Local Senators Don’t Vote For North Carolina Native AG Candidate Loretta Lynch

The North Carolina NAACP is reacting to a decision by the two North Carolina U.S. Senators to not support Loretta Lynch as the country’s new attorney general.

Lynch, who grew up in Greensboro, N.C. and went to high school in Durham, was recently grilled by senators on Capitol Hill.

Her responses apparently did not persuade both Republican Senators Richard Burr and Thom Tillis.

Both said her recent comments against North Carolina’s voter ID law, which is being challenged in court, would show she would play politics and pursue “frivolous lawsuits against the state.”

Leaders with the N.C. NAACP said Lynch was more than qualified for the job and the senators’ opposition is regressive.

“They are actively lobbying against the candidacy of Loretta Lynch,” NC NAACP President Rev. William Barber said.

“…(W)hy are you attacking a daughter of North Carolina who has done everything right to come to this place?” asked Barber.

Lynch does have Republican support from two other senators.

Her nomination was approved by the Senate Judiciary Committee, but it’s unclear when the full Senate will take up the vote.

Was William Shakespeare Gay?

According to The Times of India and other sources, the sexuality of William Shakespeare has again been called into question by leading scholars, it has been reported.

Sir Brian Vickers, a visiting professor at University College London, started the academic debate by claiming that a “Times Literary Supplement” book review was wrong to state that Shakespeare’s sonnet 116 was written in a “primarily homosexual context,” Daily Star reported.

The British academic asserted that the sonnet did not give any indication about his love life and argued that Shakespeare was talking about a type of love that had nothing to do with sexual attraction.

However, scholar Arthur Freeman stated that no “responsible editor” would dismiss the possibility “of homosexual, as well as heterosexual passion” being behind the sonnets.

Prof Stanley Wells, honorary president of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, also took issue with Sir Brian writing and mentioned that when a poet whose name is William writes poems of painful and unabashed sexual frankness which pun on the word “will” 13 times in Sonnet No 135, it was not unreasonable to conclude that he might be writing from the depths of his own experience.

However, it has been widely acknowledged that Shakespeare married Anne Hathaway when he was 18 and that he had three children.

NAACP President “Concerned” About Ferguson Grand Jury Decision

NAACP President Cornell William Brooks said he was “concerned” about the forthcoming grand jury decision in the Michael Brown shooting case because the prosecutor failed to act upon previous complaints about the Ferguson, Missouri police department and didn’t give the jurors sufficient instructions.

Police stepped up security in St. Louis on Sunday, with a grand jury to decide whether to indict a white officer – Darren Wilson – for shooting dead an unarmed black teenager.

Brown, a high-school graduate planning to go to technical college, was shot at least six times by Darren Wilson in the St. Louis suburb of Ferguson on August 9, inflaming racial tensions and sparking weeks of protests, some violent.

The mostly black suburb of 21,000, which has an overwhelmingly white police force and town government, has been on edge for several days in anticipation of the jury’s decision.

Metal interlocking fences and orange plastic barricades sealed off the Buzz Westfall Justice Center in Clayton, another suburb of the city of St. Louis and where the grand jury has been meeting, with a handful of uniformed officers on duty outside.  A police officer unfurled yellow police tape saying around the barricades, watched by a group of journalists in the rain.

There was no announcement from the grand jury over the weekend, but vocal protests continued in St. Louis Sunday night.

Owners have boarded up shops and businesses in the part of Ferguson where protests were concentrated in August, and also braced for a violent fallout regardless of the jury’s decision on Wilson.

Wilson reportedly told the grand jury he acted in self-defense after tussling with the youth. Others say Brown had his hands in the air when he was shot dead.