Florida Sentinel Bulletin

CHICAGO — Thousands of teachers walked off the job Monday in Chicago’s first schools strike in 25 years, after union leaders announced that months-long negotiations had failed to resolve a contract dispute with school district officials by a midnight deadline.

The walkout in the nation’s third-largest school district posed a tricky challenge for the city and Mayor Rahm Emanuel, who said he would push to end the strike quickly as officials figure out how to keep nearly 400,000 children safe and occupied.

“This is not a strike I wanted,” Emanuel said Sunday night, not long after the union announced the action. “It was a strike of choice … it’s unnecessary, it’s avoidable and it’s wrong.”

Some 26,000 teachers and support staff were expected to join the picket. Among teachers protesting Monday morning outside Benjamin Banneker Elementary School on Chicago’s South Side, eighth-grade teacher Michael Williams said he wanted a quick contract resolution.

“We hoped that it wouldn’t happen. We all want to get back to teaching,” Williams said, adding that wages and classroom conditions need to be improved.

Officials said some 140 schools would be open between 8:30 a.m. and 12:30 p.m. so the children who rely on free meals provided by the school district can eat breakfast and lunch, school district officials said.

A Texas man is being held on $2 million bond after he reportedly confessed to killing a teenage girl who was scheduled to testify against him during his upcoming trial.

Franklin Davis, 30, reportedly told cops that he killed 16-year-old Shania Gray, a student athlete at Hebron High School, on Thursday afternoon. The teen was supposed to testify against Davis in connection to a 2010 sexual assault case in which she alleges that he raped her. The alleged rape took place when Davis stopped by to visit the children Gray was babysitting.

Davis was cuffed for the alleged rape in July of 2011; he posted bond the followng next month.

Miami – A Lauderhill woman is facing child cruelty charges after she beat her teen son with a baseball bat and tried to stab him, telling him “I have to kill you,” police said Monday.

Sheronda Hall Roselva was arrested Sunday morning following the attack at her home in the 2000 block of Northwest 59th Way, Lauderhill Police said.

According to police, officers responded to the home just before noon to calls of a 17-year-old being attacked with a bat by his mother.

When the officers interviewed the teen, he said he was in his room sleeping when his mother came in and hit him in the head with the bat, striking him repeatedly, police said.

Roselva left the room and returned with a knife and told her son “I have to kill you,” the teen told police.

The son was able to grab his mother’s arm and keep her from stabbing him, before he ran to a neighbor’s house where the neighbor called 911, police said. When officers got to the home, they found Roselva sitting outside with the bat and knife next to her, police said.

ATLANTA – For 17-year-old Abel Gumbo, things couldn’t be better. Only a few months ago he was among more than a thousand students at a high school in the Zimbabwean capital, Harare. Today he is rubbing shoulders with future leaders at Atlanta’s Morehouse College.

Gumbo is one of 10 students from Africa who have been awarded full ride scholarships to Morehouse, beginning this fall. Everything is being paid for by billionaire Strive Masiyiwa, Zimbabwe’s richest man, according to the 2011 Forbes list.

The telecom tycoon has committed $6.4 million in scholarship dollars to send 40 African freshmen to Morehouse over a four-year period. This year’s intake comprises of two teenagers from Burundi and eight from Zimbabwe.

“It’s been an experience,” said Gumbo, who is studying for an undergraduate computer science degree. “I have left everything behind to gain an education in America.  Computer science is technologically more advanced in the States and I am learning a lot about people from different cultures.”

TOLEDO, OH — President Barack Obama on Monday laid out the theme his party will hammer home at the Democratic National convention this week, declaring Republican challenger Mitt Romney wants to lead the country with failed and outdated ideas that harken to the last century.

Pres. Obama was speaking in a pre-convention campaign swing to members of the United Auto Workers Union in Toledo, a city like many in Ohio where the economy is heavily dependent on the auto industry. Pres. Obama injected that industry with huge amounts of government money in the earliest days of his administration, preventing General Motors and Chrysler Corp. from likely going out of business and laying off more than one million workers.

Romney opposed the auto bailout and accuses Pres. Obama of profligate government spending that Republicans contend has done little to lift the country out of the economic morass after the Great Recession and near meltdown of the country’s financial system, events that date to the presidency of Republican President George W. Bush.

The Republicans showed their political arguments last week during their convention that officially nominated Romney. The theme of that gathering: Pres. Obama is a failed president.

The Democrats are fighting back and Pres. Obama said on Monday that watching the Republicans was like seeing an old television program in black and white.

Those polls show most Americans continue to fault Pres. Obama’s Republican predecessor George W. Bush as author of the economic malaise. Most Republicans, however, blame Pres. Obama for failing to turn things around during his 3 ½ years in the White House.

Romney, polls show, is favored as the best candidate to handle the economy, although Pres. Obama is seen as the more likable choice.

Professor Melissa Harris-Perry is usually known for her cool, calm and collected demeanor; even her passionate examination of the Black community is always measured and academic.

This is probably why Monica Mehta,  a guest on MSNBC’s “The Melissa Harris-Perry Show,” thought she could voice a generic opinion on the private and business sector, in the context of risk-taking, without getting called out for its narrow scope.

She thought wrong.

After Mehta stated that entrepreneurship involves a level of risk, presumably not undertaken by those in living in poverty, Harris-Perry went in:

“What is riskier than living poor in America? Seriously! What in the world is riskier than being a poor person in America? I live in a neighborhood where people are shot on my street corner. I live in a neighborhood where people have to figure out how to get their kid into school because maybe it will be a good school and maybe it won’t. I am sick of the idea that being wealthy is risky.

Darnell Washington, 24, and his wife, Tania, 25, are on the run after Tania helped her husband escape from Glen Helen Rehabilitation Center in Devore, California.

After breaking free, the criminal minded couple stopped at a 7-11 convenience store. Something about them struck a sheriff’s deputy as “suspicious,” so he ran their plates and discovered they were listed as “armed and dangerous.”

That’s when the situation escalated.

The deputy called for backup and confronted Washington and his wife when they exited the store, prompting the gun battle.

Authorities say Washington emerged from the rear of the vehicle exchanged gunfire with the deputy, wounding him.

The couple then fled after allegedly carjacking another vehicle.

Washington and his wife later abandoned the stolen vehicle in South Gate before carjacking another vehicle.

The deputy was air-lifted to a hospital with non-life threatening injuries and the 2012 Bonnie and Clyde are still on the run.

Alan Padilla, 17, has been charged with 1st-degree murder in the death of 17-year-old Jalen Stogner (pictured). Stogner was gunned down in front of his mother and younger brothers, 11- and 4-year old, at a laundromat.

Stogner was assisting his mother when he exchanged “dirty looks” with another man, leading to an altercation. When the man pulled out his gun, the teen attempted to run, but was shot in the side of his back.

Stogner’s mother became “frozen” when she saw the weapon and his little brother dropped the detergent in horror. “Just to see my son lying in that puddle of blood, and I couldn’t do nothing to save him,” said Marla Stogner. “I just called and screaming his name and he just wasn’t responding.”

The convicted Colombian drug smuggler known as the “Godmother of Cocaine,” Griselda Blanco, 69, was gunned down by a motorcycle-riding assassin in Medellin, Colombian.

Blanco spent nearly 20 years in prison in the United States for drug trafficking and three murders before being deported to Colombia in 2004.

Two armed riders pulled up to Blanco as she was leaving a butcher shop in her hometown, and one shot her twice in the head.

Family members said Blanco had cut her ties to organized crime after returning to her country.

Blanco was one of the first to engage in large-scale smuggling of cocaine into the United States from Colombia and set up many of the routes used by the Medellin cartel after she was sentenced in the United States in 1985.