“It’s a very tough situation,” co-manager Shelly Finkel told ESPN.com. “He can’t fight like that. That’s what we all told him and he finally agreed. It’s too much.”
Guerrero’s wife, Casey, was diagnosed with leukemia two weeks before then-featherweight titleholder Guerrero was scheduled to defend his belt against Martin Honorio in November 2007.
Guerrero left his wife’s bedside just a couple of days before the fight, knocked Honorio out in the first round, and returned to his wife and their two children.
Casey Guerrero’s leukemia eventually went into remission but is back. She underwent a bone marrow transplant recently and has been at Stanford Hospital in Palo Alto, Calif., for about 10 days, Guerrero’s co-manager Bob Santos said.
“They won’t really know if the bone marrow is going to take, so we’re hoping that it does,” Santos said. “Robert wanted to fight. He thought he could spend half the day with her and train the other half the day, but she started to take a turn for the worse. I told him point blank there is no way I would allow him to fight. Me and Shelly had to talk him out of it. This is a tough sport and if he’s going to fight somebody like Katsidis you have to be 100 percent focused. With this situation, how could he be?”
“She had just been diagnosed and there was a lot of hope and optimism,” he said. “The doctorshttp://www.15rounds.com/wp-admin/media-upload.php?post_id=12472&type=video&TB_iframe=true were like, ‘We can try this and we can do that.’ In this case, it’s hit or miss. We just don’t know if the [bone marrow transplant] is going to work. If this doesn’t work there is nothing they can do for you. She’s at a point where if this doesn’t work, unless there is divine intervention, she’s in big trouble.
“I got the call and they said it’s very serious,” said Richard Schaefer of Golden Boy Promotions, who promotes Guerrero. “All of our prayers are with Robert and his wife and we hope that she can pull through. I feel so bad. They have two young kids. I hope that she will be able to make it. His wife is fighting for her life. That is way more important than any fight in a ring.”
Racial divisions emerge in an online world.(Business)
The Seattle Times (Seattle, WA) January 10, 2011 Byline: Jesse Washington; The Associated Press When the personal-computer revolution began decades ago, Latinos and blacks were much less likely to use one of the marvelous new machines. Then, when the Internet began to change life as we know it, these groups had less access to the Web and slower online connections — placing them on the wrong side of the “digital divide.” Today, as mobile technology puts computers in our pockets, Latinos and blacks are more likely than the general population to access the Web by cellular phones, and they use their phones more often to do more things.
But now some see a new “digital divide” emerging — with Latinos and blacks being challenged by more, not less, access to technology. It’s tough to fill out a job application on a cellphone, for example. Researchers have noticed signs of segregation online that perpetuate divisions in the physical world. And blacks and Latinos may be using their increased Web access more for entertainment than empowerment.
A greater percentage of whites than blacks and Latinos have broadband access at home, but laptop ownership is now about even for these groups, after black laptop ownership jumped from 34 percent in 2009 to 51 percent in 2010, Pew found.
Increased access and usage should be good, right?
“I don’t know if it’s the right time to celebrate. There are challenges still there,” says Craig Watkins, an associate professor at the University of Texas at Austin and author of “The Young and the Digital.” We are much more engaged, but now the questions turn to the quality of that engagement, what are people doing with that access.” For Tyrell Coley, 21, engagement mostly means entertainment. Last month the New York grocery clerk launched a Twitter conversation about “#femalesneedto.” The “hashtag” in the name allowed others to join in.
Within a few hours, #femalesneedto was the top trending topic on Twitter — meaning more of the site’s 17 million users were talking about it than anything else. Most comments came from black users and focused on relationships.
Coley is black, and so are most of his 3,756 Twitter followers. So are about 25 percent of all Twitter users, roughly double the percentage of blacks in the U.S. population, according to a February 2010 survey by Edison Research and Arbitron.
Many of Twitter’s trending topics have been fueled by black tweets. Coley uses his phone for 80 percent of his online activity, which is usually watching hip-hop and comedy videos or looking for sneakers on eBay. go to web site mytouch 4g review
This trend is alarming to Anjuan Simmons, a black engineer and technology consultant who blogs, tweets and uses Facebook “more than my wife would like.” He hopes that blacks and Latinos will use their increased Web access to create content, not just consume it.
Simmons has made professional connections and found job opportunities through social media. But when he first started using Twitter, the first thing he looked for was other black faces to connect with.
“We tend to see other African Americans as family. Even if we haven’t met someone, we often refer to other black people as ‘brothers’ or ‘sisters.’ Facebook and Internet access are what most of Miguel Amador’s customers want when they enter his two stores in Latino neighborhoods in Camden, N.J. His mobile-device sales are up 50 percent from a year ago. His top seller is the MyTouch 4G phone, which costs $499.
Amador, an immigrant from the Dominican Republic, uses a laptop at home and a desktop in his store to run his business and update his Facebook accounts. One for personal use and one for his customers.
“For the Latino community,” he says, “people without Internet are missing about 65 percent of the opportunities in life.” Utopian idea The early days of the Internet were filled with visions of a Utopian space where race would disappear, famously captured by a 1993 New Yorker cartoon with one pooch sitting at a computer saying to another, “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.” But the reality has turned out much differently, says Peter Chow-White, an assistant communications professor at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia and co-author of the forthcoming anthology “Race After the Internet.” He says there is “absolutely” still a racial divide online, in terms of broadband access and the ability of blacks and Latinos to make their voices widely heard. go to site mytouch 4g review
That’s what danah boyd found as she documented a form of “white flight” among teenagers from MySpace to Facebook in 2006-07.
A social-media researcher for Microsoft and a fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, boyd interviewed teens in 17 states and spent more than 2,000 hours observing online practices.
She found that black youth were more likely to be on MySpace, while whites were leaving what some called MySpace’s “ghetto” environment for Facebook. Although few white teens explicitly said they were leaving MySpace to get away from blacks or Latinos, she said their comments were often closely tied to race and class.
“The higher castes of high school moved to Facebook,” one 17-year-old told her. “It was more cultured, and less cheesy. The lower class usually were content to stick to MySpace.” These movements “reflected a reproduction of social categories that exist in schools throughout the United States. Because race, ethnicity and socio-economic status shape social categories, the choice between MySpace and Facebook became racialized,” boyd wrote in an article to be published in “Race After the Internet.” Facebook, MySpace Today, Facebook has eclipsed MySpace in popularity, and Facebook says that blacks are about 11 percent of all U.S. Facebook users. But no ethnic group has increased its Facebook usage more than Hispanics, which went from about 3 percent to 9 percent of U.S. users since 2006, according to the site’s own analysis.
Amador says this trend, along with more Internet access in general, is speeding up the process of assimilation for Latinos by connecting them to their friends and families back home.
“When you’re far away from something, you have a strong feeling for it, and you want it more,” he says. “But now that we can get closer to those things, it makes us much more comfortable here.” CAPTION(S):
Frank Franklin Ii / The Associated Press: Tyrell Coley, 21, of Queens, N.Y., holds his iPhone displaying his Twitter account. For Coley, digital engagement mostly means entertainment. (0415375959) Matt Rourke / The Associated Press: Ritmo Records owner Miguel Amador meets with a customer in one of his Camden, N.J., stores. Most of his revenue used to come from CDs; now it’s mobile devices. (0415376798)
