Homeless vet, couple allegedly made up story for GoFundMe scam
The New Jersey couple who raised hundreds of thousands of dollars in a viral charity campaign for a homeless man were allegedly working with the vagrant as part of an elaborate ruse, according to a new report.
Prosecutors believe that Mark D’Amico and Kate McClure conspired with homeless man Johnny Bobbitt to create their get-rich-quick scheme in 2017, NBC’s Philadelphia affiliate reported Wednesday.
The couple turned themselves in to authorities Wednesday, but Bobbitt was still at large, the news station said.
According a source who spoke to the news outlet, which said it had a copy of a criminal complaint, all three are expected to face charges of conspiracy and theft by deception for working together to create the ruse. The Burlington County Prosecutor’s Office is expected to make an announcement in the case Thursday, according to multiple reports.
Prosecutors did not immediately return a call for comment, and reps for the couple and Bobbitt were not available.
McClure, 28, and D’Amico, 39, created a GoFundMe page in November 2017, claiming homeless drug addict Bobbitt spent his last $20 to fill up McClure’s empty gas tank after her car broke down on I-95 near Philadelphia.
The charity campaign exploded, raising tens of thousands of dollars from unsuspecting donors in a matter of days — and ultimately shooting up to more than $400,000.
“It has changed my entire outlook about people, my outlook about people has skyrocketed,” McClure said of the donations at the time.
Their plan began to unravel in August of this year, when Bobbitt sued the couple, claiming they were withholding funds raised on the GoFundMe from him.
McClure and D’Amico, both of Florence Township, NJ, accused Bobbitt of being on drugs and refused to pay him until he was clean.
Article via NYPost
Caregiver who left 4-year-old girl to die in hot car fined just $25
A Pennsylvania caregiver who left a 4-year-old child to die in a hot car two years ago was fined just $25.
After deliberating for three hours last Friday, jurors acquitted Brittany Borgess, 30, of Williamsport, of the most serious charges against her, the AP reported.
Borgess, who prosecutors said left family friend Samaria Motyka in an SUV with the windows closed for over six hours in July 2016, was acquitted of involuntary manslaughter, child endangerment and reckless endangerment.
Lycoming County Senior Judge Dudley Anderson found Borgess guilty of the summary charge of leaving a child unattended in a car. She fined her $25.
Upon hearing the verdict, several of the victim’s family and friends exploded with rage and were escorted from the courtroom for screaming profanities, Penn Live reported.
Defense attorney Peter Campana called Borgess’ actions on the day of the child’s death an “autopilot mistake.”
On the day of the tragedy, Borgess dropped her 2-year-old son, Isaac, off at his daycare. Instead of dropping family friend Samaria off at her daycare, Borgess drove straight to work, leaving the girl strapped to a booster seat in the back of the car. Williamsport temperatures hit 97 degrees that day, and Borgess parked the sweltering car in an area with no shade.
Six and a half hours later, Samaria was found unresponsive on the floor of the car with her head on the front passenger seat. She managed to get out of her booster seat, police said. Samaria’s internal temperature reached 110 degrees, according to an evaluation at Williamsport Regional Medical Center.
Campana argued Borgess was sleep deprived and stressed because she was about to get married and that she “didn’t want this to happen.”
Friends of the victim’s family started a GoFundMe page after her death. It raised $820 of its $1,000 goal.
via: https://nypost.com/2018/11/13/caregiver-who-left-4-year-old-girl-to-die-in-hot-car-fined-just-25/
Teacher suspended after student wore KKK outfit in class for presentation
A teacher in Missouri has been suspended after a student dressed up as a member of the Ku Klux Klan as part of a history class presentation, district officials said.
A ninth-grader at Poplar Bluff High School dressed as a member of the KKK on Friday as students in an American history class made presentations pertaining to amendments to the US Constitution. The student in question, wearing a white robe and hood, was part of a group assigned to the 15th Amendment — guaranteeing voting rights regardless of race or color, KFVS reports.
District officials have since suspended the teacher as an investigation continues, but they don’t believe the student was acting with intent to offend or discriminate against other students, according to the station.
“There’s no context for this,” Poplar Bluff School District Superintendent Scott Dill told KFVS. “There’s no point at which anyone in our public school system is going to say that this is OK. It is very obvious that this can’t happen in any setting anywhere, and so we will do our best to ensure that we do what we do best, which is education.”
District officials will now take steps to ensure teachers are providing “age-appropriate historical context” on key topics in a responsible manner.
“And we will make sure that our students, our teachers and our community understand the context, understand what is acceptable and what will never be acceptable,” Dill continued.
A letter of apology was sent by the unidentified teacher and read to students early Monday, KFVS reports.
“I made a mistake on Friday during our skit assignment,” the teacher wrote. “I let a student wear an inappropriate costume that was unacceptable and hurt many people’s feelings. As the professional in the room, I should have known better. I am sorry.”
The teacher’s apology continued: “I am so sorry for making this mistake, and I hope that you can forgive me and we can work through this together. I understand that healing and forgiveness take time, and I am absolutely okay with that.”
It wasn’t long before a photograph of the teen dressed as a Klansman soon began circulating on social media Friday. A former student who graduated from the school last year shared a Facebook post depicting the student but she had not been in the classroom at the time, the Springfield News-Leader reports.
“I’ve never ever heard of a history teacher who said it was okay to use a KKK costume for a project,” graduate Brianna Anthony told the newspaper. “Because when people walk into that classroom and see that uniform, that’s automatically a red flag.”
Costumes weren’t a part of history classes during her time at Poplar Bluff, Anthony said.
“We just got in group projects and did, like, reports,” she told the newspaper. “We used costumes in English, going over stories.”
via: https://nypost.com/2018/11/13/teacher-suspended-after-student-wore-kkk-outfit-in-class/
Janelle Monáe Is The 21st Century’s Time Traveler
It’s not enough to make list after list. The Turning the Tables project seeks to suggest alternatives to the traditional popular music canon, and to do more than that, too: to stimulate conversation about how hierarchies emerge and endure. This year, Turning the Tables considers how women and non-binary artists are shaping music in our moment, from the pop mainstream to the sinecures of jazz and contemporary classical music. Our list of the 200 Greatest Songs By Women+ offers a soundtrack to a new century. This series of essays takes on another task.
The 25 arguments writers make in these pieces challenge the usual definitions of influence. Some rethink the building legacies of popular artists; others celebrate those who create within subcultures, their innovations rippling outward over time. As always, women forge new pathways in sound; today, they also make waves under the surface of culture by confronting, in their music, the increased fluidity of “woman” itself. What is a woman? It’s a timeless question on the surface, but one deeply engaged with whatever historical moment in which it is asked. Our 25 Most Influential Women Musicians of the 21st Century illuminate its complexities. —Ann Powers
Janelle Monáe is many people in alternate timelines at once. She’s an archivist of right now, interpreter of back then, dreamer of one day. She imagines black people into the future in the midst of past and present threats of erasure. And after two studio EPs and three albums, the full scope of her work illuminates how the past, present and future might exist simultaneously. Who we were, who we are and who we’d like to be swirl and layer until timelines merge.
She’s Cindi Mayweather, an android on the run from an oppressive government dressed in black and white. She’s Jane, a human who holds onto her memories even as powers-that-be aim to systematically erase them. She’s a singer and actress; a queer, black woman who grew up in Kansas, City, Kan. to working class parents; an Atlanta transplant who sold her CDs and sang on Atlanta University Center library steps before signing with Bad Boy in 2008.
Monáe’s first self-released demo album The Audition (2003) was situated in both the present and the future. “Lettin’ Go,” a song about getting fired from Office Depot, appears on the same project as “Metropolis,” a four minute primer for the Afrofuturist world that Cindi Mayweather would love and live in. The universe she accelerated herself into was centuries away from the right now.
Monáe received the first of several Grammy nominations for “Many Moons,” a song from her 2007 release Metropolis: Suite I (The Chase). In Metropolis, androids are “the Other” in a dystopian reality set in 2719. The story of Metropolis revolves around Cindy Mayweather – just one of the characters Monáe would perform as, onstage and off, for much of her career.
These characters allow Monáe to sometimes speak in symbol and shadow. Timelines blur then sharpen, and visions of the future collide with present realities. “Left the city, my mama she said ‘Don’t come back home / These kids round’ killin’ each other, they lost they minds, they gone,'” she sings in Metropolis‘ “Sincerely, Jane.” Even when Monáe sings in character, the sense of something immediately true to her own life bobs into and outside of these voices.
Read more via NPR
Jada Pinkett Smith Admits to Struggling with Bias: ‘Blonde Hair on White Women Just Triggers Me’
Jada Pinkett Smith is revealing what “triggers” her about white women.
On Monday’s episode of Red Table Talk, the 47-year-old actress spoke about the relationship between white women and women of color, and revealed a surprising revelation of how she views the former.
“I think what crushes me, specifically in my relationship with white women, the thing that really breaks my heart is that white women understand what it feels to be oppressed,” Pinkett Smith said.
Her 17-year-old daughter, Willow, chimed in, “Because of their sex.”
“Exactly. Because of their sex,” the mother of two agreed. “What it feels like to be ostracized or not being treated as an equal.”
Pinkett Smith admitted to her own biases, saying, “I have to admit I’m guilty to that to a certain degree because I do have my own biases, specifically to blonde women.”
“Blonde hair on white women just triggers me,” the Girls Trip star said while snapping her fingers. “I’ve had to catch myself.”
“Do you have a specific incident with someone who had blonde hair?” her mother, Adrienne Banfield-Jones, asked.
“Absolutely. All throughout my childhood. I do remember experiencing being teased by white women in regards to my hair, how I looked, feeling belittled,” Pinkett Smith said.
Pinkett Smith then invited Red Table Talk producer Annie Price to the table to share her opinion on the racial divide between white women and women of color.
“Any time I want to have a conversation [about race] I’m afraid I’m going to offend somebody just by starting to talk,” Price said. “I feel like I’m going to say the wrong thing.”
She continued, “I hear a lot of times that white women have privilege and they need to recognize they have privilege. I’m sure I do. I just haven’t had the experience to recognize that I have the privilege. I don’t understand the feeling of racism. I feel a lot of times trying to be friends or trying to reach out to women of color, sometimes I feel like they don’t want to be my friend.”
Pinkett Smith said she believed “there is something unique” about “why black women and white women have such a difficult time [talking to each other].”
“We, even as black women, have to be willing to look at our biases that keep us from being able to bridge the gap,” she added.
Red Table Talk airs Mondays on Facebook Watch.
Article via People
Simon Cowell reveals he parted ways with Little Mix over disagreement on Woman Like Me
The group parted ways with Cowell’s label Syco just a week before the release of their LM5 album.
Simon Cowell has opened up about parting ways with Little Mix, the most successful act on his record label Syco.
The music mogul and X Factor judge told The Sun that the decision to sever ties came after falling out with their management company Modest over a songwriting credit on their latest single Woman Like Me.
Little Mix also said they weren’t keen on recording the song, which was co-written by Ed Sheeran, Jess Glynne and Steve Mac. The track peaked at Number 2 on the Official Singles Chart earlier this month.
“The irony was the record they were arguing about, which is Woman Like Me, they didn’t want to record,” Cowell said. “This was one of those ironic times that we were having a hit and nobody was happy.”
“It was just embarrassing but, funnily enough, I was more annoyed, again, not about me, but about the fact people who had worked so hard in my company were being misrepresented. Why do artists think they’re more important than staff members? They’re not. They’re the same.
Simon explained that the decision “wasn’t down to money”, adding: “Basically, they said we’d done a terrible job. I had agreed not to talk about this publicly because I thought it was a private matter. I said, ‘We can’t work with the management, it’s as simple as that’.
“Everyone’s like, ‘There must have been something massive and that’s why it collapsed’. Well, I can show you all the correspondence between me and the girls over the years, there’s never been an instance when we’ve fallen out. As I said in my email to them, I stand by the fact they are the hardest working bunch of girls I’ve ever worked with. They deserve everything they’ve got.”
MORE: Big albums still to come in 2018
Little Mix are gearing up to release their fifth album, LM5, on November 16. The group are due to perform on the new series of Michael McIntyre’s Big Show on BBC 1, which kicks off on November 17.
Article via OfficialCharts
Was Derek Fisher Worth It? Gloria Govan Loses Full Custody Of Her Boys To Matt Barnes
Matt Barnes just scored a colossal sized victory in his custody case against ex-wife Gloria Govan and was awarded sole physical and legal custody of their 10-year-old twins.
Barnes also got a restraining order against Govan that will extend through May 2020. But the order doesn’t include the children, named Carter and Isaiah, since the judge doesn’t believe she’ll be a threat to them.
Govan was also ordered to complete 26 anger management sessions, as well as 10 parenting classes.
The restraining order and mandatory sessions have to do with the “Basketball Wives” star being arrested in August after she and Barnes got into a confrontation at their sons’ school.
She was charged with felony child endangerment, which eventually got dropped but some might say the arrest led to the court’s decision to award Barnes custody.
Another theory could be that Govan’s high-profile relationship to Derek Fisher didn’t help her case either since it brought a lot of negative attention. If you recall, after Govan and Barnes split, she began dating Fisher, who used to be Barnes’ friend.
Then in October of 2015, Barnes drove 95 miles to Los Angeles and attacked Fisher after his boys called him to say he was inside their home.
Now, based on the judge’s ruling, Govan will be allowed to see her boys every other weekend and gets to have dinner with them every Wednesday evening.
So far she’s remained silent about the decision, but Barnes posted a photo with his attorneys, expressed his gratitude and called them the “Dream Team.”
Article via AtlantaBlackStar
Health department poured bleach on food meant for the homeless
Missouri health department officials admitted to pouring bleach on food meant for homeless people earlier this month, claiming the volunteers preparing and serving food didn’t have permits.
On Nov. 5, Kansas City health department employees dumped vats of chili and soup as well as sandwiches in bags and soaked them in bleach to stop homeless people from eating the food — which they deemed a potential health threat.
“E. coli or salmonella or listeria can grow in the food,” director of health for Kansas City, Rex Archer, told Fox 32.
“And then you give that to homeless people who are more vulnerable, they will end up in the ER and even die from that exposure.”
But members of Free Hot Soup, the organization feeding the homeless, told KCTV that homeless people were undeterred by the bleach and ate the food anyway because they thought it would “clean out their systems.” The group said that if the health inspectors were truly concerned about the health of the homeless, they wouldn’t have left the bags of food out for them to sift through.
The organization claimed the health department’s crackdown was actually to keep homeless people from gathering in public parks
“They don’t like the quality of people we are attracting. They don’t like looking at them,” Nellie Ann McCool with Free Hot Soup told KCTV.
The health department denied that allegation, according to an article published by the Kansas City Star this week.
Members of Free Hot Soup argued that they are merely “friends of the homeless,” and said if people don’t need a permit to host a potluck dinner for friends, neither should they.
“This is scaring all of us,” one of the group’s organizer’s, Tara McGaw, told the Kansas City Star on Nov. 5. “We’re not an establishment. We’re not a not-for-profit. We’re just friends trying to help people on the side.”
Kansas City Mayor Sly James sided with the health department after the story came to light.
Phony social media accounts posing as Powerball winner promise to give money to new followers
DES MOINES, Iowa – If you’ve recently followed Lerynne West on Facebook or Twitter with the hopes of getting a piece of her recent Powerball winnings, that likely isn’t going to happen. The lottery winner from Iowa is not handing out her winnings to strangers despite what some social media users are claiming.
According to Wixted and Company, the group handling Lerynne West’s media requests, several accounts on Facebook and Twitter have been reported after users have claimed to be West.
The grandmother claimed her $344 million Powerball jackpot prize earlier this month. Soon after claiming her winnings, fake accounts on Facebook and Twitter have appeared, promising that new followers will get a $100,000 piece of her winnings. There are many profiles on each platform claiming to be West.
After winning half of the $687 Million Powerball jackpot in early November, West launched a foundation that will help others and organizations in need, but not giving away money to new Twitter followers.