Florida Sentinel Bulletin

NEW YORK — Wal-Mart Stores Inc. has withdrawn its membership in a conservative political group that has come under fire as part of the Trayvon Martin case, saying it has strayed from its core mission to advance free-market principles.

The group, the American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC, is made up of a group of lawmakers and private sector officials and has become a lightning rod for political debate in recent months. Wal-Mart has been a member since 1993.

Liberal activists complain that ALEC, which has been around for nearly 40 years, improperly influences legislation around the country by allowing corporate leaders to develop model legislation alongside state lawmakers. They also point to some of the laws that ALEC has helped spread around the country, such as ID rules for voters and the so-called “Stand Your Ground” self-defense law that’s at the center of the Florida case in which teenager Martin was killed.

Wal-Mart’s decision follows several other companies’ withdrawal from the group, including Amazon.com, Coca-Cola Co., Kraft Foods Inc., McDonald’s Corp., PepsiCo Inc. and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

MIAMI – The cannibal who was discovered eating a a man’s face on the side of a Florida highway, and had to be shot at least six times before he stopped, has been identified by the Miami-Dade County Medical Examiner’s Office as Rudy Eugene, 31, reports CBS Miami. His gruesome attack on the homeless man is the fourth recent, vicious attack in that area blamed on drugs, according to Miami-Dade County police.

As previously reported, Eugene had to be shot to death by police after he was found eating another man’s face. Even as he was hit by the repeated shots, he kept gnawing at his victim’s face, whom sources say is now barely recognizable.

Eugene was arrested on a battery charge when he was 16-years-old, and was arrested at least seven other times for charges including marijuana and trespassing. His ex-wife said that his behavior was erratic and increasingly violent.

“I wouldn’t say he had a mental problem, but he always felt like people was against him,” she said. “No one was for him, everyone was against him.” The woman filed for divorce in 2007 after a little of a year of marriage. She told the reporter that there were times she feared for her life.

“He was literally eating his face, from the top of his forehead to his jaw is gone. He wasn’t only gnawing at it, he was swallowing bits of his face,” said Armando Aguilar, who heads the local chapter of the Fraternal Order of Police. “This is about the fourth incident I hear already within our Miami Dade County area where these individuals have taken off their clothes and gone totally insane as a result of the drugs they’re taking,” he continues. “I don’t know if there’s any such a thing as good LSD out there but apparently this is really bad LSD.”

ATLANTA – Fred Dukes recently walked the stage to receive his high school diploma from Booker T. Washington High School in Atlanta, Georgia. What made this young man’s achievement so much sweeter was that he did it while being homeless and without any family support.

Dukes, who scored a 24 on his ACT and has a 3.0 GPA, had been homeless since December. His mother moved to South Carolina for a job, but he opted to stay behind.

Dukes decision meant that he had to live without any family support. Dukes stayed with any friend who had extra space. A close friend of his, Malcolm, allowed him to stay at his place if needed.

In December, when he was forced to stay in a homeless shelter in downtown Atlanta, Dukes says life got really tough. “I got into an altercation with a couple other people that were staying here and they wanted to take my stuff, my belongings,” said Dukes.

Dukes is not the only young person to overcome homelessness in pursuit of his or her education.

Eboni Boykin, who earned a full scholarship to Columbia University, despite being homeless for much of her childhood. These back-to-back stories can never grow too repetitive. Just as we see negative, non-stop commentary and reporting about the ills of our community, we have to be as aggressive in highlighting the great feats our young people overcome to realize their goals.

He plans on attending Coker College in South Carolina in the fall where he wants to major in business.

DETROIT – In the aftermath of the suicide of a 7-year-old Detroit boy last week, police and family members are seeking answers to how a young child could end his life. The CEO of the charter school that he was attending insists that there were no signs that he was bullied as has been speculated.

“To the best of our knowledge, after careful review with the principal, teachers and counselors, there was never any mention of bullying by the student’s mother, who was an active volunteer at the school,” said Geneva Williams, interim CEO of the University Preparatory Academy and University Preparatory Science and Math school districts, in a statement on Friday. “The student was in a very caring and nurturing environment.”

The wife of a former Chicago police officer is not giving up the fight for her husband’s freedom. In April, Howard Morgan was given 40-years in prison for the attempted murder of the four white police officers who shot him 28 times.

Back in 2005, Morgan’s encounter with the racist police officers resulted in him sustaining several gunshot wounds, including being shot in the back 21 times. Since the altercation, Morgan’s wife, Rosalind, continues to rally support for her husband’s release. “Forty years is a wrongful conviction, especially when you are innocent,” she said. “We are reaching out to everyone to help overturn the conviction, including, the Illinois Secretary of State and the Illinois Governor.”

Rosalind hopes to get $100,000 signature through the website Change.org, and plans to present them to President Obama. “If you don’t receive a fair trial in the United of America, where else can you go? I’m asking everyone all over the world to get involved in this injustice. If they can forget about Mr. Morgan, they might as well forget about justice for Trayvon Martin.”

WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama on Friday said the United States has a “moral imperative” to lead the fight against hunger and malnutrition in Africa despite shrinking national budgets around the world.

Pres. Obama announced $3 billion in private sector pledges to help boost agriculture and food production in Africa. He said the U.S. and other donor nations would continue to make “historic investments” in development, though he offered no new American government pledges.

At first, it might seem like your typical case of modern parental discipline: A Texas mom has prohibited her 12-year-old daughter from using the photo-sharing site Instagram after she caught the girl posting a photo of herself holding an unopened bottle of vodka with a caption that read “I sure wish I could drink this.”

But it’s what ReShonda Tate Billingsley did next that has people buzzing: Billinglsey, a prominent Houston-area author, had her daughter post a new picture of herself to Instagram earlier this month holding a sign reading, “Since I want to post photos of me holding liquor, I am obviously not ready for social media and will be taking a hiatus until I learn what I should (and) should not post. Bye-bye.”

Billingsley then posted the same photo – in which only the lower half of her daughter’s face was visible – to her own personal Facebook page and it has since gone viral. It has seen 11,000 shares from Facebook alone, not to mention attention from various media outlets.

And you thought Octomom had her hands full—a Tennessee man who has fathered 30 children is asking the courts for a break on child support.

Desmond Hatchett, 33, of Knoxville has children with 11 different women.

The state already takes half his paycheck and divides it up, which doesn’t amount to much when Hatchett is making only minimum wage. Some of the moms receive as little as $1.49 a month. The oldest child is 14 years old.

Hatchett explains how he reached such a critical mass: He had four kids in the same year. Twice.

Back in 2009 when Hatchett was in court to answer charges that many of the mothers were not receiving child support, he had 21 children. At the time, he said he was not going to father any more kids, but he ended up having nine more in the past three years.

The state cannot order Hatchett to stop making babies. He hasn’t broken any laws, according to the report.

NEW YORK — It was on the streets of her Harlem neighborhood in the 1940s that teenager, Althea Gibson began working on the tennis skills that would take her all the way to winning Wimbledon.

But according to the 1940 census, the trailblazing athlete didn’t even exist.

There’s no record of Gibson and her family in the decennial census, the records of which were released online to the public April 2 by the U.S. National Archives after a 72-year confidentiality period lapsed.

She and her family aren’t the only ones — more than a million Black people weren’t accounted for in 1940, an undercount that had ramifications at the time on everything from the political map to the distribution of resources.

According to census reports, the Black undercount was estimated at 8.4 percent in 1940, meaning that a population counted at 12.9 million was actually more like 14.1 million. The undercount for the nonblack population was 5 percent, or about 6.3 million people. The total undercount for all races was 7.5 million.