Soul Singer Attacked on Stage for Dedicating Song to Trayvon Martin

July 15, 2013, 6:04 am

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Legendary musician and future R&B Hall of Fame inductee Lester Chambers suffered injuries Saturday after he was attacked on stage for dedicating a song to Trayvon Martin.

According to police, the Civil-Rights-era leader of soul rock group The Chambers Brothers was performing at the Hayward-Russell City Blues Festival in downtown Hayward, California, when he was suddenly rushed by a woman identified as 43-year-old Dinalynn Andrews Potter after he dedicated Curtis Mayfield's "People Get Ready" to Trayvon Martin shortly following George Zimmerman's acquittal.

Chambers' wife Lola said the 73-year-old musician told audience members that Mayfield would have changed the lyric "there's a train a comin" to "there's a change a comin" were he alive today.

Friend and fellow musician Kurt Crowbar Kangas filed this report following the incident:

[T]he woman who attacked him was white and yelled something like “it’s all your fault” before she hit him, he went down hard but was halfway caught by Barren, thank God, she was subdued by Police and taken away while the para-medics came and took him to a local Hospital where he went thru a series of cat scans, no broken bones, the only injury for now is a 8″ scratch in the kidney area of his back and it’s starting to swell.

A photo posted on Facebook by Chambers' son Dylan showed Lester recovering at home with a large bruise on his back.

Soul Singer Attacked on Stage for Dedicating Song to Trayvon Martin

He reportedly suffered a bruised rib muscle and nerve damage as a result of the assault.

Andrews Potter was arrested and booked on suspicion of battery before being released. Chambers' family is looking to have police charge her with a hate crime.

Chambers was last in the news in March of 2012 after he came forward to reveal that unscrupulous record execs withheld royalties from him for years, forcing him to live on $1,200 a month.

[photos, mug shot via Facebook]

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Hero Teens Find, Rescue Missing Girl After Chasing Down Kidnapper

July 15, 2013, 6:46 am

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Hero Teens Find, Rescue Missing Girl After Chasing Down Kidnapper

A 5-year-old Pennsylvania girl who was abducted Thursday in Lancaster Township was rescued and returned safely to her mother thanks a pair of teens who located the kidnapper and chased him down on their bikes.

15-year-old Temar Boggs and his pal Chris Garcia didn't know Jocelyn Rojas or her family when they decided to join the local police in searching for her abductor.

"I had the gut feeling that I was going to find the little girl," Temar told Lancaster Online.

That gut feeling proved prescient: Just two hours after a middle-aged man reportedly lured Jocelyn into his vehicle with the promise of ice cream she was spotted by Temar inside a maroon car on Gable Park Road.

Temar said the car caught his eye as it suspiciously swerved in an out of side streets, seemingly trying to avoid getting noticed by police vehicle in the area.

The boy and his friend gave chase on their bikes, and quickly caught up with the vehicle.

Looking inside they saw a little girl and an older man behind the wheel. The man looked back at Temar and Chris before driving a short distance and pushing Jocelyn out of the car.

"She runs to my arms and said, 'I need to see my mommy,'" Boggs recalled.

Unfortunately the kidnapper managed to drive off and police are still asking for the public's assistance in helping to track him down.

But Jocelyn's family is just happy to have her back, and they know who to thank for that.

"[They] were just saying that I was a hero, that I was a guardian angel and that it was amazing that I was there and was able to find the girl," said Temar. "I'm just a normal person who did a thing that anybody else would do."

[screengrab via Lancaster Online, video via Fox43]

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Part-Time Is the New Full-Time

July 15, 2013, 6:52 am

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Part-Time Is the New Full-Time

America's Part-Time Recovery, in which the regular jobs that were vaporized in the Great Recession are replaced with shitty part-time jobs, is working out beautifully for the noble job creators. Thanks to a combination of high unemployment, the looming Obamacare law, and greed, it appears that for many workers, part-time status is the new normal.

The WSJ today is the latest to look at the part-timing trend in the restaurant industry, which has been building ever since it became clear to employers that they might be able to avoid paying employee health care costs simply but cutting hours. The unusually high unemployment rate that's persisted for the past several years makes this easy, by providing restaurants with a large pool of desperate people willing to take whatever they can get.

Obamacare's mandates were recently pushed back for a year to give businesses time to prepare, but that doesn't change the simple calculation for business owners: 50 employees working 30 hours or more a week= mandatory insurance by employers. Business owners are naturally seeking to escape this burden. Thankfully, there are consultants to help them carry out their patriotic duty of paying as little as possible to their employees:

Employers also are also considering workarounds. Mark Lettelleir, chief executive of M.B.A. Inc., a human-resources firm in St. Petersburg, Fla., is helping several different area restaurants manage their staff so they can share employees. The test program, which is expected to begin in the fourth quarter, will involve about 500 employees of both chain and local restaurants looking to retain their full-time employees without counting them as such.

Thank god America doesn't have a single-payer health care system, which would be a significant burden to HR consulting firms that specialize in fucking workers out of their health care benefits.

[WSJ. Photo: AP]

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Reddit Floods Hospital with Pizza After Young Patient Pleads for a Pie

July 15, 2013, 7:23 am

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Reddit Floods Hospital with Pizza After Young Patient Pleads for a Pie

A Redditor who happened by the Children’s Hospital in Los Angeles snapped a photo of one patient's amusing SOS: "SEND PIZZA RM 4112."

The passionate plea was apparently posted in jest by the family of 2-year-old Hazel Hammersley, a young cancer patient with stage 3 neuroblastoma who is currently undergoing chemotherapy.

Reddit Floods Hospital with Pizza After Young Patient Pleads for a Pie

Within minutes of the pic's posting on Reddit, the first order went out. Then, a few minutes later, another. And another. And a dozen more.

On the family blog, Hazel's mom Lauren described their reaction:

Hazel woke up from her nap to the smell of pizza and was so excited to chow down! Several other children and nurses came into the room, with music playing, and had themselves a wonderful Pizza Party. As of yesterday evening, there was more than 20 boxes delivered and more was coming! We had such a great time!

The hospital had apparently received so many pies that they were forced to publish a post on their own blog informing pizza donors that "NO MORE PIZZA IS NEEDED."

Both the hospital and the family were very grateful for the impromptu outpouring of support, but they also expressed their hope that this act of kindness extend beyond pizza to general awareness of childhood cancer.

Hazelnut has 18 grueling months of treatment ahead of her, and the family has set up a Facebook page for those wishing to follow her story or continue to show their support.

Reddit Floods Hospital with Pizza After Young Patient Pleads for a Pie

[H/T: Reddit, photos via Facebook]

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Couple Driving to Dave Matthews Show Spots a Hitchhiking Dave Matthews

July 15, 2013, 7:52 am

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Couple Driving to Dave Matthews Show Spots a Hitchhiking Dave Matthews

Emily Kraus and her boyfriend were on their way to Hershey, Pennsylvania, to see Dave Matthews perform, and were running late as it was.

That's why they almost didn't stop for a hitchhiker by the side of the road who turned out to be Dave Matthews himself.

The singer had gone for a bike ride and suffered a flat tire, stranding him in the middle of nowhere.

"I did not have a cell phone on the bicycle. So I thought, 'Shit'," Matthews would later tell the audience at Hersheypark Stadium.

Happily for Kraus, she had just added a bike rack to her car, and so was able to accommodate the eco-friendly musician.

As incredible as it might seem to give your idol a lift to his own concert, Kraus and her partner were far too starstruck to make any meaningful conversation with Matthews along the way.

"[W]e were talking about his tour and where he had come from," she told WPXI.

Matthews, however, was just as grateful to the couple for their act of kindness: He offered them dinner backstage and then front-row seats to the concert.

The next day Kraus wasn't so sure that she hadn't dreamed the entire thing, so she pulled out her tickets and found a note from Matthews that confirmed it: "Thanks for the ride."

Couple Driving to Dave Matthews Show Spots a Hitchhiking Dave Matthews

[screengrab via WPXI, photo via Facebook]

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Several Hospital Employees Fired for Accessing Kim Kardashian’s Records

July 15, 2013, 1:22 pm

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Several Hospital Employees Fired for Accessing Kim Kardashian’s Records

Places you’re allowed to snoop: wallets, purses, drawers, “accidentally opened” emails on iPhones, bank statements casually left on the table. Places you should avoid snooping at all costs? Kim Kardashian’s electronic medical records at a major hospital, especially if that major hospital is your employer.

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