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New Coldplay song to be featured in ‘Catching Fire’
Posted in News from the Soul Brother
Tagged Chris Martin, Coldplay, entertainment, film, movie, soundtrack, The Hunger Games: Catching Fire
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Why Isn’t NYC Promoting Morning-After HIV Meds?
By Tim Murphy
Last Wednesday, in scorching midday heat, about twenty members of the longtime HIV/AIDS activist group ACT UP held a protest in front of Mt. Sinai Medical Center’s entrance at Madison Avenue and 100th St., their shirts soaked in sweat. They carried posters reading “Why Didn’t Your E.R. Know About HIV Morning-After Drugs?” and “How Many More Infected Before You Get It Right?” Walking in a circle, they chanted: “What do we want? PEP on demand. When do we want it? Now!”
Passersby, when I asked them, generally had no idea what PEP was. Nearby, Mt. Sinai staffers on their lunch break watched the protest impassively. “There was a mix-up that night,” said a female employee who asked not to be named. “We’ve never had a problem with this before.”
Well, what is PEP? Short for “post-exposure prophylaxis,” it is the practice of starting a month-long course of HIV meds within 72 hours of possible exposure to the virus to prevent permanent infection. In 2005, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control issued evidence of PEP’s effectiveness plus guidelines for PEP usage, and the New York State health department did the same in 2008 – and again as recently as this year – for ERs throughout the state, requiring them to administer PEP to medically qualified patients who request it.
The protest last week was a response to an incident involving a gay man who, according to ACT UP, went to the Mount Sinai Medical Center emergency room earlier this month after fearing he had been exposed to HIV during sex, asked for PEP, and had difficulty obtaining his starter dose. (The man wants to remain anonymous and ACT UP would not put me in touch with him.) As many as three Mt. Sinai ER staffers told the man there was no such treatment, says ACT UP, and it was only after the man called up the activist group, which then got in touch with a doctor with admitting privileges at Mt. Sinai, that the man was given PEP medication.
Read More Why Isn’t NYC Promoting Morning-After HIV Meds? — Daily Intelligencer.
Angela Davis – Trayvon Martin and Violence in America
Posted in Soul Brother Presents
Tagged african american, Angela Davis, presentation, Trayvon Martin, United States, video, violence
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The Dream Defenders Introduce ‘Trayvon’s Law’; Talib Kweli Weighs In
By Brentin Mock
For four weeks now, the youth justice alliance called the Dream Defenders in Florida have peacefully held the state capitol building captive, pushing for reforms to laws that criminalize youth of color. Today, they unveiled “Trayvon’s Law,” a three-pronged bill that aims at the hearts of problematic policies the Defenders say allowed for neighborhood watch guard George Zimmerman to stalk and kill 17-year-old Trayvon Martin when he was innocently returning to his father’s fiancée’s house from the store. Trayvon’s Law seeks to reverse state laws that allow people to shoot-and-kill first then claim self-defense later with impunity, that encourage racial profiling, and that excessively punish black and brown school students for trivial offenses. Many have argued that Trayvon Martin was racially profiled as a black youth by Zimmerman, who initially invoked “Stand Your Ground” self-defense laws after he shot and killed the teen. Martin was suspended from his school in Miami when he was murdered. The Dream Defenders have scored a number of victories since initiating their #TakeoverFL sit-in. A number of celebrities and high-profile activists have camped with them, including actor/singer Harry Belafonte, civil rights leader Jesse Jackson, and today, rapper Talib Kweli. In their first
Read More The Dream Defenders Introduce ‘Trayvon’s Law’; Talib Kweli Weighs In – COLORLINES.
Many Americans have no friends of another race: poll
By Lindsay Dunsmuir
About 40 percent of white Americans and about 25 percent of non-white Americans are surrounded exclusively by friends of their own race, according to an ongoing Reuters/Ipsos poll.
The figures highlight how segregated the United States remains in the wake of a debate on race sparked by last month’s acquittal of George Zimmerman in the shooting of unarmed black Florida teenager Trayvon Martin. President Barack Obama weighed in after the verdict, calling for Americans to do some “soul searching” on whether they harbor racial prejudice.
There are regions and groups where mixing with people of other races is more common, especially in the Hispanic community where only a tenth do not have friends of a different race. About half of Hispanics who have a spouse or partner are in a relationship with non-Hispanics, compared to one tenth of whites and blacks in relationships.
Looking at a broader circle of acquaintances to include coworkers as well as friends and relatives, 30 percent of Americans are not mixing with others of a different race, the poll showed.
Respondent Kevin Shaw, 49, has experienced both integration and racial homogeny. He grew up in downtown Kansas City, Missouri, and attended a mixed high school where he was one of only two white teenagers on the mostly black football team. His wife, Bobbi, is Hispanic. They met in high school and have been married for 27 years.
Read More Many Americans have no friends of another race: poll | Reuters.
George Zimmerman and Infamy: What Can He Do Now?
By Danielle C. Belton
Last week George Zimmerman — found innocent of murder, but still the killer of teen Trayvon Martin — was pulled over by a police officer in Forney, Texas, east of Dallas.
Nothing happened.
In fact, the only detail of note was that Zimmerman was packing heat in the glove compartment (which he disclosed to the officer) and was going “nowhere in particular.”
The officer’s dashboard camera captured the nonincident, and the officer himself got away with snapping a cellphone picture of Zimmerman. Perhaps the officer couldn’t help himself, since George Zimmerman is “famous.” Not the kind of famous where you ask to be in the cellphone picture with him, but the infamous kind, where you sneak a picture that you can show your disbelieving friends later in a ghoulish conversation about celebrity, death and the continued life of George Zimmerman.
While, for many folks, the story of dead Florida teen Trayvon Martin and the man who killed him was one that people chose sides over and were passionate about, for many others it was another narrative played out in the press like reality TV. Even the court case was televised. So there was a spectacle about all of it. A story. And stories have endings.
A Hollywood ending would have meant that Zimmerman went to prison, never to be thought of again. But there was no Hollywood ending. He was found not guilty, and so now Zimmerman is famous — or, rather, infamous. But no one has any idea what to do with him or his infamy.
Regular, nonmurderous fame is typically good currency if you know what to do with it. Like Republican Tom DeLay going from smiling mugshot crook to Dancing With the Stars. Or this Sydney Leathers person who’s turned some “sexts” between herself and New York City mayoral wannabe Anthony Weiner into a semilucrative porn-adjacent career. Maybe she’ll go on Dancing With the Stars next.
Posted in News from the Soul Brother
Tagged Anthony Weiner, Dallas, Florida, George Zimmerman, infamy, race, Texas
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Fronczak missing Chicago boy case: FBI reopens probe
It comes after DNA tests showed that the child returned to the missing baby’s parents is not their son.
Paul Fronczak, 49, was raised by Chester and Dora Fronczak after detectives found him abandoned in New Jersey in 1965.
But he questioned his identity as he felt he did not look like them, reports say.
Hundreds of police officers and FBI agents searched for the baby after his abduction from Michael Reese Hospital in April 1964 – when he was just one day old.
A woman dressed as a nurse reportedly told Dora Fronczak that the doctor wanted to examine her son. She handed him over and he was never returned.
Over a year later, a boy deemed to resemble the missing child was found abandoned outside a shop in Newark and given to the Fronczaks.
Read More BBC News – Fronczak missing Chicago boy case: FBI reopens probe.
NYPD Agrees To Purge Names Of Those Stopped And Frisked
By Nicole Flatow
The New York Police Department will erase hundreds of thousands of names and addresses it has collected of those stopped and frisked, in a settlement announced Wednesday.
Some NYPD data on stop-and-frisks is useful for tracking the breadth of the controversial practice now under fire both in court and by the City Council, and the city publishes demographic information on stop-and-frisks several times a year. But names and addresses of those stopped have been used by the NYPD in criminal investigations. “[I]f you got stopped on the street and were in the database, you were a target of an investigation even if you had done absolutely nothing wrong,” the New York Civil Liberties Union’s Christopher Dunn told the New York Law Journal. “This will end that completely.”
The database compounded the harms imposed by millions of NYPD stop-and-frisks performed over the course of the Bloomberg administration, particularly of young black men.
Read More NYPD Agrees To Purge Names Of Those Stopped And Frisked | ThinkProgress.
How One State Succeeded in Restricting Payday Loans
Cash Money Store for short term loans (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
In 2009, consumer advocates in Washington State decided to try a new approach to regulating payday loans. Like reformers in other states, they’d tried to get the legislature to ban high-cost loans outright — but had hit a brick wall. So, instead, they managed to get a law passed that limited borrowers to no more than eight payday loans in one year.
Lenders would still be free to charge annual rates well into the triple digits, but the law would eliminate what critics say is the worst aspect of payday loans: borrowers caught in a cycle of debt by taking out loans over and over.
At least in Washington, most payday loan borrowers didn’t take out eight loans in a year. Data from 2009, the last year before the reform bill went into effect, shows how many people in 2009 took out one to four loans, five to eight loans, and so on. Two-thirds of these borrowers took out eight or fewer loans in 2009.
But the people who take out only a few payday loans do not drive industry profits. That becomes clear when, instead of looking at the number of people, one looks at the number of loans. Then the trend flips: About two-thirds of loans went to borrowers who took out nine or more loans in 2009.
In other words, one-third of payday loan borrowers accounted for two-thirds of payday loans made in Washington State in 2009.
Read More How One State Succeeded in Restricting Payday Loans – ProPublica.
‘A Dream Foreclosed’: How Financial Predators Created a Crisis That Led to 10 Million Americans Being Evicted
By Amy Goodman and Laura Gottesdiener
As President Obama heads to Phoenix today to tout the “housing recovery,” journalist Laura Gottesdiener examines the devastating legacy of the foreclosure crisis and how much of the so-called recovery is a result of large private equity firms buying up hundreds of thousands of foreclosed homes. More than 10 million people across the country have been evicted from their homes in the last six years. Her new book, “A Dream Foreclosed: Black America and the Fight for a Place to Call Home,” focuses on four families who have pushed back against foreclosures. “The banks exploited a larger historical trajectory of discrimination in lending and in housing that has existed since the beginning of this country. The banks intentionally went into communities that had been redlined, which meant that the Federal Housing Administration had made it a policy to not lend and not to guarantee any loans in minority neighborhoods all throughout most of the 20th century that didn’t supposedly end until well into the 1960s,” Gottesdiener says. “And they exploited that historical reality and pushed the worst of the worst loans in these communities that everyone knew were unpayable debts — that Wall Street knew.”
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