Thursday, July 30, 2009

Divorce Is Not Good Physically

 

(CNN) -- Divorce causes more than bitterness and broken hearts. The trauma of a split can leave long-lasting effects on mental and physical health that remarriage might not repair, according to research released this week.

Research shows health differences between people who are married and those who have gone through a divorce.

"People who lose a marriage take such damage to their health," said Linda Waite, a sociologist at the University of Chicago in Illinois.

Waite and co-author Mary Elizabeth Hughes, of Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, found that divorced or widowed people have 20 percent more chronic health conditions such as heart disease, diabetes or cancer than married people. They also have 23 percent more mobility limitations, such as trouble climbing stairs or walking a block.

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Tuesday, July 28, 2009

Duke University Official Caught in Alleged Black Child Sex Scandal

 

 

 

A Duke University official has been charged in federal court with offering his 5-year-old adopted son up for sex. Frank Lombard, associate director of the Center for Health Policy, was arrested Wednesday in Raleigh, the FBI said.

Duke University official has been arrested and charged with offering his adopted 5-year-old son for sex. Authorities said that Lombard tried to persuade a person,who he did not know was a police officer,to travel to North Carolina to have sex with Lombard's child.

An unidentified informant who already faces child porn charges in a different child sex case pointed investigators to Lombard, according to court documents. The informant told investigators he had met Lombard on the Internet four years ago. The informant described in graphic detail how he allegedly observed Lombard molesting an African-American child on four occasions over an Internet video chat service called ICUii.

The informant said, according to court papers, that Lombard, who is white, said that he lived in the Raleigh-Durham area of North Carolina and that the child was one of two adopted African-Americans in his custody.

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Monday, July 27, 2009

African American Woman Named Surgeon General

Dr. Regina Benjamin Named Surgeon General

 

President Barack Obama turned to the Deep South for the next surgeon general, choosing a rural Alabama family physician who made headlines with fierce determination to rebuild her nonprofit medical clinic in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.

Dr. Regina Benjamin is known along Alabama's impoverished Gulf Coast as a country doctor who makes house calls and doesn't turn away patients who can't pay — even as she's had to find the money to rebuild a clinic repeatedly destroyed by hurricanes and once even fire.

"For all the tremendous obstacles that she has overcome, Regina Benjamin also represents what's best about health care in America, doctors and nurses who give and care and sacrifice for the sake of their patients," Obama said Monday in introducing his choice for a job known as America's doctor.

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Sunday, July 26, 2009

HIV Killing Black Women in Droves

Tony Wafford has taught his three daughters that when they go on a date, they need to be prepared: They carry a credit card, cash for a cab, a cell phone and a condom.

Young black women, he tells them, make up a strikingly disproportionate amount of HIV and AIDS cases in the United States. HIV infection is the leading cause of death for black women ages 25 to 34, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Those aren't statistics you ignore.

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Black News: Huh? Parents blame 8-year old Child for her Rape


Crime SceneJust when you think you've heard all there is to hear about the horrors of child abuse and neglect in this country, there's this horrifying report: An eight-year-old girl is allegedly gang-raped by four boys -- one of them her cousin -- and then rejected by her parents for shaming them.
You heard me.


The victim hails from a Liberian enclave in Arizona, and all of the children involved are refugees. Her 23-year-old sister, who was supposedly babysitting when four boys attacked the youngster in a storage shed (pictured), told KTVK in Arizona, "She always bring trouble...I came to her and said it's not good for you to be following guys because you are still little." If the girl, who is now in foster care, were to come home, her sister says she would be scolded. "She's just bringing confusions among us," she said.

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Saturday, July 25, 2009

Your Black News: Gay Writer E. Lynn Harris Dies at 54 – How?

E. Lynn HarrisJohn Bazemore/Associated PressThe author E. Lynn Harris.

Updated | 2:48 p.m. E. Lynn Harris, the best-selling author of novels that addressed questions of identity and sexuality among black men, has died, his publicist told The Associated Press. He was 54.

According to his official biography at his Web site, Mr. Harris was born in Flint, Mich. and raised in Little Rock, Ark. At the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville, he was the school’s first black male Razorbacks cheerleader and was a lifelong fan of the team. He sold computers for a living until he self-published his first novel, “Invisible Life,” in 1991; it was picked up by Anchor Books in 1994, spawning a prolific writing career spanning ten more novels, from “Just As I Am” in 1994, to “Basketball Jones,” published in January, as well as a 2004 memoir, “What Becomes of the Brokenhearted.”

In a review of Mr. Harris’s 2006 novel “I Say a Little Prayer” in The New York Times Book Review, Troy Patterson wrote that Mr. Harris “has helped bring taboo topics — like closeted black men indulging their sexuality ‘on the down low’ — into mainstream conversation.” From his debut with “Invisible Life”, Mr. Patterson wrote that Mr. Harris offered a writing style that “was smoothly paced, and the prose occasionally opened up on Fitzgerald-lite moments of sparkling sentiment.”

 

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Tuesday, July 21, 2009

Protect Your Hair Color

Posted by Patrice Grell Yursik


You finally found the perfect shade, went to a professional, and shelled out major bucks for your fancy new hair color. Now what? Are you just gonna sit back and let it grow out and fade?

I don't think so!

Finding ways to preserve your hair color is essential. Anything less would mean just wasting your money. So if you've got yourself a gorgeous new hair color, you might want to investigate investing in the following five products.

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Funding for aids vaccine cut in south Africa

South Africa

 

South Africa's government joined Monday in launching a high-profile trial of an AIDS vaccine created by its own researchers -- the first designed by a developing country -- but the moment was marred by the lead researcher's announcement it has actually halted funding its own project.

It was a jarring development in a nation whose politicians have a history of unscientific responses to the epidemic. Attempts to get an explanation from the government were not immediately successful.

Monday's announcement was meant to be a proud occasion for a nation where politicians have a history of unscientific responses to the epidemic. But after a government minister lauded the project, Professor Anna-Lise Williamson, the scientist heading the research, said the state had pulled the plug on its funding.

 

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Sunday, July 19, 2009

Obama’s New Pick for Surgeon General: Dr. Regina Benjamin

President Barack Obama nominated an Alabama country doctor who has three times resurrected her clinic in a fishing village after disasters to be U.S. Surgeon General on Monday and help him advocate for healthcare reform.


Dr. Regina Benjamin promised to advocate for Obama’s healthcare agenda as “America’s doctor” if she gets the job as chief public spokesperson on health issues, saying her own family and patients have been victims of the failing U.S. system.


“Through floods and fire and severe want, Regina Benjamin has refused to give up. Her patients have refused to give up,” Obama said in a White House Rose Garden announcement.


U.S. surgeons general in the past have issued influential reports on topics including smoking, AIDS and mental health. Benjamin said she not only wanted to serve in the traditional role of surgeon general, encouraging healthy habits, but press to make medical care more easily available.

 

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Saturday, July 11, 2009

Study: Black Men and HIV – Big Problems

A small survey of young black men from the South who tested positive for H.I.V. in their teens and early 20s found that most had engaged in risky sexual behaviors but thought it unlikely they would be infected, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

HIV Rates Among Black Men

 

More than half of the 29 gay or bisexual men surveyed said they had engaged in unprotected anal sex in the year before they were infected and had had sex with slightly older men, the survey found. Both are risky behaviors, yet the vast majority of the young men said they had not thought that they would ever be infected.

Young black gay and bisexual men are becoming infected with H.I.V. at alarming rates, particularly in the South, and health officials are trying to analyze their risk factors in order to refine education and intervention strategies.

“We need to make sure that H.I.V. infection does not become a rite of passage for young black men who have sex with men,” said Dr. Alexandra Oster, one of the authors of the survey published last week in the agency’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.

After the Mississippi State Department of Health notified the C.D.C. in late 2007 that the number of new H.I.V. diagnoses had spiked at a sexually transmitted disease clinic serving Jackson, Miss., , the agencies teamed up to do the survey. The number of newly diagnosed H.I.V. cases among all black men in the Jackson area had increased 20 percent between 2004-2005 and 2006-2007, but infections among those ages 17 to 25 had jumped 45 percent.

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Monday, July 6, 2009

News: Black Infant Mortality Still a Problem

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It's an urgent question, posed in disparate corners of Palm Beach County:


Why are 16 of every 1,000 black babies dying before taking their first breath?


Some younger mothers are losing their babies after rough sex, fights and overly physical play. Other mothers battle depression, diabetes, high blood pressure and weight. Compounding those factors are the drag of poverty, a distrust of doctors, and a lack of education, foresight and proper nutrition.
The findings are part of a year-long, Legislature-financed effort to uncover the causes of high black infant-mortality rates in eight counties across the state.


One speaker at a Delray Beach meeting recounted the story of a pregnant, 16-year-old focus group participant who had lost a baby at 13 after a fight at school.

 

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Where do Black Bloggers Go?

 

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Your Black World

Your Black Money

Your Black Woman

Your Black News

Your Black Politics

Your Black Health

AOL Black Voices

The Grio

Friday, July 3, 2009

Black News: Pastor’s Wife Talks about Husband Being on the Down Low

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Nearly two years ago, Ingrid Michelle was leveled by the shocking truth. Her then-husband of 12 years revealed that he had engaged in oral sex with a young man they both knew. The problem? Apart from being her spouse at the time of the “incident” her husband had been a youth pastor at a thriving church. And the young man? A former member of the flock. After recovering from the initial shock, Ingrid would be confronted with mounting evidence and eyewitness testimony that she had married not only a man who had been living life on the down low, but who was also an accused pedophile.  Shocked and disgusted to her core, Ingrid would have to pick up the pieces of a shattered life and begin again.  It would get much worse before it got better.

Below is her story in her own words:

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