In today’s top news, Beyoncé dispels surrogacy rumors, President Obama shouts out Young Jeezy at the latest White House Correspondents’ Dinner and Brian McKnight receives offers to perform his X-rated R&B satire ballad.

Beyoncé dispels surrogacy rumors. [BET]

President Obama shouts out Young Jeezy at the latest White House Correspondents’ Dinner. [Billboard]

Brian McKnight receives offers to perform his X-rated R&B satire ballad. [BET]

Ellen show DJ Tony Okungbowa makes his silver screen debut. [BET]

Bill Clinton and President Obama campaign together on the economy. [Reuters]

A Gallup poll shows that Americans expect to work longer, retire. [TODAY]

New study shows overweight teens may have harder time controlling diabetes. [CTV]

A mother’s stress level during pregnancy may cause iron deficiency in newborns. [HealthDay]

Sudan president declares state of emergency along South Sudan border. [CNN]

Uganda claims Sudanese government supports Joseph Kony. [New Vision]

In today’s news, the suspected shooters of five Black men in Tulsa, Oklahoma have been arrested, Bill Cosby speaks out on the Trayvon Martin tragedy and, for the second time in three weeks, a CNN reporter says the N-word on live TV.

The suspected shooters of five Black men in Tulsa, Oklahoma have been arrested. [BET]

Bill Cosby speaks out on the Trayvon Martin tragedy. [WashingtonTimes]

For the second time in three weeks, a CNN reporter says the N-word on live TV. [DailyCaller]

Trayvon Martin’s family could sue the homeowner’s association in the neighborhood where he was killed. [AP]

A Fox Orlando news affiliate refers to neo-Nazis as a civil rights group. [ThinkProgress]

Violence forces cancellation of two Young Jeezy concerts in Canada. [BET]

Study: Children of mothers who are diabetic or obese while pregnant are at a higher risk of developing autism. [FOX]

Rapper Young Buck to lose much of his intellectual property in his bankruptcy settlement. [BET]

Easter Sunday suicide bombing in Nigeria kills 38. [CSM]

Mali’s president formally stepped down. [CNN]

In today’s top news, CNN lifts its suspension of Roland Martin over offensive remarks, Black churches vow to register one million voters on Easter Sunday and a new study links red meat to premature death from diabetes, heart disease and cancer.

CNN lifts suspension of Roland Martin over offensive remarks. [Newsbusters]

Black churches vow to register one million voters on Easter Sunday. [ChristianPost]

Study links red meat to premature death from diabetes, heart disease and cancer. [FOX]

Michelle Obama will lead the U.S. delegation to the 2012 Summer Olympic Games in London. [AP]

Oprah gives her long-time beau Stedman some face time on the cover of O magazine. [BET]

Poll of Republican voters in Alabama and Mississippi show most believe Obama is Muslim. [NYDN]

Record rainfall soaks Southern Louisiana. [CNN]

Analysts say foreign policy will determine whether Obama remains in office next term. [AP]

Afghans attack delegation visiting site of massacre. [BBC]

Marketing agency makes homeless people wi-fi hotspots; offering Internet for donations. [NYT]

In today’s top news, Nick Cannon says he has been diagnosed with an autoimmune disease, former child star Brandy says her daughter will have to wait to hit the stage and Oprah Winfrey is set to interview Whitney Houston’s family.

Nick Cannon says he has been diagnosed with an autoimmune disease. [BET]

Former child star Brandy says her daughter will have to wait to hit the stage. [BET]

Oprah to interview Whitney Houston’s family. [AP]

President Obama on Sunday warned of “loose talk of war” with Iran.  [AFP]

U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder to address the “targeted killing” of Americans abroad. [FOX]

House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi endorses Jesse Jackson Jr. for r-eelection. [AP]

Seven-year-old boy survives tornado after being dropped on a highway. [MSNBC]

Scientists are testing out an artificial pancreas for diabetics. [CNN]

Designer drug “Spice” linked to kidney failures. [Reuters]

Congo explosions kill 200 and wound nearly 2,000. [CNN]

(Photo: Jeff Fusco/Getty Images)

In today’s top news, music legend Aretha Franklin gets a ring, two Black frats have Obama’s back and Georgia’s anti-fat ads attract bad flack.

The ‘Queen of Soul’ Aretha Franklin gets engaged. [BET]

Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum says poor Blacks shouldn’t get welfare handouts. [CBS]

FAMU Board approves anti-hazing plan. [CNN]

Some Memphis Black farmers say they have been shut out of a class action lawsuit. [WMC-TV]

Nigerians take to the streets to protest high gas prices. [BBC]

Diabetes during pregnancy may lead to ADHD. [CNN]

Two Black fraternities have joined forces to rally support for Obama’s re-election bid. [BET]

Senegalese musician Youssou Ndour eyes the country’s top post. [AP]

Georgia’s anti-obesity ads featuring children are ruffling feathers. [NYDN]

Hong Kong rings in 2012 with fresh fears of a Bird Flu outbreak. [WSJ]

Doctors stumbled upon a medication that greatly reduces patients’ risk of “minor amputation” onset by diabetes. The physicians gave diabetics a drug originally intended to lower their cholesterol and were astonished to see that they were 36 percent less likely to require a limb removed, a new analysis of research says. In Australia, Finland and New Zealand, researchers studied about 10,000 patients, between 50 and 75 years old who had type 2 diabetes, the kind linked to obesity. Half of them were given fenofibrate, a drug available generically and sold as Antara, Fenoglide, Lipofen and others. The other half were given fake pills. After five years, 115 patients had at least one lower limb amputation because of diabetes, which damages nerves and blood vessels, and can lead to amputation in severe instances. About one diabetes patient in 10 loses part of a leg. The study, first published in 2005, aimed to see if fenofibrate prevented heart disease. It didn’t. But in this new analysis, experts found patients on fenofibrate had a 36 percent lower risk of a first amputation than those on placebo. Patients who lost part of their legs were more likely to have heart disease, smoking, skin ulcers or previous amputations. Amputations were labeled minor if they were below the ankle and major if they were above the ankle. The risk of minor amputations in patients without large vessel disease, the narrowing of blood vessels, was nearly 50 percent lower in the group taking fenofibrates. The risk of a major amputation was not substantially different between the two groups. Taller people were also more likely to suffer amputations. The results were published Friday in the medical journal Lancet.

 Stem cell research, approved by President Obama earlier this year, could help patients fight type 1 diabetes, new research shows. A few people with the disease have been able to survive for nearly three years without insulin shots after having their own blood stem cells removed and injected into them, U.S. and Brazilian researchers reported Tuesday. So far, a couple dozen boys and men have been treated within six weeks of being diagnosed with type 1 diabetes, and autoimmune disease that destroys the insulin-producing cells in the pancreas, generally forcing individuals to take insulin shots to survive. (People with type 1 make up only about 10 percent of all diabetics; most people have type 2, which can be controlled with diet, exercise, oral drugs, or insulin shots.) “After the transplant, 20 of the 23 patients became insulin-free for at least a few months or even years,” reports Health.com. “Twelve of them stayed free of insulin for an average of 31 months and eight patients had periods ranging from six to 47 months in which they were free from insulin.”

Black teens are less likely to smoke than Whites. During their teen years, Blacks are much less likely to smoke than Whites, a new study says. However, most of this advantage disappears by mid-adulthood, researchers say. There is a puzzle here in that usually the health disadvantages in African Americans show up early in life and get worse as they get older,” says Fred Pampel, Ph.D., a sociology professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder. “For cigarette-smoking, African Americans tend to act in a more healthy way during their teens, but that advantage goes away by middle age.” The study appears in the December issue of the Journal of Health and Social Behavior. Pampel used data from two surveys to look at groups of White and Black teens to see how their cigarette-smoking patterns changed as they aged. “Resources, such as higher income, more education, better access to medical care and greater use of nicotine replacement products, help Whites quit at a faster rate,” Pampel said. But C. Tracy Orleans, Ph.D., of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, said the study did not factor in possible socio-demographic differences in exposure to higher tobacco prices and taxes, which “deter youth onset and promote quitting, especially among low-income smokers, and protection by worksite and comprehensive smoke-free airs laws, which affect adult cessation more than youth initiation.”

 Celebrities stand up to diabetes. Several celebrities are talking about their battles with diabetes during National Diabetes Month. To see what they have to say, go to BET.com/Body & Soul.

Tweens, teens double their diabetes drug use. America’s tweens and teens more than doubled their use of type 2 diabetes medications between 2002 and 2005, with girls between 10 and 14 years of age showing a whopping 166-percent increase. What is behind the increase? The most likely cause, scientists say, is obesity, which is closely associated with type 2 diabetes. The finding is included in a study of chronic medication use in children ages 5 to 19 released today in the journal Pediatrics by researchers from the Saint Louis University School of Medicine, pharmacy benefit manager Express Scripts and the Kansas Health Institute. In addition to diabetes, the study found that the use of blood pressure, cholesterol, attention-deficit disorder and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADD/ADHD), asthma and depression medications increased at varying levels during the four year period. For help with controlling diabetes, see BET.com’s “Stand Up To Diabetes” feature.

Teens who need flu shots aren’t getting them. Too few American teens with asthma and other high-risk illnesses aren’t getting their flu shots, a new study finds. Researchers looked at vaccination rates from 1992 to 2002 for 18,703 adolescents with asthma, cardiac disease, immune system disorders and other conditions. What they discovered is that during the study period, vaccination rates improved, but only from 8 percent to 15 percent. From 1999 to 2002, only 11 percent of the patients received vaccinations during all four seasons, and more than 56 percent received no flu shots during those four years. Doctors are somewhat at fault, the researchers say, because from 45 percent to 55 percent of the teens who had one or more health-care visits during the flu season didn’t get a flu shot. Those who had preventive visits were more likely to receive the influenza vaccine. “Influenza vaccination has been recommended for adolescents with high-risk conditions for well over a decade,” study author Mari Nakamura, a clinical fellow in pediatrics at Children’s Hospital Boston, said. In children and adolescents with high-risk conditions, flu can lead to severe illness, hospitalization and even death. The study’s findings can be found in the November issue of Pediatrics.

HPV virus is linked to 25,000 cancers over five years. The human wart virus  known as HPV caused 25,000 cases of cancer in the United States between 1998 and 2003, including not only cervical cancer but also anal and mouth cancers, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported on Monday.  The study suggests the need for screening of both men and women to be expanded for human papillomavirus, or HPV, said another team of researchers, who did a similar study. HPV includes about 100 different viruses, and they are the leading cause of cervical cancer. The viruses, transmitted sexually and by skin-to-skin contact, can also cause anal and penile cancers, as well as cancers of the mouth and throat. HPV also causes common warts. Both Merck and Co. and GlaxoSmithKline make vaccines against some of the strains of HPV most strongly linked with cervical cancer, but not all. The vaccines are recommended for girls and young women who have not yet become sexual activity.  ”Currently available HPV vaccines have the potential to reduce the rates of HPV-associated cancers, like oral and anal cancers, that are currently on the rise and for which there is no effective or widely applied screening programs,” the CDC’s Dr. Mona Saraiya, who led the study, said in a statement. “This gives us baseline data to measure the impact of HPV vaccine and cervical cancer screening programs in reducing the incidence of cervical cancer and other HPV-associated cancers… .”

Sleep is seen as the newest obesity fighter. Consistently getting a good night’s sleep may help protect children from becoming overweight adults, a study published Monday suggests. Researchers found that among more than 1,000 people followed from birth to age 32, those who got too little sleep as children were more likely than their well-rested counterparts to become obese adults, Reuters News reports. The link between sleep deprivation during childhood and obesity risk later in life held up even when the researchers figured in things like the impact of a child’s weight or TV habits, and adulthood exercise level. All of this supports the idea that early sleep habits have a direct effect on weight in the long term, according to Dr. Robert John Hancox, the study’s senior author. “Although we cannot prove that this is a cause-and-effect relationship,” he told Reuters Health, “this study provides strong evidence that it probably is.”

Eating more fish can help you control diabetes. Centering your dinner around a fish dish at least twice a week might help people with diabetes lower their risk of kidney disease, a study suggests. In the November issue of the American Journal of Kidney Diseases, British researchers analyzed the records of more than 22,300 middle-aged and older English men and women who were part of a large European cancer study to determine the effect of fish on kidney disease. What they found is that of the 517 study subjects who had diabetes (most of whom had type 2), those who on average ate less than one serving of fish each week were four times as likely to have albumin in their urine than people with diabetes who ate fish twice a week. Adler speculates that the nutrient content of fish may affect kidney function and improve blood glucose control. But the researchers could not say what type of fish had the biggest impact, reports USA Today.To get more help with diabetes, go to BET.com/Body &Soul.