NOVI, Mich. (WWJ) – More than 4,000 tech jobs are up for grabs today at the Suburban Collection Showplace in Novi, where the Engineering Society of Detroit is holding it’s annual fall job fair.

Companies hiring include Altair, Denso, Chrysler, DTE, ITT, Magna and Mitsubishi Motors. These companies and more will be looking for engineers and technical professionals to fill full- or part-time vacancies in a variety of fields and skill levels, for positions including: Architects, Chemical, Civil, Computer, Design, Energy, Electrical, Biomedical, Environmental, Aerospace, Transportation, Biofuels, Defense, Manufacturing, Mechanical, Programming, Technical and other engineering and technology related fields.

The job fair is free to ESD members and only $15 for non-members (includes a one-year free membership to ESD, which is good for new first time members only.) It will take place starting at 2 p.m. until 7 p.m. today at the Suburban Collection Showplace in Novi.

To register, visit http://ww2.esd.org/home.htm. For more information, call 248-353-0735.

http://detroit.cbslocal.com/2012/10/01/esd-holding-job-fair-in-novi-today/

His new talkshow is less than a month old (it debuted on September 4), but Steve Harvey has already landed a major guest in First Lady Michelle Obama!

There's an election to win.

I suppose Harvey will likely take a break from the usual material (relationships, love, sex, money matters, etc, etc, etc.) and talk politics with the FLOTUS; or maybe not.

Details via press release from NBCUniversal below:

FIRST LADY MICHELLE OBAMA TO APPEAR ON "STEVE HARVEY" WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 3, 2012

Chicago, IL - September 26, 2012 - First Lady Michelle Obama will tape an episode of the all-new daytime show "Steve Harvey" that will air on Wednesday, October 3 (check local listings for time and channel). Mrs. Obama will tape the episode in Chicago on Thursday, September 27.

Said Harvey, "I'm so honored to welcome First Lady Michelle Obama to the set of my new daytime show. We're a new show with just a few weeks on the air, so this means the world to me and my staff."

"Steve Harvey," which has connected with millions in its first few weeks with its blend of common sense advice and humor, is produced by Endemol USA with Steve Harvey, Alex Duda and Rushion McDonald serving as executive producers. The show is cleared in 98% of the country, including all of the NBC Owned Television Stations, and is distributed in national syndication by NBCUniversal Domestic Television Distribution. "Steve Harvey" is taped before a live studio audience at the state-of-the-art HD NBC 5 studios in downtown Chicago.

http://blogs.indiewire.com/shadowandact/first-lady-michelle-obama-to-appear-on-steve-harvey-wednesday-october-3-2012

Police in Roseville, Mich. dug up a driveway on Friday and took some soil samples. No findings have been announced yet.

An unidentified man recently told police he saw a man bury something in the driveway, in the summer of 1975, shortly after James (Jimmy) Hoffa disappeared. It was also after he had lunch with Tony Provenzano, a Teamster officer and Tony Jack Gicalone, a Detroit mobster, at the Machus Red Fox restaurant.

Hoffa was last seen in the parking lot of the Detroit restaurant in 1975.

"What happened to Jimmy Hoffa?" is a question that has not been answered since he was missing. Hoffa was the former head of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters and was convicted of trying to bribe a grand juror in 1964, and of stealing from his union's pension fund.

James Hoffa was last seen in the parking lot of a Detroit restaurant in 1975.

He was pardoned after serving less than five years of a 13-year sentence, and one of the stipulations was he could have nothing to do with his old union.

Subsequently, he disappeared.

Myriad rumors concerning his whereabouts have abounded since that time. One of the most famous was a 1989 interview with Tony "The Greek" Frankos, a former mobster, gave saying Hoffa had been fingered by Fat Tony Salerno, a crime boss, because Hoffa refused to expose mob ties in the Teamsters.

Frankos said Hoffa was buried under the west end zone of the football stadium then being built in New Jersey. No traces of him were found there.

There were other tips that he was buried beneath Detroit's Renaissance Center or dumped out of a small plane into Lake Erie.

Richard Zuckerman, a Detroit criminal attorney who was on the team that investigated the disappearance in the 1970s, calls this week's dig "lunancy," and believes Hoffa's remains were incinerated.

Zuckerman said the public should remember that Hoffa's death was not a movie crime story--but murder.

Jimmy Hoffa was a tough guy," said Zuckerman, "who strong-armed people and stole," but he was never suspected of killing anyone.

Zuckerman said he was in the U.S. Army in Vietnam and learned about families now knowing for sure what happened to their loved one.

"Carrying that pain for 37 years is unimaginable," says Richard Zuckerman. So he adds, "I don't make Jimmy Hoffa jokes."

Jimmy Hoffa's son, James P. Hoffa, is current president of the Teamsters. His daughter, Barbara Ann Crancer, is a retired Circuit Court Judge in St. Louis. 

http://www.examiner.com/article/search-continues-for-jimmy-hoffa

DETROIT (WWJ) – Some welcome news for drivers today. Gas prices are going down again.

AAA Michigan reports that the average price of gas statewide is $3.879 per gallon. The average price dipped 2.2 cents this week, following last week’s nearly 11-cent decline, according to the auto club. In metro-Detroit, however, as of this morning, prices were as low as $3.73 a gallon at a station at Six Mile Road and Inkster in Livonia.

However, even though prices are down, the statewide average is still 49.7 cents more than last year.

AAA surveys 2,800 Michigan gas stations daily. To find the cheapest gas nationwide, click here to be connected to the AAA Fuel Price Finder.

http://detroit.cbslocal.com/2012/10/01/welcome-news-for-drivers-gas-prices-are-down-again/

President Obama’s campaign will be avoiding the “zingers” and focusing on the issues "We also saw in reports that Mitt Romney and his team have been working on zingers and special lines for months," said Obama campaign spokeswoman Jen Psaki, according to pool reports. "That's not what the President's focus is on. So if you're expecting that, that's probably not what he's going to deliver on. As I said, he's speaking directly to the American people and we know what they want to hear is what his plan is for moving the country forward, and that's what we're hoping he can deliver on, on Wednesday."

The New York Times reported on Friday, “Mitt Romney’s team has been working to make sure he avoids coming off as a scold. His sparring partner, Senator Rob Portman of Ohio, channeling Mr. Obama, has gone after him repeatedly, to the point of being nasty. The goal is to get Mr. Romney agitated and then teach him how to keep his composure, look presidential”

The first presidential debate is Wednesday, October 3, at the University of Denver in Denver, Colorado.

Martin Luther King Jr. didn't emerge on the civil rights scene fully formed but drew from a rich spiritual and intellectual heritage that he owed, in part, to his mentor, the Rev. Dr. Benjamin Elijah Mays. Mays served as president of Morehouse College in Atlanta for 27 years and delivered the eulogy at King's funeral. In the first full-length biography of Mays, Dr. Randal M. Jelks, associate professor of American and African American studies at the University of Kansas, provides an in-depth look not only at Mays' meteoric rise from humble Southern roots to international acclaim, but he also sheds new light on the fertile soil out of which the Civil Rights Movement grew. I talked to Jelks about the book earlier this week. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Christine A. Scheller: Why is Benjamin Mays important?
Randal M. Jelks: First, most people think of the Civil Rights Movement as being born in December 1955 with Rosa Parks and the Montgomery bus boycott. In point of fact, it had a long and winding road to becoming a fully understood national movement. You had to have teachers and people who laid out the groundwork for what began in '55, and so I wanted remind readers, particularly those readers who are not familiar with institutions within the Black community, of the great intellectual leaders and teaching that went on to fully fuel a movement.

Mays grounded his civil rights philosophy in the Christian faith, but moved away from his conservative Baptist heritage into Social Gospel theology.
That's correct. The Social Gospel emerged from a German Baptist, Walter Rauschenbusch, who was a minister in Hell's Kitchen in New York. When you see people dying everyday from disease and impoverishment (these were European immigrants) at an alarming rate, you say, "How is this individualized gospel helping these people? Is it only teaching them to be saved for the moment and live through this hell on earth?" Mays concluded the same thing from both the impoverishment he faced in rural South and the kind of totalizing exclusion that he saw in Jim Crow America.

You write that Rauschenbusch didn't say much about the sin of racism, but that Mays saw in Rauschenbusch's theology something he could use. Did Mays express any resistance to adopting the Social Gospel in light of Rauschenbusch's relative silence on race?
Mays is like all people in that you find a creative spark. You read somebody and their experience is different than yours, but you find something in that text that triggers your thinking. I think that's how Mays used Rauschenbusch. If he was going to remain Christian, then the gospel has to speak to societal issues; it couldn't just speak to individual issues. If it was just personalized and just a communitarian voluntary organization, it could not be a force for mobilizing social change. That's what Mays would probably say.

You said Mays' emphasis was more on Jesus' humanity than on his divinity. Did Mays believe in the divinity of Christ?
If you use the old theological terms, people with high Christology hold to the divinity of Christ; with low Christology, they emphasize the humanity of Jesus. So Mays would have had a low Christology in the sense that what he sees as important about Jesus are the actions that he took and what he stood for. For Mays, Jesus' death on the cross is because of his actions in facing the state. It is the ethics of Jesus and the teachings of Jesus that are far more long-lasting than whether Jesus arose from the dead. He doesn't have this sort of Anselm theology of the Middle Ages that says Jesus is the sacrifice for all of us.

That sounds consistent with his belief that faith is action. Is there a direct link there?
Yes, I think he would be much more aligned with 1 and 2 John than with the Apostle Paul.

Why did Mays think it was so important to ground his arguments for racial equality in the Christian faith?
Mays could rightly assume that the American narrative began with religious freedom and the theology of those English Protestants of all stripes coming to the British colonies of North America. So, even if we had Catholics and Eastern Orthodox in the United States, that narrative sort of shapes American life and culture. And, in his era, people still went to church in great numbers. So it made sense sociologically for him to speak the language of the people and through these institutions that had moral influence.

Later when the Black Power movement arose, Mays seemed to be skeptical that civil rights could be achieved apart from a moral or spiritual foundation. Is that correct?
He wasn't skeptical. I think the generation coming after him was much more skeptical about the ideas of moral suasion in light of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. and other things. They begin to see that political power, and some would even argue revolutionary struggle by means of arms, was much more important. You can see everyone growing tired of state-sanctioned violence that was done against young civil rights activists. So there's a real move to say that faith is power. Mays is now in his 70s as the Black Power movement emerges and he begins trying to figure out if it is right to speak in this language. What I was trying to show was that in that moment, everything was really kind of confused and here was a man who had spent his life trying to mobilize Christians to tackle the problem of race. Mays was trying to give them some grounding.

A huge part of his work involved educating Black pastors. Has that legacy been born out?
There is still the need to educate Black clergy. Mays wanted to educate them in a certain way. Black people are like everybody else in America; they have a diversity of opinions. I don't think he was as explicit as he might have been that he wanted to educate Black pastors in a liberal, progressive way in order to empower a social movement. There are lots of pastors who go to conservative seminaries and who buy whole hog the arguments. I would think that would be short-sighted if they really looked at the conditions within Black communities.

He seemed to have some prejudice against the low-church experience.
Mays, as a part of his generation, really didn't look favorably on the experience of Pentecostals in particular and people in store-front churches. I think his own biases came out there. Also, he was biased because he was a Baptist. In his era, even though he was trying to be non-denominational, he doesn't quite know what to do with people who are in ever-growing numbers becoming Pentecostal store-front preachers. He hadn't thought that out. And, of course, you're shaped by your education, and here he was a University of Chicago PhD. I don't think his teachers at that time would have given much thought to the growing numbers of Pentecostals. Even some of his critics, when they were criticizing the negro's church, saw that bias.

He had a strong commitment both to Christianity and democracy that you connect with his Baptist ecclesiology.
That's right. It's very much rooted in the long history. Alexis De Tocqueville wrote about this in Democracy in America. One of the things that we don't give enough credit to is the Protestant dissenting tradition that is a shaping force in American democracy. The constitution of the United States very much resembles the way the Presbyterian church is ordered and the governing structures of the country very much resemble long-held patterns that govern the Calvinist tradition. Freedom of conscience is also very much an inheritance that he picked up on as a dissenting tradition.

I thought it was fascinating to read about how Mays' trip to India to meet Ghandi and his debates with the Dutch Reformed South African theologian shaped his view of the American experience.
He didn't see the problems of the United States as separate. This is the privilege of being able to travel at a time when most Americans would not have seen the world. He very much realized that the problems of Black liberation were the problems of liberation for people around the world in many different settings. He was particularly drawn to the affinity between Apartheid and Jim Crow. He had heard those same debates about whether the Bible condones a separate reality. He wanted to strike that down. In terms of Ghandi, what he saw was that black people in America were a racial minority, so to pick up 1917 Bolshevik-style revolution would have been tantamount to signing a death warrant. This is where his Christian ideals come in. Non-violent struggle keeps people's dignity and personhood in tact. This is something very important for him, coming out of the Baptist tradition, which teaches that God is no respecter of persons, but every person is precious in God's sight. That's what struck him about Ghandi in his long struggle against the British.

His connection with Martin Luther King Jr. went back to when King was a high school early-admission student at Morehouse.
King's father was a trustee of Morehouse and a graduate of Morehouse himself. And so, for young King to be entrusted to Benjamin Mays was a very good thing for his family. The Mays' consistently had not only Martin King, but other young students over to dinner, and introduced them to national figures from A. Philip Randolph to Dorothy Height. They're all at dinner listening to these conversations, soaking them up. What a wonderful education. So King becomes very much persuaded through Mays that ministry could have a social application, because, as he writes, he had planned to go to law school. He had not planned to pick up things like his father, who he thought was too conservative in his approach to ministry. So Mays becomes this new model of a highly educated Black minister and socially connected to world-wide issues.

You write that King modeled his early civil rights persona after Mays. In what way did he emulate Mays?
The reason I write that is we forget that Martin King was 26 years old when the Montgomery bus boycott starts. When I was 26, I was an adult, but I was still very much a young adult with no experience whatsoever. And so you take on personas as you are trying to find your voice, sort of like painters and musicians. They play like other musicians until they find their own creative spark and energy. King was already a really fine young orator, but in terms of being fully formed, I don't think so. I think he was still trying to give homage to Mays as a kind of father figure. That's why he was very much trying to be poised and deliberate like Mays. Biographies kind of annoy me because they are written as though this man has no developmental history like all of us. When King's home is bombed in Montogmery, Mays has to persuade his father to back off, because his father wants him to pack up and move back to Atlanta. Mays becomes an intervening force.

And yet, Mrs. Mays complained at one point that King was borrowing from Mays without attribution.
Preaching is an art like music. If you hear a lick, and that's good, you're going to borrow that lick. But she certainly was not worrying about the greater cause. She was like, "That's my husband's work and he should be giving more credit where credit is due."

In your estimation, what do we owe Benjamin Mays?
I don't know that he would say we owe him anything, but for me, both as a religious person and an intellectual, I first wanted to show that there were a variety of models out there. It's very important that we hear from different voices within the community. Of course there are conservative pastors who come on, like E.V. Hill in Los Angeles. Certainly E.V. Hill back in the day was very conservative. Mays also is a critic of people like Billy Graham and Reinhold Neibuhr.

Second, if Benjamin Mays had been president of Harvard, there would have been 1000 books written about him, because in a 27-year stretch, he graduated and was looked up to by people like Martin Luther King Jr., Marian Wright Edelman, Julian Bond, David Satcher, who was Surgeon General of the United States, and on and on and on. If he had been president of Harvard, people would say, "What kind of educator does that? What's the shaping force for him to make this place so rich?" But it's a little Black school for men, and he saved it from closing its doors. I think one of his great legacies is this connection between education and religious faith and thought.

Lastly, long before this term "public intellectual" was coined, he was indeed a public intellectual, writing primarily to Black people. I don't think you would have seen too many White writers, like Neibuhr, saying in a column that the Korean War is wrong. There have been thousands of books written on Neibuhr, who said that the Cold War was a good thing. I was trying to say there are other voices out here who had significance and who have historical legacies that are important.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/christine-a-scheller/benjamin-e-mays-interview_b_1890693.html?utm_hp_ref=black-voices&ir=Black%20Voices

DETROIT (WWJ) – The Detroit Chapter of the National Association of Black Journalists will host and roast a Pulitzer Prize winner and social activist.

On October 6, at the Detroit Marriott Renaissance Center, Angelo Henderson one of the founders of Detroit 300, will be on the hot-seat, the focus of a roast by the Detroit chapter.

The chapter expects to host more than 400 attendees – including several area journalists, religious and civic leaders to participate in the roast.

The Detroit Chapter is celebrating its 30th anniversary and launched a 30-30-30 campaign at the beginning of the year.

The group’s goal is to host 30 events and raise $30,000 to support our scholarship fund and programs. The chapter was established in December 1981 and officially founded in 1982.

The association provides scholarship opportunities in print and broadcast journalism in addition to addressing racism in news coverage and employment.

You can find more information about the DC-NABJ roast of Angelo Henderson, HERE.

http://detroit.cbslocal.com/2012/09/30/pulitzer-prize-winner-angelo-henderson-to-be-center-of-roast/

City of Detroit officials will be in court to stop a strike by the water department employees who walked off their jobs on . Workers at the Detroit water and sewer system continued striking today against plans to eliminate the majority of their jobs through privatization. Detroit’s waters and sewer system serves close to 4 million southeast Michigan Residents.

Updated 10/1/12 at 11:30 a.m.-

According to the Detroit News: 

Detroit — A federal judge on Monday granted a temporary restraining order barring Detroit Water and Sewerage Department unions from engaging in a strike and interfering with business operations.

The temporary order issued by U.S. District Court Judge Sean F. Cox comes after workers from the Detroit waste water treatment plant walked off the job Sunday in protest of proposed cuts to their workforce.

The judge has ordered the unions to appear in federal court at 10 a.m. on Oct. 11 to answer the department's motion and to show cause why the court should not issue the injunction. To Read More Click Here. 

SOUTHFIELD (WWJ) - Autumn has arrived and the time has come for local health departments to gear up for this year’s flu season. This time, the H1N1 swine flu is not the only strain that is a major concern.

Kathy Forzley, Manager and Health Officer of the Oakland County Health Division, says this season’s flu vaccine is formulated to take on a trio of influenza strains.

“In this flu shot, there are three strains,” Forzley told WWJ Newsradio 950′s Pat Sweeting. “One of them being the 2009 H1N1 and then there’s two new strains and one of them that we saw (was) the Wisconsin strain. We saw a little bit of that last year so we’re expecting (that) we might see it again this year. And the other one was seen in the Southern Hemisphere and actually there’s been a considerable heavy number of cases in Australia and that will be incorporated into this shot this year.”

Last month in Wisconsin, health officials reported two cases of people infected with a new strain of swine flu. There were also heavy reports coming from Australia about the deadly H3N2 flu strain activity being widespread across the country.

In Oakland County, flu vaccinations are currently available at the Health Division offices in Pontiac and Southfield locations. Forzley reminds the public who should be immunized against influenza.

“Everyone over six months should get the flu shot,” Forzley said. “The elderly, the very young and the immune compromised are the ones that have potentially the greatest risk for life threatening symptoms or illness. Even though you might not fall in that category, you should still get your flu shot because you’re not only protecting yourself. You’re protecting the people around you.”

Flu symptoms to watch for are fever, aches and loss of appetite.

http://detroit.cbslocal.com/category/news/

ROYAL OAK (WWJ) - Henry Ford Health System and Beaumont Health System are the latest medical centers in Metro Detroit to hop aboard non-smoking bandwagon.

The hospital systems on Friday issued a joint statement announcing a smoking ban for employees hired after Jan. 1 as part of an “ongoing commitment to patient safety and employee wellness.”

“As health care providers, we have a responsibility to take a leadership role in promoting healthy behaviors – starting with ourselves,” said Beaumont’s president and CEO Gene Michalski.

Talking to WWJ Newesradio 950, Henry Ford’s Eric Bacigal explained more about the policy.

“During the work shift the individuals that are currently employed are not able to use any tobacco product, either during breaks or lunch, and they’re not able to have any odor from smoke at all from the point when they report for their actual service until the end of their shift,” Bacigal said.

Tobacco products include but are not limited to cigarettes, cigars, pipe tobacco, snuff, chewing tobacco and e-cigarettes.

Job applicants will be screened to ensure they do not use tobacco. Current employees will be encouraged to quit. Both companies’ current policies prohibit the use of tobacco products during work hours. Employees who violate these policies are subject to disciplinary action, up to and including termination.

“There’s no question that we believe that healthier behaviors and not smoking is a positive thing for health care costs,” said Jay Holden, Vice President of Human Resources at Beaumont. “And we think it’s really important for patients because employees who smell of smoke, we have many patients that are sensitive to that — people who are allergic to that.”

Holden said current employees can be, and have been, asked to go home if they smell of smoke.

The health care systems will join the Detroit Medical Center and Botsford Hospital in adopting no-nicotine policies.

http://detroit.cbslocal.com/2012/09/28/beaumont-henry-ford-to-adopt-non-smoking-hiring-policy/