Florida Sentinel Bulletin

The U.S. House of Representatives has approved legislation that would prevent people who receive welfare benefits from using their federal payments at strip clubs, casinos or liquor stores.

Republicans have argued this bill will attempt to prevent the waste and abuse of federal payments. The legislation was approved 395-27.

In a strange new twist in the fight to stop illegal immigration between the U.S. and Mexico, federal authorities are reporting that black drivers have been used as decoys to help smugglers avoid detection.

U.S. federal authorities indicted five people in connection with a suspected smuggling ring that used non-Spanish speaking, African-American drivers to ferry undocumented immigrants over the border in an effort to avoid detection.

The ring coordinated with international smugglers to pick-up undocumented immigrants once they crossed the border and transport them to Los Angeles, officials said.

Last week, the Barack Obama re-election campaign named a 31-year-old former field director for the NAACP to be African-American Vote Director for the campaign’s Operation Vote outreach effort.

Stefanie Brown, formerly the national field director for the NAACP in Baltimore, will direct the campaign’s Black voter outreach efforts. Operation Vote is the campaign’s national drive to get Black, female, Latino, LGBT, veteran and young voters to the polls. Pres. Obama won an overwhelming majority of Black votes in 2008, and most experts believe he’ll need a similar groundswell among African-Americans to win in November.

Brown, a graduate of Howard University, served as both national field director and head of the NAACP’s Youth & College division. As national field director, she is credited with leading an effort that the NAACP says registered more than 200,000 voters for the 2008 and 2010 elections.

MIAMI, FL – Marsee Strong and Edward Bailey, the parents of a 9-year-old boy who was found naked, emaciated, beaten, and dazed as he wandered the streets of his North Miami Beach neighborhood, were taken into custody on aggravated abuse and child neglect charges.

The unidentified child, who was compared to a concentration camp Auschwitz victim, had apparently been starved to the point where his eyes were bulging from their sockets and his bones were sharply protruding from his skin.  The boy weighed 35 pounds, which is the weight of a healthy 3-year-old child.

Police found the child wandering through his neighborhood on Saturday night.  According to investigators, he had jumped out of the window of his home to escape Strong and Bailey’s house.  Paramedics took the child to a nearby hospital, where he pleaded for food and told officials that he had not eaten in three days.

Upon examination of the child, doctors found evidence of recent and older severe beatings; there were permanent marks all over his body.  The boy’s hands and feet were also swollen. Investigators also discovered that there were four other siblings in the home, one aged 18 and pregnant.

The parents are unemployed and had already been investigated by the Florida Department of Children and Families.  Interestingly, a case worker had dropped by the child’s home a month prior to check on the children.  No reports had been filed after the social worker’s visit.

The state investigator had already been monitoring the boy based on reports that he refused to eat and was a self-mutilator who ate pieces of his own skin.  The juvenile court Judge Cindy Lieberman, who is overseeing the case, was disturbed by the social worker’s claims.

Strong denied hitting the child, but admitted to failing to protect her son from others, not properly supervising him, and failing to seek immediate medical attention for the boy.  Bailey also denied striking the boy, but did admit to allowing others to hit him without intervening.

An uncle, who claims that he was unaware of any wrongdoing in the child’s household, has stepped in and asked to be the guardian of all five of the children. Instead, Judge Lederman decided to appoint a guardian to take care of the children and ordered medical tests for all of the children in the home.

Meanwhile Strong is being held on a $65,000 bond while Bailey’s was set at $60,000.

ATLANTA, GA – Morehouse College has announced that its president of five years, Dr. Robert M. Franklin, will step down from his position at the end of the 2012 academic year.

During a sabbatical from Morehouse, Franklin will serve as Scholar in Residence at Stanford University’s Martin Luther King Jr. Institute. Upon his return, he will transition to the roles of President Emeritus and Distinguished Professor, the college’s highest honor.

Chairman of the Morehouse College Board of Trustees, Robert Davidson, extols Franklin’s commitment to service and his dedication to empowering the young men of Morehouse.

Franklin, a 1975 graduate of the prestigious all male school in Atlanta, Georgia, will also travel the world to further a conversation introduced in his book, Crisis in the Village: Restoring Hope in African American Communities, by examining the conditions of boys and men around the globe.

PHOENIX – Peoria, Ariz., police officer, Sgt. Pat Shearer, posted a picture of a group of teenagers holding guns, with one of them holding an Obama Hope T-shirt that appears to be full of bullet holes.

The picture also appeared on the page of a high school student and is being investigated by the secret service.

Shearer, who said he would sacrifice his life for President Barack Obama, said that he didn’t “think that them shooting up the T-shirt was a big deal.”

“I think it was more of a political statement obviously,” he added. “It’s not like they were going to go out and shoot the president.”

A 17-year-old African-American teen was beaten during a hate crime in Chicago in late December 2011, area police are now reporting.

The victim, Joshua Merritt, a senior at Brother Rice High School, was attacked by three white teenage boys who attend the same institution.

The assault was allegedly motivated by the Black male starting a interracial relationship with the cousin of the youngest perpetrator. The assailants were charged on January 10 for the December 23 attack.

Matthew Herrmann, 18, was charged with misdemeanor battery, a hate crime, and unlawful restraint. He will be tried as an adult, while the younger offenders, who are 16 and 17, were cited in delinquency petitions for the same charges.

ANN ARBOR, Mich. – President Barack Obama called Friday for an overhaul of the higher education financial aid system, warning that colleges and universities that fail to control spiraling tuition costs could lose federal funds.

The election year proposal was also a political appeal to young people and working families, two important voting blocs for Pres. Obama. But the initiative faces long odds in Congress, which must approve nearly all aspects of the president’s plan.

Speaking to students at the University of Michigan, Pres. Obama said the nation’s economic future would depend in large part on making sure every American can afford a world-class education.

“We are putting colleges on notice,” Pres. Obama said. “You can’t assume that you’ll just jack up tuition every single year. If you can’t stop tuition from going up, then the funding you get from taxpayers each year will go down.”

Pictured: President Barack Obama speaks at the University of Michigan’s Al Glick Field House in Ann Arbor, Mich.

Pres. Obama Meets With George H.W. And Jeb Bush

WASHINGTON  – President Obama met with former president George H.W. Bush and former Florida governor Jeb Bush in the Oval Office on Friday, joining in a bipartisan gathering in an election year.

The White House said the three men enjoyed a personal visit in the Oval Office as they have in the past when the former president is visiting Washington.

A Florida man has been arrested for allegedly hacking to death a Connecticut man and eating the victim’s eye and part of his brain, police said Wednesday.

Tyree Lincoln Smith, 35, was arrested Tuesday night on a Connecticut warrant for murder, according to police in Lynn Haven, Fla.

A property inspector discovered the body of Angel L. Gonzalez on Friday on the third floor of an abandoned home in Bridgeport, Conn., according to that city’s police department. A medical examiner determined that the cause of death was blunt head trauma and ruled Gonzalez’s death a homicide.

On Monday, a cousin of Smith’s in Connecticut contacted the Bridgeport police about Gonzalez’s death. She told detectives that Smith had arrived at her house Dec. 15 and said he wanted to “get blood on his hands” before going to a park and then to the abandoned home, where he used to live, according to an arrest warrant affidavit.

The next day, Smith returned to the cousin’s house with blood on his pants, hands and an axe, the affidavit said. Smith’s cousin said he told her that he was sleeping on a porch at the abandoned home when we was awakened by a Hispanic man and invited inside. Then Smith described beating the man’s face and head with the axe and collecting one of his eyes, a piece of his skull some of his brain matter, which he consumed in a nearby cemetery, the affidavit said.