September 2011 Archives

The South has a high rate of violence against women and Georgia has the 6th-highest rate of women killed by men, reports the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

The Homicide data is from 2009, and was put together by the Violence Policy Center. The states with the most violence against women are: Nevada, Alabama, Louisiana, Arizona, Tennessee, Georgia, South Carolina, South Dakota, Hawaii and Missouri, according to the study.

Terrell Owens, better known as T.O., caught up on child support that he owes to the mother of his child and avoided a stint in jail, reports the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

Prior to paying, T.O. was looking at a possible jail sentence on a contempt charge, because he had fallen two months and $10,000 behind. He owes $5,000 a month. Ownes' case is in the Georgia courts because he is a resident of Fulton County, reports AJC.

Arguing that his child's homework promotes polygamy, a Cobb-County parent named Hal Medlin filed a complaint with the school district, reports WSBTV.

The situation arose at Campbell Middle School where Hal Medlin's 13-year-old daughter was assigned to read a letter from a Muslim woman from a non-western country. It contained a passage that said that the woman wouldn't mind if her husband took more wives in the future. Hal Medlin felt this was an inappropriate promotion of polygamy (and the Islamic religion), reports WSBTV.

Regardless of how the school district decides to handle the matter, it might be useful to discuss the phenomenon of taking multiple wives, also called polygamy, and the law that covers this practice.

Taylor Armstrong’s abuse at the hands of her late husband will make up a big part of an upcoming Entertainment Tonight episode, as well as a Dr. Phil show, reports Reuters.

Taylor, a star of Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, is speaking out for the first time since her husband Russell Armstrong’s suicide. Russell killed himself by hanging back in August, just weeks before a new season of Real Housewives of Beverly Hills debuted on September 5.

Police have apprehended a suspect in the shooting of a woman and her ten-year-old daughter outside a Rockdale County daycare center, reports the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. What makes the killings particularly tragic is that the suspect is the husband of the woman that was killed.

Police arrested Terrence Sherrod Roberson when he walked into the sheriff’s office and surrendered three hours after the Little Mountain Christian Academy shooting. From the few facts that have been revealed so far, it would seem that Terrence Sherrod Roberson was viewed as a danger by many people, as his mother previously called her son’s boss and warned him that her son had stolen a car and was armed, reports the AJC. Roberson has currently been charged with various counts of aggravated assault.

The Salahis, the couple famously known as the white house crashers and later featured on The Real Housewives of D.C., are going their separate ways, reports the Orlando Sentinel.

The odd circumstances leading to the divorce between Tareq and Michaele Salahi include the salacious gossip that she left Tareq to have an affair with the married rocker Neal Schon of Journey. And, in fact, Tareq is reportedly banned from Journey's gigs in Atlanta, reports the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

Entertainment aside, there is a legal angle to this story that is useful for those who want to look deeper. Namely, the various stipulations reportedly in the prenuptial agreement between the Salahis.

He didn’t call a baby-sitter or the child’s mother when the child was crying, opting to use force instead. And now the Georgia Supreme Court has upheld the murder conviction of the Clayton County man, Jeremy Antonio Stokes, who suffocated his son in 2008, reports the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

Jeremy Antonio Stokes had previously been convicted of the “forcible suffocation” of his son Jeremiah, but had reached the Georgia Supreme Court on appeal. The murder occurred after Stokes grabbed the crying child’s face and tried to force a pacifier down.

Tragedies like a father that suffocated a child leave little room for speculation. The best thing to do is simply to mourn the loss of life.

William Nazario, the boyfriend of a woman who was found dead in Clayton County and whose children were bound in her home, is being identified as a person of interest by the authorities, reports WSBTV.

The woman, identified as Korean Bowden, was discovered by her pastor, who went to check on her at her home. That's where the children, ages 4 and 12, were found bound up. William Nazario had fled in a black Chevy Tahoe, but the authorities eventually caught up to him. He is currently facing charges of false imprisonment and aggravated sodomy, reports WSBTV.

People that are familiar with the couple say that the relationship between William Nazario and Korean Bowden had come violent, at the level of pushes and shoves.

If you can have a roommate when neither of you have kids, why not have a roommate when both of you have kids? This simple idea of community, along with finances, seems to be driving a new trend, that of single mom cohabitation, reports Babble.

Although the idea of communal parenting is as old as time -- even Plato recommended it -- the recent rise of single mom cohabitation may be simple demographics. According to a number of surveys about single mother parenthood, 41% of new mothers are unmarried. Faced with similar challenges, it was only a matter of time that single moms living together became more widely accepted.

The story of the Frenchman that was ordered to pay his wife $14,000 for failing to have sex with her for 21 years is making the rounds, reports CBS Atlanta.

In the now infamous case, a judge in Nice ruled that among married couples “sexual relations must form part of a marriage.”

This prompted CBS News to locate a study by Georgia State University which found that 15 percent of married couples haven’t had sex with their spouses in the last six-months-to-one-year.

A recent divorce made a Savannah bailiff so angry that he drove through the Liberty County Courthouse in a vehicle, reports the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

The man, reportedly named James Gregory Frasier Jr., is from Hinesville and 44-years-old. He has been charged with a criminal attempt to commit property damage, reckless conduct, and terroristic act. The rampant Savannah bailiff, who drove a Mercedes, launched his car into a brick planter outside the back entrance to the courthouse. No one was injured, and the bailiff only suffered minor injuries.

What if you were responsible for helping bring 150 plus children into this world? It might sound astonishing, but there is at least one man out with that much off-spring. No, he's not a polygamist. He's a sperm donor that has so many children now that they have their own club, reports the New York Times.

The case of this one very successful sperm donor highlights the larger trend in American reproduction, that each year there are between 30,000 and 60,000 children born from donors. Even this estimate is small, it seems, because most women don't report that they were inseminated by a donor.

After the pop-star Beyonce Knowles and her husband Sean "Jay-Z" Carter announced news of Beyonce's pregnancy it created history's biggest Twitter storm. It was bigger even than the death of Osama Bin Laden or the Japanese Earthquake, reports Huffington Post.

If a pregnancy has that kind of cache, then its likely going to spur discussions as well. One conversation was launched by Charing Ball, a columnist for the Atlanta Post, which describes itself as "an online news site about African-American business news and African-American politics."