Showing posts with label black women. Show all posts
Showing posts with label black women. Show all posts

Tuesday, April 20, 2010

Was Dorothy Height the Last Significant Black Woman to Have a Voice?

by Lola Adesioye, Huffington Post

Dr. Dorothy Height, the matriarch of the civil rights movement, died today at the age of 98. Dr. Height stood with Dr Martin Luther King during his "I have a dream speech" and worked tirelessly as an activist until her last days.

Her contribution was invaluable in the shaping of black America and American society as a whole. Dr. Height provided an example of ceaseless dedication to a cause greater than oneself, and was a living, breathing demonstration of the formidable power of female leadership, especially for black women.

President Obama referred to Dr. Height as the "godmother" of the movement, going on to say that she "served as the only woman at the highest level of the civil rights movement -- witnessing every march and milestone along the way."

In the 60s, Heights had to overcome gender prejudice in order to do her work. She was cropped out of photos because she was female and she was less well known than her male counterparts. Yet despite the challenges, she recognized the importance of women in black leadership and continued to push for that.

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Tuesday, August 4, 2009

Supermodel Naomi Sims Has Died

 

 

Naomi Sims has died of cancer at the age of 61. Sims was credited as breaking racial boundaries in modeling, appearing as the first black cover model of Ladies' Home Journal in November 1968. She was also among the first to be represented by Wilhelmina agency and went on to model for designers such as Halston in her career. Two photographs of her are featured in the The Model As Muse exhibit currently on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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Sex Can Be Healthy

 

If you thought that making love was just a gesture of love or for pleasure, think again. Sex has much more to it than most of us think and know. Did you know that sex is a form of physical exercise? Sex three times a week burns lots of calories, and if maintained throughout the year, is equivalent to jogging 75 miles. To make it simpler, a vigorous bout burns around 200 calories, about the same as running 15 minutes on a treadmill.

 

Regular sex is regular exercise and has similar benefits, including improved cholesterol levels and increased circulation Apart from giving you a good work out, sex once or twice a week improves the immune system as well.
Research has shown that an active sex life helps us live longer. Organs and systems in the body perform better and remain healthy because sex increases the supply of oxygen to the cells and stimulates the activity of various organs and systems within the body. People with complaints of cholesterol, take heart! You have a good medicine, which you would not refuse. Where sex balances out the good cholesterol to bad cholesterol ratio, it also simultaneously reduces the overall cholesterol count in the body. So there you go, you can now control your bad cholesterol with pleasure. By having sex three or more times a week, men reduce their risk of heart attack or stroke by half.

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Monday, August 3, 2009

New HIV Strain Discovered In Cameroon Woman

WASHINGTON – A new strain of the virus that causes AIDS has been discovered in a woman from the African nation of Cameroon. It differs from the three known strains of human immunodeficiency virus and appears to be closely related to a form of simian virus recently discovered in wild gorillas, researchers report in Monday's edition of the journal Nature Medicine.

The finding "highlights the continuing need to watch closely for the emergence for new HIV variants, particularly in western central Africa," said the researchers, led by Jean-Christophe Plantier of the University of Rouen, France.

 

The three previously known HIV strains are related to the simian virus that occurs in chimpanzees.

The most likely explanation for the new find is gorilla-to-human transmission, Plantier's team said. But they added they cannot rule out the possibility that the new strain started in chimpanzees and moved into gorillas and then humans, or moved directly from chimpanzees to both gorillas and humans.

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