Legendary comedian-actor-activist Dick Gregory will receive a coveted star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame next year, reports Variety.com.
The Walk of Fame Selection Committee announced the list of 30 honorees—which also includes iconic R&B group Kool & The Gang and super-producer Pharrell Williams last week.
“We know that the new selections represent the best of the entertainment industry and will be a great addition to the Walk of Fame for both the Hollywood community and fans from around the world who visit Hollywood every year,” Maureen Schultz, Chair of the Walk of Fame selection committee, said in a statement.
Will Farrell, Melissa McCarthy, Jennifer Garner, Peter Jackson, Eugenio Derbez, Daniel Radcliffe, Paul Rudd, Christoph Waltz, James L. Brooks, Ken Ehrlich, Bobby Flay, Seth MacFarlane, Julianna Margulies, Chris O’Donnell, Jim Parsons, Amy Poehler, Kelly Ripa, Sofia Vergara, Lukasz ‘Dr. Luke’ Gottwald, Pitbull, Al Schmitt, Raymond Chandler, Bob Kane and Larry Elder round out the diverse and sure to debated over list.
Of the 30 ceremonies planned for the recipients, approximately 24 of them will be broadcasted to a worldwide audience.
article via newsone.com
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Barbershops are central to the narrative of Black manhood in the United States.
It is where jokes are cracked, friends are made, issues debated, and, soon, where blood pressure will be tested.
According to the Daily Breeze, Dr. Ronald G. Victor, the head of Cedars-Sinai’s hypertension center, will use a $8.5 million grant to help train Black barbers to check men for high blood pressure.
“Uncontrolled hypertension is one of the biggest health problems facing the African-American community today,” said Victor, the Burns and Allen Chair in Cardiology Research. “Hypertension is called the silent killer because there are no symptoms. We need to find a way to reach out to the community and prevent the serious complications caused by high blood pressure because all too often, by the time a patient finds out they have the condition, the heart and kidneys already have been damaged.”
Read Cedars-Sinai’s statement on the groundbreaking project below:
A Cedars-Sinai Heart Institute physician has been awarded an $8.5 million grant aimed at enlisting African-American barbers in the fight against hypertension, a deadly condition that can cause strokes, heart attacks and organ failure, and which is particularly devastating to African-American men.
Ronald G. Victor, MD, director of the Hypertension Center in the Cedars-Sinai Heart Institute, was the first to subject increasingly popular barbershop-based health programs to scientific scrutiny with randomized, controlled testing. His study, published in 2011 in the Archives of Internal Medicine, showed that if barbers offered blood pressure checks during men’s haircuts and encouraged patrons with hypertension to follow up with physicians, hundreds of lives could be saved annually.
Now, with the grant from the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, Victor is about to start a new, randomized, controlled clinical trial that will include 500 African-American male patrons of 20 Los Angeles-area barbershops. All participants will have uncontrolled hypertension and be longtime customers of the participating barbershops. The goal of the new trial is to test the effectiveness of barbershop hypertension programs and whether expanding such programs is feasible and cost-effective.
The Cedars-Sinai-led research study will be conducted in partnership with several California medical centers.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 67 million American adults have hypertension. Of that number, 53 million are aware of their condition, 47 million are treated, and 31 million have it under control. Among African-Americans, 43 percent of men and 45.7 percent of women have hypertension, compared to 33.9 percent of White men and 31.3 percent of White women.
Victor’s 2011 study concludes that if hypertension intervention programs were put in place in the estimated 18,000 African-American barbershops in the U.S., it would result in the first year in about 800 fewer heart attacks, 550 fewer strokes and 900 fewer deaths.
“We hope that the new trial’s outcomes will show an even greater benefit while lowering the cost of providing high-quality healthcare for hypertension in a high-risk population,” Victor said.
article via newsone.com
Brooklyn County is leading New York State in inmate exonerations for 2014 thus far, the New York Daily News reports. Of the 11 inmates cleared of criminal wrongdoing this year, Kings County has eight of them, all spearheaded by new boro D.A. Kenneth Thompson’s 13-person team. Thompson has made exonerations one of his offce’s key focuses.
“I am determined to get to the bottom of these cases,” Thompson, who defeated longtime D.A. Charles Hynes in last year’s city elections, told the Daily News. Each of the men cleared had spent two decades behind bars.
To that end, he has made great use of his Conviction Review Unit, which is currently looking at 57 questionable homicide prosecutions. The unit has cleared four defendants so far, Thompson added. D.A.’s in the other boroughs say they don’t plan on launching widescale exoneration units. Though his predecessor started the unit, Thompson has expanded it. He allocated $1.1 million for the unit and plans to broaden its focus once its caseload decreases. Legal authorities say they are impressed by his work.
“It’s absolutely unprecedented,” said Rob Warren, director at the Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern University. “I hope it lives up to the expectations and becomes a model to the nation.”
“We hope that by the end of this review, we can learn some lessons and shed some light on how these cases come about,” Thompson added.
According to experts, the state’s high number of wrongful convictions stems from the mass homicides from the crack epidemic of the 1980s.
article by Hannington Dia via newsone.com
Debbie Allen Champions Arts Education for Youth, Kicks Off National Tour of "Brothers of the Knight"
Debbie Allen Champions Arts Education for Youth, Kicks Off National Tour of "Brothers of the Knight"
Oscar, Emmy and Tony Award-winning choreographer and director Debbie Allen premiered her new theatrical production Brothers of the Knight at the Saban Theatre in Beverly Hills last night, kicking off a five-city summer tour. Turning out to support Allen and her passion for training today’s youth in the arts were actors Jenifer Lewis, Clifton Powell, “Grey’s Anatomy” star Ellen Pompeo, Darrin Hewitt Henson, New Kids on the Block singer Joey McIntyre and WNBA All-Star Lisa Leslie, among others. (Click here to see GBN’s Instagram photos from the event.)
Grammy-winning musician James Ingram wrote the music to this modern adaptation of the classic Brothers Grimm tale, The Twelve Dancing Princesses, where twelve brothers steal away to a magical ballroom and dance every night away unbeknownst to their strict preacher father.
Allen, who produced the show with husband and former NBA All-Star Norm Nixon, went on a five-city tour to find the best young talent possible, then trained and worked closely with them to bring the production to life.
“I opened this audition to kids who are not just in dance schools,” Allen said, but “to people who simply love to dance.”
Allen is passionate about arts education for youth and mounts productions like this every year to shed light on its importance as more and more public schools drop arts, music and theatre programs.
“It’s a battle right now. Arts education is disappearing without a trace from the public schools. If you don’t have arts as part of the core of your curriculum, you are not going to be well educated,” Allen recently told WGBH in Boston.
Allen has been fighting to keep dance and the arts available for youth for quite some time. In 2001, Allen opened the Debbie Allen Dance Academy (DADA), a non-profit organization which offers classes in various dance disciplines for youth and teens.
Brothers of the Knight runs until June 22 in Los Angeles, then moves to Boston from June 27-29, Philadelphia July 3-6, Washington DC July 10-13 and Charlotte July 17-20. To order tickets, go to brothersoftheknight.com. To sponsor or donate to this show, click here.
article by Lori Lakin Hutcherson (follow @lakinhutcherson)
The man came into the emergency room of St. Louis’ Barnes-Jewish Hospital complaining of abdominal pain. Having no insurance, he had avoided medical care as long as he could, but the pain had finally become too intense.
The gastroenterologist called in to consult that day was Darrell Gray, a young physician from Baltimore doing a fellowship at the hospital, which is affiliated with Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. The patient, in his late 40s or early 50s, had blood in his stool and a mass in his stomach.
“It didn’t take much more diagnostic work to understand that, feeling the mass and seeing that his history of passing blood, this was likely a cancer,” Gray recalls. “Here’s a young guy who comes in with what was later found to be metastatic cancer. At that point I really couldn’t do much for him.”
That experience, and others like it, prompted Gray to continue his already extensive training, which included the fellowship, a residency at Duke, and medical school at Howard University. To top that off, he spent the last year at the Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH).
Gray got a taste of public health work during his fellowship. While in St. Louis, he designed a bridge program to connect disadvantaged populations with the health care system. His target population was African-American men, who have a higher incidence of colorectal cancers than the general population, a reality that, in poorer neighborhoods, is compounded by other barriers to health care, such as a lack of insurance, a lack of knowledge about preventive measures, and chronic unemployment.
To reach these men, Gray contacted area churches, gave short educational presentations during the community announcement portion of Sunday services, and followed up with those who contacted him, connecting them with screening services and primary-care physicians. The experience was satisfying, but also made him realize how much he didn’t know.
“I realized from that program that there were some areas I needed strengthening in: health policy, public health, population health,” Gray said. “While I enjoy seeing a patient in the office, I want to be able to impact populations.”
Gray, who graduates this spring with a master’s in public health, said he has benefited greatly from his year at HSPH. In addition to his academic work, he shook hands with the prime minister of Namibia, met with the former health minister of Kenya, met senior White House adviser Valerie Jarrett, and met with Jonathan Woodson, the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Health Affairs.
“I had high expectations coming in, but it has exceeded my expectations,” said Gray, who is at HSPH on a Mongan Commonwealth Fund Fellowship in Minority Health Policy.
With her list of 73 sexy Black female scientists, Kyla McMullen is dismantling multiple destructive stereotypes about Black women. Not only are we beautiful and intelligent, but Black women are pursuing the highest levels of education in the much discussed STEM fields.
Kyla explains, “The face of Science needs an extreme makeover. If the current generation is going to be engaged in scientific careers, we need to dispel the stereotypical image of a scientist as being a white, glasses wearing, socially-inept nerd.”
Representation matters, and it’s important to show the world, not to mention the little girls who might want to enter these fields, that Black women are in these fields and their education does not strip them of their desirability. The list features a wide array of women who’ve pursued a host of different fields.
View the full list here.
article via theculture.forharriet.com
He led a tough life. The odds were stacked against him and, at one time, it did seem that he wouldn’t be able to make it through high school. He, and almost everyone around him, just couldn’t imagine seeing him succeed.
But that is exactly what Festus Ohan, 22, did: he succeeded. Festus spent his teen years in foster care. He remembers the day his father left him.
“I went to bed in tears, crying, praying, [and] asking God ‘Why did this happen to me?’” Festus says. Over the years, he was passed on from one family to another, so many of them in fact, that even he isn’t sure about the exact number – seven or eight is his best estimate.
All he knows is that the time he spent in the foster care system “was the worst time” in his life. It didn’t help with his education either.
“Early on in high school, I got in trouble for fighting a lot,” Festus says, “and I was in a pre-expulsion contract.”
His ultimate dream was to become a doctor. But the life he was living almost made it impossible for him to keep that dream alive.
Those that were actually supposed to encourage him were the ones that were discouraging him. “Constantly hearing my foster parents throw statistics at me, about there’s only a 1 percent chance that a foster kid will even graduate college, let alone attend professional school, kind of impacted me in a way,” Festus says.
That’s all changed now. Festus is about to graduate from University of California, Riverside with a degree in neuroscience. He’s so good at his studies that, so far, he has been accepted to 7 medical schools all over the country: Northwestern University, Columbia University, Cornell University, University of California, San Francisco, University of Houston, University of California, Los Angeles, and University of Southern California.
But Festus has made up his mind; he’s headed to UCLA’s David Geffen School of Medicine where he has been offered a fellowship that covers all expenses.
“I actually start Aug. 4, so I’ll have like a 6-week break,” Festus says, “but I’m excited for the next step in my journey.”
article by Liku Zelleke via themedicalblog.net
Jimmy Scott, a jazz singer whose distinctively plaintive delivery and unusually high-pitched voice earned him a loyal following and, late in life, a taste of bona fide stardom, died on Thursday at his home in Las Vegas. He was 88.
The cause was cardiac arrest, his wife, Jeanie Scott, said.
Mr. Scott’s career finished on a high note, with steady work from the early 1990s on, as well as a Grammy nomination, glowing reviews and praise from well-known fellow performers like Madonna, who called him “the only singer who makes me cry.” But the first four decades of his career were checkered, with long periods of inactivity and more lows than highs.
After enjoying sporadic success in the 1950s, he had almost none in the 1960s. Albums he recorded for major labels in 1962 and 1969, which might have jump-started his career, were quickly withdrawn from the market when another company claimed to have him under contract. He virtually stopped performing in the 1970s and made no records between 1975 and 1990.
The fact that both men and women considered themselves Mr. Scott’s disciples is not surprising: because of a rare genetic condition called Kallmann syndrome, which caused his body to stop maturing before he reached puberty, Mr. Scott’s voice never changed, and he remained an eerie, androgynous alto his whole life.
Standing 4-foot-11, with a hairless face to match his boyish voice, he was originally billed as Little Jimmy Scott, and he was presented to audiences as a child until well into his 20s. In his mid-30s he unexpectedly grew eight inches taller and, although he otherwise remained physically unchanged, doctors told him an operation might stimulate his hormonal development. He decided against it.
“I was afraid of entering uncharted territory,” Mr. Scott told David Ritz, the author of “Faith in Time: The Life of Jimmy Scott” (2002). “Besides, fooling with my hormones might mean changing my voice. Whatever the problems that came with the deficiency, my voice was the one thing I could count on.”
Mr. Scott’s condition left him incapable of reproduction.
James Victor Scott was born on July 17, 1925, in Cleveland. The third of 10 children, he lived in orphanages and foster homes after his mother was killed in a car accident when he was 13. After singing in local nightclubs for a few years, he went on the road in 1945 with a vaudeville-style show headed by Estella Young, a dancer and contortionist. He moved to New York City in 1947 and joined Lionel Hampton’s band a year later.
His 1950 recording of “Everybody’s Somebody’s Fool” with Hampton set the pattern for his later work. A mournful ballad of love gone wrong, the song was delivered with feverish intensity and idiosyncratic, behind-the-beat phrasing. The record was a hit, but because it was credited on the label simply to “Lionel Hampton, vocal with orchestra,” few people knew that Mr. Scott was the singer.
The Mixed Remixed Festival, a family festival, hosts the largest Loving Day celebration on the West Coast at the Japanese American National Museum in downtown Los Angeles (100 N. Central Ave.) tomorrow, Saturday, June 14, from 10 a.m. to 9 p.m.
Loving Day is officially held every year on June 12, the anniversary of the 1967 U.S. Supreme Court decision Loving v. Virginia, which struck down all anti-miscegenation laws remaining in sixteen states.
The festival celebrates stories of the mixed experience and multiracial Americans, the fastest-growing demographic in the U.S., bringing together film and book lovers, innovative and emerging artists, and multiracial and multicultural families and individuals for workshops, readings, performances, and film screenings.
A fiscally-sponsored project of Fractured Atlas, a non-profit arts service organization, the festival is produced by New York Times best-selling writer Heidi Durrow and a talented staff of volunteers.
The event is free and open to the public. The complete festival schedule can be found at www.mixedremixed.org. Highlights include:
• The largest West Coast Loving Day celebration at 6:30 p.m. with the annual Storyteller’s Prize presentation and live show. The prize will go to Comedy Central’s hit comedic duo Key & Peele, award-winning writer Susan Straight, and Cheerios’ marketing team as part of a dynamic live show featuring comedians, musicians and spoken-word poets. This program is currently reserved at capacity, but any open seats near showtime will be offered to individuals on the wait list. Call (213) 293-7077 or email heidi@mixedremixed.org.
• Families can enjoy interactive craft activities all day as part of the Target Free Family Day; storytelling time with Sebastian Jones, co-author with actress Garcelle Beauvais of the children’s book “I Am Mixed”; and a writing workshop for kids with Lora Nakamura, author of “Bonsai Babes.”
• KPCC, Southern California’s largest public radio station, will produce a special panel called “#Multicultivate,” moderated by KPCC’s Josie Huang.
• Two award-winning feature films: “Sleeping with the Fishes” (directed by Nicole Gomez Fisher), winner of the Best New Director Award at the Brooklyn Film Festival, and “Closure” (directed by Bryan Tucker), a feature documentary about a transracial adoptee’s search for her biological parents. The latter screening will be followed by a panel discussion with the filmmaker and transracial adoptees and activists. The festival will also present a program of several ground-breaking short films.
• Readings by Krista Bremer, author of the hit memoir about her bicultural marriage, “My Accidental Jihad” (Algonquin Books); Crystal Chan, author of “Bird”; Chris Terry, author of “Zero Fade”; and many others. Skylight Books is the Festival’s official bookseller.
• Acting and writing workshops will be led by published authors and professional actors. Award-winning poet Aaron Samuels, author of the prize-winning “Yarmulkes & Fitted Caps,” will present a poetry-writing workshop; celebrated voice-over artist and acting professor Rayme Cornell will lead a voice-over class; and Khanisha Foster will offer a Performer’s Bootcamp. A complete list of workshops appears on the festival website.
• More than a dozen esteemed panelists will speak on diverse topics related to the mixed experience. Panelists include scholar Marcia Dawkins, activist/filmmaker Thomas Lopez, and YouTube’s Channing Sargent.
Festival sponsors include: Cheerios (Silver Sponsor), Japanese American National Museum (www.janm.org), Zerflin.com, Pitfire Artisan Pizza, Miss Jessie’s, and Poets & Writers through a grant from the James Irvine Foundation.
article by Lori Lakin Hutcherson (@lakinhutcherson)
According to MTV Act, Beyoncé is donating $125,000 to Embrace Innovations, an organization that gives out little “sleeping bags” to keep alive underweight infants whose parents can’t afford (or don’t have access to) an incubator.
They aren’t actually sleeping bags, but they look like them, and they are lifesaving and easy to use. Thanks to Beyoncé, there will be pilot testing with these inventions in Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Malawi, Mali, Nigeria, Rwanda, Senegal, Tanzania and Uganda, and Beyoncé could be saving at least two thousand infants via her contribution. The baby warmers have already been used in some areas of the world, but this will ensure more parents are able to get them.
Beyoncé announced her donation while at Gucci’s Chime for Change anniversary party. Since Chime for Change is dedicated to helping women, it was great timing. Jane Chen, the TED Fellow and TED speaker behind the baby warmers, was thrilled by the support.
“She [Beyoncé] told me how incredible she thought the innovation was,” Jane said. “I think what struck me was how sweet and genuine she was—and just so excited about our work. One of my most memorable moments was getting to dance with her after we spoke.” Beyoncé’s publicist, who had given birth to a premature baby, also fully understood the importance of this invention.
article by Lori Lakin Hutcherson (@lakinhutcherson)