Open Mouth. Insert Foot.

[Kobi]

A spokeswoman for an elementary school in North Carolina has apologized for a "poorly worded" letter sent to parents in February, which suggested the students wear "animal print" clothing in honor of Black History Month.

WSOCTV reports that the Western Union Elementary School in North Carolina's Union County sent the letter, which also suggested dressing in "African-American attire," in celebration of the school's Feb. 28 Black History Day. The letter was published online by the LGBT rights blog UnicornBooty.com.

"While it was well-intended, it was poorly worded," Union County Public Schools' Chief Communications Officer Luan Ingram said in a statement. "We are reminding all of our principals to be very sensitive in word choices when communicating with parents concerning different ethnic groups and cultures that make up our world."

Ingram said the students had been studying the history of Africans who had been forcibly brought to America as slaves and that the clothing suggestion was meant to honor their cultural heritage, not be a commentary on modern African-American clothing.

Ingram told the Charlotte Observer that a similar letter had been sent home to students for the past seven or eight years and that none of the students' parents had complained about it.


An image of the letter first appeared on the photo sharing site Imgur and quickly made its way to Reddit. The full text of the letter reads:

"Parents, during the month of February, Western Union students have been studying Black History. On Tuesday, February 28, WUES will participate in a Black History Day. We will have speakers from 8-10am. We are encouraging students to dress in 'African American attire.' If you do not have this, students could wear animal print clothing or shirts with animals native to Africa (zebras, giraffes, lions, elephants, etc.) Thank you!"

http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/sideshow...HRlc3QD;_ylv=3

[Kobi]

Belvedere celebrates its vodka’s superior drinkability — but a new ad for the liquor producer is hardly in good taste.

The ad, which reads “Unlike some people, Belvedere goes down smoothly,” got its share of outraged reactions on Twitter, where the ad first appeared as part of a new marketing campaign. Featuring a prominent photo of a man grabbing a terrified-looking woman from behind, the not-so-subtle double entendre about the vodka’s taste ended up sounding like sexual assault to most that saw the ad.

Belvedere ended up taking the ad down within an hour, reported Forbes, but its efforts to calm those who thought the ad made light of rape and sexual assault were hardly satisfying. Belvedere’s first attempt at an apology fell short of its mark:

Belvedere Vodka @belvederevodka We apologize to any of our fans who were offended by our recent tweet. We continue to be an advocate of safe and responsible drinking.

The non-apology drew its own share of ire, with many assuming the vodka maker failed to fully appreciate the offensiveness of its ad’s message and instead put the burden of misunderstanding on its viewers.

The senior staff of the company eventually issued a fuller apology, saying the ad was “absolutely inconsistent with our values and beliefs,” and promising to donate to a women’s support charity. It was a step in the right direction, but the company stumbled slightly in their execution.

When asked by a New York Observer reporter what charity would receive its donation, Belvedere’s president mentioned RAINN (the Rape Abuse and Incest National Network) — but the link he included took the reporter to the personal Facebook page of a Singaporean Facebook member named Rain Chan. The link, to be sure, was fixed in a subsequent email (the result of a copy and paste error), and directed users to RAINN’s official Facebook page.

Though the ad’s inflammatory nature is hard to forget, RAINN appreciated the overture in the end: “Nice to see a company that not only undoes its mistake but looks for a way to do good afterwards,” reads a post on the organization’s Facebook page. But will the tasteless ad cause a nasty hangover for the company?


Read more: http://newsfeed.time.com/2012/03/25/...#ixzz1qBi7GECI

[Kobi]

FORT MYERS, Fla. (AP)—Boston Red Sox pitcher John Lackey has apologized for using “a thoughtless choice of words” during an interview this week.

Speaking with a Boston Globe columnist, Lackey said it was “retarded” to make too much of reports about some Red Sox starters drinking beer and eating fried chicken in the clubhouse last year during games when they weren’t pitching.

On Tuesday, Lackey issued a written statement released by the Red Sox.

“I apologize for my thoughtless choice of words that appeared in print earlier today. I meant no harm, and I am sorry to all I offended,” he said.

Lackey is recovering from Tommy John surgery in November and will not pitch this season. He is entering the third season of a five-year, $82.5 million contract with the Red Sox.

[Kobi]

Summer's Eve's much-talked about "Hail to the V" ad campaign is no more. The videos showed talking hands that were supposed to represent vaginas, but it wasn't the unsubtle depiction of genitalia that got the company in trouble. It was the racial undertones of the depictions. After defending their ads against critics, The Richards Group ad agency surrendered Wednesday and pulled the videos from YouTube. "Stereotyping or being offensive was not our intention in any way, shape, or form," said agency spokesperson Stacie Barnett. "The decision to take the videos down is about acknowledging that there's backlash here. We want to move beyond that and focus on the greater mission."

Summer's Eve and The Richards Agency had hoped that the videos would make women feel more empowered. After all, the feminine hygiene company took flak last year for an ad that told women to douche before asking for a raise. We're not completely surprised that this year's campaign didn't work out. As we said last week, there's really no good way to advertise douching products.

In case you missed the ads altogether, Stephen Colbert did a reenactment on his show.

http://www.theatlanticwire.com/busin...ina-ads/40474/

[Kobi]

Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa, compared immigrants to dogs at a town hall meeting on Monday, saying that the United States should pick the best immigrants the way one chooses the “pick of the litter,” according to a story in Salon, which also carried a video clip of the incident.

King told constituents in Pocahontas, Iowa, that he’s owned lots of bird dogs over the years and advised, “You want a good bird dog? You want one that’s going to be aggressive? Pick the one that’s the friskiest … not the one that’s over there sleeping in the corner,” the online magazine reported.

“You get the pick of the litter and you got yourself a pretty good bird dog. Well, we’ve got the pick of every donor civilization on the planet,” King said. “We’ve got the vigor from the planet to come to America.” According to Salon, the liberal research group American Bridge captured the comments on video.

King, a conservative, is one of the most anti-illegal immigration members of Congress, and he is also known for his sometimes impolitic comments.

http://news.yahoo.com/rep-steve-king...GFnZQ--;_ylv=3

[Kobi]

SAO PAULO (AP) — A Brazilian airline says one of its female pilots tossed a passenger off a flight because he was making sexist comments about women flying planes.

Trip Airlines says in a Tuesday statement the pilot ejected the man before takeoff as he made loud, sexist comments upon learning the pilot was a woman. The jet continued on to the state of Goias after a one-hour delay.

Trip says it won't tolerate disparaging remarks made about any of the 1,400 women working for the airline.

http://news.yahoo.com/female-pilot-t...GFnZQ--;_ylv=3

[Kobi]

In North Carolina, one lawmaker, after voting to reject a state grant that covered family planning services, said “If these young women are being responsible and didn’t have the sex to begin with, we wouldn’t have this problem….”

One Georgia legislator recently compared women to farm animals—insisting women should be forced to carry pregnancies that aren’t viable to term just like pigs and cows do.

Pennsylvania Governor Tom Corbett said that women who didn’t want to be subject to the requirements of the state’s invasive and demeaning ultrasound law should just close their eyes.

[Kobi]

Reverend William E. Lori, spokesman for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, recently argued before Congress that contraception is no more essential to women than a ham sandwich.

[Kobi]

Andrzej Bojanowski, the deputy mayor of Gdansk – one of the four Polish host cities of Euro 2012 – gave football fans, visitors and residents a rather uncomfortable welcome during a radio interview on Tuesday.

Poland’s image is already under the scrutiny of sport-lovers globally, following aggressive Russian-Polish brawls, alleged “monkey chants” directed at Italy’s Mario Balotelli, and apparent abuse hurled at the Czech Republic’s Theodor Gebre Selassie elsewhere in the country. And Bojanowski’s choice of words, when praising the honorable residents of Gdansk, has only made things worse.

He explained in the live radio broadcast: “I thank residents and city employees for behaving like normal civilized white people toward our guests who have in turn also behaved like normal white people.”

Backtracking in a local newspaper, Bojanowski wrote: “I apologize to anyone I may have hurt with the clumsy phrasing I used this morning in a live broadcast. I simply wanted to thank residents and guests, whatever the color of their skin.”


Read more: http://newsfeed.time.com/2012/06/14/...#ixzz1xrjEaOhE

[Kobi]

"As long as we keep talking about racism, it'll never go away. ... There's some people who walk through this world and can't help but hear those sort of things."




http://sports.yahoo.com/blogs/mlb-bi...9376--mlb.html

[Kobi]

Despite the fact that the three-day conference was reportedly festooned with confederate flags and banners bearing Ku Klux Klan and white-supremacist slogans, and that it was scheduled to end July 6th with a “Sacred Christian Cross Lighting Ceremony” — not unlike the kind performed by the Klan –organizers denied that his organization was a hate group. “The white race is God’s chosen people,” William C. Collier, the organizer of the event, told WBRC. “We don’t have the facilities to accommodate other people. We haven’t got any invitations to black, Muslim events. Of course we are not invited to Jewish events and stuff.”

The Christian Identity Ministries, which is running the event along with the Church of God’s Chosen, also claims on its website that the “Europeans and their descendants are the chosen people of God.”





Read more: http://newsfeed.time.com/2012/07/06/...#ixzz1zweUTVIp

[Kobi]

BERLIN—A town in southwest Germany has drawn accusations of sexism after designating two particularly tricky parking spaces "men only."

The mayor of the Black Forest town of Triberg says women would find it difficult to park there because drivers need to back in diagonally without hitting a pillar and a wall.

Gallus Strobel noted that 12 places in the 220-capacity car park are reserved for women. Many German cities designate a small number of parking spaces, usually near exits, for women concerned about their personal safety in poorly-lit garages.

Strobel told The Associated Press on Thursday that he had received overwhelmingly positive reactions from men who feel discriminated against by "women only" parking.

But the Triberg mayor says some "humorless people" had criticized the move.


http://www.boston.com/news/nation/ar...--+Latest+news

[Kobi]

Is Chad Johnson – formerly known as Chad Ochocinco– hoping to reconcile with his estranged wife Evelyn Lozada?

After his arrest on Aug. 11 for allegedly head-butting Lozada, the former Miami Dolphins player recently showed off a new tattoo of Lozada's face on his leg. When a Twitter user mentioned the tattoo and Lozada's filing for a divorce, Johnson responded, "Divorce? Child please... that's my WIFE." To another user, he wrote, "I don't give a flying pretzel in skittle rainbow hell what she filed for."

And while Lozada admits that she'll "always have love" for her husband of 41 days, she can't see them working things out in the future.

"This is something you should never tolerate," says Lozada, who hopes to inspire victims of domestic abuse to get help. "I don't care what the situation is – or who the man is."

http://www.people.com/people/article...s-topheadlines

[Kobi]

The head of U.S.-based appliance company KitchenAid surely missed much of the presidential debate Wednesday night, forced to do damage control after a tweet published on the brand’s official account contained a disparaging remark about President Obama’s late grandmother.

After Obama mentioned his grandmother, who helped raise him and died just days before the 2008 election, @KitchenAidUSA sent the following message to its 25,000 followers — now deleted, but widely preserved in hundreds of retweets.

Corrin Foster @corrinrenee Easy there. RT: @KitchenAidUSA: Obamas gma even knew it was going 2 b bad! 'She died 3 days b4 he became president'. #nbcpolitics
3 Oct 12

The tweet sparked a massive backlash, and KitchenAid swiftly issued an apology tweet:

KitchenAid @KitchenAidUSA Deepest apologies for an irresponsible tweet that is in no way a representation of the brand's opinion. #nbcpolitics
3 Oct 12

Cynthia Soledad, KitchenAid’s senior director of branding, then took control of the KitchenAid account to issue a follow-up tweet that sought to “personally apologize” to the President and his family, as well as to “everyone on Twitter” for the “offensive tweet.”

In an email to tech website Mashable, Soledad explained that an employee had intended to tweet the message through a personal account, but mistakenly broadcast it via the corporate handle.

KitchenAid @KitchenAidUSA It was carelessly sent in error by a member of our Twitter team who, needless to say, won't be tweeting for us anymore.
4 Oct 12

Read more: http://newsfeed.time.com/2012/10/05/...#ixzz28YqErVME