Golf star gains Forbes magazine’s No. 1 rank.

Golf star Tiger Woods tops all takers in earnings from June 1, 2007 to June 1, 2008, according to Forbes magazine. Woods pulled down $115 million in competition earnings and endorsements, making him the top-paid pro player in the world. Others making the men’s top-earner list include retired NBA star Michael Jordan, who heads the Charlotte Bobcats, banked $45 million over 12 months, still snatching checks from his Nike brand endorsements. Male athletes out-earned female athletes by a collective $483 million compared with the women’s $118 million, according to Forbes.

Opening Olympics ceremonies begin today. It’s not only D. Wade, Kobe and King James who’ll hold court at the Beijing Olympics, which host opening ceremonies today. Elite Black athletes will compete in sports as diverse as track and swimming. The Williams family’s presence will be felt in women’s tennis, as Black stars appear among 11,000 athletes from 205 nations. You can follow BET.com to see who’s a contender and who brings home the gold.

Expansion team’s choice appears to be Thunder. The former Seattle Supersonics has apparently become the Oklahoma Thunder. But the new franchise’s name appeared on the Web without an official NBA announcement. Not long after the “Thunder” leak surfaced, the nickname was removed from the league’s site. Last month, the NBA had included Thunder among its potential choices after the city of Seattle let the team go to Oklahoma over complications with an arena lease.

World Lens: Hurricane Dolly rips through parts of Mexico ; Singer Lenny Kravitz rocks Budapest ; and the U.S. Olympic basketball team trains in Beijing . See the pictures here.

Police seek clues to who murdered an Atlanta mother
Investigators and family members in the Atlanta suburb of Duluth continued seeking clues Tuesday to explain why anybody would shoot to death a 40-year-old mother as she waited to pick up her daughter from work. After all, authorities say, the car that was stolen from Genai Coleman Friday night, when she was gunned down outside a Red Lobster restaurant, was an old Dodge; plus, she had no enemies anyone knew about. A stunned Geraldine Brown, who flew to Atlanta from Elkhart, Ind., immediately after hearing that her daughter had been shot, said the car certainly was “nothing worth being killed over,” according to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “They had the car, why did they have to shoot her?” Coleman, a single preschool teacher at Montclair Elementary School in DeKalb County, took in and raised three foster daughters (now ages 19, 21 and 23) at her home in Snellville, Ga., the Journal-Constitution reports. “‘Genai’ means “one who loves people,” and she did just that, her mother said.

Detroit’s Kilpatrick has some legal team

If Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick has to cough up some more cash, gets booted out of office or winds up in jail behind the scandals swirling around him these days, it certainly won’t be due to a lack of legal representation. The Detroit News reports that the embattled city chief, who is “confronting legal challenges on at least six fronts, has assembled a huge team of attorneys to fight an array of civil lawsuits and attempts to remove him from office without compromising job one – defending Kilpatrick on felony charges.” Such a seemingly humongous effort, according to the News, requires at least 17 public and private attorneys. BET.com/News has more on this story. Should Kilpatrick step down, or is there a witch hunt against the mayor?

A Georgia school gets the paddles ready for the fall
To spank or not to spank … that’s the question in Twiggs County, Ga., where principals are breaking out their paddles this fall to deter misbehaving. It won’t be the first time that the school district puts the wood to students who act up. Last year, for example, a second-grader was swatted for throwing pencils, as were others who were deemed too unruly for the standard time-out or other methods of discipline, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports. But the policy was rarely used. Teachers and administrators can opt out if they desire, and parents must sign a permission slip to allow their children to be paddled. Read more of what the parents and teachers had to say at BET.com/News.