Sarah Anne Smith of the Washington Post says that Will Smith is the latest celebrity victim of an Internet hoax. Will Smith is not dead, just the victim of a nasty rumor that you may have seen on the Internet this weekend. The Village Voice reports that the latest celebrity death hoax started on FakeAWish.com,…

Hank Stuever of the Washington Post lambasted VH1’s first scripted television series, Single Ladies, which follows the lives of three women and their trials and tribulations over relationships. The soap opera, which takes place in Atlanta, is executive-produced by Queen Latifah. Stuever writes, “This is a series for people who found Sex and the City…

Alison Flood of the U.K.’s Guardian is reporting that Aminatta Forna has won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for her story of postwar Sierra Leone, The Memory of Love. Forna, who was born in Glasgow, Scotland, and raised in Sierra Leone, said she hoped that the win, announced in Sydney at the weekend, would make her…

The Human Rights Campaign has released a video in support of marriage equality, starring entertainer Vanessa L. Williams. The video is part of the New Yorkers for Marriage Equality campaign, which is centered on video testimonials from New Yorkers who support the right of gay and lesbian couples to marry. In the video, Williams, who…

Fresh from our “You’ve gotta be kidding us” file, Maya Rodriguez of WWLTV is reporting that nearly six years after Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans East remains without a hospital. With great fanfare, the city bought the abandoned Methodist Hospital on Read Boulevard last summer, but little has been done with the property since then. At…

In honor of its 50th anniversary, Amnesty International has released a Worldwide Death Penalty Abolition Timeline. The timeline shows that in 2008, 93 percent of all known executions occurred in five countries: China, Iran, Pakistan, the United States and Saudi Arabia. Argentina, Chile and Uzbekistan abolished the death penalty in 2008. The timeline is broken…

The Huffington Post is reporting thatonly 6.5 percent of U.S. adults get enough physical activity while they’re working, according to a first-of-its-kind national estimate reported Thursday in the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. Another report, published Wednesday in the journal PLoS One, further suggests that America’s obesity epidemic can be blamed on the steady…

MSNBC is reporting that although the FBI announced last week that violent crime is down, the Northeast saw an increase in murders (8.3 percent), forcible rapes (1.4 percent) and aggravated assaults (0.7 percent). Why that region was affected by crime more than others isn’t clear. Perhaps it was because of the grinding poverty found in…

The New York Daily News is reporting that Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-N.Y.) is considering pursuing civil and criminal charges against Dan Wolfe, who describes himself as a “conservative Reagan Republican,” for allegedly hacking his Twitter account. Weiner’s account was hacked and a lewd photo of the congressman was sent to a young college student, Genette…

USA Today is reporting LaShawna Threatt, an aspiring model, was killed when she and her friend fell through a 10th-floor glass window at Atlanta’s upscale W Atlanta-Midtown hotel early Saturday morning. It is being reported that the girls were “play fighting” when they fell through the window. “It appears that there was no malicious act,…