Daily News Feed 3.10.2010/Vocab: phantasmagoria

Because We Matter: Why Ebony is Still Needed
When talks between Johnson Publishing Company and Earvin “Magic” Johnson broke down last month, it seemed as though African-Americans shrugged and moved on. There was little concern that Ebony magazine, the bastion of black media in this country, might be headed to an exit after 65 years of continuous publishing. The celebrity-studded ‘zine that once breathlessly detailed star’s homes and love lives has fallen out of favor in the new media world of blogs, Twitter and Facebook. Now that Barack Obama is president of the United States, the reigning Miss America is black, both Mo’Nique and Three Six Mafia have won Oscars and a black men have coached their teams to Super Bowl wins, is there still a need for Ebony and its sister publication, Jet? (Continue Reading…)

Black Barbie sold for less than White Barbie at Walmart
Walmart is raising eyebrows after cutting the price of a black Barbie doll to nearly half of that of the doll’s white counterpart at one store and possibly others. A photo first posted to the humor Web site FunnyJunk.com and later to the Latino Web site Guanabee.com shows packages of Mattel’s Ballerina Barbie and Ballerina Theresa dolls hanging side by side at an unidentified store. The Theresa dolls, which feature brown skin and dark hair, are marked as being on sale at $3.00. The Barbies to the right of the Theresa dolls, meanwhile, retain their original price of $5.93. The dolls look identical aside from their color. (Continue Reading…)

FBI shuts down civil rights era investigations
With little fanfare, the FBI announced in an article in the Washington Post last week that it was closing its investigations into all but a handful of unsolved civil rights era murders. The head of the FBI team assigned to investigate these cold cases stated that “there’s maybe five to seven cases where we don’t know who did it. For every other case, we got it.” This announcement came as a surprise to activists who have pushed the FBI and the Justice Department to re-open and fully investigate many of these cases. It is also a blow to the families of murdered blacks from that era, who have been the primary force pushing federal law enforcement officials to fully investigate and unearth the truth of what happened to their loved ones. (Continue Reading…)

Christians flee after Nigeria’s massacre
Ed Gordon returns to BET News
NAACP calling for the resignation of school board chair
Report: Nearly half of Black women have herpes
East Africa new frontier for oil exploration