Three New York Corrections Officers resigned after for among other things, showing preferential treatment to rapper Foxy Brown.

According to the New York Daily News, Brown was allowed to conduct an interview with a magazine and take a photo shoot for her album.

She served nine months in Rikers Island for an assault conviction in 2006.

Detroit’s Ex-mayor is Freed
Detroit’s disgraced ex-mayor, Kwame Kilpatrick, will leave jail today after 99 days behind bars for lying to a jury about his relationship with former chief of staff Christine Beatty. The Motor City’s 38-year-old Hip-Hop Mayor left Detroit’s downtown jail just after midnight en route home. He must meet with probation officers tomorrow before heading off to a job interview, reportedly a high-paying gig in Texas. According to The Dallas Morning News, Kilpatrick met with Dallas Mayor Tom Leppert before he went to jail.

Media Want Jena-Six Youth Hearing Records
Media groups want access to the sealed records of Mychal Bell, the Black youth who was convicted for his role in beating a White classmate in the tiny Louisiana town of Jena. He and five other young Black males were charged with attempted murder in the incident, but the charges were reduced amid an outcry from Black leaders, civil rights advocates, students and others, who in 2007 marched 20,000 strong on the community of a couple thousand residents.  Bell later pleaded guilty to a juvenile charge of second-degree battery. Read the rest here.

Naomi Campbell’s agreement was not made public.
Supermodel Settles with Maid Naomi Campbell has settled out of court with her ex-maid, who said the 38-year-old, hot-tempered supermodel hit her and called her names. The terms of the settlement were not released. Gaby Wilson, who worked for Campbell in 2005 and 2006, said in her lawsuit that Campbell also threatened to charge her with theft after she couldn’t find a pair of designer jeans.

 

Grenada cracks down on saggin’ pants.

Officials in Grenada are cracking down on people who wear sagging pants that show their underwear. The move by the Caribbean island nation follows similar bans in a few U.S. cities. The country’s police Commissioner James Clarkson believes the crack-down will bring “back morality into20the country,” reports Caribbean Net News. Some young men have forgotten where their waist is, he added. As another result, women in the nation are doing the same thing; wearing their clothes very low. “Any time you allow lawlessness to start taking effect on your country, you have a problem,” he said. Clarkson, who was appointed in August, said he is looking to form a closer relationship with the press. He also announced that he wants to improve the working conditions for female officers.

Nine in Senegal convicted of homosexuality.

An HIV-prevention activist and eight others in Senegal have been sentenced to prison for allegedly engaging in homosexual acts. The group was arrested in a raid at the apartment of the activist Diadji Diouf, weeks after Senegal hosted an international AIDS conference. Senegal, which is mainly a Muslim country, is among 38 nations that have outlawed acts of homosexuality.

 Christine Beatty, Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick’s former top aide who was busted exchanging steamy text-messages with him, got a dose of the same medicine he got in late October.  Wayne County Circuit Court Judge Timothy Kenny slapped the 38-year-old ex-chief of staff with a 120-day jail stint for obstruction of justice. She was convicted of lying under oath about the extent of her relationship with the Motor City’s so-called “Hip-hop Mayor.” Read more here.

 World Lens:

Will Smith is in Germany promoting, South Africans ring in the New Year, Sudanese protest against Israelis. See pics.

Activists to remain jailed in Zimbabw
Fourteen Zimbabwe activists, who stand accused of planning to bring down the government and President Robert Mugabe, were ordered by a court to remain jailed pending a Supreme Court hearing, reports CNN. “It is clear that the attorney general has appealed against the high court judgment. For that reason, the accused cannot be released at this stage,” said Judge Mishrod Guvamombe. Nine activists, including the head of the rights group Zimbabwe Peace Project, were recently charged with recruiting citizens to participate in military training to overthrow the government. Seven others were charged with banditry, which, in Zimbabwe, carries the death penalty. Two activists were released.  The majority of those arrested are members of the opposition party Movement of Democratic Change. The party’s leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, had said he’d pull out of the power-sharing deal he signed in September with Mugabe if the accused were not released by the end of the year.

Akon may not be as tough as he wants you to think. While he might have been a petty thief as a youth, he was no hardened criminal, Akon told an Atlanta newspaper. Aliaune Thiam has been playing up his criminal past since he officially arrived on the music scene in 2004 as Akon. The Atlanta rapper-songwriter-singer’s first single was titled “Locked Up.” And the Atlanta-based labels he shares with hip-hop/R&B artist T-Pain, reggae star Kardinal Offishal and pop newcomer Colby O’Donis are named Konvict Entertainment and Kon Live. And the title of his sophomore CD, which sold 3 million copies, was “Konvicted.” All of that was on purpose, to give him street cred, Akon told The Atlanta Constitution-Journal. It was, he says, “to remind myself of where I’d come from, what I’ve been through, and what I don’t want to go back to.” While the Smoking Gun Web site’s report that the Atlanta singer fabricated much of his claims about being a convicted felon and one-time leader of a car theft ring, he says his story is one of a troubled past. Akon told the Atlanta paper that he served about three years in and out of jail on car theft and weapons charges, but it’s true that he never served time in prison. He said he’d wanted to go to Clark-Atlanta University and play basketball when he first came to Atlanta, but hurt his knee and then” the hustler came out in me.” ‘You know what? College was never for me. I want to be in the music industry.’ “OK, I played around until about ‘98 before I realized, ‘OK I’ve got to get some money. I’m broke.’”

“Soul Train” legend could serve five years. The host and creator of TV’s most popular Black music and dance show could go to prison for five years after a dispute with his wife last month. “Soul Train” legend Don Cornelius is charged with spousal abuse, dissuading a witness from filing a police report and assault with a deadly weapon after cops were called to his Hollywood Hills home. Cornelius, 72, faces three counts of abusing his wife Victoria, following the L.A. City Attorney’s filing last week. In the 1970s and 1980s, “Soul Train helped launch the careers of dozens of Black recording artists.

Marion Jones speaks out about her jail time.

Saying she will focus on efforts to help children learn from her mistakes, recently released Olympian Marion Jones gave her first interview to Oprah Winfrey since being stripped of five Olympic medals and serving several months of jail time for lying in court about using steroids. Once the world’s most famous woman sprinter, Jones still insists she didn’t knowingly take performance-enhancing drugs, believing they were a diet supplement. “I’m trying to move on,” she told Winfrey. “I hope that everybody else can move on, too.” Asked about her lowest moment while jailed, Jones said “so many things to count.” She concluded that missing the birthdays of both her 5- and 1-year-old sons topped the list. Jones wept as she read a letter she’d written to the boys while incarcerated. But she expressed a new pleasure at having people deal with her as a non-sports heroine. “I appreciate, so much, the little things,” Jones added. “I am energized by this next chapter.”