The rally comes after inmates in four of the states prisons waged a hunger strike that lasted nearly a month long in protest of their conditions.

Chief among the strikers’ five-point list of demands was a call for an end to so-called “debriefings,” lengthy interviews prison officials used to determine an inmates’ gang status. Prisoners complained the process often resulted in inmates being labeled snitches and targeted for violence by rivals.

Read more at The Grio.

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In Los Angeles, a former Sea Org member, Lawrence Wollersheim, sought twenty-five million dollars for “infliction of emotional injury.” He claimed that he had been kept for eighteen hours a day in the hold of a ship docked in Long Beach, and deprived of adequate sleep and food.

According to a court declaration filed by Rathbun in July, Miscavige expected Scientology leaders to instill aggressive, even violent, discipline. Rathbun said that he was resistant, and that Miscavige grew frustrated with him, assigning him in 2004 to the Hole—a pair of double-wide trailers at the Gold Base. “There were between eighty and a hundred people sentenced to the Hole at that time,” Rathbun said, in the declaration. “We were required to do group confessions all day and all night.

According to Rathbun, Miscavige came to the Hole one evening and announced that everyone was going to play musical chairs. Only the last person standing would be allowed to stay on the base. He declared that people whose spouses “were not participants would have their marriages terminated.” The St. Petersburg Times noted that Miscavige played Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” on a boom box as the church leaders fought over the chairs, punching each other and, in one case, ripping a chair apart.

Tom De Vocht, one of the participants, says that the event lasted until four in the morning: “It got more and more physical as the number of chairs went down.” Many of the participants had long been cut off from their families. They had no money, no credit cards, no telephones. According to De Vocht, many lacked a driver’s license or a passport. Few had any savings or employment prospects. As people fell out of the game, Miscavige had airplane reservations made for them. He said that buses were going to be leaving at six in the morning. The powerlessness of everyone else in the room was nakedly clear.

Jefferson Hawkins, a former Sea Org member and church executive who worked with Haggis on the rejected Dianetics ad campaign, told me that Miscavige had struck or beaten him on five occasions, the first time in 2002. “I had just written an infomercial,” he said. Miscavige summoned him to a meeting where a few dozen members were seated on one side of a table; Miscavige sat by himself on the other side. According to Hawkins, Miscavige began a tirade about the ad’s shortcomings. Hawkins recalls, “Without any warning, he jumped up onto the conference-room table and he launches himself at me. He knocks me back against a cubicle wall and starts battering my face.” The two men fell to the floor, Hawkins says, and their legs became entangled. “Let go of my legs!” Miscavige shouted.

Haggis called several other former Scientologists he knew well. One of them said that he had escaped from the Gold Base by driving his car—an Alfa Romeo convertible that Haggis had sold him—through a wooden fence. The defector said that he had scars on his forehead from the incident. Still others had been expelled or declared Suppressive Persons. Haggis asked himself, “What kind of organization are we involved in where people just disappear.

Whitehill and Venegas worked on a special task force devoted to human trafficking. The laws regarding trafficking were built largely around forced prostitution, but they also pertain to slave labor. Under federal law, slavery is defined, in part, by the use of coercion, torture, starvation, imprisonment, threats, and psychological abuse. The California penal code lists several indicators that someone may be a victim of human trafficking: signs of trauma or fatigue; being afraid or unable to talk, because of censorship by others or security measures that prevent communication with others; working in one place without the freedom to move about; owing a debt to one’s employer; and not having control over identification documents. Those conditions echo the testimony of many former Sea Org members who lived at the Gold Base.

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In addition to being beaten by his father (once, so badly that he blacked out for three days), Tyler Perry was also sexually abused by four different adults when he was a child.

Perry details his traumatic childhood, saying, “[It was] a living hell,” adding, “I feel like I died as a child.”

Tyler Perry Opens Up To Oprah About Child Abuse

He spoke about using his imagination to escape the pain:

“I could go to this park [in my mind] that my mother and my aunt had taken me to. … I’m there in this park running and playing, and it was such a good day. So, every time somebody was doing something to me that was horrible, that was awful, I could go to this park in my mind until it was over.”

He wept when Oprah asked him what he would say to the little boy left behind? “I would say, ‘It’s going to be all right.”

Perry wasn’t the only who cried today, he brought tears to Oprah’s eyes by thanking her for all she’s done for viewers for 25 years.

Take a look:

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Siohvaughn Wade is firing back at Dwyane Wade… On the same day she was arrested for failure to appear in court, she filed another lawsuit claiming Dwyane abused her and their two sons, physically and emotionally, for years.

In the lawsuit she said the abuse included picking her up and throwing her to the ground while she was pregnant.

In a February 2010 outburst, Dwyane Wade allegedly called their crying 8-year-old son a “m———–” and said “Didn’t I tell you men don’t f—— cry, man the f— up,” according to the lawsuit.

Attached to the lawsuit is a March application for a restraining order, sparked –she claims in the documents — by a recent fight between the Wades that triggered a panic attack.

James Pritikin, Dwyane Wade’s attorney, said he hadn’t seen the suit, but dismissed the allegations

“That’s not the first time she’s made the allegations, and there’s nothing to support them,” Pritikin said, noting the protracted divorce case can be attributed to Siohvaughn Wade. “Mrs. Wade demonstrates she just can’t let go.” – Source

I wonder if these two are thinking about the damage they’re doing to their kids???

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Antoinette Nicole Davis, the mother of 5-year-old Shaniya Davis

According to abcnews.com the body of 5-year-old Shaniya Davis was found alongside a North Carolina highway near her hometown, according to Raleigh ABC affiliate WTVD.
Searching for Shaniya Davis: North Carolina Police Search Highway for a Body.

Police have charged 25-year-old Antoinette Davis, left, of trafficking her daughter, 5-year-old Shaniya Davis, right, who has been missing for nearly a week.

Shaniya had been missing for nearly a week. Her mother, Antoinette Davis, 25, was due in court today on charges of human trafficking and child prostitution.

Fayetteville Police spokewoman Theresa Chance told ABCNews.com today that officers had been searching a portion of Interstate 87 between Harnett and Lee counties.

“Information that we received leads us here as far as where the body was discarded,” she said.

But police, she said, continued to receive tips constantly that there had been sightings of the little girl alive.

“This is very hard on the officers,” she said. “They have their own small children. Everyone thinks ‘What if this was my child?’”

Authorities had been working around the clock trying to bring the little girl to safety, Chance said.

“Everyone is very tired, very tired and worn out,” she said.

Mark Logan, executive and director of the Polaris Project and the former U.S. ambassador to combat human trafficking, called the cases of parents pimping or selling their own children “extreme,” especially when they are very young.

“It’s frightening to learn about the age of entry into prostitution being 12 to 14,” he told ABCNews.com today.

In general when parents traffic their own children, the fathers tend to be violent and abusive, while the mothers are typically desperate.

“But no poverty or economic desperation can along explain the prostitution of a child,” he said.

While there are no numbers on how many young children are trafficked by their own parents, there are about 100,000 minors trafficked in the United States each year, Logan said.

“Most of them are runaways or throwaways,” he said.

A school teacher in San Antonio, Texas is facing aggravated sexual assault of a child after police say he coerced some of his female students into having sex with him.

Police there say 37-year-old Robert Louis Rosseau is being held in the Bexar County jail under a $100,000 bail.

According to the Express News, Rosseau who taught classes at the Christian Academy of San Antonio, allegedly created a “secret society” to lure teenage girls into having sex with him.

Authorities said Rosseau’s secret society, which included him and two of the girls, began to unravel last month, when the third teen balked at joining the group. That teen told authorities that the two girls who were members of the society, which they referred to as an “order,” attempted to recruit her into the group on two weekends in September. To become a member, the two girls told the teen, she had to be “intimate” with Rosseau to establish trust, according to an arrest affidavit.

School principal Jim Bazar said none of the alleged incidents happened on school grounds and Rosseau has been terminated. Police say Rosseau could face more charges.

TMZ.com has tracked down the ex-wife of gospel star BeBe Winans to get her reaction to his continued appearances on “The Oprah Winfrey Show” despite his ongoing domestic violence case.

In February, Debra Winans made headlines after accusing her ex-husband of shoving her to the ground in front of their two kids, ages 10 and 13. According to the report, the two had a “verbal altercation” regarding “custody issues dealing with their children.”

In light of Winfrey’s stand against domestic violence, and particularly Chris Brown, who has pleaded guilty to assaulting then-girlfriend Rihanna, Debra Winans tells TMZ she’s “hurt by Oprah’s decision to have BeBe on the show.”

Ironically, BeBe’s arrest in February came one day before Oprah aired her domestic violence special in response to the Chris Brown case.

With a domestic violence charge pending until another court hearing next year, BeBe was on “Oprah” Friday to promote “Still,” his new gospel album with sister CeCe. He is also the host of “Oprah’s Karaoke Challenge,” a nationwide competition to find the best karaoke singer.

Round 1 of the challenge will air on Thursday (Nov. 5).

A 6-year-old who saw her mother brutally gunned down on the streets of Brooklyn two years ago has written a letter to first daughters Sasha and Malia Obama asking them for support.

“Hi Malia and Sasha,” Bianca Perez wrote in her letter to President Obama’s 11- and 8-year-old girls. “Two years ago, I lost my mommy. She was killed by a bad man in front of me. …

“I’m writing this letter to see if you can ask your daddy to help me and my daddy,” Bianca wrote in pencil above a drawing of Obama and his girls.

Bianca wrote the letter with the help of her father, Joseph Perez, 31, last week, according to the New York Daily News. They sent the letter over the weekend.

Her mother, Christina Scarabaggio, 27, was shot to death by an abusive boyfriend in September 2007 as she tried to shield Bianca, then 4, in front of their Bay Ridge home.

Christopher Flynn, 27, shot Scarabaggio twice in the back and once in the face before turning his .380-caliber handgun on himself.  Bianca has been living with her father on Staten Island ever since. Like many New Yorkers, he has fallen on hard times.

He’s a mover and a union member, but work has slowed to a trickle in the past few months. He owes his landlord $3,800.  His hours at work have been dwindling, and he hasn’t been working enough to qualify for health care, he said, so Bianca hasn’t been able to go to her therapist or dentist.

The city’s Administration for Children’s Services gave him a couple of beds, he said.  His luck turned worse last month, when his sister told him she would no longer be able to pick up Bianca from school because she had to get a job. Perez said he has no choice but to pay for day care when he’s working.

“I really don’t know how I’m going to do all this,” Perez said. “This week, I just worked one day.”

He said his daughter still has dreams about her mother’s killing but doesn’t like to talk about it.

Bianca said she often thinks about how her mom used to read books to her before bed. “Sometimes I have dreams about my mom,” she said. “She’s singing, ‘Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.’”

Gabourey Sidibe is the lead actor for the upcoming blockbuster movie “Precious.” The film isn’t going to open in theaters until November 6, but it has been garnering Oscar buzz for months. It’s executive produced by Oprah and Tyler Perry and directed by Lee Daniels of “Monster’s Ball.”

For the first time, we’re getting a bird’s eye view into the woman behind the “Precious” character.  Sidibe sat with ABC’s Good Morning America host Robin Roberts and revealed that she hasn’t even acted before.  This is her first role!  She is 26 and a college student.

You’ll find that Gabourey, or Gabby, as her friends and relatives call her, is a “little” different from the character she plays. And as you see in the photos, that’s an understatement.

The lead character and Mo’Nique (who plays her mother) are the big scene stealers for the project.  Oscar buzz has also been circling Mo’Nique since the first viewing of the trailer.  She comes through the screen as the venomous, abusive mother of Precious.

We’ve seen “Precious” and, trust us, Faye Dunaway in “Mommy Dearest” ain’t got nothin’ on Mo’Nique.

If you’ve either seen “Precious” itself or the trailer, but not the GMA piece, you need to click over NOW and link to the interview. You’re in for a treat.

I couldn’t help think about Noah (who is also 6) and what little Falcon must be thinking as he soared across the slightly windy skies of Colorado.  I cringed thinking that he may get caught in a power line, clip a plane or simply land poorly, causing his death.  The media speculated about the possibility of him not receiving enough oxygen and the tragic possibilities due to it being a helium balloon.  I watched, wanting Falcon to come out unscathed and praying for his parents.  I thought about what they must have been going through and couldn’t imagine being them.  I was scared. Then…the balloon wound up in that field.  The rescuers ran to its’ aid as quickly as they could.  There were paramedics on hand – in case.  They dug a small dirt trench to prevent the balloon from moving any further.  And they moved in.  They opened the door to the base and to their surprise (we think), there was no Falcon.  Where could he be?  Did he jump out along the way.  Oh my gosh!  Was this ending even more tragic than we originally thought?  No!  It was all a hoax.  They tricked us.  The lied.  They cried wolf.  They tugged at our heartstrings and made us fall in love with their son – and we wanted them to have a happy ending.  I’m over it!

When I sat and thought about people who use their kids to make it big, I got sick to my stomach.  Now, am I saying I don’t believe in child actors?  No!  I’m speaking to those people who have their children lie in order to gain the attention of the masses and those who SEEM to exploit their children with reality television: Octomom, John & Kate Plus 8…the list can probably go on a little.  Recently they even wanted Michael Jackson’s kids to appear in the reality series The Jacksons: A Family Dynasty.  *Ahem* Didn’t their dad JUST die?  And now we’re in talks about them participating in a reality show?  Get real!!  If we want to further damage these children…sure, let’s go right ahead and make that happen.  I just think it is so unfair to the children that they are subjected to the lights, cameras and action in order to increase television ratings.  Because let’s be honest, the raw, unscripted behavior of children is enough to capture the attention of viewers for years to come.   The crazy thing about Falcon and his family is, they had already been dipped into the reality world through “Wife Swap.”  I guess that wasn’t nearly enough for Richard (Falcon’s dad).  They obviously didn’t make as much of an impact on THAT show as they would their own bizarre life telling.  Well…now he’ll have a new reality show to put together.  One from behind bars!  Dummy!!

Read more: http://elev8.com/daily-offerings/news/lets-stop-pimping-our-kids-for-fame/#ixzz0VFsXxDWQ