Tyler Perry writes letters to Penn State victims

Tyler Perry addresses an 11-year-old boy involved in the Penn State sexual abuse scandal.
Perry’s letter starts by saying: “I don’t know your name, but I know your face. I don’t know your journey, but I know where you are. I am your brother!”
Perry goes on to reveal personal details of his own sexual abuse as a child, and how his voice went unheard when he reached out for help to friends and family. Perry writes, “The strength that it must have taken for your 11-year-old voice to speak out about such a horrible act is something that I didn’t have the strength or courage to do at your age.” The star calls the boy “my hero.”
Perry also tells the boy: “You have nothing to feel ashamed of. I want you to know you didn’t do anything wrong. Please know that you were chosen by a monster. It’s not your fault. You didn’t ask for it and, most of all, you didn’t deserve it.”
Perry, who first revealed he was a survivor of childhood sexual abuse to Oprah Winfrey in 2010, also writes about some of the adults he knew in his childhood, stating, “They knew and did nothing. One of them even said to me that it was my fault, because I allowed myself to spend time with the molesters.”
Toward the end of the open letter, Perry encourages the boy to go through with the trial: “You may feel all alone on the witness stand, but just know there are millions of young boys and grown men who are standing with you, including me. If every man who has ever been molested would speak up, you would see that we’re all around you.”
Perry ends his letter by saying: “My prayer is that you feel our strength holding you up. You will get through this: you’ve already endured the worst part at age 11. Now fight on, my young friend, fight on! We are all with you.”
Numerous individuals have made claims of sexual abuse against former Penn State assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky. The Harrisburg Patriot-News recently reported that Pennsylvania’s Children and Youth Services is now conducting a probe into two new accusations that were opened within the last 60 days.
Should authorities confirm the authenticity of the allegations, it would mean Sandusky’s accusers are children since the Children and Youth Services concerns itself only with victims who are under the age of 18.
The 40 current counts of sexual abuse against Sandusky listed in the grand jury indictment involved boys over a 15-year period who are adults now. Sandusky has maintained his innocence.

Refuse to evict 103 yr old woman

Deputies refuse to evict 103-year-old woman

By msnbc.com

In Georgia, deputies and movers refuse to evict a 103-year-old woman and her 83-year-old daughter. Tamron Hall.

A 103-year-old woman and her 83-year-old daughter got a last-minute eviction reprieve when sheriff's deputies and movers decided they couldn’t uproot the women from their longtime Atlanta home.
Fulton County Sheriff’s deputies and a moving company hired by the bank showed up at Vita Lee’s Penelope Road home on Tuesday, according to a report on WSBTV.com.The planned eviction was reportedly the latest move in a legal battle that dates back years.

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But when the men saw the frail woman, they decided to leave instead of carry through with the forced move, WSBTV.com reported.The reprieve comes just three weeks shy of Lee’s 104^th-birthday. Lee said she just wants to live out her last days in the place she has called home for more than half a century. "I love it. It’s a mansion," she said about the modest house.
Still, the stress of the situation was apparently too much for Lee’s daughter, who reportedly was rushed to the hospital. Lee said she hopes now the bank will leave her alone.
"Please don't come in and disturb me no more," Lee told WSBTV.com. "When I'm gone you all can come back and do whatever they want to."

CUNY tuition hike causes protest for students

Student protesters gather in the streets around Baruch College where the school was shut down for several hours for the afternoon when the board votes on an appeal of a recent tuition hike. Protesters took over the streets and the neighborhood for some time.

 CUNY students protest after, the $300 tuition hike approved Monday means a hard blow and its about making ends meet for many students.

Aunil Seoparson said he chose CUNY for two reasons. “I came here at first because it was cheap,” the 22-year-old from Corona, Queens said.

The second reason, Seoparson said, was that he hoped to pave the way to college for his younger sister and especially his brother, a high schooler who dreams of one day going to medical school.

“We have to plan our college expenses as a family," he said. “I don’t know if that’s gonna happen now.”

Seoparson, who works as a freelance computer programmer to make ends meet, said even before the hike he was not happy with the quality of his education.

“I just want to get out of here as soon as possible,” he said. “Their solution is to accept more students and raise tuition. As it is we have 300 students in some classrooms. You can’t learn like that. It’s too crowded.”

Paola Martinez, 23, a sophomore political science from Harlem, said she already works two jobs to pay for college, rent and child care for her year-old son, and the tuition hike really hurts.

“I can’t take any more loans,” Martinez said. “I owe too much money as it is."

Martinez said her semester tuition will climb from $2,500 to about $2,850 per semester. But she doesn’t qualify for financial aid because she and her husband’s household income is $35,000.

“I feel like they [the board of trustees] don’t care if I graduate or not,” she said. “I feel like they are discriminating against minority students. We are the ones who come here.” 

Conrad Murray 4 years behind bars

According to CBS- Dr. Conrad Murray is set to be sentenced for involuntary manslaughter today for ending the life and career of Michael Jackson.The six-week trial presented the most detailed account yet of the pop singer's final hours, but left many questions about Murray's use of an operating room anesthetic to treat the superstar's chronic insomnia.

Prosecutors want Superior Court Judge Michael Pastor to sentence Murray to a maximum four-year term, which would likely be cut at least in half due to jail overcrowding. Defense attorneys want probation for the cardiologist, saying he will lose his ability to practice medicine and likely face a lifetime of ostracism.Jackson's family members will have an opportunity to speak before Murray is sentenced, although it remains unclear if any planned to make a statement. During the investigation into the singer's June 2009 death Murray told detectives he had been giving the singer nightly doses of propofol to help him sleep as he prepared for a series of comeback concerts. Propofol is supposed to be used in hospital settings and has never been approved for sleep treatments, yet Murray acknowledged giving it to Jackson then leaving the room on the day the singer died.

Murray declined to testify during his trial but participated in a documentary in which he said he didn't consider himself guilty of any crime and blamed Jackson for entrapping him into administering the propofol doses. In their sentencing memorandum, prosecutors cited Murray's statements to advocate for him receiving the maximum term. They also want him to pay restitution to the singer's three children -- Prince, Paris and Blanket. It's unlikely that Murray can pay any sizable sum, including the $1.8 million cost of Jackson's funeral. He was deeply in debt when he agreed to serve as Jackson's personal physician for $150,000 a month and the singer died before Murray received any money

PENN STATE SEX ABUSE SCANDAL

A senior law enforcement source tells FBI agents in Pennsylvania are now “looking hard” at whether to open up their own investigation because of allegations that former football assistant coach Jerry Sandusky crossed state lines to commit child abuse.

One of the Pennsylvania state charges against Sandusky alleges that he flew one boy – identified as Victim Number Four – to the Outback Bowl in Tampa in 1998 and then again to the Alamo Bowl in San Antonio in 1999. Starting when the boy was about 13 years old, Sandusky “repeatedly” abused him, including at the bowl games, a grand jury report charges. When the boy resisted Sandusky’s advances, the grand jury indictment charges, the football coach threatened “to send him home from the Alamo Bowl.”



The feds are also trying to determine whether Sandusky used the Internet to communicate or even recruit his victims—also grounds for the FBI to become involved. And a New York-based charity, the Fresh Air Fund, confirmed this week that it sent five children to live with Sandusky in the 1970s and one in the mid-1990s.

The review of the Sandusky matter is being conducted by Peter J. Smith, the U.S. attorney in Harrisburg, Pa. In a public statement this week, he called the Sandusky allegations "extremely disturbing" because they involve the safety of children, and "therefore mandate a thorough review of all the facts and appropriate action by law enforcement at all levels, including federal agencies." Beyond supporting an ongoing inquiry by the Department of Education into the actions of Penn State officials, Smith added: "I can't comment about other specific areas of federal inquiry."

25th Anniversary: Its MAGIC

I was on the phone with my editor at the time, talking about the mindless things writers and editors talk about, when I heard.

"Magic Johnson says he is HIV positive and will retire from the NBA," my editor said.

His tone never changed as he read this off the wire. It came without the "Oh my gosh" or "You aren't going to believe this," one would expect to proceed such an announcement. He just read it as it appeared on his computer screen, as if he was repeating a list of weekly assignments.

"Magic Johnson is HIV positive."

Twenty years later I can feel the sudden chill of a warm afternoon turned cold. The moment remains locked in my mind; from the smoothness of the phone receiver, to the way the blinds were pulled three-quarters of the way up the window of the small house I rented on Connecticut's shore.

Never had 13 words seemed more improbable. Thinking of them now, they still do. No athlete seemed more alive than Magic. And my first thought as the editor read the bulletin was that we were going to watch the slow, steady shriveling of Magic Johnson. This was the beginning of the end, of course. Nobody lived long with HIV. That much we knew back then. Maybe it would be a few months, perhaps two years, but the decline was going to be fast. His face would sallow, his great body would wither. There would be living memorials. There would be a funeral.

And it would all happen before the decade was halfway gone.

"He is going to die! He is going to die!" I can still hear the AIDS activist shouting that night on TV. Of course he was going to die. HIV meant AIDS back then and AIDS meant a rapid and awful death. It was all we knew in a world where we didn't understand this disease that had seemed to come from nowhere but was filling in everywhere.

The last thing anyone could have expected was that two decades later, his story would be about life.

He not only didn't die, he became larger than ever.

In the town next to mine in the Washington suburbs, there is a Magic Johnson theatre. Sometimes when I am on Capitol Hill, I drop into a Magic Johnson Starbucks. I hear of Magic Johnson developments and Magic Johnson charities. On the Seattle night in 1999 when teargas from the WTO protests filled the air, I walked a few blocks to KeyArena where I sat a few rows behind Magic and Starbucks Chairman Howard Schultz at a Sonics-Lakers game. Now there is talk he wants to buy a sports team.

Who knew he would last this long? Who knew he would be so big? To watch him now, dressed in suits, his body larger than in his basketball days yet robust with his face a healthy glow, it's as if he will live forever. He is 52 now, middle aged, at the point where many of his contemporaries walk with limps and aching backs. The irony is they too expected Magic to be gone by now and yet he is the one who is lively and robust, the one who is doing things.

I got in my car and drove that day he announced he had HIV. My thoughts were a jumble, a knot tightened in my stomach. I was just 24 and in my first newspaper job, a place where breaking news is supposed to send you skittering to the computer. Today we are more accustomed to these kinds of things. We live on a diet of breaking news feeds, sucked in by the scrolling red bar that comes many times a day bearing the promise of altering our world. But the bar comes so fast now, each bulletin shouting something big: Death! Verdict! Upset!

No announcement before or since has knocked me flat the way that one did. My guess is there are dozens in this business who would say the same thing. Eventually, seeking solace, I found myself at a church basketball court where I sometimes played. A friend, a Celtics fan, dressed in his Larry Bird jersey, held his wrists limp and swished flamboyantly: "I'm Magic!" he shouted, prancing about.

The rest of us stared, our faces filled with disgust. How could you be a fan? How could you love the game and act like that?

And look at Magic Johnson now. How silly our worry, our pain, our scorn.

He's survived that day's worst thoughts and fears.

In the end, that's the biggest news of all.

WORLD WITHOUT MONITORS OR KEYBOARDS: THE LIFE OF TOUCH

A few months ago I was looking at a child interacting with magazine as though it was an ipad. The toodler had trouble making the page turn if she only knew that she could simply turn the pages with her fingers.

At Carnegie Mellon student Chris Harrison explained to me, gadgets with screens the size of  oyster cracker have inspired new ways to "steal" everyday surfaces to replace the computer screen. By using tiny projectors that sense your every move, you'll soon be able to read and write email on a wall or table top. Or surf the web on the palm of your hand or the leg of your jeans.
In a project with Microsoft, he's also developed "Skinput." It is a bio-accousic sensor that converts the tapping of your forearm or fingertips into commands for a music player or video game. So along with new advances in voice-recognition software, it won't be long before the mouse, keyboard and game controller are replaced by the snap of a finger and a spoken command.

Switched at birth

A court rewarded two Russian families $100,000 each in compensation Monday from a maternity home that accidentally switched their daughters at birth. The parents said they could use the money to house the girls, now 12, next to each other.

The story has captivated Russia for ever since the families learned about the switch several months ago.

During divorce proceedings, one man refused to support his daughter Irina — who has dark hair, dark eyes and olive skin — because she didn't look like him. A DNA test then revealed that neither he nor the mother, Yuliya Belyaeva, were Irina's biological parents.

An official investigation then tracked down Irina's biological father, Naimat Iskanderov, who had been raising Belyaeva's own child, Anna, in a neighboring town.

Belyaeva said the news still makes her shiver.

"It is very unpleasant to relive those memories," she told The Associated Press in a brief telephone interview. "We still can't fully comprehend what happened."

In video broadcast on Russia's NTV television, Belyaeva laughed with joy Monday after the judge delivered the verdict in a courtroom in Kopeisk, an industrial town of 140,000 in Russia's Ural Mountains, but Iskanderov remained stone-faced.

Fair-skinned Anna strongly resembles her biological mother Belyaeva, while Irina looks like her father Iskanderov, an ethnic Tajik born in the Central Asian and mostly Muslim ex-Soviet state of Tajikistan.

The video showed Belyaeva caressing Anna, while Irina, whom she raised, sat stern-faced with her eyes downcast.

"She feels jealous," Belyaeva said in televised remarks.

Belyaeva married again after separating from her husband and gave birth to two more children. Iskanderov parted with his wife when Anna was five but later married again, according to the Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper.

Despite the verdict, Belyaeva said the swap will leave lasting emotional scars.

"The money just can't ease the pain," Belyaeva said. "All the money in the world isn't worth a child's look at mother ... there are moments when I think it would have been better if I hadn't known anything about that."

Russian television reports said the girls don't want to leave the parents who raised them, so the families were thinking of using the compensation money, which is huge by Russian standards, to live near each other or even share a home.

"I would like us to share a house so that we don't worry about her daughter coming to me and the other way round," Iskanderov said on television.

His former wife and Belyaeva's former husband were not present in the courtroom Monday and made no statements after the court ruling.

Belyaeva said she would prefer separate houses nearby, so that "we see our children growing up and take part in their education."

Belyaeva also identified the nurse who she claimed mixed up the babies, but the nurse denied any responsibility.

"I know it was not me who did it," nurse Nelly Prokopyeva told Russian television.

This is not the first time a Russian court decision has resolved a hospital mix-up.

In 2009, a court in the central Russian town of Mtsensk ordered two mothers to swap their two-year-old sons following a DNA test that proved the children were mixed up at a maternity hospital. The case was complicated by the ethnic and religious background of the women — one of them was ethnic Russian and Orthodox Christian, while the other one was ethnic Chechen and Muslim.

Missing for 17 years since Halloween

When Halloween rolls around each year, what comes to mind is 7-year-old trick-or-treater Tony Bagley. His face and story, a particularly sad and unsolved shooting that happened Halloween night of 1994, are tough to forget.

That’s when Tony, excited and dressed in a skeleton costume as he went door to door trick-or-treating, walked ahead of his sister, aunt and mother when he approached a street corner toward the next house.

At the same time, at 6:15 p.m., a man wearing a hooded sweatsuit ran into the street and opened fire on the Bagley family. Witnesses told investigators that the gunman then jumped into a waiting car and left the area, with the car headlights off.

Tony, a second-grader at Fitzgerald Elementary School, was shot in the head. His 10-year-old sister Shanell Bagley, his mother LaShelle Cooper and an aunt who asked to remain unnamed were also sprayed with the gunfire. Shanell required surgery to remove part of her liver, while the aunt, who was shot in the leg, and mother, who was struck in the chest, were treated and released. Tony was placed on life support and later died.

At face value, the shootings appeared premeditated, targeting the Bagleys. Northtown, as the city is nicknamed, is known as being gang-infested, although police have stopped short of connecting the crimes to gangs.

The only description of the shooter was that he was a 5-foot-8-inch African-American man who was wearing a dark-colored jogging suit. The killer vanished into the night, leaving a cold trail behind him.

Theories varied, with the most prominent being that another family member, not with the Bagleys that night, had been the intended target. That theory, however, never panned out for investigators. Then-Lt. Mike Blackwell with the North Las Vegas Police Department said instead that the shooting may have been retaliation for a drug deal gone bad.

The case was so frustrating for police and the family, because there were no real leads, that police went so far as to call on a psychic for help. Tony’s mother flew to Los Angeles with a detective to talk to the psychic, said the boy’s grandmother, Carolyn Landers.

“The psychic told them where the gun was, in an abandoned building,” Carolyn said. “It seemed good at first. But when police went to the building, there was no gun.”

The Bagley family found new hope when Tony’s story was broadcast four months later on “America’s Most Wanted.” But Ivey Van Allen, a publicist for the program, said afterward: “We didn’t get any calls.”

On the first anniversary of Tony’s death, the late Bob Stupak, a gambling mogul, offered a $100,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of Tony’s killer. Again, no leads came from it.