clipped from www.nytimes.com

Job Seekers Get a Gift of Goodwill

By CLYDE HABERMAN

She had the sad eyes of someone who’d known tough days, the eyes of the jobless. “It’s been a year,” she said when asked when she last had work. “A long time.”

At first this middle-aged woman didn’t mind giving her name, but then asked to retreat into anonymity. She had a possible job lined up: case manager for a social services agency. Might as well play it safe. No need to advertise her long unemployment or where she was standing at the moment, in a Goodwill store on Third Avenue in East Harlem.

clipped from www.nydailynews.com

Harlem specialty cupcake shop Tonnie's Minis part of growing number of gourmet bakeries in New York

BY Spencer Bailey

SPECIAL TO THE DAILY NEWS

Warga/News

Tonnie's Minis in Harlem was opened by Tonnie Rozier (l.) and Karen Filippi just weeks ago when the store was asked to be featured on the Wendy Williams Show.

Tonnie Rozier was about ready to open up Harlem's first cupcake specialty store in late October when the call came from the Wendy Williams Show.

The daytime talk-show hostess wanted to feature his Tonnie's Minis shop as part of National Dessert Week. Rozier put icing production in high gear.

"Since we opened up our doors, there hasn't been a dull moment," said Rozier, 40.

Located at 264 Lenox Ave. at 123rd St., Rozier's shop is just one in a growing number of gourmet cupcake bakeries whose colorful, cream-filled display cases have popped up all over Manhattan.

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City Councilman Charles Barron gears up to challenge current Council speaker Christine Quinn

BY Kathleen Lucadamo

DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER

Saturday, December 5th 2009, 4:00 AM

Smith for News

City Councilman Charles Barron will announce his bid for Council speaker on Sunday.

Controversial City Councilman Charles Barron is gearing up to challenge Christine Quinn's reign as Council speaker.

"This is going to be done from the ground up," said the Brooklyn Democrat, who plans to announce his bid Sunday with dozens of community leaders on the steps of City Hall.

"I think the speaker should be a facilitator, not a dictator," said Barron, who has long argued that Quinn (D-Manhattan) wields too much power.

Barron admits "it's a long shot" that he'll win, but the move will make waves for Quinn, who ran unopposed for the post four years ago.

The Council votes on the position in January, but county political bosses - who favor Quinn - have a heavy influence on the vote.

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Council Speaker to Unveil Policy on Food for the City

By JULIE BOSMAN

Christine C. Quinn, the City Council speaker, is to unveil a long-term plan on food policy on Monday, a plan she says goes beyond the issues of trans fats and sugary sodas to address the production, transportation and sales of food in New York City.

Her initiative, called FoodWorks New York, is meant to build on the efforts of the Bloomberg’s administration’s food policy coordinator, Benjamin Thomases, whose office improves access to food for low-income New Yorkers. Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg first established the food policy coordinator’s office in 2007.

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Frisky risky for city kids

By YOAV GONEN Education Reporter

More city public high-school kids are testing positive for sexually transmitted diseases now than two years ago -- when the city started its nearly $1 million education and testing program to combat STDs.

More than 8 percent of girls and 4 percent of boys who volunteered for the Department of Health screening program this past school year tested positive for chlamydia or gonorrhea, the two most common bacterial STDs.

That translated into 667 positive test results among the 11,410 teens at 111 high schools who submitted confidential urine samples, an overall infection rate of nearly 6 percent.

That figure was a slight drop from the 2007-08 school year, when 7.3 percent of the tests came back positive.

But it was an increase from 2006-07 -- the first year of the program -- when the infection rate among a smaller sample of students was 4.8 percent.

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Holiday Books

Photography

By JENNIFER BASZILE

Whether the lashed back of an enslaved person, the charred remains of a lynching victim or a terrified marcher fleeing a fire hose, shocking images of degradation seem to dominate the visual history of the African-American experience. Amid so much hardship, one might wonder what, if anything, to say about the nature of black beauty in photography. Deborah Willis, head of New York University’s photography and imaging department, spent a decade exploring the question. In POSING BEAUTY: African American Images From the 1890s to the Present (Norton, $49.95), Willis makes a monumental contribution to contemporary American culture by presenting a definitive history of black beauty.

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© Carnegie Museum of Art; from “Posing Beauty”

A portrait of a woman modeling a double V hairstyle, by Charles (Teenie) Harris, circa 1940s.

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From “Posing Beauty”

Anthony Barboza’s “Harlem, 1970.”

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Holiday Books

The Man Who Sang, Played and Smiled

By DAVID MARGOLICK

One of the hardest parts of writing a biography is finding a fit subject, but sometimes they’re in plain sight. Despite his incalculable contributions to American culture, there has never been a fully adequate narrative biography of Louis Armstrong. Terry Teachout now fills that void with “Pops.” He begins by suggesting how this omission came to be, then persisted for so long.

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SATCHMO
The Wonderful World and Art of Louis Armstrong
By Steven Brower
256 pp. Abrams. $35.

“My hobby is to pick out the different things during what I read and piece them together and [make] a little story of my own,” Armstrong once explained. These striking, intimate collages of print, script, tape and photography, made between 1953 and 1971, display a startling virtuosity and amount to a kind of fractured self-portrait.

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Chronicle of a Changing City

Corey Kilgannon/The New York Times

OPEN Nov. 10, Long Island City, Queens

By COREY KILGANNON

IPODMEISTER, on 41st Avenue in Long Island City, will bring a smile (and an iPod or other electronic goody) to anyone hoping to liquidate a CD collection. The company was started by Kris Schrey, who said that when he tried to sell off his CDs a few years back he was humiliated by snarky music shop employees who ridiculed his musical taste and then lowballed him. Learning of the demand overseas for CDs and DVDs, Mr. Schrey started an online business through which a customer could mail in a CD library and receive an iPod, iPhone or other device based on the size of the collection. (An iPod can be had for 200 discs; more ground rules are at ipodmeister.com.)

Now customers can bring in their collections in person — no ridiculing, Mr. Schrey promises.

“The pop goes to the Caribbean, the rock goes to Eastern Europe, and the good classical and jazz goes to Korea and Taiwan.”

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Bloomberg Drops an Effort to Cut Building Energy Use

By MIREYA NAVARRO

After intense opposition from building owners, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg has dropped the most far-reaching initiative of his plan for reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

The plan, which the owners said was too costly, called for all buildings of 50,000 square feet or more to undergo audits to determine which renovations would make them more energy efficient, and for owners to then pay for many of those changes.

The mayor wants to go forward with the proposal to require energy audits, but now is leaving it up to the building owners whether to undertake the changes called for by those audits.

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Richard Perry/The New York Times

Michael R. Bloomberg, at an environmental-themed event in September, is weakening a package of bills that would cut emissions.

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Op-Ed Columnist

Black in the Age of Obama

By CHARLES M. BLOW

A hundred and fifty years ago, Charles Dickens opened “A Tale of Two Cities” with the now-famous phrase: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. ...”

Those words resonated with me recently while contemplating the impact of the Obama presidency on blacks in America. So far, it’s been mixed. Blacks are living a tale of two Americas — one of the ascension of the first black president with the cultural capital that accrues; the other of a collapsing quality of life and amplified racial tensions, while supporting a president who is loath to even acknowledge their pain, let alone commiserate in it.

Last year, blacks dared to dream anew, envisioning a future in which Obama’s election would be the catalyst for an era of prosperity and more racial harmony.

In many ways, they’ve gotten worse.

The recession, for one, has dealt a particularly punishing and uneven hand to blacks.

Earl Wilson/The New York Times

Charles M. Blow

clipped from www.newswise.com

Menthol Cigarettes Are More Addictive for African American and Hispanic Smokers

Released:
12/3/2009 8:00 PM EST
Source:

University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey (UMDNJ)

Newswise — African American and Hispanic adults who smoke menthol cigarettes may be less likely to quit smoking than those who smoke regular cigarettes, a new study by researchers at the UMDNJ-School of Public Health has found. The report, published in the December issue of Preventive Medicine, is believed to be the first to use national statistics to examine the association between menthol cigarettes and smoking cessation among adults.

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One Man’s War Story Illuminates the Heroism of One Million

By SCOTT JAMES

Until recently, Carl E. Clark, 93, was still driving his car around Menlo Park. Then came a fall, a new hip and recovery in a rehabilitation hospital. But it was another wound he wanted to talk about — one that happened 64 years ago.

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Noah Berger for The New York Times

Carl E. Clark's actions during World War II were negated.

“The Navy and the civilian media held back things that lots of us did,” Mr. Clark said. “For obvious reasons: the prejudice and bigotry that was going on at that time.”

He is part of “the greatest generation” whose valor remains largely invisible: he is among an estimated one million black veterans from World War II. Due to the endemic racism of the time, their wartime heroism was often not recorded in official battle reports, a history manipulated to negate their accomplishments.

Now there is a move to give Mr. Clark credit for his role in a dramatic tale of survival.

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Laboratory Grown Meat: Coming Soon to Your Dinner Plate

posted by Megan, selected from Green Options Dec 2, 2009 5:07 pm

By John Chappell, Green Options

Scientists in the Netherlands recently announced that they have grown meat in a laboratory for the first time. Though no one has yet to taste this laboratory meat, there is speculation that it could be commercially viable, and on your dinner table within the next five years.

The process of creating artificial meat started with extracting cells from a live pig and then placing them in a broth-like mixture of other animal parts until the cells multiplied. When the cells eventually multiplied they created muscle tissue, the texture and appearance of which has been described by researchers as “soggy pork.” Tasty.

The creation of artificial meat makes for an interesting dilemma for vegetarians. Is this “meat” still meat?

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City to Shut 4 Schools for Poor Performance; More Closings Expected

By SHARON OTTERMAN

Closing the four schools — a large technical high school in Brooklyn, one school in the Bronx and two in Manhattan — would add to the 91 other schools that have been shut since 2002 as part of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s effort to overhaul the city’s school system.

The school, Kappa II, a middle school on East 128th Street in Manhattan with 200 students, was opened in 2004 and is slated for closing by reducing one grade a year until 2012

Also in Manhattan, the 558-student Academy of Environmental Science Secondary High School, which opened in 1997 on East 100th Street, is expected to close.

The middle school grades at the Frederick Douglass Academy III, a secondary school on Third Avenue in the Bronx with 517 students, are also a target for closing.

Among the four schools whose closing was announced Wednesday is the W.H. Maxwell Career and Technical Education High School in Brooklyn,