Sketched from New York Police Department Young Women Found Dead In Hudson River Identified As Missing Fairfax, VA Sisters A pair of missing sisters who disappeared from Fairfax, Va back in August were found dead in NYC’s chilly Hudson river last week. New York police said Rotana Farea, 22, and her 16-year-old sister, Tala Farea, were discovered Wednesday afternoon near 68th Street and Riverside Drive on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. Tala was last seen August 24th, according to a posting on the website of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children . The alert said Tala might be with her sister. Investigators are leaning towards the theory that the sisters may have jumped off the George Washington Bridge as part of a suicide pact according to CBS2 . Reportedly the two had been duct-taped together around their waists and feet. Their bodies were identified Friday. Police told the New York Post that they believed the women had entered the river from the George Washington Bridge and then floated more than 100 blocks south to just below Riverside Park, which stretches for 50 blocks along Manhattan’s west side. New York police Chief of Detectives Dermot Shea told the Post that “they were not in the water that long.” The Medical Examiner is working to determine the cause of the sisters’ death. So far, no relatives of the young women have spoken to the press.
South Carolina Girl Confirmed As Baby Kidnapped From Florida Hospital 18 Years Ago This is quite a crazy story … 51-year-old Gloria Williams of Walterboro, South Carolina has been arrested and charged for kidnapping Kamiyah Mobley 18 years ago from a Florida hospital. The abduction sparked a nationwide manhunt, with the case even being featured on “America’s Most Wanted.” Still, the kidnapping went unsolved for over a decade, until a breakthrough came from a tip to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children lead authorities to South Carolina, where Mobley, who has been living as Alexis Manigo, was found and DNA testing confirmed she was the missing Kamiyah. Kamiyah’s biological parents traveled from Florida to meet her this weekend: =auto” width=”640″ height=”395″ frameborder=”0″ webkitallowfullscreen=”” mozallowfullscreen=”” allowfullscreen=””] The case is still pretty complicated as you can probably imagine. Kamiyah was raised by Williams as her own daughter and even after learning her birth story she’s continued to support the only mother she’s ever known, even defending her in a recent court hearing saying “my mom’s no felon”. Williams is accused of posing as a nurse and stealing the baby girl, wrapped in a pink and blue blanket in 1998. She reportedly suffered a miscarriage a week before the crime. In addition to raising Kamiyah Mobley as her own, Williams also has two younger biological children. She faces life in prison if convicted. This is footage of Shanara Mobley from 18-years-ago: =auto” width=”640″ height=”395″ frameborder=”0″ webkitallowfullscreen=”” mozallowfullscreen=”” allowfullscreen=””] Just heartbreaking. That poor girl, it’s got to be so hard to be in this situation. Prayers up for all those involved. SplashNews/FamilyPhoto
Lesbian Louisiana High School Senior Allowed To Wear Tuxedo To Prom Quit hatin’! Via NYDailyNews An openly gay Louisiana honor student will be allowed to wear a tuxedo to her prom after her school backed off its controversial policy Tuesday following national backlash. Claudetteia Love, 17, refused to attend Carroll High School’s formal gala later this month after she was barred from donning a suit and was told to wear a dress instead. “Girls wear dresses and boys wear tuxes, and that’s the way it is,” Principal Patrick Taylor reportedly told Love’s mother, Geraldine Jackson, while explaining his decision. School officials, who initially cited the Monroe public school’s dress code, are now reversing their decision, which gay rights activists called discrimination against Love’s sexual orientation. “Forbidding girls from wearing a tuxedo to the prom would have served no purpose other than to reinforce the worst sorts of harmful stereotypes and censor a core part of Claudetteia’s identity,” said Kate Kendell, executive director of the National Center for Lesbian Rights, which is representing the teen. “The school is doing the right thing by supporting its students and teaching them the value of respect and acceptance of one another’s differences,” Kendell said. Says Claudetteia: “Now that I can go in my tuxedo, I am looking forward to celebrating the end of my senior year with my friends and classmates at the prom, like any other student,” the senior said. “The outpouring of support has been incredible and inspiring. It is a source of strength that I will keep with me as I move on the next phase of my education and life beyond high school.” It’s pretty pathetic that there even had to be a conversation about this in 2015. Who the f*** cares what the students wear as long as it’s appropriate for a prom setting0?! Damn shame that adults keep trying to push their antiquated agendas onto children. Image via Facebook
What baby daddy drama ? Black Fathers Are Just As Involved With Their Kids As Other Races Via LA Times reports: Defying enduring stereotypes about black fatherhood, a federal survey of American parents shows that by most measures, black fathers who live with their children are just as involved as other dads who live with their kids — or more so. For instance, among fathers who lived with young children, 70% of black dads said they bathed, diapered or dressed those kids every day, compared with 60% of white fathers and 45% of Latino fathers, according to a report released Friday by the National Center for Health Statistics. Nearly 35% of black fathers who lived with their young children said they read to them daily, compared with 30% of white dads and 22% of Latino dads. The report was based on a federal survey that included more than 3,900 fathers between 2006 and 2010 — a trove of data seen as the gold standard for studying fatherhood in the United States. In many cases, the differences between black fathers and those of other races were not statistically significant, researchers said. The findings echo earlier studies that counter simple stereotypes characterizing black fathers as missing in action. When it comes to fathers who live with their kids, “blacks look a lot like everyone else,” said Gretchen Livingston, a senior researcher at the Pew Research Center who has previously studied the topic. And in light of the negative stereotypes about black fathers, “that is a story in itself.” “People think they don’t care, but we know they do,” said Joseph Jones, president of the Center for Urban Families, a Baltimore advocacy group that works with African American fathers. “We see how dads are fighting against the odds to be engaged in the lives of their children.” Sit down haters! Black dads are taking care of their responsibilities like any other race!
Jesse Friedman just got some more ammunition in his efforts to overturn his 1989 sex-crimes conviction made famous by Andrew Jarecki’s Oscar-nominated documentary Capturing The Friedmans. Although Friedman, then 19, and his father Arnold, pleaded guilty to several hundred counts of sexual abuse in a case that rocked his hometown of Great Neck, NY, he has long since maintained his innocence, and a white paper issued by The National Center for Reason and Justice indicates that his exoneration is overdue. The report, which is titled Destruction of Innocence: How Coerced Testimony & Confessions Harm Children, Families & Communities for Decades After the Wrongful Convictions Occur. was authored by Emily Horowitz, Ph.D. and Gavin de Becker, a violence and predation expert and author of The Gift of Fear. The 42-page report, which can be found in its entirety here , contains new evidence and witness statements pertaining to the case and urges Nassau County District Attorney Kathleen Rice to overturn the conviction. (In 2010, Rice launched a review of the case, which is expected to reach a conclusion soon.) The NCRJ report indicates that the Friedman case contains the 10 hallmarks of false sex crime prosecution: “Police Misconduct; Absence of Physical Evidence; Absence of Medical Evidence; Outlandish or Impossible Scenarios; Prosecutorial Misconduct; Judicial Misconduct; Coercive Interviews by Police and Therapists; Improper Relationship Between Police and Therapists; Use of Now-Discredited Memory-Recovery Techniques and Hypnosis; Police & Prosecutors Fuel Community Hysteria.” It also reveals: No child ever made any allegation or complaint against Jesse until after the police launched their investigation; The first 30 children questioned by police said they had not been abused; All charges against Jesse arose from statements of child witnesses – and all were based on statements made after the application of suggestive questioning methods; Children who attended classes alongside every one of the 14 complainants now confirm they saw no abuse in those classes; There was no physical or medical evidence ever presented against Jesse Freidman; All of the above and more was known by prosecutors and illegally withheld from Jesse’s defense lawyer, and There was clear misconduct on the part of police, prosecutors, and the judge. In 1988, Friedman and his father Arnold were charged with hundreds of counts of sexual abuse that allegedly took place during a computer class they taught in the family’s Great Neck, NY home. The charges came after police found Friedman’s father’s stash of pornography depicting adolescent boys in the house. Friedman, who’s now in his mid-40s, was released from prison in 2001 after serving 13 years of an 18-year sentence. (His father committed suicide in prison in 1995.) With the help of Jarecki and experts in wrongful conviction, he has set about clearing his name, and in the last few years has made headway. A 2010 decision by the Federal Appeals Court for the Second Circuit declared there was “a reasonable likelihood that Jesse Friedman was wrongfully convicted.” According to that decision, new evidence introduced by Jarecki and by Friedman’s legal team in the years since, shows that police and psychologists interviewing kids at the time used hypnosis and other “memory recovery techniques” that have since been shown to produce false memories and accusations. The court also suggested that allegations were elicited from children as young as eight years old by harsh interrogation methods and that Jesse’s guilty plea was the result of pressure by a biased judge who told Jesse’s lawyer that she intended to sentence Jesse to life without parole, a technique widely held to be “impermissibly coercive. In January, one of the Friedmans’ alleged victims Michael Epstein revealed that he had lied about having been sexually abused in the computer classes in order to put an end to the therapy sessions and repeated questioning he received as a result of the investigation. [ Social Science Research Network ] Follow Frank DiGiacomo on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
Suicides in the United States appear to increase in hard times and decrease during years of prosperity, according to a new government report. The image of people jumping from windows after the stock market crash of 1929 graphically illustrates the pattern detected by researchers from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “The overall suicide rate rises and falls in connection with the economy,” said lead researcher Feijun Luo, a health economist in the division of violence prevention at the CDC’s National Center for Injury Prevention and Control. “The strongest association between business cycles and suicides was among working-age people 25 to 64 years old,” he said. Co-author Dr. Alexander E. Crosby, a medical epidemiologist in the division of violence prevention at the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control, said economic hardship may trigger suicidal impulses in those already at risk of killing themselves. “Suicide results from an interaction of a number of different factors,” Crosby said. “Other studies have shown there is an association between suicide and unemployment, suicide and economic issues, and it can make vulnerable people more prone to be at risk for suicidal behavior,” he said. The report is published online April 14 in the American Journal of Public Health. The researchers found suicide rates spiked during the Great Depression (1929-1933), at the end of the New Deal (1937-1938), during the oil crisis of 1973-1975, and the double-dip recession of 1980-1982. But fewer people killed themselves during periods of economic expansion, such as the World War II years (1939-1945) and between 1991 and 2001, when the economy grew rapidly and unemployment was low. Commenting on the study, M. David Rudd, dean of the College of Social and Behavioral Science at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, said that these “interesting findings confirm what many have been thinking from an anecdotal perspective over the last several years.” Rudd agreed that those most likely to kill themselves in bad economic times are those already at risk of suicide. “It’s fairly well established that upwards of 90% of those taking their own lives suffer from a diagnosable mental illness at the time, with the overwhelming majority not being in active treatment,” he said. The difference in impact across age groups is not a surprise, given that those hardest hit face the most pressing economic demands, Rudd added. The youngest and oldest groups probably experience relatively less economic pressure, he pointed out. “Prevention efforts need to focus on recognition and more effective response to psychiatric illness, particularly in primary care settings,” he said. Source
This poster released by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children shows Carlina White as an infant, left, and what she might have looked like as an ad-ult, right. White, who was kidnapped 23 years ago as an infant from a Harlem hospital bed and raised under a different name, was reunited with her birth mother on Saturday, Jan. 15, 2011. The story begins on Aug. 4, 1987 in Harlem Hospital. Baby Carlina White, just three weeks old runs a 104 degree temperature and is rushed by worri
A 23-year-old woman who was snatched from a New York City hospital as a 3-week-old infant has been reunited with her parents after tracking down baby pictures of herself on a missing children’s website. Carlina Renae White was not yet a month old when she was kidnapped on Aug. 4, 1987. She had spiked a 104-degree fever and her worried parents took her to Harlem Hospital, where she was admitted. Joy White, then 16, said a woman dressed as a nurse approached her in the emergency room and told her everything would be fine. Joy went home to rest. When she returned to the hospital, Carlina was gone. Authorities believed the “nurse” who had comforted Joy stole the baby, but they were unable to find any trace of the missing infant. Meanwhile, a girl known as Nejdra Nance grew up in Bridgeport, Conn. As a teenager, she began to suspect that she wasn’t actually related to the the family who raised her. And she was puzzled that she was never able to get a copy of her birth certificate. Finally, she began to do some research on the Internet and found the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children’s website. On the site, she found a photo of a missing baby named Carlina Renae White. The center contacted Joy White on Jan. 4 and forwarded her a baby photo taken by the family who raised Nejdra Nance. “I was screaming, I was so excited,” Joy told the Daily News. “As soon as I saw those pictures I said, ‘That’s my daughter.’ I saw myself in her.” DNA tests confirmed Nejdra, who now lives in Georgia, is Carlina — the biological daughter of Joy White and Carl Tyson, who was 22 years old when his baby was kidnapped. The person believed to have abducted Carlina is now being investigated. Good for them! Hopefully she and her mom can begin the healing process. Source
Posted onNovember 23, 2010byBenny Hollywood|Comments Off on Breathtaking Satellite Photos Showcase the Fragile Earth as Art (Slideshow)
The Ganges River Delta. Photo credit: Image courtesy of USGS National Center for EROS and NASA Landsat Project Science Office High above the earth hover satellites; their eyes trained on the surface, capturing images from a perspective few humans will ever experience. Besides their unique position, these satellites are capable of discerning details the human eye misses. The intense detail captured by the Landsat-7 satellite—and the thermal gradients illustrated by
