In today’s top news, Nicki Minaj deletes her Twitter account after fans leak music, the number of Blacks in major league baseball has dipped to the lowest point since the sport was newly integrated and a British peer Lord allegedly offered a ten million pound bounty for the capture of Presidents Obama and Bush.

Nicki Minaj deletes her Twitter account after fans leak music. [BET]

The number of Blacks in major league baseball has dipped to the lowest point since the sport was newly integrated. [USATODAY]

British peer Lord allegedly offered a ten million pound bounty for the capture of Presidents Obama and Bush. [Telegraph]

GOP donor says he wonders if President Obama’s “teleprompters are bullet-proof.” [LATimes]

President Obama raised $53 million for his campaign and the democratic party in March. [NPR]

Several U.S. Secret Service officers are on leave today after allegedly hiring prostitutes while on detail in Colombia with the president. [CBS]

A deadly weekend tornado in Oklahoma claimed six lives. [CNN]

Three elite NYPD gun-unit officers accused of treating Black suspects like “animals.” [NYDN]

The world’s armies are eying control of the natural resources buried under the melting arctic circle. [AP]

Nigeria is the third fastest growing economy in the world. [Vanguard]

Millions in the Caribbean Survive on Less Than $2 a Day
An eye-opening report revealed that millions of people in five Caribbean nations are surviving on less than $2 a day, Caribbean Net News reports. The affected citizens are from the Dominican Republic (with 15 percent attempting to live on that small wage), Haiti (72 percent), St. Lucia (41 percent), Guyana (17 percent), Trinidad and Tobago (14 percent) and Suriname (27 percent), according to the recent Population Reference Bureau’s 2009 World Population Data Sheet. News from the bureau, based in Washington D.C., doesn’t get much better. It estimates that the population will rise in the Caribbean, as well as poverty-stricken areas in Africa, Latin America and Asia, by a little less than 50 percent between now and 2050, the news service reports. “This scenario assumes that fertility in less-developed countries will decline smoothly to the low levels observed in today’s more developed countries: about 1.8 children per woman,” the report states. “For fertility to fall to those low levels, many factors are key, including significant increases in the use of family planning in many less-developed countries.”
 

Thousands Protest Mali’s Marriage Law
Thousands of people in the west African nation of Mali have been protesting a new law that provides more rights for wives, reports the BBC. The law, which was adopted weeks ago but has not been signed by the nation’s president yet, decreed that married women are no longer required to obey their husbands. In addition, the legislation allows for stronger inheritance rights for mothers and children who are born out of wedlock, the news service reports. “We have to stick to the Koran. A man must protect his wife, a wife must obey her husband,” Hadja Sapiato Dembele, a spokeswoman from the National Union of Muslim Women’s Association, told BBC recently. Only a certain segment of the population supports the law, she says. “It’s a tiny minority of women here that wants this new law – the intellectuals. The poor and illiterate women of this country – the real Muslims – are against it,” she said.

Mortar Attack Kills Somalis
Violent exchanges between insurgents and government forces in Mogadishu have left 12 Somali civilians dead, the BBC reports. Insurgents reportedly fired at least six mortars at the presidential palace, and government troops retaliated by firing back. “Most of the shells landed on deserted houses but three hit places where people stay,” a witness told the BBC. Just in the last several weeks, more than 165,000 Somalis have fled the capital city due to fighting between the government and insurgents. The country, which has been without a stable government since the early 90s, is due to get more African Union peacekeepers, according to the nation’s Prime Minister Omar Abdirashid Ali Sharmarke. “We welcome the support of the recent AU heads of states summit in Libya for the government … and we have a firm pledge for the increase of the AU peacekeepers,” he told reporters Sunday. While Mogadishu currently has 4,300 AU peacekeepers, they are not allowed to fight insurgents unless they are defending themselves. However that mandate will be changed, to allow the peacekeepers to “fight along government soldiers,” Sharmarke said.

U.S. Will Give Flu Meds to Caribbean

The United States is set to donate 420,000 packets of Tamiflu to help countries in Latin America and the Caribbean combat the spread of swine flu. As the winter season begins, countries in the region including Argentina, Brazil and Chile are seeing a surge in serious cases of the illness, The New York Times reports. While most cases of the virus are mild, its spread is now unstoppable, Margaret Chan, who leads the World Health Organization, said at a global forum, reports the BBC.