L.A Clippers owner Donald Sterling will settle a racial discrimination lawsuit with the U.S Department of Justice by paying a $2.725 million fine.

From LosAngelesBizJournals.com

The lawsuit, originally filed in August 2006, alleged that Sterling discriminated against African-Americans, Hispanics and families with children at apartment buildings he controls in the Koreatown section of Los Angeles.

Sterling’s wife, Rochelle, and the Sterling Family Trust were also named as defendants in the suit. Sterling owns and manages 119 apartment buildings comprising over 5,000 apartments in Los Angeles County.

According to a statement from the Justice Department, the payment is “largest monetary payment ever obtained by the department in the settlement of a case alleging housing discrimination in the rental of apartments.”

The $2.725 million penalty breaks down to a $100,000 civil fine and the other $2.625 million will be paid to a fund that will pay monetary damages to those “who were harmed by the defendants’ discriminatory practices.”

Black folks: Leave the salt alone. A series of not-so-new studies have concluded that too much sodium in our diets is triggering a host of maladies in too many of us. But now, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, as many as 70 percent of Americans need to seriously cut back on the consumption of salt. That includes people with high blood pressure, those over 40 and all African Americans, the study shows. Read the rest.

More Blacks are leaving the northern and western big cities for the South, according to an analysis of the 2000 Census by Brookings Institution scholar William H. Frey. According to the analysis, while the Black populations of North and South Carolina are growing, cities like Chicago, New York and Los Angeles are seeing a decrease in Black residents, reports Greensboro’s News-Record.  More here.

Cancer has Extra Disdain for Black Folks
Not only does the disease seek out African Americans more than anybody else, but once it finds them, it’s more likely to kill them, a new report shows. While death rates from cancer has fallen for all other groups, it has risen among Blacks. In fact, the gap between Blacks and Whites is just as wide today as it was 28 years ago, according to Ahmedin Jemal, co-author of the report. Consider this: among women, death rates were 14-percent higher for Blacks than Whites in 1981. Now, they’re 16-percent higher. Death rates are 33-percent higher among Black men than Whites; this has been steady since 1981. But there is an inkling of good news for African Americans, the report from the American Cancer Society shows. Among men, overall death rates have been falling faster for Blacks than Whites, mainly because fewer Black men are dying from lung and prostate tumors, it shows. The problem, however, is that Blacks tend to be diagnosed at more advanced stages than Whites, whose cancers are more often found at earlier, more curable stages. Blacks also are less likely than Whites to get high-quality treatment in time to make a difference, says Peter Bach of New York’s Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, who was not involved in the new study.

Black colorectal cancer patients do worse than White ones, a new study has found. By the time that African-American patients are diagnosed, their chance of survival over the next five years is glum, researchers say. “Right now, we cannot definitely explain why there are such differences between the African-American and the Caucasian patients,” study leader Dr. Edith Mitchell of Philadelphia’s Thomas Jefferson University told EurekAlert.org. He believes socioeconomics might be largely responsible. “For example, research has shown that African-Americans are less likely than Caucasian patients to have health insurance, and thus they may not receive the screening necessary to detect colorectal cancer at an earlier stage,” Mitchell says. The study is based on data from the tumor registry of Thomas Jefferson University Hospital on 2,500 colorectal cancer patients treated from 1988 to 2007, and on data from the National Cancer Institute’s Surveillance, Epidemiology and End Results database on 244,701 colorectal cancer patients treated from 1988 to 2005. The findings are being presented at the American Society of Clinical Oncology Gastrointestinal Cancers Symposium in Orlando, Fla.

Tobacco companies made smoking less harsh

Scientists say that the tobacco industry tweaked menthol levels in specific brands of cigarettes, deliberately creating a milder experience for first-time smokers, ScienceDaily.com reports. Menthol masks the harshness and irritation of cigarettes, allowing delivery of an effective dose of nicotine, the addictive chemical in cigarettes. These milder products were then marketed to the youngest potential consumers, Harvard School of Public Health researchers found. “For decades, the tobacco industry has carefully manipulated menthol content not only to lure youth but also to lock in lifelong adult customers,” said Howard Koh, professor and associate dean for public health at Harvard and a co-author of the paper. Lead author Jennifer M. Kreslake, a research analyst, and colleagues from the Tobacco Control Research Program at Harvard, reviewed internal tobacco industry documents on menthol product development, conducted laboratory tests to measure menthol content in U.S. brands, examined market research reports and drew data from the 2006 National Survey on Drug Use and Health, an annual nationally representative survey among U.S. residents 12 years and older. The industry documents revealed that tobacco companies researched how controlling menthol levels could increase brand sales among specific groups. The 2006 national survey showed that a significantly greater proportion of adolescent and young adult smokers used menthol brands, compared to older smokers. In 2006, 43.8 percent of current smokers, ages 12 to 17 years old, reported using menthol cigarettes, as did 35.6 percent of current smokers 18 to 24 years old. By contrast, 30.6 percent of smokers older than 35 reported menthol use. The researchers noted that race was also a factor in use and brand choice, with African Americans as a whole more likely to use menthol brands. African-American adolescent and young adult smokers used menthol as frequently as did older African-American smokers, but they were more likely to choose a lower-menthol variety. Earlier Harvard research described industry efforts to target African Americans with menthol brands.

Jamaica is leading the Caribbean AIDS fight
Jamaica has reduced HIV in Jamaica to about 1.5 per cent, thus leading the Caribbean fight against AIDS, the Jamaican Minister of Health Rudyard Spencer reports. The country’s success has lead to an agreement for Jamaica to receive $55.2 million from the Global Fund to further fight the deadly disease. Lauding the successes of the first Global Fund program, led by outgoing Chief of Epidemiology and AIDS Dr. Peter Figueroa, the minister reported that there was also a 35-percent decline in AIDS-related deaths between 2004 and 2006. He accredited this to overall improved access to treatment for people living with HIV/AIDS. “The mother-to-child transmission rate has also witnessed a dramatic decline, from 25 percent in 2004 to less than 10 percent in 2007,” he noted. However, while Jamaica has achieved much success in HIV control, particularly in treatment and care, risk-taking behaviors have not decreased significantly, especially among vulnerable groups and young persons. Spencer announced that the new Global Fund would be rolling out a number of initiatives to target vulnerable groups, such as prostitutes and their clients, drug users, prison inmates and young persons, among others.