Half of black Americans born into poverty stay poor

Upward mobility from the bottom of the income distribution is much less likely for black than white Americans: 51% of the black Americans born into the lowest fifth of the earnings distribution remain there at age 40. Downward inter-generational social mobility from the middle to the bottom is much more common among black Americans. Seven out of ten black Americans born into the middle quintile fall into one of the two quintiles below as adults. In some ways, this is an even more depressing fact than the poor rates of upward mobility. Even black Americans who make it to the middle class are likely to see their kids fall down the ladder. Race gaps in wealth – already wide – widened further during the Great Recession. The median wealth of white households is now 13 times greater than for black households – the largest gap in a quarter century, according to analysis by the Pew Research Center. Black median wealth almost halved during the recession, falling from $19,200 in 2007 to $11,000 in 2013.

France: A rabbi who told police that he had been assaulted by Jihadists has been arrested on suspicion that he lied about the attack

Rabbi Tsion Saadon was taken into custody following the discovery of inconsistencies in his account of the alleged November 18, 2015 attack, which prompted passionate condemnations by police and even by President Francois Hollande. The rabbi claimed that he was stabbed by a man wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the symbol of the Islamic State terrorist group, who shouted anti-Semitic profanities at him with two other men. Saadon, a history teacher at the Marseille’s Yavne Jewish day school, displayed what appeared to be minor injuries. One of the two men whom Saadon said did not assault him physically showed him a picture of Mohammed Merah, the killer of four Jews in Toulouse in 2012, on his cell phone during the attack, he told police. But the injuries that Saadon showed police as resulting from the incident were inconsistent with the version he gave. Saadon is suspected of giving a false deposition and may be indicted.

An Egyptian court has handed down a life sentence that would be longer than most if carried out: The alleged criminal is only 4 years old

The strange case involves little Ahmed Mansour Qorany Sharara. A military court found him and 115 others guilty of killing three people and damaging state property during a protest in support of ousted President Mohamed Morsi in 2014. Ahmed would have been 16 months old at the time. After the verdict and the ensuing uproar over Ahmed's fate, the military admitted a case of mistaken identity. But Ahmed's fate is unclear, and his parents are worried because police have been inquiring about his whereabouts.

About half of gay and bisexual black men will be diagnosed with the AIDS virus in their lifetime, according to new government estimates

Overall, for the average American, the odds of an HIV infection is 1 in 99 and has been declining. But the risk varies widely for different groups. For example, the projection is 1 in 2 for gay black men but fewer than 1 in 2,500 for heterosexual white men. HIV, or human immunodeficiency virus, is spread mainly through sex and sharing needles for injecting drugs. In the United States, infections have long been most common in men who have sex with men. Gay and bisexual men have the highest risk, but there are racial differences within that group. For gay white men it's about 1 in 11 — a significantly smaller proportion than the estimate for blacks and Hispanics. Among heterosexuals, blacks are far more likely to be infected than other racial groups. For example, 1 in 49 black women compared to 1 in 1,083 white women.

Researchers led by Adam T. Hirsh of the School of Science at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis report that black and white Americans cope with pain differently and that blacks employ pain coping strategies more frequently than whites

The IUPUI review and analysis of 19 studies is the first to examine the entire published literature and quantify the relationship between race and the use of pain-coping strategies. "Coping" is broadly defined as the use of behavioral and cognitive techniques to manage stress. Pain coping is the specific application of these techniques for pain management. Hirsh, an assistant professor of psychology, and graduate students Samantha M. Meints and Megan M. Miller conducted the evidence-based review and analysis of clinical and experimental studies that included a total of 2,719 black and 3,770 white adults. Blacks were significantly more likely to use praying and hoping as pain-coping strategies than whites. Blacks were also more likely than whites to think about their pain in a catastrophic manner. "Our findings suggest that blacks frequently use coping strategies that are associated with worse pain and functioning," said Hirsh, a clinical health psychologist. "They view themselves as helpless in the face of pain. They see the pain as magnified — the worst pain ever. They ruminate, think about the pain all the time, and it occupies a lot of their mind space. This catastrophic manner of coping is frequently labeled by health providers as a negative or maladaptive approach to pain and has been associated with poor functioning," Hirsh continued. "But it may also be a potent communication strategy — it tells others in a culture with a strong communal component that the person is really suffering and needs help. Thus, it may be helpful in some ways, such as eliciting support from other people, and unhelpful in other ways. In future studies, we will give this more nuanced investigation." Ignoring pain rather than allowing it to interfere with the task at hand, known as task persistence, was the only coping strategy employed by whites more than blacks. Numerous investigations have found that differences in coping strategies are associated with differences in pain intensity, adjustment to chronic pain, and psychological and physical functioning. For example, several of the studies reviewed by the IUPUI researchers found that ignoring strategies are associated with less pain, whereas praying and hoping and catastrophizing are associated with higher pain levels. Blacks report higher levels of pain than whites for a number of conditions including AIDS, glaucoma, arthritis, post-operative pain and lower-back pain. Blacks also experience greater pain in both clinical and experimental studies. Blacks report less-effective pain care, are unable to return to work for a longer time and have worse functional outcomes. These race differences may be partly due to differences in pain-related coping, according to Hirsh. Chronic pain is a leading cause of work disability and costs the United States more than $600 billion annually in medical treatment and lost productivity, according to the Institute of Medicine report "Relieving Pain in America." Understanding how different racial groups cope with pain may inform chronic pain care and support individually tailored treatment.

Black Lives Matter supports racial segregation

Nashville Public Library tells Black Lives Matter activists that meetings welcoming only black people are not allowed on their premises. Enraged, Black Lives Matter activists accuse the local government of "white supremacy".

Studies show that heart failure disproportionately affects African Americans, with incidences roughly double that of whites

This population is also at greater risk of developing the condition at younger ages and dying from it. Hispanics have the second-highest risk of developing heart failure and are more likely to be younger, have diabetes or high blood pressure and be overweight/obese. Studies also show that Hispanics with heart failure have higher rates of hospitalizations and readmissions for heart failure. Numerous studies point to higher rates of modifiable risk factors such as high blood pressure, diabetes and obesity as the reason these groups are more likely to have heart failure.

Islamic barbarism: A teenage boy has been beheaded by ISIS for simply listening to Western music

Ayham Hussein, 15, was arrested by Muslim militants after allegedly being caught enjoying pop tunes on a portable CD player in the group's Iraqi capital Mosul. He was dragged before a Islamist kangaroo court which sentenced him to death in a public execution.

New research has identified common genetic variants predominantly found in African Americans that double their risk for blood clots

Venous thromboembolism (VTE) is a disorder characterized by blood clots that form in the deep veins of the legs that can travel to the lungs and become fatal. Those who suffer from VTE often have one or several alterations in their DNA that affect normal function of the blood's clotting process. Genotyping individuals to identify these genetic variants can help predict their risk. Researchers reports that the one-size-fits-all approach of looking for the same variants in all populations does not serve minorities, and the scientists conclude that African Americans clearly require a specific approach when their risk for VTE is assessed. In the United States, African Americans are 30% to 60% more likely to suffer from VTE than any other U.S. population. Despite this higher incidence, well-known genetic risk factors for VTE, such as factor V Leiden, are common in whites but occur infrequently in African Americans with the disorder. This realization led researchers to hypothesize that there might be undiscovered genetic variants more specific to African Americans. "While African Americans have a high risk for VTE, previous studies have not specifically focused on this population," said Minoli Perera, PhD, of the University of Chicago. "If we are not looking for the correct genetic mutations when we run a laboratory test, we are doing a disservice to minority populations." To understand the genetic risk factors for VTE specific to African Americans, a team of researchers led by Dr. Perera conducted a genome-wide association study in which they genotyped DNA samples from 578 African Americans, 146 of whom had a history of unprovoked VTE. Next, they confirmed the variants deemed highly prevalent in the first group by genotyping the DNA of an additional group of 159 African Americans, including 94 with VTE. Based on their analysis, researchers identified a link between VTE and three variants in a chromosome associated with decreased expression of thrombomodulin, a protein that regulates clotting: rs2144940, rs2567617, and rs1998081. Investigators suggest that the presence of one of these three variants doubles the risk for VTE. Approximately 36% of African Americans have at least one of these variants. Surprisingly, these variants were found in much lower frequency in other ethnicities from previous studies. "This study not only brings us closer to understanding the cause of VTE in African Americans, it demonstrates the importance of conducting population-specific research in precision medicine," said Dr. Perera. "Our next steps will involve investigating the predictiveness of these risk factors for VTE with the goal of reducing the high prevalence and burden of VTE in this disproportionately affected population."

There are just under 37,000 children in failing schools in Alabama and more than 34,000 of those children are African American

Of course, it isn't really the schools that are failing but the students. Unfortunately, in today's politically correct climate, it is almost impossible to hold blacks accountable for their own lack of academic achievement.

According to National Science Foundation data, African Americans overall earned just 4% of doctorates awarded in 2014 but the figures are far less in the sciences and mathematics — just 1.8% in the physical sciences, 2% of the Ph.D.s in mathematics and 1.7% of those awarded in engineering

In some fields not a single doctorate was awarded to an African American.

Nevada, which is more than a quarter Latino, was one of the states worst affected by the 2008 financial meltdown, with hundreds of thousands of families unable to pay their mortgages and forced to move in a crisis that by some estimates hit minorities twice as hard as whites

Las Vegas, Nevada’s biggest city, has seen some of the country’s highest foreclosure rates since 2008, hitting No. 1 among more than 200 U.S. metro areas from 2009 to 2011, according to RealtyTrac, a provider of real estate data and analytics. Even now, the city and its surrounding area rank No. 17. Latinos make up almost 32% of Las Vegas.

What did Gandhi really think of black South Africans?

“The white race of South Africa should be the predominating race,” said Mahatma Gandhi. He also said, of himself and his followers, “We believe as much in the purity of race as” white South Africans. He called black South Africans “kaffirs,” which is South Africa’s equivalent of “n***ers,” and objected to blacks living among South African Indians: “About this mixing of the Kaffirs with the Indians, I must confess I feel strongly. I think it is very unfair to the Indian population.” He wrote that “Kaffirs are as a rule uncivilized. . . . The reader can easily imagine the plight of the poor Indian thrown into such company!”

Jewish politician being investigated for assaulting woman

Former Gov. Eliot Spitzer is being investigated by the NYPD after allegedly assaulting a woman at the ritzy Plaza hotel, sources said. Sources said that after Spitzer allegedly attacked the woman at the Fifth Ave. hotel near Central Park, she tried to kill herself by slitting her wrists. Spitzer, 56, resigned in disgrace in March 2008 after he was embroiled in a prostitution scandal.

The rise of Trumpism

Charles Murray explains the rise of Donald Trump and why so many Americans are embracing his candidacy.

Pro-Hillary Clinton Super PAC is mostly backed by Jewish donors

At least eight of the top 12 donors to the pro-Clinton Priorities USA Action are Jewish — and one more is married to a Jew. Jews have contributed over half of the $41 million raised so far by the super PAC. Though the group had planned to save its money for the general election, Priorities will now spend millions in upcoming primaries to promote early voting among groups likely to back Clinton, and to run pro-Clinton ads in South Carolina. Nearly half of Clinton's financial sector donations appear to come from just two wealthy Jewish financiers, George Soros and Donald Sussman. Soros, the Hungarian-born billionaire investor, and Sussman, a hedge fund manager, are just two members of an elite group of just over a dozen Jewish mega-donors who have given a total of $25 million to Priorities USA Action, more than half of what the group has raised so far this cycle. Clinton has helped Priorities raise money and has met with the group’s donors. Those donors are overwhelmingly Jewish. Other major Jewish donors to the group include “Power Rangers” super-mogul Haim Saban, who has given $2.5 million (his wife Cheryl, who is not Jewish, gave another $2.5 million); Herbert Sandler, former owner of a large savings & loan association called Golden West, who gave $1.5 million, and Slim-Fast billionaire S. Daniel Abraham, who gave $1 million. Also on the 2015 Priorities USA Action donor rolls are Jewish Hollywood figures Steven Spielberg, who gave $1 million, his former DreamWorks partner Jeffrey Katzenberg, who gave $1 million, and Star Wars director J.J. Abrams, who gave $500,000. (Abrams’s wife Kathleen McGrath gave another $500,000.) Since its creation in 2011, Priorities USA Action has been something of a Jewish shop. Among its largest donors in the 2012 cycle were Katzenberg, Abraham, Spielberg, and Qualcomm founder Irwin M. Jacobs.

Over the past decade, according to FBI data, 40% of cop killers have been black

Police officers are killed by blacks at a rate 2.5 times higher than the rate at which blacks are killed by police.

Researchers have found that despite the complexity of the US population, individuals know their ancestral origins, and that self-reported ethnicity and race is a reliable indicator of genetic ancestry

In one genetic study, 98.7% turned out on their DNA test to be primarily what they self-identified as and among those who identified as non-Hispanic white, 427 out of 430 had their self-identifications confirmed by the genome analysis as of European ancestry.

The first study to look at dementia risk in a population representing the diversity of the United States finds dementia incidence to be highest in African Americans and lowest in Asian Americans

The rate of occurrence of dementia in African Americans was found to be 65% higher than Asian Americans. The scientists compared dementia incidence across six racial and ethnic groups – Whites, Asian-Americans, Latinos, African Americans, American Indians/Alaskan Natives, and Pacific Islanders. "Most research on disparities in dementia includes only one to two racial and ethnic groups, for example only Whites and African Americans," said study first author Elizabeth Rose Mayeda, Ph.D., Postdoctoral Fellow at University of California, San Francisco in the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics. "Our study is the only work that compares dementia for these six racial and ethnic groups representing the aging demographic of the United States in a single study population. It is also the first study to look at incidence of dementia in Pacific Islanders and American Indians." The researchers found that dementia incidence over the 14-year study period ranged from an average annual rate of 26.6 cases of dementia per 1,000 people for African-Americans, and 22.2 cases per 1,000 people for American Indians/Alaskan Natives, to 15.2 cases per 1,000 people for Asian-Americans. In between were Latinos and Pacific Islanders with an average annual rate of 19.6 cases per 1,000 people, and whites with 19.3 per 1,000. Using the observed dementia incidence rates and a widely accepted method of calculating a person's lifetime risk for developing a disease, the researchers estimated the percentage of individuals free of dementia before age 65 in each racial and ethnic group who can expect to be diagnosed with dementia over the next 25 years. The projections were 38% of African Americans, 35% of American Indians/Alaskan Natives, 32% of Latinos, 25% of Pacific Islanders, 30% of Whites, and 28% of Asian Americans.

An Iraqi migrant raped a 10-year-old boy at a swimming pool in Vienna and told police that it was a "sexual emergency" because he hadn't had sex in months

A 10-year-old boy was so brutally raped by an Iraqi migrant in a swimming pool cubicle that he had to be hospitalized for his injuries. A lifeguard immediately called an ambulance after the boy went to him in floods of tears, while the Iraqi was entertaining himself by repeatedly jumping off the three-meter diving board. Police arrested him on the spot at the pool in Vienna, and during an interrogation, he told them that it was a "sexual emergency" as he had not had sex in four months. The migrant, who had entered the country through the Balkans on September 5, 2015 official records show, said that he could not help himself as he had an "excess sexual energy".

DNA evidence lifted from the ancient bones and teeth of people who lived in Europe from the Late Pleistocene to the early Holocene - spanning almost 30,000 years of European prehistory - has offered some surprises

Perhaps most notably, the evidence shows a major shift in the population around 14,500 years ago, during a period of severe climatic instability. "We uncovered a completely unknown chapter of human history: a major population turnover in Europe at the end of the last Ice Age," says leading author Johannes Krause of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Germany. The researchers pieced this missing history together by reconstructing the mitochondrial genomes of 35 hunter-gatherer individuals who lived in Italy, Germany, Belgium, France, the Czech Republic, and Romania from 35,000 to 7,000 years ago. Mitochondria are organelles within cells that carry their own DNA and can be used to infer patterns of maternal ancestry. "There has been a real lack of genetic data from this time period, so consequently we knew very little about the population structure or dynamics of the first modern humans in Europe," Krause says. The new data show that the mitochondrial DNA of three individuals who lived in present-day Belgium and France before the coldest period in the last Ice Age - the Last Glacial Maximum - belonged to haplogroup M. This is remarkable because the M haplogroup is effectively absent in modern Europeans but is extremely common in modern Asian, Australasian, and Native American populations. The absence of the M haplogroup and its presence in other parts of the world had previously led to the argument that non-African people dispersed on multiple occasions to spread across Eurasia and Australasia. The researchers say that the discovery of this maternal lineage in Europe in the ancient past now suggests instead that all non-Africans dispersed rapidly from a single population, at a time they place around 50,000 years ago. Then, at some later stage, the M haplogroup was apparently lost from Europe. "When the Last Glacial Maximum began around 25,000 years ago, hunter-gatherer populations retreated south to a number of putative refugia, and the consequent genetic bottleneck probably resulted in the loss of this haplogroup," explains first author of the study Cosimo Posth of Germany's University of Tübingen. The researchers say that their biggest surprise, however, was evidence of a major turnover of the population in Europe around 14,500 years ago, as the climate began to warm. "Our model suggests that during this period of climatic upheaval, the descendants of the hunter-gatherers who survived through the Last Glacial Maximum were largely replaced by a population from another source," says Adam Powell, another senior author at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History. The researchers say that the next step is to construct a more comprehensive picture of the past by analyzing the complete genomes of these ancient individuals along with additional specimens representing more times and places.

Police shootings account for a much smaller share of homicides in the black community than in other communities: 4% of black homicide victims are killed by the police, compared with 12% of white and Hispanic homicide victims

Though they made up 15% of the population, in America’s 75 largest counties in 2009, blacks constituted 62% of all robbery defendants, 57% of all murder defendants and 45% of all assault defendants. In New York City in 2014, blacks committed 75% of shootings and 70% of robberies — as reported by the victims of and witnesses to those crimes — but represented only 23% of the population. In contrast, whites committed less than 2% of shootings and 4% of robberies in New York City in 2014, though they are 34% of the city’s population.