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Source: Washington University in St. Louis Date: August 26, 2007 Gambling Addiction Assessment Tool Applies Equally For Different Races Science Daily — "With African-Americans and other minority groups having both problem and pathological gambling rates that are 2-3 times higher than Caucasian gamblers, accurate diagnosis is essential to treat gambling addiction," says Renee Cunningham-Williams, Ph.D., a leading gambling addictions expert and visiting associate professor of social work at Washington University in St. Louis. Unfortunately, as with other mental health disorders, African-American and other minority groups receive disparate care from symptom recognition and diagnosis through treatment. In a first step to...

JACKSON, Miss. (AP) -- James Ford Seale, a reputed Ku Klux Klansman, was sentenced Friday to three life terms in prison for his role in the 1964 abduction and murder of two black teenagers in southwest Mississippi. Seale, 72, was convicted in June on federal charges of kidnapping and conspiracy in the deaths of Charles Moore and Henry Hezekiah Dee, two 19-year-olds who disappeared from Franklin County on May 2, 1964. The young men's bodies were found two months later in the Mississippi River. Seale showed no emotion as U.S. District Judge Henry T. Wingate read his sentence. Wingate told...

The execution-style murder of three African-American college students in Newark, N.J., forced to kneel and shot in the head – allegedly by an illegal alien from Peru who was out on bail for the serial rape of a 5-year-old – has the makings of a Willie Horton issue in 2008. Newark, like New York, is a “sanctuary city,” where cops are not to ask criminal suspects if they are in the country legally. Mitt Romney has been hammering Rudy Giuliani on the issue, trashing his tough-cop resume by painting the mayor as den mother of the Big Apple’s playpen...

Source: Association for Psychological Science Date: August 16, 2007 Why We Are Unable To Distinguish Faces Of Other Races (and Sometimes Our Own) Science Daily — There's a troubling psychological phenomenon that just about everyone has experienced but few will admit to; having difficulty distinguishing between people of different racial groups. This isn't merely a nod to the denigrating expression "they all look the same." Indeed, the "cross-race effect" is one of the most well replicated findings in psychological research and can lead to embarrassment, social castigation, or the disturbingly common occurrence of eye-witness misidentifications. Although a potentially charged experience,...

Commentary: The Red State-Slave State Connection is all too Real Commentary: The Red State-Slave State Connection is all too Real Date: Tuesday, November 16, 2004 By: Last week while I was up at Harvard University meeting with black columnists from around the country, including several of my BlackAmericaWeb.com colleagues, Michael Dawson took me to school with his map that shows the overlap between Republican red states and the old Confederacy and slave-friendly territories. Dawson is a professor of government and Afro-American studies who specializes in the ways that race and politics intersect. I was sold. His map spoke to the...

Those were grim days for race relations in New York City, the early 1990s. There were nearly 2,000 murders each year, blacks and whites died in high-profile racial killings, and a riot held a divided Brooklyn neighborhood in thrall for three dangerous nights. On Jan. 9, 1994, another match landed in this tinderbox: a caller reported a burglary at a Harlem mosque. The police ran in, and Nation of Islam guards threw punches and broke an officer’s nose. The mosque’s minister, accompanied by the Rev. Al Sharpton, drove downtown to register their outrage with the police commissioner, a street theater...

Today in the Los Angeles Daily News I write about that which has no place in the immigration debate: the separatists. “…To say that this group does the pro-immigration movement absolutely no good is an understatement. Many Americans are wary of reconquista aims voiced over the years by groups such as MEChA. But the Mexica Movement - largely composed of young people, from what I’ve seen at events - minces no words about its aims, which are broader and accompanied by more disturbing rhetoric. ‘We are slaves of the parasitic genocidal Europeans,’ states the Mexica Movement’s philosophy, and another online...

Studies have shown that white children are hospitalized more often for medical emergencies than Hispanic or black children. Researchers from George Washington University School of Medicine assumed that the disparity was because the children of color were receiving less aggressive care. But in a new study, researchers found instead that all children were admitted equally when they had true emergencies, and the white children were over-admitted for conditions that could be readily treated at home. Using data available on 8,952 children at 13 pediatric emergency rooms across the country researchers compared observed and expected admission rates for different levels of...

The conversion is expected to be the largest in modern times Thousands of tribal and Dalit Hindus in India are to embrace the Buddhist faith at a huge gathering in Mumbai. The ceremony, which may be presided over by Tibet's exiled leader, the Dalai Lama, is billed as the largest religious conversion in modern India. The converts hope to escape the rigid caste system in which their status is the lowest. Right-wing Hindus have often opposed conversion, pushing some Indian states to restrict legal changes of faith. The organisers say the number of people to convert in Sunday's ceremony...

Jesse Rae Beard is one of the 'Jena Six' students on trial This World investigates the rise of discrimination in America's deep south as six black youths are charged with an alleged attack on a white student, which could see them jailed for up to 50 years. Three rope nooses hanging from a tree in the courtyard of a school in a small Southern town in Louisiana have sparked fears of a new kind of "stealth" racism spreading through America's deep south. Although this sinister episode happened last August, the repercussions have been extensive and today the town of...

BSP supporters see their party set for government Enlarge Image India's low-caste Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) has swept to a historic victory in assembly elections in the key northern state of Uttar Pradesh.With all but a handful of results declared, the BSP had won 202 of the 403 seats to allow it to form its own government, Indian media reports said. It is the first time since 1991 that any party in the state has done so. Uttar Pradesh is India's most populous state and has long been its most politically influential. I thank people of all castes and...

One of the more delicate areas I dealt with while running a dating service for more than two decades was the issue of race, and more specifically racial stereotyping by prospective members. Stereotyping in itself is a volatile issue, and at some point during intake interviews, I often repeated the phrase “While there is some truth to all stereotypes, there are certainly many exceptions to every single one.” However, when one is dealing with a sample of more than 20,000 single, divorced, and widowed men and women, I feel confident and comfortable making certain statements in a column titled The...

BSP supporters see their party set for government Enlarge Image The low-caste Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) is heading for victory in assembly elections in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, early trends suggest.Outgoing chief minister Mulayam Singh Yadav has admitted defeat to his rival, BSP leader Mayawati, and has said he will resign when results are confirmed. Trends show his party trailing with a possible clear majority for the BSP. Uttar Pradesh is India's most populous state and has long been its most politically influential. But with caste and religion becoming the dominant factors in state politics in...

Stolen: The story of a Polish child 'Germanized' by the Nazis If they met racial guidelines, they were taken; one girl got back home By Melissa Eddy, Associated Press Poznan, Poland | On a sunny April morning in 1944, 6-year-old Alodia Witaszek was combed and scrubbed, sitting in the children's home that had primed her for membership in Hitler's master race. Over the past year she had been snatched from her family, gone hungry in a concentration camp and been beaten for speaking her native Polish. Now she had a German name, "Alice Wittke," and a new - German -...

Puerto Rico's undefined political status is a serious national policy issue involving civil rights and democracy for four million U.S. citizens. Puerto Ricans were granted citizenship 90 years ago, Congress has not adopted a policy to legally determine the island's permanent status. This is a major deviation from the traditional procedure for clear and orderly transition of territories to full democracy through statehood or separate nationhood. As a result, a population of American citizens in Puerto Rico that is larger than that of 25 states endures an indefinite state of political limbo. This week Congress will hold a hearing on...

A video aired on German TV has shown an army recruit on firing practice being ordered to pretend he was in New York's Bronx facing hostile African Americans. In the grainy 90-second video, the instructor tells the soldier to swear as he fires his gun. US civil rights leader, Al Sharpton, said it was outrageous to depict blacks as "target practice". New York officials say they are saddened and frustrated that the Bronx district is depicted so negatively. "Clearly these folks don't know anything about African-Americans or the Bronx," said Bronx borough president Adolfo Carrion Jnr, who recently returned from...

Indiana Apologizes for Role in Eugenics Indiana's Health Commissioner Apologizes for State's Role in Developing Eugenics By KEN KUSMER The Associated Press INDIANAPOLIS April 13, 2007 (AP)— - Indiana sought to atone for its role in pioneering the state-authorized sterilization of "imbeciles," paupers and others it deemed undesirable, expressing regret for passing the first such law 100 years ago. Health Commissioner Dr. Judith Monroe said Thursday at a symposium at the Indiana State Library that Indiana needed to acknowledge and learn from its role in developing eugenics. "It is one that we do regret but we should not forget,"...

NEW YORK — Syndicated talk-radio personality Don Imus apologized Friday for calling members of the Rutgers University women's basketball team "nappy-headed hos" during a segment yesterday in his "Imus in the Morning" show. Imus and his producer and on-air sidekick, Bernard McGuirk, went on to further attack the black members of the team, calling them "jigaboos and wannabees." In his apology, Imus called his comments "insensitive and ill-conceived." "It was completely inappropriate, and we can understand why people were offended," he told listeners at the opening of his broadcast Friday morning. He further called the comments "thoughtless and stupid" and...

'Song of the South' pits art vs. cultural sensitivity http://www.charleston.net/assets/webPages/departmental/news/Stories.aspx?section=localnews&tableId=136791&pubDate=3/31/2007 http://tinyurl.com/2w5vty BY RON MENCHACA The Post and Courier Talk of a possible re-release of the 1946 Walt Disney film 'Song of the South,' which is criticized for its plantation-era depictions of blacks as the happy servants of wealthy whites, already is sparking a debate. The film was reshown in theaters as recently as 1986, but it never was released on video in the United States. Its cultural and cinematic significance have been the subject of scholarly debate for decades, and bootlegged copies of the film are popular on the black...

Black church in Stafford County vandalized and spray-painted with racial slurs By CATHY DYSON A cable installer had come to Union Bell Baptist Church yesterday morning to hook up wireless computer service, when he and a church deacon noticed the vandalism. Someone had spray-painted the F- and N-words on doors and parking signs at the black church in southern Stafford County. "We've come so far in terms of technology, and then you look at stuff like this and you realize our culture hasn't progressed that much," said Darak Hollis, a field representative for Cox Communications. "It's sad, especially in a...