Top 5 Live-WURD Tuesday April 21
1. Bobby Brown’s Lawyer Clarifies His Comments About Bobbi Kristina
After Bobby Brown told concertgoers in Dallas Saturday night that his daughter, Bobbi Kristina, “is awake,” Brown’s lawyer Christopher Brown is scaling back the singer’s exuberant claim that Bobbi “is watching me.”
“Bobbi Kristina’s condition has changed since moving from Emory University Hospital and there has been improvement,” Brown said in a statement to The Insider With Yahoo. “Doctors have indicated that she will have a long life. However, Bobbi Kristina is presently embarking on a rehabilitation process and the quality of her life will not be known for years to come.”
Bobbi Kristina, Whitney Houston and Bobby Brown’s only child, has been hospitalized since January, when she was found unresponsive in a bathtub in an incident eerily similar to the one which caused her mother’s death. In February, she was placed in a medically induced coma in order to treat brain swelling.
2. Convention Center Unions question change on Carpenters Union
Gov. Tom Wolf and Attorney General Kathleen Kane are being asked to investigate the April 16 reversal by Pennsylvania Labor Relations Board hearing examiner Jack Marino, who now says he will hear arguments from union carpenters and Teamsters who claim they were improperly excluded from Convention Center work.
“Mr. Marino inexplicably reversed his previous decision… despite no new information or evidence having been provided to him, as far as we know,” wrote Michael Barnes, business manager for the stagehands Local 8 and Ryan Boyer, business manager for the Laborers District Council.
The carpenters and Teamsters had been two of six unions working at the center; after they lost jurisdiction, union stagehands and laborers took over the bulk of their work.
3. Ex-agent sues Kane over sting case
A former undercover state agent has sued Attorney General Kathleen Kane for defamation, saying she made false statements about his role in a “sting” operation that caught Philadelphia elected officials pocketing money.
Claude Thomas, who posed as the driver for the operative in the sting, said Kane falsely told the public that he said the operation targeted blacks.
Thomas noted in the suit that he is African-American. He said Kane’s suggestion that he had taken part in a plan to go after blacks had damaged his reputation by portraying him as an unethical, “greedy sell-out.”
He said it was part of a plot by Kane to ” play the race card” and shift public focus from her “having killed this public corruption sting operation even though her political allies had been caught virtually red-handed by Thomas.”
4. Michael Eric Dyson’s Break With Cornel West
“It is not only that [Cornell] West’s preoccupations with Obama’s perceived failures distracted him, though that is true; more accurate would be to say that the last several years revealed West’s paucity of serious and fresh intellectual work, a trend far longer in the making. West is still a Man of Ideas, but those ideas today are a vain and unimaginative repackaging of his earlier hits.”
Dyson affirms in a 10,000-word critique of West in The Guardian that West is one of the premiere intellectuals on the intersection of race and philosophy of his time. But he says West is also passive-aggressive and petty.
Dyson told The Root that he wrote the piece because, “something irrational is going on … It was the nastiness of the tone. The unprincipled assault…”
5. One and a Half Million Missing Black Men
In New York, almost 120,000 black men between the ages of 25 and 54 are missing from everyday life. In Chicago, 45,000 are, and more than 30,000 are missing in Philadelphia. Across the South, hundreds of thousands more are missing.
They are missing, largely because of early deaths or because they are behind bars. Remarkably, black women who are 25 to 54 and not in jail outnumber black men in that category by 1.5 million, according to an Upshot analysis. For every 100 black women in this age group living outside of jail, there are only 83 black men. Among whites, the equivalent number is 99, nearly parity.
African-American men have long been more likely to be locked up and more likely to die young, but the scale of the combined toll is nonetheless jarring. And the gender gap is itself a further cause of social ills, leaving many communities without enough men to be fathers and husbands.
Click here to read these stories on 900amWURD.
Solomon Jones is an Essence bestselling author and award-winning columnist. He is the creator and editor of Solomonjones.com and morning host on 900 am WURD radio. Click here to learn more about Solomon
