18 Year Old Runner On Suicide Watch After Hermaphrodite Revelation

Caster Semanya Found to Be a Hermaphrodite

Caster Semanya’s gender fiasco manages to get worse. E-mail correspondence found by the South African newspaper Mail & Guardian shows that her team doctor Harold Adams and athletics boss Leonard Chuene did indeed know that Semenya was tested in South Africa before the World Championships in Berlin but kept Semenya in the race even after they found out that her test results were “not good.”

Semenya crossed the 800-meter finish line a full minute before her competitors. Her time, coupled with her supposed virile looks, prompted championship officials to order a gender test.

Allegedly, after arriving in Berlin on Aug. 9 with Semenya, Adams received a call from the Medforum Medi-Clinic, saying that Caster’s gender test results were problematic. Adams supposedly instructed Chuene and other ASA officials to pull Semenya from the competition, but they refused.

This latest news from the Guardian is quite controversial, because Chuene originally insisted that Semenya had not been tested before Berlin. When evidence came out that she was tested, he insisted that he had no knowledge of it.

According to a Guardian source:

Mlangeni-Tsholetsane [ASA events manager] said they couldn’t withdraw Semenya, because they needed a medal at all costs. Chuene didn’t even bother to brief the athlete about the developments around the tests and the implications. They destroyed an innocent girl because of a medal.

By now, everyone knows that Semenya was reportedly found to be a hermaphrodite, an individual with both male and female genitalia.

The 18-year-old star is supposedly on suicide watch.

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An Officer & A Lady: African American Woman Takes Charge of Army Drill Sergeants

Command Sgt. Maj. Teresa King

FORT JACKSON, S.C. (AP) — Command Sgt. Maj. Teresa King can dress down a burly, battle-hardened sergeant in seconds with a sharp phrase and a withering look, then turn around and tell trainee soldiers to be sure they get seven hours of sleep.

As the first woman to take charge of the Army’s school for its order-barking drill sergeants, the 28-year military veteran and sharecropper’s daughter said she’s used to breaking down barriers in military roles normally reserved for men.

“It’s so easy because I love it,” said King, a single, 48-year-old North Carolina native. “I have a family in the Army. It is my family.”

The stern discipline dispensed by her late father to his 12 children set her on a path of taking responsibility for herself and her siblings early on, King said during a recent interview on the Army’s training base next to Columbia.

She learned to “give a hard day’s work for whatever I earned and take no short cuts,” said King, who enjoys passing her values to young soldiers and watching them grow into senior officers and enlisted men and women.

Lt. Col. Dave Wood, King’s battalion commander, said she was chosen for her approach to “the business of taking civilians and making them into soldiers.”

Gone are the days of two decades ago, Wood said, when his drill sergeant made him clean wax off a floor with a razor blade or run around the barracks loaded down with a full duffel bag.

“She’s got this unique way of dealing with soldiers where she can be correcting them, but it’s in a manner that they’re wanting to please her and wanting to do the right thing,” he said. “It’s not degrading to them.”

King takes over command of the Drill Sergeant School on Tuesday at Fort Jackson, the Army’s largest training installation. This year the school will churn out about 2,000 of the in-your-face instructors.

The tough love approach comes through as King conducted her barracks inspections and daily “walkabout” to meet with senior enlisted men and women on a recent weekday.

A touch of bright red lipstick and kohl-dark eyeliner doesn’t soften her stern gaze when she spots a sheet corner not properly tucked or a young soldier with a uniform askew.

“What’s going on here?” she queries, soldiers jumping to attention as she enters a room as they relax between classes on becoming finance clerks or legal aides. “Get back to school and get back to doing something!”

King’s face softened once she determined one soldier in exercise gear wasn’t goofing off, but just back from the dentist and a root canal. “Get some rest, soldier,” she advised the woman with a swollen face and jaw.

“You all make sure you get your seven, seven hours of sleep!” King said before heading out the door.

King’s inspection companion, 1st Sgt. Teddy Johnson, said with a relieved grin that a day without King’s stern critiques “wouldn’t be a normal day. … She’s always that way.”

Still, she has time for a few other pursuits. She’s completed one master’s degree in business management and is working on another in theology, saying she enjoys studying issues of leadership in the Bible.

King’s elevation marks another barrier broken in a still male-dominated service of 550,000 soldiers, of which only about 14 percent are female.

There were few women training alongside men when she first entered the military in 1980, just out of high school. Several years later, she was chosen to train as a drill sergeant.

King rose to become the first female first sergeant named to oversee the heart and soul of Army warfighters: the headquarters company of the 18th Airborne Corps at Fort Bragg, N.C., where she was responsible for 500 paratroopers, 22 sergeant majors, 22 colonels and three general officers. She’s served in South Korea and Europe and held jobs at NATO and the Pentagon.

While opportunities for women have increased over the past two decades, they are still excluded from assignments where soldiers engage in direct combat, such as infantry and tank units.

Yet modern-day battlefields in Iraq and Afghanistan have shown that front lines no longer exist, and even accountants or medics in the rear can find themselves in the heat of battle and must defend themselves and their buddies.

“I have one chance to do it, and if I don’t get it right, that soldier could not survive on the battlefield,” King said.

She’s pleased that her rise should help others, she says.

“It means a door has been opened. … Who knows how far we can go?” she asks. “I just want people to be able to fly.”

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Wells Fargo Uses Tavis Smiley For Subprime Loan Trap?

Did Tavis Smiley help Wells Fargo herd black people into subprime loans? Yes, according to information contained in a lawsuit filed recently by Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan. The suit alleges that Smiley was the hook used to draw in potential customers for subprime mortgages.

You might be familiar with the “Wealth Building” seminars that Wells Fargo conducted beginning in the year 2000. Smiley was the headline speaker at these events, held in Baltimore; Chicago; Richmond, Va.; and San Francisco. The seminars were advertised aggressively in black media and aimed directly at black communities. They were a huge success. Often, standing room only audiences would hear Smiley speak about how he mostly disliked banks while strongly urging attendees to invest in real estate as a sound strategy to build wealth.

Turns out that keynote may be responsible for many unsophisticated, would-be home buyers being particularly vulnerable to the subprime loan slop Wells Fargo allegedly intended to push toward them:

But what appeared on the surface as a way to help black borrowers build wealth was actually just the opposite, according to a little-noticed explanation of the “Wealth Building” seminar strategy, contained in a lawsuit recently filed by Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan.

Wells’ plan for the seminars all along was to target black borrowers for higher-cost subprime mortgages, not for wealth-building, the suit charged. And the seminars were a part of the bank’s overall illegal and discriminatory practice of steering black and Hispanic borrowers into riskier and more expensive loans, the suit said.

According to a former Wells Fargo Home Mortgage employee, one of these “Wealth Building” seminars held in Maryland was planned for an audience that would be virtually all African American, the suit said. The plan for the seminar was for Wells Fargo Home Mortgage employees to talk about sub-prime mortgages, although they were directed by Wells Fargo Home Mortgage to use the term ‘alternative lending’ when marketing these products.” The former employee, who is white, was scheduled to speak at the seminar, but was told by a manager that she was “too white,” and that only black employees could make presentations, the suit said.

Wells Fargo, one of the nation’s largest mortgage lenders and a recipient of $25 billion in government bailout money, has denied all the charges in the Illinois suit, as well as other allegations of unfair lending. The bank did not respond to requests for comment on the seminars. Smiley, an author and advocate who hosts the late-night talk show, ‘Tavis Smiley,’ and who organizes the State of the Black Union symposiums each year, also declined comment. Source: Suit Alleges Trusted Black Figures Drew Minorities to High Rate Loans, Washington Independent

These are extremely serious allegations that will play out in the legal arena. But having worked with Smiley during the last “State of the Black Union,” I do not believe he intentionally set out to hurt black people or poor people in general. That would be like me believing that Wall Street intentionally set out to destroy its own money-making schemes.

There are at least two glaring takeaways from this. For Smiley, I’m sure he’s learned the hard way to be much more careful about how people use him and his established goodwill to sell stuff. I am skeptical of all corporations. But the other takeaway is the observation that this white company used a black spokesman to instantly gain trust and credibility where it had done little work on the ground in the black community to EARN it themselves.

All of us need to be particularly cautious when any company pushes a black person to sell you something they want you to “feel” good about and not understand.

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