film the whole thing. But, and this is a big one, it was all consentual between everyone there and they were all in high school.

Wilson’s four-year legal odyssey has inflamed racial tensions in Georgia while capturing the nation’s attention.

Black civil rights leaders alleged race and class have been at play in the case, which sparked protest marches and demonstrations in Douglasville, where Wilson was prosecuted. Douglas County prosecutors, meanwhile, have vehemently denied race played a role, noting all the defendants and victims in the case are black.

The case stems from a drug- and alcohol-fueled New Year’s Eve party Wilson attended at a Douglasville hotel in 2003. Wilson was charged with raping a 17-year-old girl at the party, but was acquitted. He was ultimately found guilty of felony aggravated child molestation for receiving oral sex from the 15-year-old girl, a crime that carried a minimum 10-year prison sentence under state law at the time.

Four other male youths at the party pleaded guilty to child molestation of the 15-year-old and sexual battery of the 17-year-old. A fifth pleaded guilty to false imprisonment. Their party was captured on a profanity-laden and sexually graphic video filmed by one of the male youths.

Since Wilson’s conviction, the former Republican state lawmaker who authored the state Child Protection Act in 1995 has repeatedly insisted it was never his intent to lock up teenagers involved in consensual sex acts. Last year, the Legislature changed the law to make similar acts a misdemeanor, punishable by up to 12 months in prison.

The Supreme Court noted that legal change in the 48-page opinion it issued in Wilson’s case Friday morning: “For the law to punish Wilson as it would an adult, with the extraordinarily harsh punishment of ten years in prison without the possibility of probation or parole, appears to be grossly disproportionate to his crime,” wrote Chief Justice Leah Ward Sears, who sided with the majority in the court’s 4-3 decision in favor of freeing Wilson.

Article link

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Take a look at these 2 commercials and what sticks out the most?

Old School:

New School:

Anything catch your attention about the commercials. Of course the old commercial is corny but did you notice the difference in the families? Where is the father in the new family?

When I saw this on TV I got a little mad and said to myself. “Is it just the norm now to depict the black family as a single mother household?” “Have you ever seen an advertisement with any family sitting at the dinner table and it is not a traditional family unit?” But, I guess this is the new reality of how the black family is perceived. The statistics also don’t lie because we have so many children born out of wedlock. It is a subtle message but sometimes the truth hurts…

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OK. If you haven’t heard already Dr. James D. Watson, Nobel Prize winner and DNA pioneer, does not like black people. I don’t know if that is the case but he does think that Africans are intellectually inferior…

In an interview published Sunday in The Times of London, Dr. Watson is quoted as saying that while “there are many people of color who are very talented,” he is “inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa.”

“All our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours — whereas all the testing says not really,” the newspaper quoted him as saying.

Before I even address that comment I want to tell a story about myself in school working on my bachelors, wont mention the school but it is the best engineering school in the South, and when I had an epiphany about intelligence. There is a general class on electromagnetics that everyone has to take if you are majoring in electrical engineering. That was the hardest class I think I have ever had. I would study, study, study and I still only had a surface level understanding of what was going on in the class. It actually seemed like everyone else was in the same boat and the grades reflected it because the average was around the mid 30’s out of 100. But, there were two people in the class that just got it. A Russian dude that was probably 30 at the time and a good friend of mine from NY. He had dreads and looked nothing like a stereotypical engineer but he was a genius. The two of them basically taught the rest of us enough so we could just pass the class…and we were are all extremely bright but we needed help.

What I found was that there are a lot of smart people of all different races. The common denominators of most of them (not all)…a good drive to succeed, decent schools growing up, and someone at home (parents, mentor, etc.) that instilled good educational habits. Then there are just some that are plain geniuses and it was just a gift. I saw as many white, Asian, Indian, and Black people who fell in the genius category but way more middle-upper class white people in the pretty smart but not genius area. So, I believe that your environment and home factors really have a big factor on intelligence. Not race or sex and I base that only on the super smart people I have run into in my life because it has been about equal (by race) across the board.

Late yesterday, the board of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, a research institution in New York, issued a statement saying it was suspending the administrative responsibilities of Dr. Watson as chancellor “pending further deliberation.”

On Wednesday, Bruce Stillman, president of the laboratory, had issued a statement saying the laboratory’s trustees, administration and faculty “vehemently disagree” with the sentiments of Dr. Watson, who has served as director and president of the laboratory, whose school of biological sciences is named for him.

Scientists at Cold Spring Harbor study plant and animal genetics, cancer and other diseases. Dr. Stillman said they did not “engage in any research that could even form the basis of the statements attributed to Dr. Watson.”…

There is wide agreement among researchers on intelligence that genetic inheritance influences mental acuity, but there is also wide agreement that life experiences, even in the womb, exert a powerful influence on brain structure. Further, there is wide disagreement about what intelligence consists of and how — or even if — it can be measured in the abstract.

For example, in “The Mismeasure of Man,” Stephen Jay Gould, the evolutionary biologist, dismissed “the I.Q. industry” as little more than an effort by men of European descent to maintain their prominence in the world.

So to his comments…I have no comment. I’m not smart enough to understand. I will leave you with a little something a different Nobel Prize winner thought…

Here’s something you probably don’t know about Albert Einstein.

In 1946, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist traveled to Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, the alma mater of Langston Hughes and Thurgood Marshall and the first school in America to grant college degrees to blacks. At Lincoln, Einstein gave a speech in which he called racism “a disease of white people,” and added, “I do not intend to be quiet about it.” He also received an honorary degree and gave a lecture on relativity to Lincoln students.

Article Link - James Watson
Article Link - Albert Einstein

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This is another story that hasn’t been getting much media attention. But, Nailah Franklin’s, a Chicago drug rep. for Eli Lilly, body has possibly been found after her disappearance on Sept. 19th. She is just 28 years old. The scoop is that a past boyfriend had been bothering her with threatening calls and she filed a police report on him. A news article I read said that they have interviewed one of your past boyfriends but no arrests have been made. Police have not ID’d the body yet but her family has told the media that it is her.

What is the deal with these crazy husbands and boyfriends killing their women? It seems like you are seeing more and more cases of this nature and the ladies are so young.

Sad End to Story of Missing Chicago Women (link)

Body Confirmed as Missing Chicago Women (link)

Have you seen Nailah Franklin (link)

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