Swim Club Discriminated Against Minority Kids: Panel

Simulations ignore 'reality of war itself:' Pulitzer winner Chris Hedges

(NEWSER) - The Army Experience Center in Philadelphia—a sort of video arcade/recruiting center—has numerous detractors, and those opponents have an influential ally. “This is just a new version of an old attempt” at recruiting, Pulitzer Prize winner and former New York Times war correspondent Chris Hedges tells dscriber. The simulations at the center demonstrate “the empowerment of firing those weapons, but without the reality of war itself,” he says. More»

Tyler Perry sponsors trip for Pennsylvania day campers

(NEWSER) - The 65 children who were denied entrance to a Philadelphia swim club are going to Disney World instead, thanks to Tyler Perry. The playwright “wanted to do something nice for them and let them know that for every negative experience, there are people out there who want them to succeed regardless of the color of their skin,” his publicist tells CNN. Elsewhere:

• Jennifer Love Hewitt and Jamie Kennedy got engaged on a whim at Kennedy’s Laugh Factory performance Saturday night, the New York Post reports.

(NEWSER) - Family members of dozens of black and Hispanic children turned away from a suburban Philadelphia swim club plan to sue the club for discrimination, the Philadelphia Inquirer reports. The director of the camp has turned down the club's invitation for the campers to return. "The children are permanently scarred," she said. More»

(NEWSER) - The suburban Philadelphia swim club at the center of a racism controversy will ask the day campers it disinvited to return, the local ABC affiliate reports. "We are very very sorry that this had to happen," the club president tells WPVI-TV. He had sparked the incident by saying the presence of the campers, who are mostly African American and Hispanic, changed the facility's "complexion" and "atmosphere." More»

Racial discrimination sends us back to the 1950s

(NEWSER) - A largely white suburban Philadelphia swim club’s barring of black and Latino campers was so backward “I thought I had fallen into a time warp,” writes Annette John-Hall in the Inquirer. Things like this happened in the 1950s—when singer Dorothy Dandridge booked a room in a Las Vegas hotel, the staff actually drained the pool—but “this isn't 1950s Las Vegas. It's 2009 Philly.” More»