truesee's Blog

LIBERTY CITY

Pastor's scandal divides Friendship Missionary Baptist in Liberty City

Congregants at Liberty City's Friendship Missionary Baptist Church are divided as their spiritual leader goes to trial on a grand theft charge.

DAVID OVALLE

Miami Herald

Tiger Woods with three alleged mistresses Jaimee Grubbs (left), Kalika Moquin (center magazine cover) and Rachel Uchitel. Three more women, all white, have since come forward.

Rimer/Scanpix/SipaSwedish model Elin Nordegren is the wife of golf super star Tiger Woods.

Amid all the headlines generated by Tiger Woods' troubles — the puzzling car accident, the suggestions of marital turmoil and multiple mistresses — little attention has been given to the race of the women linked with the world's greatest golfer.

Except in the black community.

When three white women were said to be romantically involved with Woods in addition to his blonde, Swedish wife, blogs, airwaves and barbershops started humming, and Woods' already tenuous standing among many blacks took a beating.

On the nationally syndicated Tom Joyner radio show, Woods was the butt of jokes all week.

"Thankfully, Tiger, you didn't marry a black woman. Because if a sister caught you running around with a bunch of white hoochie-mamas," one parody suggests in song, she would have castrated him.

"The Grinch's Theme Song" didn't stop there: "The question everyone in America wants to ask you is, how many white women does one brother waaant?"

As one blogger, Robert Paul Reyes, wrote: "If Tiger Woods had cheated on his gorgeous white wife with black women, the golfing great's accident would have been barely a blip in the blogosphere."

The darts reflect blacks' resistance to interracial romance. They also are a reflection of discomfort with a man who has smashed barriers in one of America's whitest sports and assumed the mantle of the world's most famous athlete, once worn by Muhammad Ali and Michael Jordan.

 But Woods has declined to identify himself as black, and famously chose the term "Cablinasian" (Caucasian, black, Indian and Asian) to describe the racial mixture he inherited from his African-American father and Thai mother.

This vexed some blacks, but it hasn't stopped them from claiming Woods as one of their own. Or from disapproving of his marriage to Elin Nordegren, despite blacks' historical fight against white racist opponents of mixed marriage.

On the one hand, Ebonie Johnson Cooper doesn't care that Tiger Woods' wife and alleged mistresses are white because Woods is "quote-unquote not really black."

"But at the same time we still see him as a black man with a white woman, and it makes a difference," said Johnson Cooper, a 26-year-old African-American from New York City. "There's just this preservation thing we have among one another. We like to see each other with each other."

Black women have long felt slighted by the tendency of famous black men to pair with white women, and many have a list of current transgressors at the ready.

"We've discussed this for years among black women," said Denene Millner, author of several books on black relationships. "Why is it when they get to this level ... they tend to go directly for the nearest blonde?"

This tendency may be more prominent due to a relative lack of interracial marriages among average blacks. Although a recent Pew poll showed that 94 percent of blacks say it's all right for blacks and whites to date, a study published this year in Sociological Quarterly showed that blacks are less likely to actually date outside their race than are other groups.

"There is a call for loyalty that is stronger in some ways than in other racial communities," said the author of the study, George Yancey, a sociology professor at the University of North Texas and author of the book "Just Don't Marry One."

The color of one's companion has long been a major measure of "blackness" — which is a big reason why the biracial Barack Obama was able to fend off early questions about his black authenticity.

"Had Barack had a white wife, I would have thought twice about voting for him," Johnson Cooper said.

So do Woods' women say something about the intensely private golfer's views on race?

"I would like to say no, but I think it garners a bit of a yes," Johnson Cooper said.

Carmen Van Kerckhove, founder of the race-meets-pop-culture blog Racialicious, said there have been frequent discussions on her site about the fine line between preference and fetish.

"Is there any difference between a white guy with a thing for blondes, and a non-white guy with a thing for blondes?" asked Van Kerckhove, who has a Chinese mother, a Belgian father and a husband born in America to parents from Benin.

She claims that Asians don't fully embrace Woods, either.

"There are two layers of suspicion toward him," Van Kerkhove said. "One toward the apparent pattern in the race of his partners, and the second in the way he sees himself. ... People have been giving him the side-eye for a while."

There's nothing wrong with wanting a mate who shares your culture, as long as it's for the right reasons, the comedienne Sheryl Underwood said after unleashing a withering Woods monologue on Tom Joyner's radio show.

"Would we question when a Jewish person wants to marry other Jewish people?" she said in an interview. "It's not racist. It's not bigotry. It's cultural pride."

"The issue comes in when you choose something white because you think it's better," Underwood said. "And then you never date a black woman or a woman of color or you never sample the greatness of the international buffet of human beings. If you never do that, we got a problem."

Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/2009/12/06/2009-12-06_tiger_woods_alienates_black_community_with_white_lovers.html?page=1#ixzz0Yw3vOtUH

Elizabeth Warren

Chair of the Congressional Oversight Panel created to oversee the banking bailouts

Huffington Post

December 3, 2009 10:00 AM

Today, one in five Americans is unemployed, underemployed or just plain out of work. One in nine families can't make the minimum payment on their credit cards. One in eight mortgages is in default or foreclosure. One in eight Americans is on food stamps. More than 120,000 families are filing for bankruptcy every month. The economic crisis has wiped more than $5 trillion from pensions and savings, has left family balance sheets upside down, and threatens to put ten million homeowners out on the street.

Families have survived the ups and downs of economic booms and busts for a long time, but the fall-behind during the busts has gotten worse while the surge-ahead during the booms has stalled out. In the boom of the 1960s, for example, median family income jumped by 33% (adjusted for inflation). But the boom of the 2000s resulted in an almost-imperceptible 1.6% increase for the typical family. While Wall Street executives and others who owned lots of stock celebrated how good the recovery was for them, middle class families were left empty-handed.

The crisis facing the middle class started more than a generation ago. Even as productivity rose, the wages of the average fully-employed male have been flat since the 1970s.

But core expenses kept going up. By the early 2000s, families were spending twice as much (adjusted for inflation) on mortgages than they did a generation ago -- for a house that was, on average, only ten percent bigger and 25 years older. They also had to pay twice as much to hang on to their health insurance.

To cope, millions of families put a second parent into the workforce. But higher housing and medical costs combined with new expenses for child care, the costs of a second car to get to work and higher taxes combined to squeeze families even harder. Even with two incomes, they tightened their belts. Families today spend less than they did a generation ago on food, clothing, furniture, appliances, and other flexible purchases -- but it hasn't been enough to save them. Today's families have spent all their income, have spent all their savings, and have gone into debt to pay for college, to cover serious medical problems, and just to stay afloat a little while longer.

Through it all, families never asked for a handout from anyone, especially Washington. They were left to go on their own, working harder, squeezing nickels, and taking care of themselves. But their economic boats have been taking on water for years, and now the crisis has swamped millions of middle class families.

The contrast with the big banks could not be sharper. While the middle class has been caught in an economic vise, the financial industry that was supposed to serve them has prospered at their expense. Consumer banking -- selling debt to middle class families -- has been a gold mine. Boring banking has given way to creative banking, and the industry has generated tens of billions of dollars annually in fees made possible by deceptive and dangerous terms buried in the fine print of opaque, incomprehensible, and largely unregulated contracts.

And when various forms of this creative banking triggered economic crisis, the banks went to Washington for a handout. All the while, top executives kept their jobs and retained their bonuses. Even though the tax dollars that supported the bailout came largely from middle class families -- from people already working hard to make ends meet -- the beneficiaries of those tax dollars are now lobbying Congress to preserve the rules that had let those huge banks feast off the middle class.

Pundits talk about "populist rage" as a way to trivialize the anger and fear coursing through the middle class. But they have it wrong. Families understand with crystalline clarity that the rules they have played by are not the same rules that govern Wall Street. They understand that no American family is "too big to fail." They recognize that business models have shifted and that big banks are pulling out all the stops to squeeze families and boost revenues. They understand that their economic security is under assault and that leaving consumer debt effectively unregulated does not work.

Families are ready for change. According to polls, large majorities of Americans have welcomed the Obama Administration's proposal for a new Consumer Financial Protection Agency (CFPA). The CFPA would be answerable to consumers -- not to banks and not to Wall Street. The agency would have the power to end tricks-and-traps pricing and to start leveling the playing field so that consumers have the tools they need to compare prices and manage their money. The response of the big banks has been to swing into action against the Agency, fighting with all their lobbying might to keep business-as-usual. They are pulling out all the stops to kill the agency before it is born. And if those practices crush millions more families, who cares -- so long as the profits stay high and the bonuses keep coming.

America today has plenty of rich and super-rich. But it has far more families who did all the right things, but who still have no real security. Going to college and finding a good job no longer guarantee economic safety. Paying for a child's education and setting aside enough for a decent retirement have become distant dreams. Tens of millions of once-secure middle class families now live paycheck to paycheck, watching as their debts pile up and worrying about whether a pink slip or a bad diagnosis will send them hurtling over an economic cliff.   America without a strong middle class? Unthinkable, but the once-solid foundation is shaking.

Elizabeth Warren is the Leo Gottlieb Professor of Law at Harvard and is currently the Chair of the Congressional Oversight Panel.

http://www.wbaltv.com/video/21812236/

Woods' fall from grace rekindles role-model debate

DAVID CRARY 

NEW YORK — Tiger Woods was different, or so he seemed, with his unmatchable talent and carefully burnished image. Unlike some pro athletes, he had welcomed being a role model. He was, it turns out, too good to be true, and his fall from grace calls into question the very idea of sports hero worship.

"No one has approached this level of perfection on and off the playing surface, maybe ever, without a single blot or tarnish," said Dave Czesniuk, director of operations for Northeastern University's Center for the Study of Sport in Society.

"The real story here is the meeting of expectations with reality," Czesniuk said. "The guy's a human being and we forget that."

Woods' apology Wednesday for unspecified "transgressions" — coinciding with reports of repeated marital infidelity — was, on one level, only the latest in a long sequence of superstar downfalls.

Michael Phelps was photographed with a marijuana pipe. Marion Jones had her Olympic medals stripped for doping that she long denied. Roger Clemens and Alex Rodriguez faced dual allegations of steroid use and adultery. And so on.

Woods, however, was unique — a globally recognized brand name that evoked impeccability and historical greatness. His sponsors and handlers, his admiring chroniclers in the media, and especially Woods himself contributed to the image-making.

"The public had become jaded and indifferent — they expected Barry Bonds and Marion Jones and Sammy Sosa to fall," said psychologist Stanley Teitelbaum, author of "Sports Heroes, Fallen Idols."

"But no one really expected that of Tiger Woods," he said. "Now that it happens to him, people are not as indifferent — there's more disappointment and more disillusionment."

Steve Elling, senior writer for CBSSports.com, wrote this week that fans and sportswriters, himself included, were gullible in placing Woods on so high a pedestal.

"We have learned by now to invest admiration in public figures with a grain of salt. With Woods, we just ate the whole salt lick," Elling wrote. "Say it with me: Never, ever again."

Woods, for all his preoccupation with mastery on the course, had managed throughout his career to be viewed as more than just a golfer — loving son to his parents, civic-minded creator of a foundation serving disadvantaged children, devoted father who said he'd play less golf so he could spend more time with his two young children.

He didn't embrace social causes, and sometimes there were brief flashes of temper or crudeness. But as far back as 1997, he was on record aswelcoming the responsibilities of role model.

"I think it's an honor to be a role model," he was quoted as saying in a Business Week article. "If you are given a chance to be a role model, I think you should always take it because you can influence a person's life in a positive light, and that's what I want to do. That's what it's all about."

If that was Woods' goal, Teitelbaum said it had been achieved.

"In terms of a role model, he's A-one," the psychologist said. "The fans, and especially kids, are desperate to have role models to look up to. ... People have made him the designated sports hero.

"When you're among the high-flying and adored, your public will give you unconditional love as long as you continue to perform," Teitelbaum added. "But there's a responsibility to be that much more careful and that much more transparent and, when something does happen, to deal with it openly."

The depths of sudden disillusionment with Woods have been almost tangible. According to Zeta Buzz, which tracks millions of blogs and social media posts, online references to Woods had been 91 percent positive before his recent troubles and by Thursday had dropped to 57 percent positive.

The owner of a youth-oriented Internet site called Role Models on the Web said Thursday he'd been inundated with hateful e-mails and phone calls for leaving a flattering entry about Woods on the site.

"Should he be considered a moral role model? No," said Lamar Brantley of Sarasota, Fla. "But through his foundation, he's done a lot of good."

Above the Woods entry on the Web site, Brantley added this update:

"I will leave Tiger up as a role model as I believe it is probably a good topic for discussion in your family. If you do or do not believe him to be a role model of any kind, discuss it with your children."

Countless parents have been forced into similar conversations in recent years as drug and sex scandals entangled star athletes in numerous sports.

"There's an important parental role to play with kids," said Joe Kelly, founder of a national fatherhood group called Dads and Daughters. "You need to make clear that role models are just models — they're not without flaws, and we will be disappointed by them sometimes, the same way we're disappointed by our parents sometimes."

Kelly said he retained a degree of admiration for Woods because of the golfer's past comments about how much it meant to become a father.

"We have higher responsibilities as fathers, rather than responding to every impulse and desire we might have," Kelly said. "When it comes to being a father, we have to be the grown-up. When we act like children, the fallout is terrible."

Some of Woods' admirers believe he will redeem himself, not only through further golfing excellence but also through a show of character.

"He is distinctive in myriad ways — not only his talent, but his extraordinary level of discipline," said Dan Doyle, director of the Institute for International Sport at the University of Rhode Island. "What I think will happen is Tiger will never make this kind of mistake again."

"The fact that he made what is clearly a big error does not dismiss him as someone who can have a tremendous effect on society and youth in the future," Doyle added. "People will give him a second chance, and he will make good on that second chance."

___

December 04, 2009 04:55 AM EST

Ga. mall evacuated after man dressed as elf tells Santa he's carrying dynamite; no bomb found

 Associated Press 9:10 a.m. EST, December 4, 2009

9:32 a.m. Dec. 2, 2009

Sterling Heights police seek bubble gum bandits

Police in Sterling Heights are warning merchants there’s a group of bubble gum bandits on the loose.

In the latest heist, two thieves chatted with the clerk of the Speedway gas station at 15 Mile and Ryan at 9:30 p.m. Nov. 21 while another man cleaned out the candy aisle of $318 in gum, according to police.

Police in Warren and Madison Heights also reported similar thefts at gas stations there.

Man arrested after hiding in Fairfield Walmart past closing time, trying to leave with cash

Toraine Norris -- The Birmingham News

December 02, 2009, 6:09PM

  A Mississippi man took holiday shopping to a whole new level last week, police in Fairfield said.

  Police said James Jefferson Jr. hid inside the Walmart on Aaron Aronov Drive on Nov. 25 shortly after the store closed at 11 p.m. and helped himself to $54,000 in cash and checks.

A store security guard subdued Jefferson after he went to the locked doors and attempted to get out. As Jefferson shook the doors, money bags from the store began falling out of his clothing, police said.

  When officers arrived they found money strapped to Jefferson's chest, in his backpack and in his pants. Officers also confiscated a duplicate key from Jefferson he used to enter the cash room.

  Jefferson, 35, also told police "I did not do this by myself. You are a cop, how do you think I got the key?," according to the police report. Police have not said whether they think he had an accomplice.

  Chief Pat Mardis said Jefferson likely could have made an escape if he had only waited for the employees who were stocking the store to unlock the doors.
  "They said if he had waited about 20 more minutes, he could have been gone for good," Mardis said. "But he got nervous."

  Jefferson was in the Jefferson County Jail this afternoon on robbery and burglary charges. His bond was set at $60,000.

  Mardis said Jefferson is facing the robbery charge because he told the security guard he had a gun and threatened to shoot him. Jefferson did not have a gun.

Wife tried to kill hubby's baby by mistress

Last Updated: 1:43 PM, December 5, 2009

NY Post

Posted: 4:33 AM, December 5, 2009 

A Brooklyn woman concocted a twisted plot to kill the unborn child of her husband’s pregnant mistress — duping her into taking medicine that could make her lose her baby, police said yesterday.

Even after the victim gave birth early because of the toxic drug, Kisha Jones, 31, continued her evil scheme by trying to feed suspicious milk to the baby in the neonatal intensive care unit, sources say.

The bizarre tale unfolded in October, when Jones became enraged after she learned her hubby, Anthony, was cheating and had sired a baby with his lover, Monique Hunter, 25, of Flatbush, cops said.

 Late that month, Jones allegedly obtained a doctor's prescription pad and tricked the seven-months-pregnant Hunter into taking a drug used to induce abortion.

Cops said Jones called Hunter using an electronic gadget that transmits bogus phone numbers to caller-ID devices, allowing her to pretend to be the assistant of the woman's doctor.

"I got a call from my doctor's office telling me to pick up a prescription at King's Pharmacy," Hunter, a nursing student at the Borough of Manhattan Community College, told The Post. "I knew something was suspicious because King's Pharmacy was not my normal pharmacy. But I didn't think anything of it."

The new mom said that she thought the call from Jones was legitimate because her doctor's number appeared on her caller-ID. She also was expecting to get a refill of a drug for her cervix.

"I didn't go and pick it up immediately," she said. "A week later I received another phone call telling me to pick up my prescription, so I went and picked it up and I took my pill."

But instead of the drug she expected, Hunter wound up getting a dose of the abortion-causing pill Cytotec, which the unsuspecting mother ingested on Oct. 27. She immediately went into labor and was rushed to Kings County Hospital, where the baby was delivered and put into the neonatal ICU.

Fortunately, the boy was born healthy and she named him Anthony Jones Jr. after his father.

But Jones' alleged plot didn't end there. Sources said she continued to target the innocent infant.

On Nov. 3, she allegedly called the hospital posing as the boy's mother, telling the staff she had pumped breast milk at home and wanted it given to the baby.

Later that day, a man showed up with two 20-ounce water bottles that purportedly contained the milk. Hospital staff immediately became suspicious because the liquid did not have the consistency of breast milk, and they called cops.

Police initially thought Hunter was targeting her own baby. But after investigating the case, cops followed a trail back to Jones, who herself has a few children with her husband, including a baby.

The suspect was arrested Thursday and charged with reckless endangerment, forgery of a prescription, criminal impersonation and attempted abortion, police said.

Police said Jones' husband had no role in the plot, though they were looking for the man who delivered the milk.

December 4, 2009

The Sun

Tiny treasure ... silicon treeHe was made out of tin by scientists at the National Physical Laboratory, London, who also created a silicon Christmas tree, left, half the width of a hair.

HERE is the world's tiniest snowman - 0.025mm high or a fifth of the width of human hair.

Verizon Wireless doubles early-termination fee for smart-phone users

Critics say charges intended to prevent customers from defecting; company says it offsets costs of pricey handsets

David Lazarus

Tribune Newspapers

December 4, 2009

Before you go shopping for a new smart phone this holiday season, keep this in mind: Verizon Wireless, the largest provider of mobile-phone services, has doubled its early termination fee for high-end handsets if you decide to go with a different carrier.

The company used to slap you with a $175 charge for jumping ship after a 30-day trial period. Now that penalty is $350. The fee applies to BlackBerrys, the much-touted new Droid and other smart phones capable of sending and receiving text messages and e-mails and accessing the Internet.

"We increased the early-termination fee for advanced devices to reflect the higher costs associated with offering those particular devices to consumers at attractive prices and investing in our network to support these devices," said Ken Muche, a spokesman for Verizon Wireless. "These costs are higher because advanced devices require more complex chipsets, microprocessors and licensed software that perform more functions than other phones."

But consumer advocates and some customers say high early termination fees are little more than a way to hold people hostage.

Denise Netzley, 46, who hadn't been aware of the $350 fee as she shopped for a smart phone at a Verizon Wireless store, said those fees should be clearly posted.

Muche said Verizon smart-phone customers can choose to not have a two-year contract and can pick a one-year plan or pay on a month-to-month basis.

But if you opt for month-to-month payments, you'll have to pay the full price for your smart phone, which typically is a lot more than the price with a contract.

A Google-powered Droid phone, for example, will run you $299.99 with a two-year contract from Verizon. The price jumps to $369.99 with a one-year contract. If you skip the contract, that Droid will cost $559.99, not including monthly service charges beginning at $39.99.

Although Verizon's $350 fee sets a high watermark for such penalties, it's in keeping with the industry practice of offering cool handsets at reduced prices in return for customers agreeing to a long-term contract.

AT&T, for example, will smack you with a $175 fee if you exit your iPhone contract before two years are up. (The fee decreases by $5 for every month you have the phone.)

"This isn't about subsidies," said Joel Kelsey, telecommunications policy analyst for Consumers Union. "It's about punishing people for leaving the provider."

He noted that Verizon will lower its early-termination fee by $10 a month for each month you're with the company. But even if you stay for the full two years, your early termination fee still would be $110. "If this was really a subsidy, that fee should be zero by the end of the contract," Kelsey said. "This shows that the early termination fees they're charging don't actually reflect the cost of the discounted phone."

Moreover, he pointed out that even if you did buy your phone separately, you still would be paying the same amount for a Verizon service plan as someone with a subsidized phone.

"Shouldn't you be paying less, considering that they didn't subsidize your phone?" Kelsey asked.

The way things work now, consumers have a tough time knowing the actual cost of products and services they get from telecom companies. Phone manufacturers and service providers enter into deals, and the pricing gets muddled amid long-term contracts, fees and special discounts.

Consumer advocates say the first way to untangle this would be to end wireless exclusivity. All phones should work on all compatible networks -- particularly with all wireless companies building state-of-the-art networks to accommodate increasingly snazzy smart phones.

They also recommend an end to the practice of service providers "subsidizing" a product they don't make.

Concord's Scraggly Christmas Tree Stirs Controversy

http://www.wbaltv.com/news/21807520/detail.html

A simple question is sparking plenty of controversy. The question "Are you good without God?" is appearing on billboards across Baltimore.
CBS

Kelly McPherson

The billboards are reaching out to people who don't or aren't sure if they believe in God. Of course, it's got the Christian community talking.

"I don't think anybody can really be good without having a part of the God component inside of them," said Christian Life Church Senior Pastor Dr. Hugh Bair.

"And we believe clearly that one does not necessarily have to have God to have good," said First Unitarian Church Minister Rev. David Carl Olson.

The billboards are not just here in Baltimore.  They're in select states across the country.  Though they're already stirring up controversy, the real point is to get the conversation started.

"They might feel they're in a minority and this billboard is a way of saying if you're good without God, then you're not alone.  There are a lot of people like you, and we're trying to reach out to them," said Emil Volcheck, Baltimore Coalition of Reason.

The United Coalition of Reason paid for the campaign.  The local chapter, consisting of atheists, agnostics and humanists, says being vocal about not needing or believing in God can ostracize people in a society surrounded by churches and religion.

"I've only recently told my family and I decided to take a more active role and to help others who may feel afraid to speak up," said Gabriel Lockett, part of the Secular Student Alliance at UMBC.

Traditional churches take offense.

"A church is basically a visible presence that says we need God and what they are saying is they're undermining what church is really all about," Bair said.

The First Unitarian Church supports the billboard and is hosting the group's national speaker this weekend to preach about "good without God" and how it can play into even a churchgoer's beliefs.

"And even in a way of being religious that doesn't necessarily have God in it that we can still live ethical, moral, good lives," Olson said.

The non-theists say they're not trying to recruit people.  The traditional church says they've survived these sort of promotions before.

The campaign coincides with a book tour titled "Good Without God: What a Billion Nonreligious People Do Believe."  The tour stops in Baltimore on Sunday afternoon.

LINK TO VIDEO

http://wjz.com/seenon/billboards.controversy.2.1346662.html

Tiger Woods had a series of crashes

Tiger Woods was driving so erratically before his mysterious car crash that he careered into bushes and hedges, up two concrete curbs and swerved across a whole street before ploughing into a fire hydrant and a tree.

Nick Allen in Los Angeles
Published: 7:16PM GMT 03 Dec 2009

Happy times: Tiger Woods with wife, Elin Nordegren, at opening the ceremony for the Presidents Cup in San Francisco Photo: AP

The pinball trajectory of his Cadillac was revealed in a police sketch of the incident which shows the golfing superstar had a total of three collisions, not two as previously thought.

As he pulled out of his drive at 2.25am he mounted a concrete curb onto a grass verge. He then tried to turn left onto a road but went all the way across, up another curb and into some hedges.

SUV then careered left across an oncoming lanes on to his neighbour's lawn where he hit the fire hydrant, before crossing the neighbour's drive and colliding with a tree.

The bizarre series of collisions will raise further questions over what caused Woods to crash.

As he recovers from the wounds to his face and reputation the superstar golfer, is also facing a hefty hit to his wallet, being forced to renegotiate his prenuptial agreement, which could lead to his wife receiving a record breaking $300 million (£180 million) in any future divorce.

Woods and his wife Elin Nordegren, 29, are desperately trying to save their marriage and have been undergoing marriage counselling sessions several times daily at their home in Orlando, Florida.

When the couple married on Oct. 5, 2004, in a wedding at the exclusive Sandy Lane resort in Barbados, Mrs Nordegren signed an agreement which staggered payments and was initially modest by A-list celebrity standards.

It is said to have given her the right to $20 million (£12 million) after 10 years of marriage.

In light of Woods' recent "transgressions" the amount has been increased to $75 million (£45 million) and the period reduced to seven years.

But experts said Mrs Nordegren could ultimately end up with one of the biggest settlements in celebrity history, dwarfing the $150 million (£90 million) paid by basketball star Michael Jordan to his former wife Juanita.

Mrs Nordegren will also sign a nondisclosure form that will prevent her from ever telling her story.

Woods faced further public opprobrium yesterday from the fellow golfer who introduced him to his wife.

Mrs Nordegern was working as an au pair for Jesper Parnevik, a fellow Swede, when she met Woods at the 2001 British Open.

Parnevik, 44, said: "I'm kind of filled with sorrow for Elin since me and my wife are at fault for hooking her up with him, and we probably thought he was a better guy than he is.

"I would probably have to apologise to her and hope she uses a driver next time instead of a three-iron."