Is it because Barry Bonds is Black?
Everyone has a theory about why U.S. federal prosecutors never let Barry Bonds out of their sights for four years as the Giants slugger hit 104 home runs and broke the records of Willie Mays, Babe Ruth and Hank Aaron.

The day after baseball's newly crowned home run king was indicted for allegedly lying about using steroids, historians and legal experts say Bonds was targeted because he shrugged off the accusations, while pursuing the game's most cherished title.

"There is not a minute that goes by that some federal agent or federal prosecutor or law enforcement figure somewhere is not being lied to by someone," said Jean Rosenbluth, a former federal prosecutor in Los Angeles who teaches law at the University of Southern California.

"What the government tends to do is not prosecute perjury unless it's a high-profile case," Rosenbluth said. "You can send the message out worldwide saying, 'Do not lie to us.' Barry Bonds is a perfect example."

Whether his petulant behaviour and singular success were enough to explain the government's drawn-out investigation remained a source of disagreement. Some scholars agreed with Bonds, insisting that given how widespread doping is in sports and the U.S.'s uneasy relationship with Black superstars, race cannot be ignored as a factor.

"This is the latest in a long litany of America's near-obsession with the troublesome Black athlete. Whether it's Terrell Owens, Michael Vick or now Barry Bonds, Black athletes who don't toe the line are going to be held accountable," said Steven Millner, chairman of the African American Studies Department at San Jose State University.

Richard Lapchick, director of the Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport at the University of Central Florida, said that regardless of whether racial bias made Bonds subject to disparate treatment, it remains an important issue for professional sports and society because the perception is there.

"If you are a kid trying to decide what sport to play and look at Major League Baseball, and then see the person who is arguably the greatest player of his generation not being a favourite of the media even before the steroids story became as pronounced, you are going to be less likely to choose baseball," Lapchick said.

An Associated Press-Ipsos poll conducted this summer, while Bonds was chasing Aaron's historic record revealed a wide divide in the way Black and white fans viewed his achievements and the accusations of steroid use.

More than three-quarters of the poll's non-white respondents thought Bonds was being treated unfairly with the doping allegations, compared to just 38 per cent of non-Hispanic white fans. About two-thirds of minority fans said Bonds belonged in the Baseball Hall of Fame, while 49 per cent of non-Hispanic whites did.

Critics of the race argument point to homemaking diva Martha Stewart and U.S. presidential adviser I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby - both of whom served time for perjury - as evidence that if Bonds has been singled out unfairly it's because of the size of his paycheque, not the colour of his skin.

They also note the multiracial makeup of the other figures swept up in the steroids scandal linked to the Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative.

Like Bonds, New York Yankees first baseman Jason Giambi, who is white, was given immunity from criminal prosecution when he testified before the BALCO grand jury. Unlike Bonds, Giambi acknowledged taking steroids and weathered the fallout.

In Millner's view, a face-by-face analysis of athletes tarnished by steroids allegations misses the larger point about selective enforcement, as does the suggestion that Bonds would fare better if he had a more pleasant public persona.

"Black people may not embrace Barry Bonds, but they look with a jaundiced eye at why Barry and not Karl Rove, why Barry and not the remaining Enron engineers," Millner said. "He epitomizes the insular Black athlete, and that rubs some wrong."

The ongoing investigation of doping in baseball might dispel some of the suspicion that prosecutors reserved a special bulls-eye for Bonds if other current players, especially white pitchers, are implicated and punished, Lapchick said.

"How long it took them is a sad statement for baseball. They portrayed their whole don't-ask, don't-tell policy about steroids, when a large part of (Bonds') generation of players probably did the same thing," Lapchick said. "He wasn't doing it himself."

Just SAY NO to legal drug pushers. Parents in Maryland are being told to vaccinate theirr kids or Go To Jail.

The Right to Refuse Vaccination is one of the biggest health freedom issues that we have today. When we give government the power to make medical decisions for us, we, in essence, accept that the state owns our bodies.
More than 2,000 Prince George's County students in Maryland have not gotten their state-mandated shots. On November 14, an ultimatum was issued to some of those parents: Come to court, get the shots, or else.


Some students have missed as much as a month and a half of school because they haven't gotten the required immunizations-- for chickenpox and hepatitis B. So now the school system says it's time to get tough and take those parents to court.

Free clinics, free shots, door-to-door visits, and countless letters. Still more than 2,300 Prince George's county students don't have their required immunizations. This Saturday, more than 1600 students and their parents have been ordered to appear in circuit court for the children to be immunized. Health workers will be on hand to give the shots immediately.

The problem is a new law that took effect last year requiring students in the fifth through 10th grade to also have the chicken pox and hepatitis b vaccine. Parents who don't show up or fail to comply-- could be fined up to $50 and get up to 10 days in jail. Although getting students vaccinated by "court order" may seem unusual, the law is on the school district's side.

Mary Kivlighan with the University of Maryland's School of Public Health says-- the Supreme Court weighed in on this very issue more than 100 years ago with smallpox. The school district does grant exemptions for religious purposes or other medical reasons but only if parents apply. Going to court was a last resort. Jehovah's Witnesses have consistently resisted laws requiring undesired medical procedures.

Hepatitis b vaccine requires three shots over six months. One of the problems has been that students get one shot but don't get the others, therefore, they're not in compliance.
This push for vaccination is completely out of control. Mandates and requirements are put into place by uninformed and under-educated State legislators who are sold a bill of goods by smiling pharmaceutical lobbyists pedaling their poisons. Parents do not have an opportunity to vote on the necessity of mandates; they are shoved down their throats. They pay taxes to get their children into schools. Then they are required to inject their children with substances that could maim or kill them in order to be in "compliance."
The vaccines that are being required in Prince George's County -- for chickenpox, a benign short-term illness and for hepatitis b, a disease of drug-using homosexual adults -- are not necessary for the health of these children. Do parents know what is in these vaccines? The chickenpox vaccine is made from aborted fetal cells and contains sucrose, hydrolyzed gelatin, salt, MSG (0.5 mg), sodium phosphate dibasic, potassium phosphate monobasic, potassium chloride, trace EDTA, neomycin and serum from cows. The hepatitis b vaccines contains aluminum and yeast.
The parents of these children need to ban together and revolt. Protest, march in the street, pay the fine and spend the time in jail on principle alone. When will this stop? When will we wake up and JUST SAY NO to mandatory injections?

Dragon breathes fire on American Eagle. Japanese begin to shift cash out of U.S. investments. Many in Japan are starting to speak of "quitting America," but they are not talking about a rise in anti-American political fervor. Rather, they mean a move away from American investments that is altering global capital flows and helping to weaken the dollar.
The move is seen in decisions of individual investors like Daijo Okudaira, a 66-year-old clerk at a Tokyo consulting company. Like many Japanese, Okudaira had long limited his overseas investments to the relative safety of securities from developed countries, particularly the United States.
Starting late last year, however, Okudaira made drastic changes to his portfolio, putting $50,000 into mutual funds focusing on stocks in China and other emerging economies. He said he had been drawn to these countries because they seemed to hold much brighter growth prospects than the United States.
"People say the engine of the global economy is shifting from the United States to emerging countries," Okudaira said. "Emerging countries have growth and energy that America and Europe lack. They remind me of Japan 40 years ago."
Japan's legions of individual investors like Okudaira have emerged as a global financial force to be reckoned with, directing almost half a trillion dollars of their nation's $14 trillion in personal savings overseas in search of higher returns. Until recently, much of this huge outflow of cash, known as the yen-carry trade, had gone into United States stocks, bonds or currency, propping up the dollar's value.
Now, however, Japanese individuals are diverting more and more of that money away from the United States and the dollar and into higher-yielding global investments, ranging from high-interest Australian government bonds to shares in fast-growing Indian construction companies. Partly this "quitting America" — called beikoku banare in Japanese — reflects an increasing sophistication of Japan's investors, who embraced mutual funds only a decade ago and are still learning to diversify. But it also offers one more sign that the world does not depend as much on the American economy as it once did.
Recent figures on mutual fund purchases suggest this trend has accelerated since August, when subprime problems shook Wall Street — and along with it, faith in the United States economy. Since early August, the dollar has fallen almost 8 percent against the yen, a decline many analysts here say offers another indication of Japan's waning appetite for dollar-denominated investments.
"One lesson of August was the failure of American markets to recover," said Akiyoshi Hirose, head of research at Daiwa Fund Consulting, a research company based in Tokyo specializing in mutual funds. "On the other hand, Asia's emerging countries did recover quickly. So money is flowing out of the United States and Europe and into these newer markets."
In October alone, Japanese individuals pulled 33.9 billion yen, or about $300 million, out of mutual funds that invested solely in North American stocks and bonds, according to Daiwa Fund. In the same month, it said, Japanese individuals put 175.2 billion yen, or $1.6 billion, into funds investing in stocks and bonds in emerging countries.
In the last 12 months, Japanese individuals invested 1.97 trillion yen, or $17.5 billion, into emerging market mutual funds, according to Daiwa Fund, and during the same period, they removed 447 billion yen, or $4 billion, from North America-only mutual funds.
Demand for emerging market funds has gone up so sharply that asset management companies added 48 such funds in the past year, bringing the total number to 183, the company said. Meanwhile, it said, the number of United States-focused funds rose by just 3, to 137.
To be sure, some analysts caution that the popularity of emerging markets may prove to be a fad, especially if stock markets in China or India start falling as quickly as they rose. Analysts also say the dollar's greater familiarity gives it an enduring appeal among many Japanese, who may return once the United States mortgage problems subside.
Some analysts predicted the eventual revival of short-term currency trading between the dollar and the yen, which had been an important support for the dollar's value before August's market turmoil.
"A lot of dollar-buyers are just sidelined now," said Tohru Sasaki, chief exchange strategist in the Tokyo office of JPMorgan Chase Bank. "They'll be back once currency markets settle down."
PCA Asset Management, a Japanese arm of a British firm, said that until last year, its most popular product was a United States bond fund. Now, the company says, 80 percent to 90 percent of the investment money it receives flows into its emerging-market funds, all focused on Asia. To meet demand, the company has added five new Asia-focused mutual funds since January 2006. The most popular, a fund investing in stocks of infrastructure-related companies in India, has grown to $1.4 billion in assets in just one year.
Takashi Ishida, head of investment at PCA Asset, said the emerging-market funds have proved particularly popular with investors in their 50s and 60s, an age group that remembers Japan's period of high growth four decades ago. He said these Japanese now believe they recognize the same sort of heady growth in developing Asian countries like China, India and Vietnam.
"Asian emerging markets appear safe to invest in because they seem familiar to many Japanese," Ishida said.
Many individual investors agree, citing vague impressions of cultural affinity in explaining their optimism in Asian emerging markets. Okiko Ebata, one of a half-dozen individuals gathered on a recent afternoon for an investing seminar in Tokyo, said she had invested in overseas stocks for the first time late last year, choosing a mutual fund that focused on Vietnam. She acknowledged it was a riskier choice than United States or European stocks, but said she felt comfortable.
"I've heard people in Vietnam resemble Japanese," said Ebata, 59, as the rest of the group nodded in agreement. Two others also said they had invested in the last year in mutual funds focused on India or Southeast Asia.
In a separate interview, Okudaira, the clerk, said his China fund had doubled in value in less than a year. But even if Chinese investments cannot keep up such rates of return, he said, he and other Japanese will continue to diversify where they put their savings.

"I now have money invested in America, Europe, as well as in Asia," Okudaira said. "Japanese are learning to how to reduce risk."

It all depends on you definition of "TCB".
If you're younger than 30 or maybe even 35, you may not recognize the word "date" as a verb. But once upon a time, dating was something men and women did as a prelude to marriage, which -- hold on to your britches --back in the day was a prelude to sex.
By now everyone's heard of the hook-up culture prevalent on college campuses and, increasingly, in high schools and even middle schools. Kids don't date; they just do it (or something close to "it," an activity that a recent President of the United Statews asserted was not actual sex, because it all depends on your definition of "is"), and then figure out what comes next. If anything.

As one young woman explained "hooking up" to Washington Post writer Laura Sessions Stepp (author of the book "Unhooked"): "First you give a guy oral sex and then you decide if you like him."
This conversation took place in the family room of the girl's home. Immediately after that definition was served, the mother offered Stepp a homemade cookie. And we thought cluelessness was for teenagers.
Too often what follows the hook-up is emotional pain and physical disease, the combination of which has created a mental health crisis on American campuses.
That diagnosis comes from Miriam Grossman, author and psychiatrist at UCLA and one of five women, including Stepp, who spoke recently about sex on campus.
Grossman is most concerned that politically correct ideology has contaminated the health field at great cost to young lives. As Grossman sees it, when the scientific facts contradict what is being promoted as truth, then ideology has trumped reality.
Speaking to mostly women, Grossman notes that while some have attended college during the free-love days of the 60's and 70's, the world is far more dangerous now. Today there are more than two-dozen sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) -- 15 million new cases each year -- some of which are incurable.
The consequences are worse for young women, says Grossman. In her psychiatric practice, she has come to believe that women suffer more from sexual hook-ups than men do and wonders whether the hormone oxytocin is a factor. Oxytocin is released during childbirth and nursing to stimulate milk production and promote maternal attachment. It is also released during sexual activity for both men and women, hence the nickname "love potion." Number 9.Feminists don't much like the oxytocin factor, given the explicit suggestion that men and women might be physically and emotionally different. But wouldn't a more truly feminist position seek to recognize those hormonal differences and promote protection for women from the kind of ignorance that causes them harm?
Physically, young women are getting clobbered by STDs with potentially deadly results. If a young woman begins having sex as a freshman in college, there's a 50 percent chance she'll have the human papillomavirus (HPV) by her senior year. While most cases of HPV are harmless, the virus causes nearly every case of cervical cancer, says Grossman.
Stacey, one of the college students featured in Grossman's book "Unprotected," contracted HPV even though a condom was used. But HPV, like herpes, lives on skin that may not be covered by a condom. An HPV expert tells college women, "You'd be wise to simply assume your partner has HPV infection."
Your partner. What happened to your dearly beloved? He -- and she -- disappeared with coed dorms and the triumph of reproductive health ideology. While coed dorms replaced obstacle with opportunity, ideologically driven sex-education programs promoted permissiveness and experimentation.

Because sex education is based on the assumption that young people are sexually active with multiple partners, kids have been led to believe by mainstream health professionals that casual sex is OK. That's a delusion, says Grossman, because scientific data clearly indicate otherwise. Casual sex is, in fact, a serious health risk.
Rather than spread that word, sex educators have tweaked their message from urging "safe sex" to a more realistic "safer sex," any elaboration of which would defy standards of decency. Interested parents can find out for themselves by visiting one of several university-sponsored sex advice Web sites, such as Columbia's GoAskAlice.com.
To all good and bad, there is an inevitable backlash, and casual sex has lost its allure for many students. Having learned painful lessons from their elders' misguided altruism, they are seeking other expressions of intimacy.
At Duke University recently, Stepp asked how many in her audience of about 250 would like to bring back dating. Four out of every five raised their hands.
It would seem that young people are not hook-up machines, but are human beings who desire real intimacy and emotional connection.

Readers are a dying breed.
It's late in the day, do you know where your child is? Do you know what your child is doing ? Is it watching television, surfing the Web, listening to their iPods, talking on cellphones, and instant-messaging their friends? Well, a new report by the National Endowment for the Arts makes clear what they're doing a lot less reading...(
The report - a 99-page compendium of more than 40 studies by universities, foundations, business groups, and government agencies since 2004 - paints a dire picture of plummeting levels of reading among young people over the past two decades. Among the findings:
Only 30 percent of 13-year-olds read almost every day.
The number of 17-year-olds who never read for pleasure increased from 9 percent in 1984 to 19 percent in 2004.
Almost half of Americans between ages 18 and 24 never read books for pleasure.

The average person between ages 15 and 24 spends 2 to 2 1/2 hours a day watching TV and 7 minutes reading.
"This is a massive social problem," NEA chairman Dana Gioia, said by phone from Washington. "We are losing the majority of the new generation. They will not achieve anything close to their potential because of poor reading."
It is not just the amount of reading. According to the report, reading ability has fallen as well. While scores have improved for 9-year-olds, they dropped sharply for 17-year-olds. Only about a third of high school seniors read at a proficient level, a 13 percent decline since 1992. "And proficiency is not a high standard," Gioia said. "We're not asking them to be able to read Proust in the original. We're talking about reading the daily newspaper."
Apparently, things are not much better among college students. In 2005, almost 40 percent of college freshmen (and 35 percent of seniors) read nothing at all for pleasure, and 26 percent (28 percent of seniors) read less than one hour per week. Even among college graduates, prose-reading proficiency declined from 40 percent in 1992 to 31 percent in 2003.
The report incorporates national studies that have been carried out since the NEA's 2004 report, "Reading at Risk," found that literary reading - fiction, poetry, and plays - had crashed over 20 years among adult Americans. The new report, titled "To Read or Not to Read: A Question of National Consequence," focuses on reading in general, and it reaches down to younger age levels. While not all studies are exactly comparable in some details (such as time spans), overall they trend in the same direction.
"We took information from so many sources, you would expect some results in the opposite direction," Gioia said. "But I was impressed and depressed at how consistent the information was on the general decline in reading and reading ability."
Changes in young people's reading habits have not escaped notice in the publishing and library fields.
"I'm not hearing of a dramatically big drop, but I would say the number of serious readers, the kids who used to come in and get 20 and 30 books - we're just not seeing that," said Caroline Ward, a children's librarian in Stamford, Conn., who is past president of the children's division of the American Library Association. "We see some, but fewer than we used to."
The report found that the more books there are in a young person's home, the higher the average scores in science, civics, and history, all reading-based subjects. The report notes that average annual household spending on books, adjusted for inflation, dropped 14 percent between 1985 and 2005, and that consumer book sales declined 6 percent from 2000 to 2006.
The report does not explain why youth reading has declined, but Gioia said he suspects three main reasons: "First, something is not happening in our educational system. Second, we are surrounded by nonstop media, but for the most part it does not acknowledge reading. When the media made a celebrity of J.K. Rowling, 10 million people bought her book. Oprah Winfrey put 'Anna Karenina' on the best-seller list. Third, our lives are completely cluttered with a million gadgets."
Indeed, the report suggests that multitasking is a factor. It found that more than half of middle and high school students use other media most or some of the time while reading, and that 20 percent of the time they spend reading they are also watching TV, playing video games, sending messages, or otherwise using a computer.

Message Board Are you reading more or less?
Besides plotting statistical trends, the report cites economic consequences. Seventy-two percent of employers rated high school graduates deficient in writing, and 38 percent cited reading deficiency. One out of five American workers reads at a lower level than necessary to do his or her job. Not surprisingly, proficient readers are more likely to attain management jobs and higher incomes.
Possibly the most striking finding is that, regardless of income, levels of reading for pleasure correlate closely with levels of social life, voting, and political activism, participation in culture and fine arts, volunteerism, charity work, and even regular exercise.
"The poorest Americans who read did twice as much volunteering and charity work as the richest who did not read," Gioia said. "The habit of regular reading awakens something inside a person that makes him or her take their own life more seriously and at the same time develops the sense that other people's lives are real."
That finding confirms previous studies, said Timothy Shanahan, an education professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago and past president of the International Reading Association. "If you're low in reading ability, not only would you not read the newspaper, but you won't watch news on TV or listen to it on radio," Shanahan said. "You're less likely to take part in activities like sports or church. Being low in literacy is self-isolating, tends to push you out of culture altogether."
Patricia S. Schroeder, president and chief executive of the Association of American Publishers, said part of the problem could be that adults can make children feel that reading is a duty. A common complaint she hears from children and young adults is that few books relate to their lives or interests. "Reading is not really easy," she said, "unless they get into something they want to read about."

Barry Bonds Black Home Run King Indicted. Barry Bonds has more to worry about now than an asterisk beside his name in the record books. Just three months ago, the Black Super Star from San Francisco Giants angrily defended himself against steroid allegations on the night he surpassed Hank Aaron to become baseball's home run king.
"This record is not tainted at all," Bonds declared. "At all. Period."
Barry Bonds has never been identified by Major League Baseball as testing positive for steroids. His personal trainer Greg Anderson has spent most of the 2007 in jail for refusing to testify against his longtime friend. His attorney, Mark Geragos, said the trainer didn't cooperate with the grand jury at all.
This indictment came out of left field," Geragos said. "Frankly, I'm aghast. It looks like the government misled me and Greg as well, saying this case couldn't go forward without him."
Bonds is scheduled to appear in U.S. District Court in San Francisco on Dec. 7.
Government lawyers didn't notify Bonds of the impending indictment, a courtesy typically extended to white collar defendants so they can prepare for the public announcement.
Michael Vick, a Black Football quarterback, was indicted for his alleged role in a dog fighting enterprise. Marion Jones, a Black Olympic Track star, was indicted for doping. Barry Bonds, a Black Baseball homerun king, was indicted for allegedly using steriods. A very distinct pattern is emerging. They are all Black super-star athletes. Two white Tour de France winners, including Lance Armstrong, have been accused of using performance enhancing drugs. Not one of them has been indicted. Only the Black athletes. What's up with that??
I am appalled at the federal indictment of Barry Bonds on four counts of perjury and one count of obstruction of justice. Of course, lying to federal authorities is wrong and poisonous to the criminal justice system, if Barry lied.
I admire tenacious no-holds-barred prosecutors -- when they go after violent thugs, mobsters and would-be terrorists. The U.S. Department of Justice, however, has gone overboard in wielding its awesome might for years -- acting on a tip received in August 2002 -- to prolong a case it could have wrapped up long ago. The feds have crossed the line from closing a righteous case to prosecutorial overkill.
The charges against Bonds concern grand-jury testimony four years ago, on Dec. 4, 2003. Under grant of immunity (unless he lied), Bonds asserted that he never knowingly used banned steroids. He said he thought his personal trainer was treating him with flaxseed oil and arthritis balm.
And I wonder why the feds have put so much energy into this case, when there are so many truly dangerous criminals out there.
Why did the U.S. attorney take another four years to indict? If their case is so strong, what were they waiting for?
If they consider perjury to be a threat to the system, why wait years to go after a man whom so many observers believe lied to a grand jury? Doesn't that undermine the system's credibility, too?
Joe Russoniello was nominated to become Northern California's U.S. attorney on Thursday. Attorney General Michael Mukasey assumed his post this month. I agree with Debra J Saunders. They've both inherited this headache.
"I'm surprised," said one of his lawyers, John Burris, who was notified of the indictment by The Associated Press. "But there's been an effort to get Barry for a long time. I'm curious what evidence they have now they didn't have before."
Defense attorney Mike Rains said he spoke briefly with Bonds but did not describe his reaction. At an evening news conference, he read a statement accusing federal prosecutors of "unethical misconduct" and declined to take questions.
"Every American should worry about a Justice Department that doesn't know if waterboarding is torture and can't tell the difference between prosecution on the one hand and persecution on the other," Rains said.
The indictment charges Bonds with lying when he said he didn't knowingly take steroids given to him by Anderson. Bonds is also charged with lying that Anderson never injected him with steroids.
"Greg wouldn't do that," Bonds testified in December 2003 when asked if Anderson ever gave him any drugs that needed to be injected. "He knows I'm against that stuff."
Prosecutors promised Bonds they wouldn't charge him with any drug-related counts if he testified truthfully. But according to the indictment, Bonds repeatedly denied taking any steroids or performance-enhancing drugs despite evidence to the contrary.
On Thursday,15 November 2007, his very freedom was put in jeopardy when a federal grand jury indicted him on five felony counts of perjury and obstruction of justice, charges that could result in a maximum sentence of 30 years in prison if he's convicted.
The indictment culminated a four-year investigation into steroid use by elite athletes.
Bonds and his lawyers long have accused the government of targeting a high-profile, unpopular player merely for political gain while pondering if the investigation was racially motivated.
Charges of leaks to the media and unethical legal behavior flew from both camps as the investigation dragged on and questions mounted about the government's intentions.
The 10-page indictment mainly consists of excerpts from Bonds' December 2003 testimony before a grand jury investigating the Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative, or BALCO. It cites 19 occasions in which Bonds allegedly lied under oath.
Bonds, who surpassed Aaron's career home run mark of 755 on Aug. 7, finished the season with 762. A seven-time NL MVP, he also holds the season record with 73 home runs in 2001.
He is a free agent after being told late in the season that the San Francisco Giants didn't want him back next year.

Asked directly if Anderson supplied him with steroids, Bonds answered: "Not that I know of." Bonds even denied taking steroids when he was shown documents revealing a positive steroids test for a player named Barry B.
"I've never seen these documents," Bonds said. "I've never seen these papers."
The indictment does not explain where prosecutors obtained those results, but may have been seized when federal agents raided BALCO in September 2003.
At the end of the 2003 season, Bonds said, Anderson rubbed some cream on his arm that the trainer said would help him recover. Anderson also gave him something he called "flax seed oil," Bonds said.
Bonds then testified that prior to the 2003 season, he never took anything supplied by Anderson — which the indictment alleges was a lie because the doping calendars seized from Anderson's house were dated 2001.
Bonds has long been shadowed by allegations that he used performance-enhancing drugs. The son of former big league star Bobby Bonds, Barry broke into the majors with the Pittsburgh Pirates in 1986 as a lithe, base-stealing outfielder.
By the late 1990s, he'd bulked up to more than 240 pounds — his head, in particular, becoming noticeably bigger. His physical growth was accompanied by a remarkable power surge.
Bonds is by far the highest-profile figure caught up in the steroids probe, which also ensnared track star Marion Jones. She pleaded guilty in October to lying to federal investigators about using steroids and faces up to six months in prison.
Former Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell, who is investigating drug use in baseball, declined to comment, but the Giants, the players' union, even the White House called it a sad day for baseball.
"These are serious charges," the Giants said. "Now that the judicial process has begun, we look forward to this matter being resolved in a court of law."
In Washington, White House spokesman Tony Fratto said: "The president is very disappointed to hear this. As this case is now in the criminal justice system, we will refrain from any further specific comments about it. But clearly this is a sad day for baseball."
Commissioner Bud Selig withheld judgment, saying, "I take this indictment very seriously and will follow its progress closely."

Blacks are not victims any longer. Middle class Black Americans no longer blame racism for their economic failures. A majority of Black Americans blame individual failings -- not racial prejudice -- for the lack of economic progress by lower-income African Americans, according to a survey released Tuesday , 13 November 2007. That is a significant change in attitudes from the early 1990s.

At the same time, Black college graduates say the values of middle-class African Americans are more closely aligned with those of middle-class whites than those of lower-income Blacks, the poll by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center found.

And 40% of those surveyed said African Americans could no longer be viewed as a single community.
The report said that in 1994, 60% of African Americans believed racial prejudice was the main thing keeping Blacks from succeeding economically. Only 33% blamed the individual. Though views on the issue have shifted over time, this was the first year that a majority of Blacks, 53%, said individuals were responsible for their own condition.
At the same time, the survey found that most Blacks believed racial prejudice was still a widespread problem in America.

Pew President Andrew Kohut said that about 60% of African Americans surveyed said Blacks often faced discrimination when they applied for jobs or looked for housing. Just 20% of whites agreed with the employment assessment of Blacks and 27% with the housing.

One result of shifting views on individual responsibility may be changes in Blacks' attitudes toward immigrants. In 1986, 74% of Blacks said they would have more economic opportunities if there were fewer immigrants; today, 48% feel that way.

Most Blacks and whites who participated in the poll agreed that immigrants tended to work harder at low-wage jobs than workers of their own groups.

On the topic of diverging values, 44% of Blacks polled in 1986 said they saw greater differences created by class than by race. Today, that figure has grown to 61%.

The feeling holds for Blacks with less than a high school education: 57% of those surveyed said middle-class Blacks are more like middle-class whites than they are like poor Blacks.

"The values of the bottom and the top are different," Kohut said.

Overall, the survey found that there has been a convergence of values held by Blacks and whites. For instance, a majority of both groups say that rap and hip-hop music have had a negative influence on society. "Blacks and whites have become more culturally integrated and, therefore, less-affluent Blacks feel more estranged," Kohut said.

The survey also found that pessimism about economic prospects has grown significantly among Blacks. Fewer than half of those polled, 44%, said they expected life to get better. Twenty years ago, 57% had said they thought life would improve.

"People are quite anxious," Kohut said. "They do not see the kind of forward momentum that Blacks saw in earlier times."

One reason for the pessimism may be that the condition of the Black middle class appears to be more fragile than that of whites. About 45% of Black children who grow up in middle-class families will slip into a lower-income bracket in adulthood, according to a separate study on economic mobility sponsored by the Pew Charitable Trusts.

"Nearly half of children born to middle-class African Americans fall down to the bottom quintile [20%] as adults," said John Morton, director of the economic mobility study.

The project, which tracked more than 2,000 children from 1968 to the present, found that two-thirds of children of all races tended to earn higher incomes than their parents when measured in constant dollars, Morton said.

However, about 16% of white children and about 45% of Black children were unable to match their parents' success and slipped into a lower socioeconomic bracket in adulthood.

"The good news is that the lower the child begins on the economic ladder, regardless of race, the higher the likelihood that child will surpass their parents' income as an adult," Morton said. "The bad news is that middle-income African American families appear to have tremendous difficulty passing on their middle-income status to their children."Morton said one reason could be changing family structures.

"There is a higher prevalence of single-parent families at a time that it is increasingly important to have two salaries to maintain a standard of living," Morton said.

The Pew poll, which interviewed more than 3,000 people in September and October, had a margin of error of 2.5 percentage points. The margin was slightly higher when the attitudes of Blacks, whites and Latinos were considered separately.

Racial Bias Rampant in Foster Care System. Black, Hispanic and other minority children in the United States are far more likely than white youngsters to be taken from their homes and placed in foster care according to Steve LeBlanc of the Associated Press.
Racial or ethnic prejudices — conscious or unconscious — can lead social workers to see abuse or neglect where none exists, these experts say. A white social worker in Boston looked at the dark spots on the Black child's body and assumed the youngster had been beaten. The family denied it, but the social worker insisted.
It turned out the child had "Mongolian spots" — harmless skin blotches common among black children. The social worker's mistake was discovered before the parents got into trouble. But researchers and policymakers say such episodes are fairly common.
The experts caution that stereotyping on the part of social workers is just one factor in the racial gap, and probably a small one at that. Other factors — higher rates of poverty, inadequate housing and child care, for example — are believed to be major contributors to abuse and neglect among minorities.
Nevertheless, stereotyping is enough of a concern that cultural-awareness training for social workers has been instituted in 45 states, many of them in the just the past few years, according to a recent report by the Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress.
Nationally, Blacks make up about 15 percent of the childhood population, yet account for 34 percent of children in foster care, according to the GAO report. Black children on average stay in foster care nine months longer than white children, the report said.
The report said "bias or cultural misunderstandings and distrust between child welfare decision makers and the families they serve" was one of several factors accounting for the gap, along with poverty and lack of access to services.
"Once we are reported, we are more likely to be investigated. Once we are investigated, we are more likely to be placed in foster care. Once we are placed in foster care, we are less likely to be returned to our families," said Sondra Jackson, executive director of Black Administrators in Child Welfare.

In overwhelmingly white Utah, Black children were in foster care at more than six times their proportion of the state's population, according to the GAO. In five other states — Wisconsin, Iowa, New Hampshire, Wyoming, and California — black children were four times more likely to end up in foster care.
In Massachusetts, 7 percent of children are Black, but 19 percent children in state care are Black. Hispanics are 11 percent of the child population but 25 percent of those in foster care. White children are 79 percent of the population, but just 60 percent of those in state care.
"People come with biases and how those racial biases play out is of real concern," said Bill Brown, area director for the state Department of Social Services in Boston.
The problem is not just black and white.
When Vietnamese and Cambodian immigrants began moving in large numbers to Lowell, a mill city outside Boston, social workers started hearing troubling reports of children with odd, circular marks on their bodies.
"Our first reaction was that the children were being battered or bruised or spanked," said Zevorah Ortega-Bagni, a state social services investigative supervisor.
Social workers were actually seeing the effects of a traditional healing practice known as "cupping," in which a cup is heated and placed on the skin to draw out illnesses. Far from abuse, the marks were a sign that parents were doing their best to care for their children.
Researchers say minorities are no more likely than whites in similar socio-economic circumstances to abuse or neglect their children. But minorities are more likely to be poor, with blacks nearly four times more likely to live in poverty than others.
Kandida Garcia, a child welfare investigator in Massachusetts, said her Puerto Rican background gives her an edge when dealing with parents of a similar background — especially in emotionally charged situations.
"Another worker may target them as explosive because they are loud in nature, but I would have a different view," she said. "I could explain that this mother is not being aggressive; she is advocating for her child."
Other social workers said it took years of on-the-job experience to recognize their own ill-founded assumptions.
Virginia O'Connell, who has worked as a social worker for three decades, said it wasn't always easy to distinguish between true abuse or neglect and instances in which families were doing their best under difficult circumstances.
"I went out to homes where there were kids sharing mattresses on the floor," O'Connell said. "It was my values versus the customs and values of a family I was visiting. I really had to look at my own values and realize I couldn't make judgments based on those."
In Massachusetts, one of the states to adopt cultural training, the 2,800 social workers and supervisors are shown videos, engage in role-playing and talk about their own heritage and their assumptions about others. An Associated Press reporter asked to sit in on a session but was denied for fear it would inhibit open discussion.
However, the GAO found there was little evidence that such "cultural competency" programs have helped.
Other strategies to reduce the gap include creating multicultural teams of social workers, recruiting minority families as foster parents, and relying more heavily on "kinship caregivers" — aunts, uncles or grandparents who can step in during a crisis.
Frances Darden, a Black woman who has been a foster mother for four children, said the state should recruit more black social workers and foster parents.
"I don't know if they have the experience around our culture to handle the situation," she said. "Our ways might not be the same as they would do."

Martin of Porres is a Black Saint. "Father unknown" is the cold legal phrase sometimes used on baptismal records. "Half-breed" or "war souvenir" is the cruel name inflicted by those of "pure" blood. Like many others, Martin might have grown to be a bitter man, but he did not. It was said that even as a child he gave his heart and his goods to the poor and despised.
He was the illegitimate son of a freed woman of Panama, probably Black but also possibly of Native American stock, and a Spanish grandee of Lima, Peru. He inherited the features and dark complexion of his mother. That irked his father, who finally acknowledged his son after eight years. After the birth of a sister, the father abandoned the family. Martin was reared in poverty, locked into a low level of Lima’s society.

At 12 his mother apprenticed him to a barber-surgeon. He learned how to cut hair and also how to draw blood (a standard medical treatment then), care for wounds and prepare and administer medicines.

After a few years in this medical apostolate, Martin applied to the Dominicans to be a "lay helper," not feeling himself worthy to be a religious brother. After nine years, the example of his prayer and penance, charity and humility led the community to request him to make full religious profession. Many of his nights were spent in prayer and penitential practices; his days were filled with nursing the sick and caring for the poor. It was particularly impressive that he treated all people regardless of their color, race or status. He was instrumental in founding an orphanage, took care of slaves brought from Africa and managed the daily alms of the priory with practicality as well as generosity. He became the procurator for both priory and city, whether it was a matter of "blankets, shirts, candles, candy, miracles or prayers!" When his priory was in debt, he said, "I am only a poor mulatto. Sell me. I am the property of the order. Sell me."

Side by side with his daily work in the kitchen, laundry and infirmary, Martin’s life reflected God’s extraordinary gifts: ecstasies that lifted him into the air, light filling the room where he prayed, bilocation, miraculous knowledge, instantaneous cures and a remarkable rapport with animals. His charity extended to beasts of the field and even to the vermin of the kitchen. He would excuse the raids of mice and rats on the grounds that they were underfed; he kept stray cats and dogs at his sister’s house.

He became a formidable fundraiser, obtaining thousands of dollars for dowries for poor girls so that they could marry or enter a convent.

Many of his fellow religious took him as their spiritual director, but he continued to call himself a "poor slave." He was a good friend of another Dominican saint of Peru, Rose of Lima.

Pope John XXIII remarked at the canonization of Martin (May 6, 1962), "He excused the faults of others. He forgave the bitterest injuries, convinced that he deserved much severer punishments on account of his own sins. He tried with all his might to redeem the guilty; lovingly he comforted the sick; he provided food, clothing and medicine for the poor; he helped, as best he could, farm laborers and Negroes, as well as mulattoes, who were looked upon at that time as akin to slaves: thus he deserved to be called by the name the people gave him: 'Martin of Charity.'"


Saint Martin is one of the most popular patron saints in the Philipines and other predominantly Catholic countries.