Apologies for not getting this out to you on Tuesday. Enjoy this special edition that features Lady Gage, Eminem, Katy Perry, Jessie J.and many more artists. If you like any of them their albums are out or will be soon. The singles are available on iTunes or Amazon. Enjoy!
This is HOT!!!
Interesting presentation, considering she’s been extremely lucky by being employed by both Facebook and Google in her career. Some points are valid and others are not.
By Ryan Abbott
An American couple enslaved an African woman for two years after luring her here with an offer of a two-week job catering, the woman from Swaziland claims in court.
Thembi Dlamini sued Juna Babb and her husband Michael Babb in Federal Court. She claims the Babbs seized her passport when she arrived in Atlanta and forced her to work for two years for nothing. According to the federal lawsuit, Juna Babb told Dlamini, 37, an aspiring cook, that she needed a caterer for her son’s wedding in the United States. Dlamini says a mutual acquaintance told her the Babbs were ministers in America.
“Ms. Babb told plaintiff that defendants were looking to provide African people with positive opportunities and that it would be an especially good opportunity for plaintiff to come to the United States to work for defendants, because she could earn money to provide to her family,” Dlamini states in her complaint.
But Babb stole her passport and her return ticket and told her there never was a wedding, that it was just a trick to get her to work for the Babbs, according to the complaint. Dlamini claims says the Babbs kept her in their basement and told her not to leave the house because it was dangerous. Juna Babb told her she could not contact her family without tipping off the police, who would arrest and deport her, according to the complaint.
Read More African Woman Enslaved for Years in Georgia | Alternet.
Black borrowers have faced higher hurdles to getting loans, even before the Great Recession’s infamous credit crunch. But one subsection of the community has managed to evade financial institutions’ discriminatory practices, a new study from the University of Iowa shows.
According to the study’s lead author, University of Iowa sociologist Sarah Harkness, lenders perceive African-American women just as favorably as white males, and would lend them as much money. The reason: African-American females are generally perceived as single mothers who are industrious and hardworking, Harkness concludes.
To test her theory, Harkness gave the study participants — which included hundreds of undergraduate students and alumni from West Coast universities — a hypothetical $1,000 and asked them to look at fictional loan applications and determine how much money to loan. While the gender, race and education of applicants varied, their financial profile was the same.
What she found was that cultural stereotypes consistently influenced how much money the study participants were willing to lend, with African-American males and white women being perceived more negatively and least likely to receive funding.
“This meant being less forgiving of small errors such as typos. It also meant making unfavorable assumptions about the nature of the applicants’ employment (whether it was temporary versus permanent, for example) and their level of intelligence,” as a release on the study notes.
Read More Getting A Loan Is Just As Easy For African-American Females As White Males, Study Shows.
By Brentin Mock
The youth organizers of the Dream Defenders civil rights collective stood their ground and slept on the grounds of the Florida state capitol building for a full month in response to the “not guilty” verdict for George Zimmerman for killing Trayvon Martin. That chapter is now drawing to a close, they announced today. They are now embarking on new actions across the state to draw attention to unjust policies that the youth leaders say made Trayvon’s death and Zimmerman’s acquittal possible: Stand Your Ground laws, school-to-prison pipeline policies and racial profiling. The Defenders begin their new journey today by marching to Gov. Rick Scott’s home to deliver an “eviction notice.”
Former NAACP chairman Julian Bond was present with the Dream Defenders as they made the announcement and he said the youth activists were “ending a protest because [they] are starting a movement.”
“We came here to the capitol because we wanted what we all deserve—a seat at the table,” said Dream Defenders director Phillip Agnew at a press conference this afternoon, “and we said we were willing to stay here until our work was done.”
Read More Dream Defenders Leave Capitol, Heading for Governor’s Home – COLORLINES.
By Kim Hall and Jan Diehm
For many Americans, stress isn’t juggling family and an outsize job, or looking for meaning in work and relationships. The stress of poverty can have devastating effects on wellbeing — and when it occurs early in life, the scars are lasting and even deadly.
As Moises Velasquez-Manoff reported in an excellent story in the New York Times last month, people born at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder, regardless of later-life outcomes, are more prone to illness and premature death because “the effects of early-life stress also seem to linger, unfavorably molding our nervous systems and possibly even accelerating the rate at which we age.”
Here are some of the ways poverty can hurt physical and emotional wellbeing. As the middle class continues to be replaced by wage-workers, a wider swath of Americans may face enduring disadvantages.
Read More Socioeconomic Stress Leaves Lasting Scars (INFOGRAPHIC).
By Kevin Drum
I know, I know: I’m a broken record on the subject of lead exposure in kids and crime rates 20 years later. But there’s lately been a renewed focus on black crime and black incarceration rates, as well as the racial profiling of blacks and Hispanics in New York City’s stop-and-frisk program. Guess what? The lead theory has something to say about that.
For starters, did you know that arrest rates for violent crime have fallen much faster among black juveniles than among white juveniles? They have, as the charts below show. Rick Nevin explains why:
African-American boys disproportionately involved in the criminal justice system were also disproportionately exposed to lead contaminated dust as young children, because black children were disproportionately concentrated in large cities and older housing. In 1976-1980, 15.3% of black children under the age of three had blood lead above 
30 mcg/dl (micrograms of lead per deciliter of blood), when just 2.5% of white children had blood lead that high. In 1988-1991, after the elimination of leaded gasoline, 1.4% of black children and 0.4% of white children under the age of three had blood lead above 25 mcg/dl.
In other words, black juvenile crime rates fell further than white juvenile crime rates because they had been artificially elevated by lead exposure at a much higher rate. In the early 80s, black kids had elevated lead levels at 6x the rate of white kids. After the elimination of leaded gasoline, black kids still had elevated lead levels at 3x the rate of white kids, which explains some of the continued disparity in juvenile crime rates, but that still represented enormous progress. Not only was the ratio lower, but the absolute numbers were far lower too.
Pat McCrory (Photo credit: Hal Goodtree)
By Joseph Diebold
North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory (R) vetoed a bill Thursday that would have mandated drug testing for some public benefits applicants in the state, calling it an expensive and ineffective way to fight drug addiction.
“Drug testing Work First applicants as directed in this bill could lead to inconsistent application across the state’s 100 counties,” McCrory said in a statement. “That’s a recipe for government overreach and unnecessary government intrusion.”
The governor did issue an executive order Thursday retaining some elements of HB 392 that verify an applicant’s criminal history.
North Carolina’s chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union had opposed the bill, arguing it represented an unnecessary intrusion on a select class of people with no reasonable suspicion of drug use.
Read More McCrory Vetoes Welfare Drug Testing Bill.
soulbrotherspeaks.com 
White Is the New White
By Aura Bogado
I first saw a poster for the new series on a subway platform. The word “black” plastered near women of all colors in prison jumpsuits made me shake my head in disappointment, but I soon forgot about it along with all the others racist images I’m surrounded by daily. The next time I saw a reference to Orange Is the New Black was on a giant video billboard during the massive march in New York following George Zimmerman’s acquittal in connection with the killing of Trayvon Martin. As thousands of people took to the streets against white supremacy, there was an intense irony about a fictionalized depiction of black women cheering on a prison fight as a very blond white woman stood there, shocked with horror. I crudely tweeted, “Racist shit playing W 35 and 6th. It never ends. Neither do we. #HoodiesUp,” with a looping Vine to illustrate my disappointment.
Since that time, many a friend and colleague has taken the time to explain to me that I was wrong about my gut reaction to Orange Is the New Black. They point out that the series is based on a book, whose author, Piper Kerman, spent time in prison. I answer that Assata Shakur wrote a brilliant book titled Assata: An Autobiography that includes details about her time as the only woman in an all-men’s prison—yet I’ve not seen it developed into a series. It would be timely to do so now that Shakur is the first woman on the FBI’s Most Wanted Terrorist list.
Read More White Is the New White | The Nation.