The cornerback steered his custom truck through familiar streets. The ex-convict sat shotgun and pointed out landmarks, this “drug hole,” that “crack house,” the best routes for eluding the police.

Al Harris, at right above, with Kevin Soto. The two childhood friends plan to release a Christian rap album in August.

The cornerback is Al Harris. He wears No. 31 for the Green Bay Packers. The ex-convict is Kevin Soto. He wore No. 693430 in the Florida Department of Corrections.

They met 25 years ago, two boys from the same neighborhood north of Miami, bonded by break dancing and back flips and music above all else. That was before Harris went to the N.F.L., before Soto went to prison, before either man had heard of Christian rap.

“All these years, music kept coming up, kept bringing us together,” Harris, 35, said. “It always came back to music, no matter what we did, or where we went.”

In August, Harris and Soto will release a Christian rap album, the culmination of two lives that veered in opposite directions and converged again recently.

The cornerback wore shoulder pads for the first time at age 2, already certain his future was in football. The local boys’ club produced a stunning number of elite athletes, including the N.B.A. guard Eddie Jones and the seven players from Harris’s Blanche Ely High School teams who have played in the N.F.L.

The ex-convict preferred hip-hop. Soto owned one of the first portable stereos in the neighborhood, and he wrote rhymes about street life and Burger King commercials and rapped over the latest beats.

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CLEVELAND IS BEING REPRESENTED ON AMERICAS GOT TALENT BY A UP AND COMING GROUP NAMED NU COVENANT!

NU COVENANT IS FROM CLEVELAND OHIO AND CONSIST OF THREE BROTHERS AND ONE COUSIN FROM FAIR TEMPLE CHURCH OF GOD IN CHRIST “COGIC”. THE GROUP HAS BEEN SINGING FOR YEARS AND ARE NOW TRYING TO MAKE IT BIG TIME! SO LETS SUPPORT NU COVENANT BY WATCHING THE LIVE SHOW ON AUG 3RD ON NBC! VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE!!!

NU COVENANT NEEDS YOUR VOTES SO THAT THEY CAN STAY IN THE RUNNING TO REPRESENT CLEVELAND OHIO!!

Be sure to check out the past episodes of America’s Got Talent on www.nbc.com

In a Newsweek cover story titled “The Reinvention of the Reverend,” writers Allison Samuels and Jerry Adler give their perspective of  the “indefatigable” Al Sharpton.

Read a snippet of the News Week article below

If the Rev. Al Sharpton didn’t exist, he would have had to be invented. In fact, the novelist Tom Wolfe has claimed he did invent him, in the character of the Reverend Bacon, a supporting figure in The Bonfire of the Vanities.

Each generation of black America gives birth to its own incarnation of the charismatic preacher-activist who confronts the white power structure in the streets and talks circles around it on Meet the Press.

Just a few months after the fictional Bacon made his appearance in 1987, the real Sharpton burst onto the national stage as the fiery advocate for Tawana Brawley, a New York teenager who claimed to have been raped by a gang of white men, including a policeman.

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Al Sharpton at the round table

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We’re listening. The administration is dedicated to equity in education and we’ve been working very closely with the civil rights community to develop the most effective policies to close the achievement gap, turn around low performing schools, and put a good teacher in every classroom.

By: M. Patrick

Women going through treatment for breast cancer felt better when they tried yoga, according to one of the first scientific studies of its kind.

“Our belief is something as simple and brief as a short (yoga) program would be very useful” at combating side effects from cancer treatment, said Lorenzo Cohen, a psychologist who led the pilot study.

Yoga incorporates meditation, relaxation, imagery, controlled breathing, stretching and physical movements. Although the study was small and preliminary, it’s one of the few to try to rigorously measure the benefits of this form of exercise, Cohen said.

Researchers at the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center focused on 61 women who had surgery for breast cancer and now were getting six weeks of radiation treatment. Thirty women were assigned to a test group that took twice-a-week yoga classes. The others did not.

At the end of six weeks, study participants filled out detailed questionnaires grading their ability to lift groceries, walk a mile and perform other physical activities. They also were asked about feelings of fatigue, their sense of well-being and other aspects of their quality of life.

Their scores were converted to a scale that ranged from 0 to 100. The researchers found the yoga group consistently had higher scores in almost every area. It was most pronounced in physical function – the yoga group had a mean score of about 82, compared with 69 for the other group.


Participants said they were in better general health, were less fatigued and had fewer problems with daytime sleepiness. But the researchers found no differences between the groups in measurements of depression or anxiety.

The researchers drew blood and took saliva samples in an effort to measure the participants’ immune system function and stress levels, but those results are not finished yet, said Cohen, who presented the results at a medical conference in Atlanta held by the American Society of Clinical Oncology.

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The core American ideal of religious freedom has been put at risk. News of Park51, the proposed Muslim community center in lower Manhattan, has spawned protests against a religious group that simply seeks to create a meeting place and has gone out of its way to make clear that the space will be open to the entire New York community.

These protests, diatribes, and campaigns against Park51 violate the ideals of religious freedom to which our country has long aspired. The First Amendment of the Constitution states explicitly that

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or of the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

The local government has so far done its part to uphold and apply these Constitutional rights. The Community Board of Lower Manhattan approved the building project 29 to 1, with 10 abstentions, and Mayor Michael Bloomberg voiced his strong support.

But individuals have taken the application of this freedom into their own hands. It would appear that more extreme voices want this right to apply only to their own religious communities, and not to others. But when one group’s freedoms are threatened, the religious freedom of all Americans is at stake.

In response to the ongoing and often radical criticism of Park51 and its leaders, we are proud to announce the launch of Religious Freedom USA. Religious Freedom USA is a new campaign to safeguard freedom of religion and mobilize Americans to support Park51 as an expression of this core American value. We invite and encourage you to join the movement. Send in a video of support, write a letter to the editor, sign our petition, help organize a local rally, or join us for an event here in New York.

Some may wonder why a Born Again Christian and a future rabbi, both under the age of 25, are working to build support for a Muslim community center. To us it seems natural: this is not simply a Muslim issue, a Jewish issue, or a Christian issue. This is an American issue, and members of all religious communities are affected by a threat to religious freedom.

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What do you think about a mosque being built near ground zero? Leave your comments below.

Standing ovations are a rare occurrence at scientific conferences, but at the 18th International AIDS Conference in Vienna this week, a husband-and-wife team of researchers received no less than three from a filled-to-capacity room of hundreds of scientists, activists, and reporters.

The reason for the thunderous out-of-seat applause? The couple’s team had completed one of the most promising, innovative and carefully conducted studies on HIV prevention in years. It revealed that a vaginal gel containing an HIV medication called Tenofovir could reduce the user’s risk of sexually contracting HIV by 39%. And did we mention it was also 51% effective in protecting the user against herpes transmission? The women were told to use the gel up to 12 hours before sex and then again up to 12 hours after sex.

“The implications of this are really enormous,” said Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in Bethesda, Maryland. The results have tremendous implications in the global fight against HIV, in which advocates have long been asking for a way that disempowered women can protect themselves against the virus. In countries where rape is used as a tool of war and oppression, the female condom, while highly effective, isn’t the answer.

On Thursday, June 15, 2010, Imago Dei Music Group recording artist and famed worship leader Darwin Hobbs was taken to the hospital by his wife, Traci Hobbs, where he was diagnosed with blood clots in his lungs and admitted to an Atlanta hospital.

“While traveling to the airport for a performance in the mid-west with his close friend Yolanda Adams, he became really short of breath…something just didn’t seem right and I decided that we had better get this checked before we go any further,” said Traci Hobbs.

It was this insight that may very well have saved Darwin’s life.  Darwin recently underwent a very popular weight-loss procedure called gastric lap banding. Although the surgery itself was extremely successful-resulting in a 45 pound weight loss in just three months-he has developed complications of pulmonary emboli, a condition more commonly known as “blood clots” in the lungs. Doctors at St. Joseph Hospital in Dunwoody, Georgia believe that the clots in Darwin’s lungs stemmed from a larger clot that they discovered in his right leg.

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