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December 27
A Black Woman's Smile by: Ty Gray-El
December 26
She has won two Olympic Gold medals, two U.S. Open titles and four Wimbledon championships.
But while Venus Williams has dominated the tennis world, she's also been chasing another dream off the court: fashion design.
Last week, Williams' hard work paid off. She graduated from the Art Institute of Fort Lauderdale with an associate’s degree in fashion design after juggling school and a full-time tennis career for the past eight years.
The 27-year-old Palm Beach Gardens resident, who attended classes at the school while off-tour, said keeping up her 3.5 grade point average while claiming six Grand Slam titles has been a challenge.
“I’m very excited to be here. This is a long time coming,” Williams, donning her cap and gown, said of obtaining her degree. “It's exciting to pursue my dreams even when it seemed impossible.”
Surrounded by family and friends, including her sister, Serena, Williams signed autographs and posed for pictures shortly after receiving her diploma during an evening ceremony Dec. 13 at the Broward County Convention Center.
Williams, who also won the honor of “Best Sportswear Collection,’’ graduated cum laude.
“I’m already living my dream, but this is another goal I had,” said Williams, who became a professional tennis player at 14. “My parents always placed an emphasis on education.”
Williams has already kicked off her fashion career with the launch of her own line, EleVen, which debuted last month in the mall-based retail chain Steve & Barry’s. EleVen features low-priced sportswear, including shoes, clothing and accessories.
I'll be getting my bachlors degree in Graphic Design at the Miami Intenational University of Art and Design which is an affiliate of The Art Institutes. December 19
"Around the start of the 4th Century AD, The Roman Empire was governed by the Emperor Constantine. The Empire at this time was not in the best of health, being a morass of different cults and belief systems. The official state religion was the worship of Sol Invictus, the Sun God, and this was Constantine's own religion. However, the relatively new cult, as it then was, of Christianity was starting to enjoy a groundswell of support, and it did not require much thought to see that steps needed to be taken if Rome's tenuous grip on the Empire was to be strengthened."
"Constantine called together a meeting of religious and secular leaders at Nicea, Bythynia, Asia Minor in 325AD to resolve the situation, and it is principally as a result of this meeting that he earned the title of Constantine the Great, bestowed upon him subsequently by Church leaders. It was at this meeting that Constantine and his council resolved that if the proletariat had to have their superstitions, then better it was controlled by the state and adopted policies that the state approved of. It is this meeting that the world has come to know as the Council of Nicea, and from which the world still feels repercussions."
Most people actually worship Jesus himself rather than God. Many churches preach that by simply 'believing' that Jesus was the Son of God, you were absolved of all your sins.
That never made much sense to my complicated mind. I believe that like Jesus, we are all sons and daughters of God, however, Jesus was of a different caliber. Jesus was a human being who brought extraordinary spiritual teachings about life and about living. One of the greatest things he taught is about love and that we one another.
Is Jesus God? Yes he is and here's the kicker. When the Pharases charged Jesus with blasphemy because he said that he is the "Son of God". In his defense, in John 10:34, “Jesus answered them, Is it not written in your law, I said, Ye are gods?”. Jesus was quoting Psalms 82:6, “I have said, Ye are gods; and all of you are children of the most High”. My understanding is, We are Gods. The essence of our true self is God, the problem is that we either don't know it or believe it. If we did, it would destroy religions. Temples, chruches, mosques, kingdom halls and the like will shut down. Preachers would go out of busineses. Who can add to this list?
What do you really believe when you're sitting in those pews? Somebody please throw down something I've never heard before. December 17
(AP Photo)
SAUDIA ARABIA’S KING ABDULLAH PARDONS RAPE VICTIM SENTENCED TO 200 LASHES
RIYADH, Saudi Arabia Dec 17, 2007 (AP)
Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah has pardoned a female rape victim who had been sentenced to 200 lashes for being alone with a man at the time of the attack who was not related to her, a Saudi newspaper reported Monday.
The case had sparked international outcry. In a rare criticism of its Mideast ally, the White House had expressed its “astonishment” over the woman’s sentence. Canada called it barbaric.
Related Stories:
Exclusive: Saudi Rape Victim Tells Her Story
Saudi King Pardons Rape Victim
Saudi Says Rape Victim Was Adulteress
Saudi Justice Minister Abdullah bin Muhammed al-Sheik told al-Jazirah newspaper that the pardon does not mean the king doubted the country’s judges, but instead acted in the “interests of the people.”
“The king always looks into alleviating the suffering of the citizens when he becomes sure that these verdicts will leave psychological effects on the convicted people, though he is convinced and sure that the verdicts were fair,” al-Jazirah quoted al-Sheik as saying.
The victim in the case, known only as the “Girl of Qatif” after her hometown in eastern Saudi Arabia, was in a car with a high school friend in 2006 when they were attacked and raped by seven men.
She initially was sentenced in November 2006 to several months in prison and 90 lashes for being alone in a car with a man with whom she was neither related nor married, a violation of the kingdom’s strict segregation of the sexes.
The woman, who was 19 at the time of the rape, has said she met the man to retrieve a picture of herself from him because she had recently married.
The court more than doubled the sentence last month to 200 lashes and six months prison in response to her appeal.
President Bush expressed anger at the sentence earlier this month, saying he wondered how he would react if it had been one of his daughters. But he said he had not made his views known directly to the Saudi king, a U.S. ally.
The Justice Ministry has defended the sentence, saying the girl was having an illicit affair with the man.
Al-Sheik told al-Jazirah newspaper Monday that the king was the only official who could issue a pardon, and he did so despite the government’s view that the Saudi legal system was “honest” and “fair.”
“The king’s order consolidates and confirms what is known about the Islamic courts,” said al-Sheik. “Efficient judges look into different cases and issue their just verdicts and those convicted have the right to appeal.”
The seven men who were convicted of raping both the girl and the man were initially sentenced to jail terms from 10 months to five years. Their sentences were increased to between two and nine years after the appeal.
Although she has been pardoned, she is still at risk. She could be killed by her husband or her family members for bringing shame and to restore honor to the family. It probably would've been better if she had taken the punishment. December 16 Jonathan Goodwin is a self-taught gear-head who is creating a stir in the automotive world by taking production cars, using almost exclusively parts that are widely available, and modifying these cars to create incredibly high efficiency vehicles that run on a variety of fuels (diesel, bio-diesel, hydrogen, recycled cooking oil, you name it).
Johnathan Goodwin
Here are some excerpts from the article.
From Fast Company.com
America's most revolutionary innovations, it has long been said, sprang from the ramshackle dens of amateurs. Thomas Edison was a home-schooled dropout who got his start tinkering with battery parts; Chester Carlson invented the photocopier in his cramped Long Island kitchen. NASA, desperate for breakthroughs to help it return to the moon, has set up million-dollar prizes to encourage private citizens to come forward with any idea, no matter how crazy. As the theory goes, only those outside big industries can truly reinvent them.
Jonathan Goodwin is certainly an outsider. He grew up in a dirt-poor Kansas family with six siblings and by age 13 began taking on piecework in local auto shops to help his mother pay the bills. He particularly enjoyed jamming oversized engines into places no one believed they'd fit. He put truck engines inside Camaros, Grand Nationals, and Super Bees; he even put a methanol-fueled turbocharger on a tiny Yamaha Banshee four-wheeler. "We took that thing from 35 horsepower to 208," he recalls. "It was crazy. We couldn't put enough fins on the back to keep it on the ground." After dropping out of school in the seventh grade, he made a living by buying up totaled cars and making them as good as new. "That," he says, "was my school."
Along the way, Goodwin also adopted two views common among Americans, but typically thought to be in conflict: a love of big cars and a concern about the environment. He is an avid, if somewhat nonideological, environmentalist. He believes global warming is a serious problem, that reliance on foreign oil is a mistake, and that butt-kicking fuel economy is just good for business. But Goodwin is also guiltlessly addicted to enormous, brawling rides, precisely the sort known to suck down Saudi gasoline. (I spied one lonely small sports car in the corner of his garage, but he confessed he has no plans to work on it right now.) When he picked me up from my hotel, he drove a four-door 2008 Cadillac Escalade XL that should have had its own tugboat. He parallel parked it in one try.
If Goodwin is an artist, though, his canvas has been the Hummer. His first impression of the thing was inauspicious. In 1990, he bought an H1 in Denver and began driving it back to Kansas. Within 50 miles, the bolts in the transmission shook loose, forcing him to stop to fix it. "By the time I made it home, after three roadside repairs, I pretty much knew that the Hummer was not all it should be," he told me. He didn't think much of the 200 horsepower engine, either, which did "zero to 60 in two days. It was a piece of junk."
So Goodwin decided to prove that environmentalism and power could go together--by making his new lemon into exhibit A. First, he pulled the gas engine so he could drop in a Duramax V8, GM's core diesel for large trucks. Diesel technology is crucial to all of Goodwin's innovations because it offers several advantages over traditional gasoline engines. Pound for pound, diesel offers more power and torque; it's also inherently more efficient, offering up to 40% better mileage and 20% lower emissions in engines of comparable size. What's more, many diesel engines can easily accept a wide range of biodiesel--from the high-quality stuff produced at refineries to the melted chicken grease siphoned off from the local KFC.
A green Hummer running on BioDiesel.
Observers of Goodwin's work say his skill lies in an uncanny ability to visualize a mechanical system in precise detail, long before he picks up a wrench. (Goodwin says he does much of his mental work during long drives.) "He has talent unknown to any mortal," says Mad Mike, Pimp My Ride's host. "He has this ability to see things so exactly, and I still don't know how he does it."
For his part, Goodwin argues he's merely "a problem solver. Most people try to make things more complicated than they are." He speaks of the major carmakers with a sort of mild disdain: If he can piece together cleaner vehicles out of existing GM parts and a bit of hot-rod elbow grease, why can't they bake that kind of ingenuity into their production lines? Prod him enough on the subject and his mellowness peels away, revealing a guy fired by an almost manic frustration. "Everybody should be driving a plug-in vehicle right now," he complains, in one of his laconic engineering lectures, as we wander through the blistering Kansas heat to a nearby Mexican restaurant. "I can go next door to Ace Hardware and buy a DC electric motor, go out to my four-wheel-drive truck, remove the transmission and engine, bolt the electric motor onto the back of the transfer case, put a series of lead-acid batteries up to 240 volts in the back of the bed, and we're good to go. I guarantee you I could drive all around town and do whatever I need, go home at night, and hook up a couple of battery chargers, plug one into an outlet, and be good to go the next day.
"Detroit could do all this stuff overnight if it wanted to."
Biodiesel conversion specialist, Jonathan Goodwin, 37, is a professional car hacker. Goodwin’s company is an alternative energy start-up, SAE Energy. The company is filling an unlikely niche in the clean tech market: making muscle cars green. He has retrofitted a Hummer to run on ethanol, hydrogen, biodiesel or natural gas. The car gets the equivalent to 40 miles per gallon. He’s already converted about 60 H2 Hummers from gas to diesel and about 100 H1 hummers, including a Hummer that can burn the whole menu of clean fuels. A gas-to-diesel conversion boosts a Hummer’s mileage from about 10 miles a gallon to between 22 and 24 miles a gallon. Additionally, the horsepower jumps from about 325 in the regular Hummer to 650, giving the car more power. Consumers can drive that SUV without having to pay through the nose at the gas pumps.
Goodwins says that Detroit can do this stuff overnight if they really wanted to. What is their problem?
What do you think? December 14
Roland Martin
(CNN) -- As the mug shots of the alleged killers of NFL star Sean Taylor were shown on television, I kept wondering when we were going to see their parents step forward. I saw a couple of mothers, but their dads were missing in action.
We can spend all day talking about the ills afflicting urban America -- and there are plenty that are institutional -- but the decaying value of life in inner cities clearly can be traced to the exodus of fathers from the lives of so many young men. Excuses often are tossed about as to why black men leave their children (and their children's moms) to fend for themselves. But a lot of them are just sorry and refuse to accept the responsibility that comes with raising a child.
This is not an issue that black America can continue to sweep under the rug. I've heard countless folks talk about it, such as Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama, who noted that his dad left his family when he was a toddler and didn't see much of him growing up. Even in the Republican CNN-YouTube debate, GOP candidate Mitt Romney said fathers are part of the answer to addressing crime in inner cities.
Unless black America owns up to this problem -- and fast -- we are going to see another generation of young black men who are angry with their lot in life. And the result will be more discipline problems in school, which will lead to folks dropping out, and that is nothing but a one-way ticket to jail.
Black men, it's time to man up. Enough with the sperm donors. We need real men to stand up and accept their responsibility. The state of our boys is on us. And no one else.
Fathers are the role-models, teachers, providers and the protectors of his family from an intellctual level. Mothers have the same role but from an emotional level. When the one of the parents is MIA, the family lacks a solid foundation and it's the children who suffers. There are a few single mothers who have taken on both roles successfully but as a consequense, her health begins to fail from stress, exhaustion... emotionally and physically(My mother never reached her 40s before she started having serious health problems).
The father don't have to marry the mother but when she calls him to tell him that their child is having behavioral problems that she can't handle alone, he need to be ready to step up and help her restore order back in that house.
That's my take on the whole thing. December 12 
It is`always awe inspiring to look at God given beauty.... for me, most of that awe goes down the drain when it is "man made beauty.
What do you think?
Ellie Gunderson is the President of Georgetown University's college NAACP chapter.
A few highlights from the bio: Gunderson’s from a predominantly black working-class suburb of Detroit; she aspires to be a civil rights lawyer, either at the Southern Poverty Law Center or the NAACP; she never planned to be the group’s president this year, but someone nominated her, and she cared about the issues. She figured, Why not?
Although Gunderson is white, listen to her speak, Her vocal inflection is unmistakably “urban.” Click on the link above and hear her interview.
The NAACP has been a white organization since its inception. Even from the time of DuBois, white folks were calling the shots. White folks called the shots in the 60s and they are calling the shots now.
From The Modern History Project - Banker Jacob Schiff, the Rothschild's agent in the US, and later the funder of the Bolshevik Revolution, started the NAACP in 1909. Although founded in 1909, it didn't have a Black President until the 1970's. Until then, its President and Board were mainly drawn from the ranks of Communist Jews.
That said, I don't have a problem with this woman taking the lead of the G'Town chapter. NAACP need leadership wherever they can get it. Besides, most Blacks no longer feel any affinity with the NAACP.
He was 76. Turner died at his San Marcos home, Scott M. Hanover of Thrill Entertainment Group, which managed Turner's career, told The Associated Press. There was no immediate word on the cause of death, which was first reported by celebrity Web site TMZ.com.
Turner managed to rehabilitate his image somewhat in later years, touring around the globe with his band the Kings of Rhythm and drawing critical acclaim for his work. He won a Grammy in 2007 in the traditional blues album category for "Risin' With the Blues."
But his image is forever identified as the drug-addicted, wife-abusing husband of Tina Turner. He was hauntingly portrayed by Laurence Fishburne in the movie "What's Love Got To Do With It," based on Tina Turner's autobiography.
Tina Turner declined to comment on her ex-husband's death.
R. I. P Ike.
December 06 Okay folks, I'm a little with this one. It's finals week at school and I've been bogged down with a lot of work.
Iran: No nuke threat to U.S., but big blow to Bush's credibility
In the Nixonian terms that seem to be increasingly relevant to the Bush gang in the waning months of its occupancy of the White House, George W. Bush's often repeated statements about Iran's supposed nuclear-weapons threat "are no longer operative."
The NIE indicates that the U.S. agencies "had 'moderate confidence' that Iran would be able to produce enough enriched uranium for a weapon sometime between 2010 and 2015." Meanwhile, in response to urging from the Bush administration, the United States, Britain, China, France, Germany and Russia had been discussing U.S. demands for a third United Nations Security Council resolution to announce further sanctions against the government of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. (AFP) In light of the November NIE news, China now says that new-sanctions effort must be reconsidered. (Reuters)
If the findings of the very intelligence operation he supposedly oversees have turned out to be just a little bit embarrassing, Bush isn't letting the setback get to him, even if his fellow Republican and neo-conservative saber-rattlers are more than a little upset that the falsehood of their Iran-is-ready-to-nuke-us threat has been exposed. The latest National Intelligence Estimate "will make it harder for proponents of military action against Iran to argue their case. One source [, the BBC reports], who has close links to U.S. intelligence, said that members of Vice President Dick Cheney's staff [have] continued to call for military strikes against Iran 'on a daily basis.'" However, in Washington, "[s]enior military officers and intelligence officials are understood to have grave reservations about an attack on Iran - not least because it would be unclear how a military confrontation with Iran could be brought to a conclusion."
I am looking so forward to this man and his adminstration leaving Washington. The Bush Adminstration have been the most incompetent, decietful, murderous and dishonest adminstration in my lifetime. There have been so much cowardace and inepitude among our Congressional and Military leaders who have been enabling and accomidating this adminstration in their madness. And an apathetic U. S. citizenship. It's has been 8 bad years for our country and I am glad that this report came out.
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