NYC Pride Bashing, Obama To Lift HIV Travel Ban, Katherine Jackson Granted Guardianship, Autopsy Details, David Gest, Bernard Madoff Sentenced

Joseph Holladay, visiting New York City this weekend for Pride festivities from Boston, was alleged attacked – robbed and pistol whipped – by a group of individuals who used a number of anti-gay slur, prompting the city police to investigate the incident as a possible hate crime. Holladay, thirty-six, was assaulted early Saturday morning, along East 85th Street.

Has the Obama Administration begun lifting the United States HIV+ travel ban? An innocuous appearing update on the website belonging to the Office of Management and Budget late Friday afternoon suggests that it has.

Katherine Jackson, the matriarch of the Jackson family, has been granted temporary custody of Michael Jackson’s three children, Prince Michael Jr., Paris Michael Katherine, and Prince Michael II. Papers filed in court by attorneys representing the Jackson family argue that the children’s legal mother, Deborah Rowe, has no real relationship with them, and a decision to award custody to Rowe would be detrimental to the health and well-being of the three.

Meanwhile, the most lurid details have been released by the British press on the autopsy report of Michael Jackson, leaked according to the papers, by unnamed sources.

David Gest, ex-husband of Liza Minnelli and friend to Jackson for over forty years, says stress and an unhealthly trust in the most untrustworthy killed Jackson.

Bernard L. Madoff received the maximum sentence available by law for his lead role in an estimated sixty-five million dollar Ponzi scheme, federal Judge Denny Chin handed down a one-hundred and fifty year sentence Monday morning in Manhattan court room. Calling Madoff and his actions “extraordinary evil,” Chin said that given the complex history of the scheme that spanned some twenty years and whose victims were many, talk of forgiveness and of Madoff’s redemption lacked real meaning. Madoff, who is seventy-one, will return to a New York City district correction center until federal officials are able to determine where he will serve out his sentence. Of note, Madoff’s wife Ruth issued a somewhat surprising statement, meant, apparently, to create a distance between herself and her husband, saying that “all those touched by this fraud feel betrayed, disbelieving the nightmare they woke to. I am embarrassed and ashamed. Like everyone else, I feel betrayed and confused. The man who committed this horrible fraud is not the man whom I have known for all these years.”