Kenya Moore sure knows how to get some good camera time… Kenya Moore Breast Cancer Scare Via RadarOnline reports: The Real Housewives of Atlanta star Kenya Moore undergoes a biopsy for lumps in her breast on Sunday’s episode of the reality TV show and RadarOnline.com has a sneak peak at the drama. Moore opens up about the health scare which resulted in the medical procedure admitting with everything that has been going on in her life her “health has taken a back seat”. Dressed in a hospital gown and with a thermometer in her mouth Moore is seen listening intently as a doctor explains what they will do to her. With her supportive Aunt Lori by her side she then lies back as the nurse begins the procedure. “I had my annual mammogram done and I didn’t get the best news,” a worried Kenya says. “The doctor found not one but two lumps in my breast. Today I have to have a biopsy. I’m not really sure what to expect but finding out that I could possibly have cancer is definitely one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to face.” While the results have not been revealed Moore did respond to one Twitter fan who asked if she had cancer and said: “I encourage all women to watch next episode.” Do you think Kenya is really suffering or just playing up the drama for more camera time??
Yes, Beyoncé used pre-recorded vocals at the inauguration , BUT, it wasn’t by choice and she wasn’t the only one faking it. Via NYDailyNews reports : On the heels of Beyoncé’s flawless rendition of the Star Spangled Banner at Monday’s Inauguration ceremony, a new report claims the diva was lip-synching the entire time. Observers at the ceremony close enough to the front could tell that Beyoncé was not belting it out, but instead was singing along to a pre-recorded track, the London Times reported. Pre-recorded inauguration ceremony performances are not unheard of: At President Obama’s 2009 inauguration, cellist Yo-Yo Ma and violinist Itzhak Perlman opted to go in favor of pre-taping because of cold weather and wind. The sound emitted from their instruments could have been severely affected by the elements. They were very insistent on playing live until it became clear that it would be too cold,” Carole Florman, a spokeswoman for the Joint Congressional Committee on Inaugural Ceremonies, told the New York Times. “It would have been a disaster if we had done it any other way.” “This isn’t Milli Vanilli,” she said, referring to the 1980s group stripped of their Grammy for lip-synching. In 1991, Whitney Houston’s jaw-dropping performance of the National Anthem at that year’s Superbowl – arguably the best performance of the Anthem to date – also turned out to be lip-synched. “The music was pre-recorded, and so was the vocal,” musical director Rickey Minor confirmed to ABC News. Minor, who is currently the musical head of “The Tonight Show with Jay Leno,” explained that with such a large crowd it would have been impossible for Houston to hear herself. The Times of London also claims the Marine Corps Band was not playing, despite the fact that band director Michael J. Colburn was seen emphatically making conducting gestures on television. “All music [for inaugural ceremonies] is prerecorded as a matter of course,” a spokesperson for the Marine Corps Band told Washingtonian Magazine, “and that’s something we’ve done for years and years. The Marine Band did perform live throughout the ceremony but we received last-minute word that Beyoncé wanted to use the recording. Well what do you think about that? You’d think if she was going to pre-record the vocals she’d try to outdo Whitney, riiiiiiiight? APImages
We keep trying to tell you that race matters ! Black and Latino students in NYC who attend poverty stricken schools are more likely to end up with teachers who have received unsatisfactory ratings. Via NYPost reports : Teachers who received bad performance ratings in the past school year were likelier to be teaching in high-poverty schools, or in schools with high percentages of black, Hispanic or low-achieving students, a new analysis found. The StudentsFirstNY report on the 3.2 percent of teachers were rated “unsatisfactory” — known as a “U-rating” — for the 2011-12 school year found large differences in how they were distributed throughout the school system. The analysis found that students in high-poverty schools were at least three times more likely to be taught by a U-rated teacher than were students in low-poverty schools. “An ineffective teacher in any classroom is a failure of the system at the expense of students,” said StudentsFirstNY Executive Director Micah Lasher, a former legislative liaison for Mayor Bloomberg. “A concentration of ineffective teachers serving specific student populations is an injustice.” Among the group’s eight recommendations, including having the city and teachers’ union reach a deal on a new teacher evaluation system by next week’s Jan. 17 deadline, are financial incentives for good teachers who stay in high-needs schools. Failing to reach a deal by the deadline would cost the city at least $250 million in state education aid. StudentsFirstNY also calls for a cap on the number of ineffective teachers who are allowed to remain at one school from year to year. The city currently does have at least two programs that offers incentives for teachers who agree to work in high needs schools – one that offers recruitment and tuition reimbursements, and the other that offers $15,000 in housing support in return for a 3-year commitment. The teachers’ union has also said that high concentrations of U-rated teachers can be caused by other factors — such as antagonism between a principal and his or her teachers. A 2011 investigation by the Department of Education found that the current principal at Fordham HS for the Arts – where 20 percent of teachers received a U-rating in 2011-12 – tried to force out teachers she didn’t like by giving them bad ratings without actually having observed their teaching. So the good news is not all these teachers are really as bad as it looks, but the bad news is enough of them earned their bad ratings for us to be fairly certain that our kids are not receiving the same quality of education that white students in more affluent schools are getting? Yeah… This doesn’t seem like a newsflash, but this needs to be fixed quickly. We wouldn’t be surprised if they discovered the same kind of inequalities in cities like Chicago where youth violence is rampant either. We need to be concerned about who is teaching our kids! Shutterstock
Seth McFarlane and Emma Stone announced the nominees for the 2013 Oscars Thursday morning and Lincoln leads the pack with a whopping 12 nominations including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Actor, Best Supporting Actor and Best Supporting Actress — but fans of Flight, Beasts of the Southern Wild and Django should be happy to learn those films and the actors who starred in them were recognized as well. There are a few snubs we’ll point out to you too, but check the full list of nominees when you continue.
It’s been a violent year in Chicago , but long-time residents of Chatham are still fighting to keep their neighborhood safe after the death of one of their own rocked the community. And with the recession affecting small businesses, a once vibrant, middle-class neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side seems to be hanging on by a thread. Via The New York Times : The neighborhood’s best-known restaurants were failing, its crime rate was on the rise, and for the first time that anyone could remember there were foreclosures, with once tidy bungalows sitting empty and dark. For all that, the social scientists studying Chicago neighborhoods in 2010 were betting that the middle-class enclave of Chatham, on the city’s South Side, would remain stable through the recession. It had done so for decades, while surrounded by impoverished areas. It had somehow absorbed a wave of newcomers from recently demolished housing projects. And the researchers’ data suggested that its strong identity and scores of active block groups had helped protect residents from larger economic threats and offered clues about how to preserve threatened urban communities all over the country. Chatham should hold, barring some unforeseen cataclysm. The cataclysm hit on May 19 of that year. That night, a group of assailants jumped Thomas Wortham IV, an off-duty police officer and Iraq war veteran, as he was leaving his parents’ house. He resisted and was shot, bleeding to death on the street where he grew up. The entire city seemed to stop for breath, holding a memorial attended by hundreds of fellow police officers and citizens, Mayor Richard M. Daley and Gov. Pat Quinn of Illinois. “We were blindsided by this; blindsided by what happened to Tommy,” said his mother, Carolyn Wortham. “And yes, you begin to question everything.” In Chatham, it seemed, all bets were off. Many residents began to think the unthinkable, that maybe it was time to escape the place they had done so much to build. The community’s response to the crisis would test a theory emerging from an ambitious, nearly decade-long study of all of Chicago’s neighborhoods — that a neighborhood’s character shapes its economic future at least as much as more obvious factors like income levels and foreclosure rates. “If Chatham could maintain its relative stability despite such great challenges,” said William Julius Wilson, a professor of sociology and social policy at Harvard and the author of the 1987 classic, “The Truly Disadvantaged,” “then I think this concept of a neighborhood effect will be a landmark contribution, helping us understand how to prevent the out-migration of citizens and strengthen neighborhoods” at risk of falling into poverty. …Older residents, perpetually anxious that the younger generation is losing their values of tidiness and mutual respect, now had visible evidence of social erosion. They saw it in the habits of their new neighbors, many of them moving from the Robert Taylor Homes, which were torn down in the mid-2000s. “The big change going on is that the grandparents are moving out, and some of the younger kids coming in here are picking up behaviors that you would never have seen in Chatham before,” said Worlee Glover, a salesman who runs a blog called Concerned Citizens of Chatham. “Loitering out on 79th. Walking up and down the street, eating out of a bag. Eating out on the porch. Those kinds of things.” “Chatham and neighboring Avalon Park are both working class communities, not core ghetto areas, and both were hit hard by recession, particularly Chatham, which got hit economically and with incidents of violence.Twice in previous weeks, young men from outside the area had fired shots into the scrum around the basketball courts at Cole Park, just across the street from the Worthams’ house. Cole Park, all picnics and playgrounds when Thomas IV was growing up, now resembled a street party on most evenings, with teenagers coming just to hang out, Mrs. Wortham said. Seniors and parents of young children stayed away. “People came from all over the South Side to play at Cole Park for the very reason that it was a safe park,” said Thomas Wortham III, his father. “But it got to where no one was controlling it.” Chatham has more than a hundred block groups, citizen volunteers who monitor the tidiness of neighborhood lawns, garbage, and noise, as well as organize events, Mr. Tate said. The neighborhood has something else that many nearby areas do not: uniformly small buildings. Neat rows of one-story brick bungalows and ranch houses stand shoulder to shoulder, at attention, astride modest commercial strips, with few buildings more than three stories tall. …The ultimate verdict, for Chatham and for the neighborhood effect, may lie in what the Worthams and people like them do in historically cohesive urban communities threatened by creeping poverty and violence. “I sure did consider leaving when Tommy was killed,” Mrs. Wortham said. She took a deep breath. “But you know, whenever something like this happens, there’s plenty of blame to go around. People want to blame the city, the community organizations, the churches, all that. But nothing changes unless people look after their children, and the neighbors do, too. If people aren’t behaving, you say something. When I went to school, if I did something wrong, by the time I got home my mother knew about it.” Community involvement is key in any area. Do you think Chicago’s lack of racial integration on social, economic, and educational scales is a factor in part of the problem? Images via AP
Remember them love letters we told you Mick Jagger’s former black boo thang sold for a fortune last month? Apparently the rocker is all in a rage at Marsha Hunt over having his private thoughts become so public. But it’s not the first time he’s gotten heated with Hunt, the former couple were at odds for a number of years over his unwillingness to acknowledge or support his daughter Karis. The Daily Mail did a thorough break down of the drama: But it was this auction that reopened old wounds with Mick, who is said to be furious that his private thoughts have been sold to the highest bidder. American Miss Hunt, who now lives in a dilapidated house in rural France that urgently requires repairs, candidly admits she sold the letters to a mystery collector because she needs the money. ‘I’m broke,’ she says. ‘Anyone who has the impression that I have money knows nothing about me. I had friends who came to visit from Pennsylvania and there was no electricity in the house because the bill had been too high. ‘One of my friends said: “Surely you’ve got something you could sell?” ’ Back in the late Sixties, Mick announced his affair with Miss Hunt in typically public — if heartless — fashion. Two days after the band’s ex-guitarist Brian Jones was found dead in the swimming pool of his Sussex home, the Rolling Stones played a tribute concert to him in front of 250,000 people in London’s Hyde Park. This being Mick, the solemnity of the occasion on July 5, 1969, would not be allowed to interfere with his raging libido. For sitting in the crowd, just yards from his live-in girlfriend of three years, Marianne Faithfull, was singer Marsha, the latest celebrity notch on the Jagger bedpost. And, as if inviting both rivals for his affection was not brazen enough, Mick tactlessly, and tastelessly, opened the musical part of the show by belting out a cover version of the rock song I’m Yours And I’m Hers. Its not-so-hidden-meaning spoke volumes about Jagger’s monumental ego and his callously flippant approach to his female conquests. Certainly, it was a cruel public humiliation for the 22-year-old Marianne, given that she — along with half of London — was already well aware that her singer boyfriend was cheating on her with Hunt. But Faithfull wasn’t giving up so easily, she flew to Australia to be by his side and after he rejected her she tried killing herself by taking barbiturates. She was in a coma for several days, during which Mick stayed busy writing letters to Marsha Hunt. Some of the letters, which were included in the auction last month, were even written on headed hotel notepaper in the room at the city’s Chevron hotel, where Miss Faithfull had tried to kill herself days earlier. Jagger had first spotted Miss Hunt when she appeared as the female lead in the controversial musical Hair. Mick, who had developed a taste for beautiful black girls, got his PA to contact Marsha to ask her to appear on the cover of the Stones’ new single, Honky Tonk Women, dressed as a tart. She refused, but a few nights later, Mick turned up at her flat in London’s Bloomsbury. Within days their clandestine affair was in full swing. Born into a poor family in Philadelphia, Marsha had studied at the prestigious Berkeley University in California, before coming to Britain in 1966 at the age of 20. Her stunning looks quickly attracted a string of famous suitors, including Marc Bolan and her co-star in Hair, Paul Nicholas. Jagger, in a testament to those politically incorrect times, nicknamed his new lover Miss Fuzzy. And, while in Australia the following year, it was for her that he wrote Brown Sugar — his provocative eulogy to interracial sex and drugs that he had crudely originally titled Black P***y. Within months, his faltering relationship with Marianne Faithfull was over and Mick moved Marsha into his house overlooking the Thames on Chelsea embankment. Already missing Marianne’s son, Nicholas, to whom he had become a surrogate father, he took Marsha out to Mr Chow restaurant in Knightsbridge, where he asked her to have his child. She quickly became pregnant and a misty-eyed Jagger talked about wanting a son, whom he had decided, in typical flower-power fashion, to call Midnight Dream. The social-climbing Jumpin’ Jack Flash also decided he would send the boy to Eton. But within three months, Jagger was already going cold on the relationship — and was casting his roving eye over the latest of a carousel of girls he had marked down to share his bed. Stung by Mick’s coolness towards her, Marsha moved out. He wasted no time in installing another beautiful American — 22-year-old Californian model Catherine James into his Chelsea home. Despite Marsha carrying his child, practically all references to her and the baby were quickly airbrushed out of his life. Catherine James told me: ‘When I moved into Mick’s house, I knew about Marsha, but his relationship with her was already over. It didn’t seem a big deal to him. He just mentioned that she was a girl he had met who had got pregnant. He said he wasn’t in love with her, but she was very talented. ‘I felt he was not encumbered by anything, not by Marsha or the baby. He was young, and I didn’t get the impression he was thinking seriously about becoming a father and being part of this child’s life.’ Hit the flip for more details.
Tamar may have said sorry to Jose but she is sticking to her claims that Beyonce’s baby bump was fake! Tamar Braxton Apologizes To Joseline Hernandez But Not Beyonce Tamar Braxton has never been one to back down dot come. Recently, the singer/reality star appeared on Tiny’s new talk show “Tiny Tonight” that aired on VH1 last month when referred to Love and Hip Hop Atlanta’s Joseline Hernandez suspect lady-parts and said she didn’t believe Beyonce was ever actually pregnant Well, it looks like amidst struggling sales and losing fans; YTamar has decided to offer an apology to Joseline… But, what about Beyonce? Welp!!! Looks like Tamar is sticking to her guns on this one.
Yawn. Lil Scrappy And Soulja Boy Fight On Twitter When keepin’ it e-gangsta goes wrong. Attention slores Lil’ Scrappy and Soulja engaged in some online thuggery recently, this is what happened… Sounds like another season of Love & Hip Hop ATL is right around the corner…. Twitter
Yawn. Lil Scrappy And Soulja Boy Fight On Twitter When keepin’ it e-gangsta goes wrong. Attention slores Lil’ Scrappy and Soulja engaged in some online thuggery recently, this is what happened… Sounds like another season of Love & Hip Hop ATL is right around the corner…. Twitter
