Tony Awards to be held at Radio City Music Hall

The 67th Tony Awards will be held at Radio City Music Hall on Sunday, June 9th. The event is to be simulcasted by CBS at 8/7c. How I Met Your Mother star Neil Patrick Harris will be hosting the event once again, making this his fourth time hosting the event.

The following is a list of candidates with multiple nominations across categories.

• 13: Kinky Boots
• 12: Matilda the Musical
• 10: Pippin
• 9: Cinderella
• 8: Golden Boy
• 6: Lucky Guy, Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike
• 5: The Mystery of Edwin Drood, The Nance, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
• 4: Motown: The Musical, The Trip to Bountiful
• 3: The Assembled Parties, A Christmas Story, The Musical, Hands on a Hardbody, The Testament of Mary
• 2: Bring It On: The Musical, The Heiress, Orphans

Statute Allows NYC Prep School Predators to Avoid Prosecution

By Amanda Andries

The clock on the tower at Horace Mann ticked away, as alleged abuses took place there. Credit: Jim.henderson via Wikimedia Commons

Several affluent parents paid one of New York City’s most prestigious and oldest prep schools an annual tuition of more than $25,000 annually, from the 1970s until the mid-1990’s to give their children the best academic opportunity money could provide. But instead, it is suspected that they were blindly sending their children off to be abused by trusted faculty at the The Horace Mann School, according to a New York Times Magazine article, written by a former student, Amos Kamil and published last summer.

On Friday, April 26, the Bronx district attorney said that anyone who may have perpetrated acts of sexual violence at the 125-year-old school, could no longer be prosecuted because the statute of limitations has expired. Even though they said that they found a history of abuse that went  stretched from 1970s up until 1996.

After the Times article broke the wall of silence that surrounded the tony institution, a hotline was set up for victims and 25 former students — three women and 22 men — came forward with abuse claims against former faculty. The now adult, past students were being represented by celebrity attorney, Gloria Allred.

According the Times feature, the perverse behavior of several well-known faculty members was common knowledge around the Horace Mann campus. One coach reportedly performed “private-parts inspections.”

“I heard about some teachers who supposedly had a habit of groping female students and others who had their eyes on the boys. I heard that Mark Wright, an assistant football coach, had recently left the school under mysterious circumstances. I was warned to avoid Stan Kops, the burly, bearded history teacher known widely as “the Bear,” who had some unusual pedagogical methods. Even Clark came in for some snickering: he had no family of his own, and he had a noticeably closer-than-average relationship to the Bear, another confirmed bachelor,” Kamil, who graduated Mann in 1982, wrote.

On their website the school has a prominent link addressing the abuse claims. They have been unusually open and upfront about the matter— showing a rare level of transparency about the issue. The school has even posted a letter to the parents of students of the school and a hotline number where abuse can be reported. The administration also refers to rules of action that they recommend and advise students to take, in their Family Handbook. 

According to Allred, 20 of her clients have already settled with Horace Mann.

Cough Up A Lung, Where I’m From…New York City?

According to a report by the American Lung Association, New York City makes the list of cities with high levels of ozone and particle pollution.

No, this isn’t the remix to Jay-Z’s Where I’m From (Marcy Son), but according to a new report by the American Lung Association, New Yorkers are breathing in high levels of polluted air.

Researchers of the American Lung Association measured the levels of ozone and soot in the air in close to 1,000 cities across the nation between 2009 and 2011. Results showed that some cities had improved from last year and residents were breathing in cleaner air. However, results also showed that some cities had gotten worse.

New York City joined the company of Los Angeles, Houston and Dallas of cities with high levels of polluted air.

“The long-term trend is positive and headed to much cleaner air,” said report author Janice Nolen, assistant vice president of national policy and advocacy for the American Lung Association. “[However], there is an uptick in some areas that are a concern and some areas where the problem remains very, very serious.”

It is only expected for New York City whose landscape is comprised more of skyscrapers and tight spaces than grass and gridlock traffic.

More than 1.1 million adults have asthma and are seen in eight percent of school-aged children, which is attributed to the air quality in urban areas.

The cleanliest cities included Bismarck and Rapid City of North and South Dakota respectively.

Maybe Mayor Michael Bloomberg had something here with his congestion pricing plan.

Pic: Wikimedia

Phoenix House Accused of Paying Outrageous Executive Perks

Multiple facilities for drug and alcohol addiction treatment are under fire, as Phoenix Houses, are accused of paying over and above executive perks to their higher employees.

Phoenix Houses of New York has a long tradition in treatment, and exists in 10 states, with over 150 treatment houses for individuals wishing to recover from addictions.

According to Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli, employees were paid off with outrageous bonuses which included such perks as new cars for their executives.

In the time being examined by the state, Phoenix House received $8.5 million in state aid for treatment and they are now being accused of shelling out $223,000 of that in inappropriate perks. Including a $4,000 Wal-Mart shopping spree where an administrating assistant used a gift card to purchase cigarettes, weight loss supplements and you guessed it…booze, with funds intended to treat people battling alcoholism.

The employee, from the Yorktown Phoenix House, had tried to hand in false receipts to cover the actual purchases, as she also worked at Wal-Mart and received a discount.

With the looming audit to come, Phoenix Houses around the country, who are fully committed to the treatment of drug, alcohol and gambling addiction may have their names tarnished due to the fringe benefits of executives.

New York Non-Profit is Awarded Pulitzer Prize.

A small non profit underdog was bestowed with the honor of taking home one of the most prestigious awards in journalism, the Pulitzer prize in national reporting, Last Monday.

InsideClimate News, a Brooklyn based, web only non-profit publication which focuses on environmental causes and ecological threats were honored with the award for their investigative coverage of the shortcomings and dangerous flaws found within our nations pipeline regulations.

Notably, their coverage of the Enbridge spill in Michigan’s Kalamazoo River and their coverage on diluted bitumen, which is a ecologically harmful and controversial form of oil.

This non-profit, funded mainly by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, has no office and eight full time reporters, but their mission, “to produce clear, objective stories that give the public and decision-makers the information they need to navigate the heat and emotion of climate and energy debates.” proved successful. Proving, you don’t need the budget and resources of a large, high end, established publication to create great journalism.

Alongside marquee names like The Times, The Wall Street Journal and the Associated Press, InsideClimate news got the recognition they deserved, which will likely increase their potential to do even more.

Score one for the little guys at this years Pulitzers.

Women Are Writers, Too

There are thousands of American writers, including women, but for some reason Wikipedia is slowly but surely removing women writers from their “American novelists” list, according to the New York Times.

American writer, Amanda Filipacchi, wrote the op-ed for New York Times when she noticed her name was switched from the American Novelists list. Other women included Harriet Beecher Stowe, V.C. Andrews and Judy Blume – all great proclaimed American writers. Though there is not a subcategory for “American Men Novelists,” women writers are being placed under “American Women Novelists.” Filipacchi also observed that it was not just for American novelists but extended out to Haitian novelists as well. Haitian women writers were categorized under “Haitian Women Novelists.”

 “So it seems, at least, that women from different countries are treated the same. It’s just too bad they’re not treated the same as men,” she wrote.

The original list, which includes hundreds and thousands of names, is full of men writers at first glance. If women are going to be placed in their own category, men should have one, also. Leaving American Novelists just for men writers is very deceiving and sexist, of course. If students had to do a report on an American writer, women would not be recognized immediately because the first few hundred names are men.

Filipacchi sent Wikipedia an email about the sexism, while also making her discovery known across social networks. The news spread to other blogs and soon became topic of conversation.This led to the changes of the American novelists list and women are slowly making their way back into the list. 

Television News “Uh-Ohs” Hinder Boston Bombing Coverage

It would be a huge missed opportunity to not bring up the Boston Marathon bombings from the past week.

It’s amazing how Monday seemed like such a normal day over in New York, until you heard of the horror going on elsewhere in Boston.

Reading words like “Deadly explosion at Boston Marathon” on the New York Times website aren’t easy when you don’t expecting anything like that on the website, but that’s just what happened and it was very serious.

Of course, out came all those false reports shared in news media outlets we’re supposed to trust.

CNN had, well let’s just say, “less than stellar” coverage of the attacks. False reports quickly came that they already  had a suspect in custody at the hospital, The New York Post said on its website that 12 people were killed, that a “dark-skinned male” had committed the crimes and other things as well.

It even goes back to the Sandy Hook shootings where reports said the shooter killed his mother as well and even when congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords had been shot, they had reported that she was killed.

Sure when tragic things happen, we all go in a state of panic more or less. It’s human nature. Of course, everybody is going to jump to speculations and accusations that turn out wrong in the end, but that should be a given for the people who were directly involved with or witnesses to that tragedy, not the news media outlets who cover it.

These outlets are almost like that high school gossip girl from high school who always has the “scoop” on who’s going out with who and what’s going on only to find out later she was wrong and has to backtrack on the whole story altogether.

There’s no victory when CNN is compared to a gossip girl. None.

The biggest problem with the 24-hour news coverage of the bombings was that it came off that the concern was more about being first and getting whatever they heard onto the air, than being right, verifying that the information was in fact, true before releasing it.

What was missing that day was a sort of “filter” and because of that, we all had news that was pushed as “exclusive” turn out to be false.

Nobody wishes for any tragic events like this, but we can hope that in the future, news sources get it right and focus on being right than being first. If you’re wrong in the end anyway, what’s the point of being first?

Post 9/11 Veterans Show Boost in Employment Numbers

One in four Iraq and Afghanistan veterans now have government jobs, according to a new Labor Department report that found an improved employment picture for the 9/11 generation of veterans.

Among the 2.7 million veterans who served on active duty in the United States Armed Forces at any time since Sept 11, 2001, a group referred to as Gulf War-era II veterans,  the unemployment rate hit 9.9 percent in 2012, a decline of 2.2 percent in 2011.

The jobless rate for all veterans is 7 percent. Twenty-eight percent of Gulf-war era II veterans reported having a service-connected disability in August 2012, compared with 14 percent of all veterans.

Most of that progress appeared to be among men where it is at 6.9 percent. The jobless rate for female post-9/11 veterans was 8.5 percent in 2012, about the same as the previous year, said the veterans employment summary released Wednesday by the Labor Department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Post 9/11 veterans, especially younger ones, have a higher unemployment rate than non-veterans of the same age.  While most of the focus has been on veterans aged 18 to 24, whose jobless rate has been greater than 20 percent,  the report said veterans males  aged 25 to 34, in the Gulf War-era II, also have a higher unemployment rate than non-veterans in the same age range.

Government work, at the federal, state and local level, account for employment of 25 percent of post 9/11 veterans, compared with 14 percent of non-veterans. This is slightly higher than for veterans of all generations, who hold about 20 percent of public-sector jobs.

Sept 11, were a series of four coordinated terrorist attacks launched by the terrorist group al-Qaeda upon the United States in New York City and Washington D.C.

The Morgan Library Acquires a Rare Glimpse into Salinger’s Life

The Morgan Library and Museum recently acquired nine letters written by J.D. Salinger in the 1940s to add to their collection of correspondences by the author. Kept for decades in a shoebox by their recipient Marjorie Sheard, a then aspiring writer from Toronto, the letters offer a rare glimpse into the life and mind of the very private Salinger.

The Morgan Library and Museum in Manhattan purchased the letters from Ms. Sheard, now 95, for an undisclosed amount and shared them with The New York Times. The paper reports that the letters are dated between 1941 and 1943, when Salinger had not yet reached literary fame. After reading a few of his pieces in publications such as Esquire and Collier’s, Ms. Sheard wrote to Salinger for advice. According to The Times, the letters are initially positive and flirtatious, but later become darker, especially in respect to an anticipated publication in The New Yorker of his short story “Slight Rebellion Off Madison,” a precursor to The Catcher in the Rye. “God and Harold Ross alone know what that bunch of pixies on the staff are doing with my poor script,” Salinger wrote.

Ms. Sheard held on to the letters all of these years, however her family finally decided to sell them to fund the increasing cost of her elder care. While of obvious personal value to Ms. Sheard, the letters are of significant historical value to The Morgan Library. Apart from hinting at possible unpublished works, Morgan curator and department head of their literary and historical manuscripts Declan Kiely says “It’s a wonderful opening into his earliest years as a writer.”

Teens…If Plan A doesn’t work, there is always Plan B!!!

Plan B is birth control you can use to prevent pregnancy up to five days (120 hours) after unprotected sex.

Earlier this month, a federal judge ordered the U.S Food and Drug Administration to make the “morning-after” emergency contraception pills available to all girls without a prescription. This order has reversed the December 2011 decision by U.S Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, which prevented girls under 17 from buying the pills without a prescription.  Even though physicians and doctors concluded that the morning-after pills were safe for younger adolescents and did not cause promiscuity, Sebelius still stands firm with her position on the pills. Even President Obama continues to support the restriction on the pills, invoking his daughters. Despite the strong support system for boundaries on the pill known as Plan B, critics such as John O’ Brien saw Sebelius’s decision as more political than scientific and stated keeping an age restriction on access to emergency contraception is an example of a politically motivated decision which makes it more shameful.

Although the federal judge granted young girls access to the Plan B pill without a prescription, some pharmacists have refused to dispense emergency contraceptives because it violates their religious faith. They believe that making pills available over the counter removes the pharmacist’s role in dispensing the drug. Many parents also agree stating that giving young girls prescriptions for these pills are averting parental rights.

Birth control continues to be one of the most controversial topics in society today especially with teen pregnancy on an all-time high.  Here is a link to the full article and a video interview with sex educator Laura Berman: U.S judge widens ‘morning-after’ pill access for young girls

I’m not sure which approach would be more effective, but I do agree with Ms. Berman that this is a personal issue and that each parent should be the primary sex educator of their children. After hearing both sides, what do you guys think?