Detroit — A coalition of welfare rights groups is appealing to the United Nations to assist Detroit residents in battling the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department over water shutoffs for delinquent bills.
In an eight-page report submitted this month to the UN special rapporteur, groups including the Sierra Club, the Detroit People’s Water Board, Michigan Welfare Rights Organization and Blue Planet Project say they are “outraged” about the alleged violation of human rights to water and are calling on authorities to restore service and stop further cut-offs.
The groups are calling the situation a “massive human rights atrocity” and pleading with the federal and state government to work with the bankrupt city to establish a fair and sustainable rate structure.
“The case of water cut-offs in the City of Detroit speaks to the deep racial divides and intractable economic and social inequality in access to services within the United States,” the report says, adding the shutoffs are a “last-ditch attempt” to make up for lost revenue.
“The burden of paying for city services has fallen onto the residents who have stayed within the economically depressed city, most of whom are African-American.”
Water department officials deny the allegations.
“The accusation that they’re making that we are targeting poor customers in massive shutoffs is not true,” said Curtrise Garner, a department spokeswoman. “We are seeking payments for our delinquent water and sewerage accounts. It’s consistent but it’s not massive.”
In March, the utility announced it was starting a campaign to target tens of thousands of Detroiters with balances more than $150 overdue or more than two months behind on their payments. Of the nearly 324,000 Detroit water and sewerage accounts, half are overdue.
Darryl Latimer, the department’s deputy director, said in March the department was preparing for up to 3,000 shutoffs a week, employing up to 20 additional contractor crews.
The company put out 46,000 shut-off notices this spring. But shut-offs, so far, have totaled about 4,500, Garner said Tuesday. The goal is to get people to begin paying their overdue accounts, she added.
Last week, the City Council approved an 8.7 percent hike in water and sewer rates for Detroit customers.
The 6-2 approval is expected to aid the ailing water system in covering capital costs. The rate is higher than the average of 4 percent for the systems suburban customers and result, in part, from the increasing number of uncollected bills, DWSD has said.
A typical Detroit resident pays $64 per month for water and sewer services. Under the increase that goes into effect July 1, they would pay $70.67, according to documents provided to the council from the water department.
“We will work with them to get on a payment plan,” Garner said. “They don’t even have to be on shut-off status. We are willing to work with people who are having trouble paying the bill.”
In the June 18 report, various groups also provide firsthand accounts from residents who were having water services cut off by the department.
“The Detroit People’s Water Board is hearing directly from people impacted by the water cut-offs who say they were given no warning and had no time to fill buckets, sinks and tubs before losing access to water,” the report says. “In some cases, the cut-offs occurred before the deadline given in notices sent by the city. Sick people have been left without running water and working toilets. People recovering from surgery cannot wash and change bandages. Children cannot bathe and parents cannot cook.”
Tuesday, June 24, 2014
Sunday, June 8, 2014
Tuesday, May 27, 2014
Sunday, April 13, 2014
Wednesday, March 19, 2014
RAPPER "MA$E" files for divorce after 12 years of marriage!
Mase’s divorce filing in Georgia dated January 2nd, cites irreconcilable differences with Twyla Betha. And it sounded nasty, Mase asked for full custody of their two kids and even wanted HER to pay HIM child support.
He claims they separated August 2013 — after 12 years of marriage.
But just over a month later — the day before Valentine’s Day — Mase inexplicably had a change of heart, filing to dismiss his divorce petition.
The fiasco is priceless — if you look at the website for Mase’s El Elyon International Church in Atlanta the entire thing is built around his successful relationship with his wife. The two even hawk their “successful marriage” book series called “What Do You Do After I Do?”
And the book description is perfect: “In this series, Mason and Twyla Betha share keys to build a marriage that will last a lifetime.”
Sunday, March 16, 2014
Tuesday, March 11, 2014
Stuart Scott’s Story of Perseverance ESPN Anchor’s Private Battle With Cancer Becomes a Public One
WEST HARTFORD, Conn. — Inside the mixed martial arts studio, Stuart Scott lifted the black T-shirt that read, “Everyday I Fight.” Beneath was a footlong scar that bisected the ESPN anchor’s washboard abs.
“It’s a sign of life,” he said, though it is the spot where cancer surgeons have opened his abdomen three times to remove parts of him.
Scott’s fight continues. He has had 58 infusions of chemotherapy. He recently switched to a pill. But the drugs have not fully arrested the cancer that struck first in 2007, when his appendix was removed. It returned four years later. And it came back again last year. Each recurrence seems more dire, and yet after each, Scott has returned to his high-profile work at ESPN, ensuring that his private fight also has become a public one.
Friends, family, colleagues and strangers ask how he is faring. Yet Scott, 48, says he does not want to know his prognosis.
“I never ask what stage I’m in,” he said recently over lunch. “I haven’t wanted to know. It won’t change anything to me. All I know is that it would cause more worry and a higher degree of freakout. Stage 1, 2 or 8, it doesn’t matter. I’m trying to fight it the best I can.”
Scott’s approach once puzzled Sage Steele, a fellow ESPN anchor and one of his closest friends.
“I’ve asked him on two occasions: ‘What does this mean? What do the doctors say?' ” she said. “And I’m nervous asking it, but after hearing his answer for the second time, I choose not to ask again. I don’t know if I could do it the same way.”
Scott’s sister, Susan, says she understands her brother’s psychology.
“I think he can only live with this by not even incorporating the potential end of it,” she said in a telephone interview from North Carolina. “It’s too weighty. It doesn’t mean he doesn’t think about it, but to let it in starts to validate it and gives it more heft.” But, she added, “Every time I get a call that Stuart’s in the hospital, I have to think about what this means for his mortality, and is this the time?”
Scott’s absences from ESPN are noticeable because he remains one of the network’s most familiar personalities. Hired in 1993, he soon became one of the signature anchors on “SportsCenter” and on the network’s N.F.L. and N.B.A. programming. “SportsCenter” stars like Keith Olbermann, Dan Patrick and Rich Eisen left the network over the years, but Scott has remained. He has always projected a cool vibe, blending hip-hop language and pop culture references with sound effects and catchphrases like “Boo-yah!” and “Cool as the other side of the pillow,” and he has delivered highlights and commentary in youthful outbursts and in the cool, brooding form of a poetry jam.
Recently, during the N.F.L. scouting combine, he used the debate over Johnny Manziel’s quarterbacking future as grist for an antic, one-on-one conversation with himself.
“I don’t need to do that to keep myself engaged,” he said. “I think it’s unique and part of who I am.”
On the air, Scott seems unaffected by three bouts with cancer. His demeanor on “SportsCenter” is unchanged: excitable, energetic, creative, even a bit wild. But his face looks thin, and his colleagues are concerned.
“There are some days when I say, I don’t know how he’s doing it,” said Mark Gross, a senior vice president for production who has known Scott for two decades.
Continue reading the main story
On the night he returned to “Monday Night Countdown” last November in Tampa, Fla., Scott received a text from his sister, who calls him the crown prince of their parents’ four children. It included a quotation from Arthur Ashe: “Start where you are. Use what you have. Do what you can.”
“I wasn’t trying to bring him to tears, but I felt, as a family member processing this, each time is scary,” she said. “The last time was really scary.”
A return to a regular routine, like Scott’s traveling to a “Monday Night” location or grappling in an M.M.A. gym, is a significant marker in a cancer survivor’s life. So are the nights he co-anchors “SportsCenter.” But the effort can sap his strength. Soon after returning from his last surgery, Scott frequently needed to lean back in his chair and relax during commercial breaks, often not hearing much of what his producer said.
Steele said that for years Scott had masked his pain when the cameras came on.
“I’ve visited while he’s been getting chemo; it shook me up,” she said. “But then I’d put the TV on at 11 that night, and he’s still Stuart Scott.”
Restoring Energy
Thin but muscular, Scott uses mixed martial arts and high-intensity cross-training workouts to restore the energy that chemotherapy saps from him.
Dressed all in black for a recent workout, he popped in a mouthpiece inscribed with the initials of his daughters, Sydni, 14, and Taelor, 19, and then walked onto the blue and gray padded floor to face Darin Reisler, the sculptured owner of the gym. For 90 minutes, they battled and sparred.
Despite his weakened condition, Scott is skillful, quick and graceful. His breathing grew labored as the workout progressed, but he was happy to be back. He needs the physical contact, he said, the jolt of competitiveness.
“Jab! Cross! Hook! Jab!” Reisler shouted. Scott’s punches shot out in quick combinations that smacked off Reisler’s hand pads, echoing in the nearly empty gym.
The kicks came next — three in rapid succession. Then Scott leapt and delivered a flying kick at Reisler. “You kick like an ox,” he told Scott.
Scott and Reisler moved on to chokeholds and arm bars — sometimes both stopped to explain their submissions as if teaching a class — and wrapped up by fighting in a steel cage.
“God, that felt good,” Scott said as he pulled off his custom-made blue helmet and left the cage.
Still, there are indignities and frustrations. After his third surgery last September, his wound did not close for more than two months. During the last few weeks he was attached to a wound VAC, which drained the surgical site. It is “a pretty interesting contraption if it’s not attached to you,” he said.
He was forced to wait five months, until late February, so his abdominal area would not be vulnerable to the kicks, punches and grappling of the Muay Thai and Brazilian jiujitsu he practices. So far, Scott said, his cancer has not spread beyond where it was found. But he would not give a doctor permission to speak about his condition or provide further details. “My colon has been resected,” he said. “But it’s not colon cancer. No doctor has ever said that it has spread to my kidneys or lungs.”
Paul Mansfield, an appendiceal cancer specialist at MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, said the disease has various forms that range from benign to very aggressive.
Although he could not comment directly on Scott’s case, he said that the oral drug that Scott recently switched to, regorafenib, “is fairly toxic.”
Mansfield said: “It doesn’t really create a response in patients but may stabilize things. It’s pretty far down the list of what we’d use.”
Scott said that he had continued to be flexible about the course of his chemotherapy, even considering experimental treatments.
“We’ve talked about doing a clinical study,” he said, “which I might do at some point. We’re going to see what happens with this new drug. And I guess I could go back to my old regimen. There is some evidence that it did some help, but chemotherapy is not an exact medical science. I heard an oncologist say that in the world of oncology, two and two doesn’t equal four, it equals five or six or three.”
Daughters’ Questions
Scott speaks frequently about his daughters, with pride and melancholy. He is divorced from their mother and they share custody. Taelor, the 19-year-old, is in college.
When he first learned he had cancer, the girls asked him a lot of questions. Taelor once asked if the cancer would kill him, he recalled. “I said: ‘It could, and that’s why we’re doing everything we can. That’s why I’m taking every medicine I can and that’s why I keep working out so we can keep traveling the way we do and so I can act silly and goofy and keep embarrassing you.' ”
Now the girls ask fewer questions. He figures that they are typical teenagers who prefer not to discuss what scares them.
“I know they worry about it,” he said, “probably more than I want them to.”
As he drove from his recent workout to lunch, he turned on a video of Sydni, the soloist in her school choir, singing the pop song “Skyscraper.”
“I watch this once or twice a day,” he said, as Sydni’s strong, mature voice filled the car’s interior. “She doesn’t like me to play it for people, but I said, ‘Dude, I got bragging rights.' ”
He listened, almost in silence, until she sang the last words.
“The end,” he said, “gives me chills.”
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