Florida Sentinel Bulletin

Don Lemon, a weekend anchor on CNN Newsroom, has a highly personal memoir coming out next month. It’s called ‘Transparent’, and it will reveal, among other things, that Lemon is gay and suffered sexual abuse as a child.

Lemon hasn’t kept his sexuality a secret; his colleagues at CNN have long known that he’s gay. But as he recently revealed, he thinks the news will surprise a lot of people–and he’s aware that “going public in his book carries certain risks.”

“I’m scared, I’m talking about something that people might shun me for, ostracize me for.”

Maybe. But so far, at least, people seem to be rallying around Lemon. The Times notes that “he has been assured of support by CNN”–the network has already booked him as a guest on Monday’s edition of CNN Newsroom, and he’ll be on The Joy Behar Show on sister network HLN this week.

NEW YORK — After months of flirting with politics, Donald Trump said Monday he won’t run for president, choosing to stick with hosting “The Celebrity Apprentice” over a bid for the Republican nomination.

The reality TV star and real estate mogul made his announcement at a Manhattan hotel as NBC.

“I will not be running for president as much as I’d like to,” Trump said.

Trump’s office released a formal statement just as he was taking the stage. In it, a confident Trump said he felt he could win the Republican primary and beat President Barack Obama in the general election, but had come to realize a presidential campaign could not be run half-heartedly.

“Ultimately, business is my greatest passion and I am not ready to leave the private sector,” Trump said.

DAYTON, OHIO — Jurors in a woman’s third trial found her guilty Friday of killing her baby daughter by cooking her in a microwave oven.

China Arnold was convicted of aggravated murder in the death of 28-day-old Paris Talley in August 2005. Arnold could receive the death penalty because Ohio is a death penalty state. The sentencing phase will begin Monday.

Arnold’s first trial ended in a mistrial. She was found guilty in the second trial, but that conviction was reversed last fall. An appeals court found there was misconduct by prosecutors and that the trial court made an error by not allowing a material witness to testify in Arnold’s defense.

Prosecutors have said Arnold, 31, intentionally put the baby in the microwave after a fight with her boyfriend. The defense had argued that someone else was responsible.

Medical experts testified that the baby died after her temperature reached 107 to 108 degrees Fahrenheit (42 Celsius) and that she probably was in the microwave for more than two minutes, dying quickly afterward.

“She died because she was overheated,” said Dr. Marcella Fierro, retired chief medical examiner for Virginia. “She was cooked.”

Messages seeking comment from the prosecutor and defense attorney were left at their offices, but a gag order in the case prevents anyone connected to it from commenting outside court.

Assistant Prosecutor Dan Brandt told jurors in court that Arnold’s actions were “even more purposeful” than a slaying with a gun or knife, the Dayton Daily News reported.

“Baby Paris is without life, but she’s not without a voice,” Brandt told jurors in closing arguments. “Please listen to her.”

Brandt said that Arnold had to carry the baby over, place her in the microwave, shut the door and press buttons. Then she waited while her child cooked to death, Brandt said.

Defense attorney Jon Paul Rion argued that the evidence pointed as much to Terrell Talley, the baby’s father, as it did Arnold.

Rion said Talley’s testimony that Arnold said “I killed my baby” left out important context: She only meant that she failed as a mother by allowing the crime to happen and not that she killed her child.

The defense attorney also said that Talley’s sneakers were stained with a bodily substance that should have been tested. Arnold also was very intoxicated, Rion said.

“No mother is going to do this, in this way,” Rion said. “China Arnold is innocent of these charges.”

Brandt said that Arnold admitted to police that the baby woke her up and that she was alone, beside her other sleeping children. There also were no signs of a break-in, he said.

Talley testified Arnold was drunk, but not so drunk that she would not know what happened. He said she told him the baby would still be alive if he hadn’t been unfaithful to her.

WASHINGTON — Black members of Congress are pressing President Barack Obama for a greater focus on creating jobs in urban areas where unemployment is often highest. Obama said he was trying to fix the economy as a whole, said Rep. Emanuel Cleaver, D-Mo., chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus.

The exchange happened last week at the first meeting between Obama and the full Black Caucus since Obama became president. It follows longstanding complaints from some in the African-American community that the nation’s first black president hasn’t done more to help minority communities on jobs and other issues.

Cleaver told reporters at the White House that lawmakers in the group _ which has about 40 members, all but one of them Democrats – highlighted to the president the difficulties of communities beset by high unemployment and stressed the need to address it, especially with summer approaching and teens looking for jobs. The overall unemployment rate is 9 percent but it’s 16.1 percent among blacks.

“He understands clearly what we spoke to him about, and that is the pain that is taking place in the urban core and many of the districts we represent,” Cleaver said.

“The president did speak to us about things that the administration is already doing and he said to us twice that he’s working on trying to heal the economy, and that if he heals the economy it will also take care of the issues that we raised,” Cleaver said.

Obama’s consistent response to questions about whether he should be doing more for blacks or other individual groups is that the best way to help any community is by growing the overall economy.

Cleaver said that lawmakers offered ideas including targeting census tracts where poverty is persistent and seeing whether federal emergency declarations for flood-hit areas or elsewhere can be used to generate jobs in those areas.

People who are unemployed “are begging for help and I think that the Congressional Black Caucus and the president are both interested in trying to come up with some means of addressing that and doing it rather quickly,” said Emanuel.

Emanuel said Obama didn’t promise anything specific, and it wasn’t clear whether anything new would be forthcoming from the White House.

A senior administration official said in an interview later that the president has various proposals that address Black Caucus concerns, including proposals in

Obama’s 2012 budget blueprint that would send $40 million in grants and $2.5 billion in employment and investment tax credits to economically distressed areas; and a Department of Labor program meant to publicize job opportunities for low-income youths. The official spoke anonymously to discuss issues raised in the private meeting.

Asked whether the group was unsatisfied with what Obama’s been doing to address their concerns Cleaver said: “We’re not satisfied that the poor and the vulnerable are hurting. We are satisfied that the attention of the president is on that.”

A central Florida prison inmate has been sentenced to another 43 years for killing his cellmate for whining too much.

A Lake County judge sentenced 23-year-old Phillip Adams last month. He had previously pleaded guilty to second-degree murder in a deal with prosecutors to avoid the death penalty.

Authorities say Adams was sharing a cell at Lake Correctional Institution with 43-year-old Marc Rogers in July 2009 when Adams grew tired of listening to Rogers complain about his sentence. He was serving 25 years for fatally stabbing a housemate in Boynton Beach.

Authorities say Adams chewed the hem off a bed sheet and used it to strangle Rogers.

If not for the attack on Rogers, Adams would have completed his four-year sentence for lewd and lascivious molestation in October.

WASHINGTON — Americans are growing more optimistic about the U.S. economy, a sentiment that is benefiting President Barack Obama despite public disenchantment with his handling of rising gasoline prices and swollen government budget deficits.

An Associated Press-GfK poll shows that more than 2 out of 5 people believe the U.S. economy will get better, while a third think it will stay the same and nearly a fourth think it will get worse, a rebound from last month’s more pessimistic attitude. And, for the first time since the 100-day mark of his presidency, slightly more than half approve of Obama’s stewardship of the economy.

Both findings represent a boost for Obama, though he still must overcome ill will over government red ink and the price of gas at the pump, now hovering around $4 a gallon.

But the public’s brighter economic outlook also could signal a boost to the current recovery, which relies to a great degree on consumer behavior. A public that is confident about economic performance is more likely to spend more and accelerate the economy’s resurgence.

The poll was conducted May 5-9 in the aftermath of the U.S. commando raid that killed Osama bin Laden, the al-Qaida leader behind the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. The spike in public esteem for Obama as a result of that successful clandestine mission may have helped Obama’s standing on issues other than national security.

The poll coincides with renewed attention in Washington to the nation’s growing debt and the federal government’s long-term budget deficits, so any positive signs from the public could help Obama push his policy proposals. A bipartisan team of lawmakers is working with Vice President Joe Biden to identify spending cuts. Meanwhile, lawmakers also are discussing major structural changes to the tax system and to the government’s mammoth benefits programs of Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.

The results of the AP-GfK poll stood out because other surveys taken after bin Laden’s death, while showing a spike in support for the president, continued to indicate dissatisfaction by a majority for his handling of the economy. Still, like the AP-GfK poll, other surveys also found American attitudes about the state of the nation improving.

Forty-five percent of those polled in the AP-GfK survey said the country was now moving in the right direction, an increase of 10 percentage points from five weeks ago. And attitudes about life in general remained positive, with 4 out of 5 respondents saying they were happy or somewhat happy with their circumstances.

The Associated Press-GfK Poll was conducted by GfK Roper Public Affairs and Corporate Communications. It involved landline and cell phone interviews with 1,001 adults nationwide and had a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 4.2 percentage points.

Talk about a long time coming, Black Chicago firefighters get their victory.

The Chicago Fire Department  was ordered by a federal appeals court to  hire 111 African Americans who passed a firefighters entrance exam 16 years ago.
According to the ruling by The Seventh U.S. Circuit Court, Chicago must also pay millions of dollars to thousands more who took and passed the same test.

This serves as another hit to the Windy City, which has been on the losing end of court decisions regarding the 1995 test for years, including a 2005 ruling by a federal judge who said the test discriminated against Black applicants and a U.S. Supreme Court ruling last year that the candidates did not wait too long to sue the city.

An attorney for the black firefighter candidates told The Associated Press that the 111 jobs would be filled from the applicants who passed the 1995 test and their pensions would be adjusted as if they’d been firefighters since 1995. And, said Joshua Karsh, 6,000 others who also passed the test will divide “tens of millions of dollars” that would have been paid 111 firefighters from 1995 until today.

A spokeswoman for the city’s law department called the decision a “partial victory” for the city because it reduced the number of African Americans the fire department must hire from 132 to 111. “Reducing the number of plaintiffs who are eligible reduces the damages,” said Jenny Hoyle.

Uhh… If you say so.

Hoyle said that the city was still calculating the damages as result of dividing the back pay of 111 firefighters among the 6,000 applicants, but that officials estimate the payout will be about $30 million.

The ruling stems from a test given in 1995 that was intended to measure an aptitude for firefighting. After the test, anyone who scored 64 or below was deemed not qualified, but officials told those who scored above that number that while they passed, they would randomly hire the top 1,800 who scored 89 or better.

Because only 11 percent of the African Americans scored 89 or better, the overwhelming number of applicants hired from that test were white.

Karsh said the test was discriminatory because there was no evidence that the applicant who scored 89 or better would be any better firefighter than another who scored a 64, and in fact in 2005 a federal judge said the test discriminated against black candidates. In her ruling the judge said the city knew the cutoff point was meaningless and would disproportionately exclude blacks from the pool of candidates most likely to be hired.

“If the city of Chicago had selected firefighters at random from all the people who passed the test it would have gotten a pool of equally capable firefighters and the pool would have been more integrated,” said Karsh said. He said he did not know when the hiring might begin, but said that he expected it to start soon.

After the judge’s decision, the city, which hadn’t given another test since 1995 because of ongoing court challenges, gave another test in 2006. But that test was given on a pass/fail basis and that all passing applicants, and not just the top ones, were processed randomly for additional tests such as physical agility and background checks.

U.S. officials have found documents that reveal Osama bin Laden was plotting to assassinate President Obama.

According to reports by ABC News:
U.S. officials are analyzing one million pages of data from the trove found in Osama bin Laden’s compound during the raid that killed him, and say they have learned more in the past ten days than in the past 10 years.

Among the things they’ve learned is that the al Qaeda leader wanted to find a way to kill President Obama.

The reports also stated that through the discovered writing bin Laden was encouraging his followers to assassinate the President, and find ways to disrupt the 2012 American elections.

“I would say this is probably very personal on bin Laden’s part, to kill a President that he believes has violated the Muslim faith,” said ABC News consultant and former FBI profiler, Brad Garrett. “He is incensed, inflamed, obsessed about killing the President.”

Also, the president’s 88-year-old step-grandmother, Sarah Obama, has been receiving death threats in her Kenyan village from an al Qaeda affiliate.

Yet, the elder Obama seems unfazed by the threats, “My life has not been affected in any way,” Sarah Obama said to ABC News. “It has not restricted my movement.”

Sarah Obama has been under protection since Barack Obama became president, and her security has been increased since Osama’s death, and threats are being closely monitored.

In other news, 80 people are dead following a double suicide bombing in Pakistan.

The incident is believed to be a revenge attack by the Pakistan Taliban for the killing of Osama bin Laden. Threats of more attacks have also been made.

After months of closed-door litigation between Bishop Eddie L. Long and the four men who accused him of sexual misconduct, a settlement has yet to be reached and the case could soon be headed to trial later this year.

The two parties in the scandalous case were reportedly close to reaching a settlement back in April but for reasons unknown, this fell through.

Judge Jonny Panos, the presiding judge in the case, is now preparing for a trial that could start as early as August or September.

There was no reason given for the breakdown during mediation when things seemed to be close to finalized. Neither side in the case has commented on the recent halt in progress.

Last September, Bishop Eddie L. Long, minister of New Birth Missionary Baptist Church in Lithonia GA, was accused by four former members of using his influence to lure them into sexual relations.

The four men filed lawsuits against Long and his youth academy.

The Bishop denies the claims.