Louisiana braces for weekend hurricane and flooding

A potential tropical storm brewing in the Gulf of Mexico presents twin troubles for coastal Louisiana and Mississippi — the possibility that the flooded Mississippi River will be lapping at the tops of levees this weekend, and a danger of flash floods like the one that unexpectedly walloped New Orleans on Wednesday.

The Gulf of Mexico disturbance that dumped as much as 8 inches (20 centimeters) of rain just three hours in parts of metro New Orleans was forecast to strengthen into a tropical depression Thursday, then a tropical storm called Barry Thursday night, and, possibly, a weak hurricane by Friday.

The biggest danger in the days to come is not destructive winds, but ceaseless rain, the National Hurricane Center warned: “The slow movement of this system will result in a long duration heavy rainfall threat along the central Gulf Coast and inland through the lower Mississippi Valley through the weekend and potentially into next week.”

Forecasters said Louisiana could see up to 12 inches (30 centimeters) of rain by Monday, with isolated areas receiving as much as 18 inches (46 centimeters). And the storm’s surge at the mouth of the Mississippi could also mean a river that’s been running high for months will rise even higher.

Southeastern Texas also was at risk of torrential rains.

New Orleans got an early taste Wednesday of what may be in store. News outlets said a tornado may have been responsible for wind damage to one home, while floodwaters invaded some downtown hotels and businesses as streets became small rivers that accommodated kayakers. The floods paralyzed rush-hour traffic and stalled cars around the city.

It all happened fast.

“I must have got to work about a quarter to 7,” said Donald Smith, who saw his restaurant on Basin Street flood for the third time this year. “By 7:15, water was everywhere.”
It brought memories of a 2017 flash flood that exposed major problems — and led to major personnel changes — at the Sewerage and Water Board, which oversees street drainage. City officials said the pumping system that drains streets was at full capacity. But the immense amount of rain in three hours would overwhelm any system, said Sewerage and Water Board director Ghassan Korban.

The Mississippi is already running so high that officials in Plaquemines Parish at Louisiana’s southeastern tip ordered evacuations of some areas to begin Thursday. A voluntary evacuation was called on Grand Isle, the vulnerable barrier island community south of New Orleans. Gov. John Bel Edwards declared a statewide emergency in light of the gathering storm.

A spokesman for the Army Corps of Engineers in New Orleans said the agency was not expecting widespread overtopping of the levees, but there are concerns for areas south of the city. The weather service expects the river to rise to 20 feet (6 meters) by Saturday morning at a key gauge in the New Orleans area, which is protected by levees 20 to 25 feet (6 to 7.6 meters) high.

The Corps was working with local officials down river to identify any low-lying areas and reinforce them, spokesman Ricky Boyett said. He cautioned that the situation may change as more information arrives.

“We’re confident the levees themselves are in good shape. The big focus is height,” Boyett said.

Edwards said National Guard troops and high-water vehicles would be positioned all over the state.

“The entire coast of Louisiana is at play in this storm,” the governor said.

New Orleans officials have asked residents to keep at least three days of supplies on hand and to keep their neighborhood storm drains clear so water can move quickly.

As the water from Wednesday morning’s storms receded, people worried about what might come next.

Tanya Gulliver-Garcia was trying to make her way home during the deluge. Flooded streets turned a 15-minute drive into an ordeal lasting more than two hours.

“This is going to be a slow storm … That’s what I’m concerned about,” she said.

Tourists Floyd and Missy Martin of Raleigh, North Carolina, were trying to make the best of it at a store with puddles on the floor where they were buying an umbrella, chips and peanuts, and two bottles of merlot.

“We could drown out our sorrows or make an adventure of it,” Floyd Martin joked.

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After fatal police shooting controversy Mayor Pete Buttigieg rolls out proposal to address systemic racism

Pete Buttigieg has a message for white liberals who decry racism: “Good intentions are not going to be enough.”

The Democratic presidential candidate and South Bend, Indiana, mayor is combating perceptions that he’s out of touch with black people and will struggle to win their votes. On Thursday, he’s unveiling his most detailed proposals yet, which he says are aimed at addressing the systemic racism that affects the black community. And he’s pairing that with candid talk aimed at white Democrats.

“White Democratic voters want to do the right thing but maybe haven’t fully thought about what that means or what that requires of us,” Buttigieg said in an Associated Press interview. “The reality is America as a whole is worse off when these inequities exist.”

Buttigieg, 37, was virtually unknown in national politics when he launched his campaign , but has gained ground with a compelling narrative as a young, gay military veteran offering generational change in the White House. He raised $24.8 million during the second quarter, a stunning sum that topped other leading Democrats, including former Vice President Joe Biden and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders.

But his rise has coincided with questions about his handling of race in South Bend. He was criticized for firing the city’s first black police chief early in his career and has admitted he hasn’t done enough to improve the lives of black residents.

Buttigieg left the campaign trail last month after a white police officer fatally shot a black man the officer said was armed with a knife. Some South Bend residents criticized him for being more focused on his presidential prospects than developments back home.

Under scrutiny, Buttigieg has been aggressive in directly tackling racism on the campaign trail. In Iowa last week, he shot down a question from a white man who suggested the best way to address crime in his hometown is to “tell the black people of South Bend to stop committing crime and doing drugs.”

Buttigieg responded that “racism is not going to get us out of this problem.”

“The fact that a black person is four times as likely as a white person to be incarcerated for the exact same crime is evidence of systemic racism,” he said. “With all due respect, sir, racism makes it harder for good police officers to do their job, too. It’s a smear on law enforcement.”

In the interview, Buttigieg said he’s in a unique position to talk about race.

“As the urban mayor who, for better or worse, may be the white candidate called on most often to discuss matters of race in this campaign, I want to make sure that every kind of audience is very clear on where I stand and, most importantly, what it is we can actually do,” he said.

The mayor has dubbed the proposals the Douglass Plan. It’s named for black abolitionist Frederick Douglass and modeled after the Marshall Plan, which helped Europe recover after World War II.

The plan addresses disparities in health, education, wealth, criminal justice and voting rights. Buttigieg says it’s a “complement” to the push by Democrats in Congress to study reparations to determine how to compensate the descendants of slaves.

“This is my entry, as specifically as possible, about what we can do across all these different areas of American life where the black experience is very much like living in a different country,” he said.

He said he will promote the plan before both black and white audiences in early primary states, but it’s unclear whether that will be enough to resonate with black voters. One measure of his commitment will be how he spends the nearly $25 million he raised in recent months, including whether he’ll staff up in South Carolina, which holds the first primary where black voters are crucial.

Buttigieg has sought to build connections with black voters and recently appeared with the Rev. Al Sharpton and the Rev. Jesse Jackson and at the Essence Fest in New Orleans.
Sharpton, who has criticized homophobia, has said Buttigieg could face skepticism from older black Americans uncomfortable with the idea of a gay president. Buttigieg said the most important thing is for voters to get to know him as a person, but he acknowledged the challenges posed by his historic candidacy.

“Many of the older generation activists that I’ve worked with in many ways are more patient on some of those institutional questions but have less comfort with the form of diversity that I represent,” he said. “It’s just a reminder that people are different, and you’ve got to meet them where they are. But at the end of the day, what I learned at home politically is the most important thing on a voter’s mind is how is your election going to impact their lives.”

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World-class diagnostics for low-income communities in sub-Saharan Africa

Genevieve Barnard Oni’s iPhone lights up with the same notifications dozens of times each day — but they aren’t from a popular Instagram account or an overactive group chat. Instead, the notifications signal every time a patient is treated at MDaaS Global’s health clinic in Ibadan, Nigeria.

Last month Barnard Oni MBA ’19, who co-founded the company with her husband, Oluwasoga (Soga) Oni SM ’16, as well as Joe McCord SM ’15 and Opeyemi Ologun, received 750 such notifications. If all goes according to plan, that number is about to multiply.

Operating outside of the wealthier, well-resourced city center, the company’s clinic offers affordable diagnostic services, including ultrasounds, X-rays, malaria tests, and other lab services, that were previously inaccessible to many families in the area.

MDaaS has accomplished this by building a supply chain that gets refurbished medical equipment into the African communities that need them most, and by leveraging technology to streamline clinic operations.

By partnering with dozens of nearby hospitals and clinics to get patient referrals, the MDaaS clinic has diagnosed more than 10,000 patients since opening less than two years ago. Now, fresh off a $1 million funding round, the company is planning to export its model to other areas of Nigeria and West Africa, with the goal of operating 100 diagnostic centers in the next five years.

“We’re trying to build four diagnostic centers [by early next year] and show that the new centers will have the same trajectory as our first,” Soga says. “After we’ve proven that, we can start building for scale, building maybe two or three centers a month all over Africa, the idea being we know exactly how things will go when you build them.”

A desperate situation

Soga’s father runs a private medical practice in Ikare-Akoko, Nigeria. Like many doctors in rural areas of sub-Saharan Africa, he has long struggled to get reliable medical equipment at affordable prices. Negotiating to purchase used equipment from Europe or China requires expertise in the global equipment marketplace and also comes with risks, as most secondhand equipment lacks warranties and operating manuals.

Genevieve, on the other hand, worked on public health initiatives in Malawi, Ghana, and Uganda before coming to MIT. During those experiences, she realized how useless donated medical equipment is without technicians trained to set up and maintain them, and without access to spare parts.

“Countless times I saw rooms full of equipment that had never been set up or equipment that had been used for a few months before breaking down, with no hope of repair,” she says.

A common goal

Soga entered MIT’s system design and management graduate program in 2014 and met Genevieve later that year. The two quickly realized they shared a passion for improving health care in Africa. For their second date, Soga invited Genevieve to his development ventures class, where he pitched a rough idea for providing rural doctors like his father with high-quality, refurbished medical equipment and ongoing service support.

MIT offered Soga and Genevieve seed funding to further pursue the idea through the Legatum Center, the PKG Center, MIT IDEAS, and the Africa Business Club.

McCord joined the team in the summer of 2016, and the co-founders were able to secure a partnership with Coast 2 Coast Medical in Massachusetts to begin buying refurbished medical equipment in bulk.

But when they began selling the equipment in Nigeria, they realized their biggest customers were from hospitals and clinics in big cities that predominantly served high-income patients. These facilities already had access to many of the machines MDaaS was selling, but found they could save money through the startup.

The founders faced a dilemma: They weren’t serving the people that needed them most, the low-income communities they’d dreamed of helping since their time in Africa, and yet, by the summer of 2017, the business was profitable — a difficult milestone for startups anywhere, let alone one in Nigeria. They tried different financing options to get their equipment to poorer clinics, including offering to lease or rent out the equipment, but clinics in rural and low-income areas still struggled to achieve the patient volumes necessary to make it work.

“We weren’t reaching this really large market, the 130 million patients that live outside of the largest urban areas that have the biggest issues accessing medical equipment,” Soga says. “The market of high-end hospitals wasn’t exciting for us. … We’d be stuck in big cities, serving high-end clientele. That wasn’t what drove us.”

Upending their business model, they decided to take on new costs and open their own diagnostic center in a low-income community in southwestern Nigeria. The people in this community had limited access to the high-quality diagnostic services enabled by the company’s machines. By centralizing diagnostic services, the founders could aggregate patient demand across dozens of hospitals and clinics, helping them keep prices low and scale faster than if they just sold equipment. This approach would also give the founders a chance to work directly with the patients they were trying to help.

Even as they faced bigger challenges and risks associated with the new model, they never planned to stop at one clinic.

“We had to make the change,” Soga says. “We just kept following our north star, which is to improve health care outcomes. Anybody can build one clinic, but it gets really interesting when you’re building 20, 30, 40 clinics across the continent.”

The MDaaS clinic has been up and running since November 2017. It features a digital X-ray machine, an electrocardiogram (ECG), an electroencephalogram (EEG), an ultrasound, and a full suite lab. For most tests, in-house physicians interpret the results. For others, results are sent to specialized clinicians in big cities.

Today, MDaaS gets patient referrals from more than 60 hospitals and clinics in the region in addition to welcoming walk-ins and partnering with insurance companies. About 70 percent of the people MDaaS treats are women and children.

The founders say they broke even on their operations in just five months and have been operating profitably ever since, proving the need for their services in the area. In fact, the number of patients seen per day at the center has grown by a factor of five since January 2018.

Their dream of operating 100 diagnostic centers will begin by building a few more in Nigeria before they expand to nearby countries, including Ghana and Cote D’Ivoire, possibly as early as next year.

“Right now, we want to test replicating what we have and learn how to manage multiple facilities at once,” Soga says.

As for Genevieve’s mounting phone notifications, she remains thrilled to get constant reminders of the impact the co-founders’ hard work is having. Still, with the ultimate goal of transforming care across sub-Saharan Africa, she admits she’ll have to turn them off at some point soon.

“We’re trying to get to the point where it’s almost a diagnostic center in a box,” she says. “We can provide everything you’d need to go from zero patients to seeing 1,000 or 2,000 a month. We’re also getting so much data and information about the people we’re seeing, so we know the diseases they’re coming in for and the type of diagnostics they need. This information will become increasingly important as we look to build health care solutions for hundreds of thousands of patients instead of tens of thousands.”

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Family of Black man killed by cop in Buttigieg’s city wants officer’s pay stopped

A South Bend, Ind., family outraged by the police-involved killing of their loved one, wants the city’s mayor, 2020 presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg, to revoke pay for the officer who shot him.

On Tuesday, the family of Eric Logan submitted a petition demanding that South Bend Police Sgt. Ryan O’Neill’s pay be revoked in light of the killing of the father of seven and the questionable circumstances of the case.

The family wants Buttigieg to make a recommendation to have the cop’s pay revoked since he doesn’t have the authority to render that decision.

READ MORE: Police shooting of Black man poses Pete Buttigieg’s biggest 2020 challenge yet

The fatal shooting has become a political headache for Buttigieg in the midst of his presidential campaign, even though he has tried to address it on the local level.

“It’s unfair to the Logan family, it’s unfair to the taxpayers of South Bend, Indiana, and his friends as well that this officer is receiving his pay from taking a life from this community,” said Vernado Malone, founder of Justice for South Bend said during a press conference on Tuesday, ABC News reports.

“We are asking the mayor and he has a duty to make a recommendation that Sgt. O’Neill be placed on leave, pending investigation, without pay,” Malone said. “The mayor has said he’s with the Logan family, and he wants change in this community. This here is the time, mayor.”

“This is the time, Mayor Pete, to step up and make your own demands and changes,” he said. “You don’t need a police board or anybody else. We are asking you, as our mayor, to obey this demand that we will be giving you today.”

READ MORE: 2020 Candidate Pete Buttigieg must confront racism after Black father killed by police

Logan, 54, was killed June 16 when O’Neill fired his weapon during an incident that took place as the officer followed up on a report of car break-ins in the downtown area.

The officer defended shooting Logan saying he confronted him in a parking lot and only shot him after he threatened him with a knife. But this remains unconfirmed because O’Neill did not have his body camera on at the time of the incident.

The family of the victim strongly opposes O’Neill’s narrative of events. The family has since filed a civil rights lawsuit.

Buttigieg does not have the power to directly revoke O’Neill’s pay, and he told ABC News on Tuesday that South Bend’s Public Review Board is charged with making that decision.

“It’s a board of safety. It’s five civilians appointed by the mayor, who meet and receive evidence and in a transparent and accountable process, decide on matters like this,” he said. “I know that some people imagine that a mayor sits up there in the office and decides who’s in trouble, who’s fired, who goes up and who goes down.”

“But we have a legal system here and it’s constraining and it’s frustrating,” he added.

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Suzanne Berger named inaugural John M. Deutch Institute Professor

Political scientist Suzanne Berger has been named MIT’s inaugural John M. Deutch Institute Professor, joining the select group of people holding MIT’s highest faculty honor.

Berger is a lauded scholar who has published many studies of European politics and society, and who, in an overlapping phase of her career, has become an influential expert about the prospects of America’s innovation economy and advanced manufacturing.

Along with Berger, economist Daron Acemoglu has also been named Institute Professor. There are now 12 faculty holding the Institute Professor title, along with 11 Institute Professors Emeriti. The new appointees are the first faculty members to be named Institute Professors since 2015.

“It is difficult to imagine anyone more deserving of the distinction of Institute Professor than Suzanne Berger,” says MIT President L. Rafael Reif. “Throughout her one-of-a-kind career, Suzanne has worked at the frontier of at least three distinct research areas and made influential contributions in every one. She stepped forward to inspire and lead groundbreaking research collaborations that brilliantly served both MIT and the nation. And — before we knew how much we needed it — she had the wisdom to invent the signature program that now leads MIT students into deep engagement with cultures around the world.”

In a letter sent to MIT faculty today, MIT Provost Martin A. Schmidt and MIT Chair of the Faculty Susan Silbey lauded Berger as an “internationally acclaimed scholar” and praised her work on numerous campus-wide MIT initiatives.

Berger’s central role in multiple MIT studies of the innovation economy and global business competition has “helped MIT in the realization of its mission to ‘serve the nation and the world,’” Schmidt and Silbey wrote. They added that Berger, as founding director of the MIT International Science and Technology Initiatives (MISTI), “has had a profound impact on generations of MIT students.”

MISTI sends hundreds of MIT students a year to internships in overseas labs and companies, and funds MIT faculty collaborations with researchers globally.

Nominations for faculty to be promoted to the rank of Institute Professor may be made at any time, by any member of the faculty, and should be directed to MIT’s Chair of the Faculty.

In a sense, Berger has almost packed two careers into her time at MIT. When Berger joined MIT in 1968, she was studying the political ideologies of French peasants, and she has published multiple books and articles about French and European society and politics, including “Peasants Against Politics,” (1972), “The French Political System,” (1974), and “Dualism and Discontinuity in Industrial Societies,” (1980), the latter co-authored with Michael Piore.

Additionally, starting in the 1980s, Berger became a key figure in several MIT-wide study projects, a branching interest that Berger credits in part to the broad-ranging research environment at MIT.

“MIT really changed me,” Berger says. “I’ve learned a lot at MIT. What an extraordinary place to be constantly learning, and rethinking your basic assumptions about how the world works.”

Berger adds that she “deeply honored” to be named an Institute Professor, and noted that outside of MIT, “many people do not understand that we have extraordinary departments in economics, political science, linguistics, philosophy, and more. So on behalf of those of us on social sciences, I feel this is recognition of the role social scientists play, both in research and in the education of our students.”

As Berger also notes, her career is also marked by both her own individual research, and her participation in Institute initiatives, some of which have been highly influential in shaping public discourse.

“Over all my years at MIT, I’ve come to see that Institute Professors are people who both have worked in their own fields and made contributions to the Institute,” Berger says.

That certainly is true in her case. In 1986, Berger was named to MIT’s Commission on Industrial Productivity, which conducted an intensive multiyear study of U.S. industry. That resulted in the widely read book “Made in America” and spurred MIT to found its Industrial Performance Center.

For Berger’s part, serving on the commission also spurred her to play a central role in subsequent Institute-wide projects. That included studies of Hong Kong and Taiwan, for which she and Richard Lester, now associate provost at MIT overseeing international activities, co-edited the books “Made By Hong Kong” (1997) and “Global Taiwan” (2005). 

More recently, Berger was a key part of a five-year Institute global study of manufacturing that resulted in a 2006 book she authored, “How We Compete.” The book evaluated the strategies of multinational companies, examining when they outsource tasks to other firms and under what circumstances they move their own operations overseas.

Berger followed that up by co-chairing MIT’s commission on Production in the Innovation Economy, formed in 2010, which took a deep look at the state of advanced manufacturing in the U.S., providing important input for federal policy in this area. Berger was also lead author of a 2013 book written with the other commission members, “Making in America,” summarizing the group’s findings.

Currently Berger’s work is continuing along two tracks. She is a member of MIT’s “Work of the Future” task force, which is studying the condition of labor in the U.S., and working to complete a book project of her own, on the wave of globalization that occurred in the late 19th century.

Berger received her undergraduate degree from the University of Chicago and her PhD from Harvard University in 1967. She joined the MIT faculty in 1968 and has been at the Institute ever since.

Berger has received many other honors in her career. She was made a Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur by France in 2009. She has also been awarded a Guggenheim fellowship, and been named a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

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Daron Acemoglu named Institute Professor

Economist Daron Acemoglu, whose far-ranging research agenda has produced influential studies about government, innovation, labor, and globalization, has been named Institute Professor, MIT’s highest faculty honor.

Acemoglu is one of two MIT professors earning that distinction in 2019. The other, political scientist Suzanne Berger, has been named the inaugural John M. Deutch Institute Professor.

Acemoglu and Berger join a select group of people holding the Institute Professor title at MIT. There are now 12 Institute Professors, along with 11 Institute Professors Emeriti. The new appointees are the first faculty members to be named Institute Professors since 2015.

“As an Institute Professor, Daron Acemoglu embodies the essence of MIT: boldness, rigor and real-world impact,” says MIT President L. Rafael Reif. “From the John Bates Clark Medal to his decades of pioneering contributions to the literature, Daron has built an exceptional record of academic accomplishment. And because he has focused his creativity on broad, deep questions around the practical fate of nations, communities and workers, his work will be essential to making a better world in our time.”

In a letter sent to the MIT faculty today, MIT Provost Martin A. Schmidt and MIT Chair of the Faculty Susan Silbey noted that the honor recognizes “exceptional distinction by a combination of leadership, accomplishment, and service in the scholarly, educational, and general intellectual life of the Institute and wider community.” Schmidt and Silbey also cited Acemoglu’s “significant impacts in diverse fields of economics” and praised him as “one of the most dedicated teachers and mentors in his department.”

Nominations for faculty to be promoted to the rank of Institute Professor may be made at any time, by any member of the faculty, and should be directed to MIT’s Chair of the Faculty.

A highly productive scholar with broad portfolio of research interests, Acemoglu has spent more than 25 years at MIT examining complicated, large-scale economic questions — and producing important answers.

“I’m greatly honored,” he says. “I’ve spent all my career at MIT, and this is a recognition that makes me humbled and happy.”

At different times in his career, Acemoglu has published significant research on topics ranging from labor economics to network effects within economies. However, his most prominent work in the public sphere examines the dynamics of political institutions, democracy, and economic growth.

Working with colleagues, Acemoglu has built an extensive empirical case that the existence of government institutions granting significant rights for individuals has spurred greater economic activity over the last several hundred years. At the same time, he has also produced theoretical work modeling political changes in many countries.   

He has researched the relationship between institutions and economics most extensively with political scientist James Robinson at the University of Chicago, as well as with Simon Johnson of the MIT Sloan School of Management. However, he has published papers about political dynamics with many other scholars as well.

Acemoglu has also been keenly interested in other issues during the course of his career. In labor economics, Acemoglu’s work has helped account for the wage gap between higher-skill and lower-skill workers; he has also shown why firms benefit from investing in improving employee skills, even if those workers might leave or require higher wages. 

In multiple papers over the last decade, Acemoglu has also examined the labor-market implications of automation, robotics, and AI. Using both theoretical and empirical approaches, Acemoglu has shown how these technologies can reduce employment and wages unless accompanied by other, counterbalancing innovations that increase labor productivity.

In still another area of recent work, Acemoglu has shown how economic shocks within particular industrial sectors can produce cascading effects that propagate through an entire economy, work that has helped economists re-evaluate ideas about the aggregate performance of economies.  

Acemoglu credits the intellectual ethos at MIT and the environment created by his colleagues as beneficial to his own research.  

“MIT is a very down-to-earth, scientific, no-nonsense environment, and the economics department here has been very open-minded, in an age when economics is more relevant than ever but also in the midst of a deep transformation,” he says. “I think it’s great to have an institution, and colleagues, open to new ideas and new things.”

Acemoglu has authored or co-authored over 120 (and still rapidly counting) peer-reviewed papers. His fifth book, “The Narrow Corridor,” co-authored with Robinson, will be published in September. It takes a global look at the development of, and pressures on, individual rights and liberties. He has advised over 60 PhD students at MIT and is known for investing considerable time reading the work of his colleagues. 

As a student, Acemoglu received his BA from the University of York, and his MSc and PhD from the London School of Economics, the latter in 1992. His first faculty appointment was at MIT in 1993, and he has been at the Institute ever since. He was promoted to full professor in 2000, and since 2010 has been the Elizabeth and James Killian Professor of Economics. 

Among Acemoglu’s honors, in 2005 he won the John Bates Clark Medal, awarded by the American Economic Association to the best economist under age 40. Acemoglu has also won the Nemmers Prize in Economics, the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award, and been elected to the National Academy of Sciences. This month, Acemoglu also received the Global Economy Prize 2019, from the Institute for the World Economy.

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Despite coming to blows with his father, assault charges dropped against Wendy Williams’ son

After a blowup between father and son that came down to fists swinging, it turns out Wendy Williams’ son, Kevin Hunter Jr., won’t have to face assault charges.

The younger Hunter, 18, was charged for punching his dad Kevin Sr., in the face during a fight that was said to have started because he confronted his dad about his demand for spousal support from Williams. Hunter reportedly cheated on Williams, which allegedly was the catalyst that made Williams file for divorce.

Hunter ultimately didn’t want to press charges against his son and on Tuesday, Kevin Jr. appeared in court to offer his not guilty plea. Prosecutors decided against moving forward with the case and the charges were ultimately dropped, Entertainment Tonight reports.

READ MORE: Wendy Williams shops tell-all interview as husband Kevin Hunter claims she turned son against him after their fight

According to TMZ, the father and son got into a heated argument back in May in the parking lot of a store in New Jersey. Sources claim the two were arguing about Kevin’s demand for spousal support from his wife. Hunter allegedly called 18-year-old Kevin Jr. “brainwashed” and proceeded to put him in a headlock. Kevin Jr. then reportedly punched his father in the face.

According to a source, “Kevin Jr. was a bit aggressive towards his father and his father tried to control the situation,” The source said, according to ET. “Kevin Jr. then punched his father in the face and the cops were called sometime later. Kevin Sr. and Kevin Jr. have always had a great relationship. Not everything is as it appears and Kevin Sr. looks forward to moving past this.”

Williams recently returned to the air after a five-week hiatus and told her audience she was using the time to reflect.

READ MORE: Wendy Williams sheds tears over divorce drama, but then gets real about it

“I was just a woman relaxing and gathering my thoughts,” she said about the use of her vacation time. “I had my books, my thoughts, thinking about you, but mostly gathering my life for me, and my son and my family.”

She also spoke briefly about her new boyfriend.

“It helps that he’s a doctor. I am not gonna say one more word, you’re not gonna blow this for me. You’re not gonna blow this for me. But he’s been married, his kids are in their 20s… and yes, he’s Black. I know you’re wondering.”

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August Alsina reveals loss of ability to walk and battle with serious illness

The Awesome Bowling Robot Is Surely Fake. Here's How to Tell

The viral video of BowlBot 5000 throwing a strike inspires great physics questions, even if robots aren't yet coming for our bowling alleys.

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How Phone Taps and Swipes Train Us to Be Better Consumers

Opinion: Smartphone interfaces train our motions, closing the gap between our bodies and our virtual selves. But what does that mean when our movements are choreographed by corporate interests?

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The 'Super Mario Maker 2' Community Is a Haven of Player Creativity

The hallowed halls of Mario have become, in the hands of fans, shrines to the gods of difficulty.

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Beyonce and Blue Ivy hit the red carpet in formation for ‘The Lion King’ Hollywood premiere

It was a mother/daughter date night for Beyoncé  and daughter Blue Ivy Carter who were in formation and shined in crystals as they sashayed down the red carpet in matching outfits at The Lion King Hollywood premiere on Tuesday.

READ MORE: Blue Ivy’s summer vacation pics have us all in our feelings

Bey who voices the character Nala in the re-imagined movie, also executive produced a companion album “The Lion King: The Gift,” and dropped a new song “Spirit” on Tuesday night.

Beyoncé e Blue Ivy! 💛 #TheLionKing pic.twitter.com/4XS9tVCDn8

— Beyoncé Access (@beyonceaccess) July 10, 2019

Bey stepped out on Tuesday with her daughter by her side and stunned in an Alexander McQueen tuxedo dress, adorned with crystal chandelier embroidery with a dégradé crystal embroidered skirt, Entertainment Tonight reports. Blue Ivy stunted like her momma in a matching black dress with silver crystals.

While it didn’t appear that Jay-Z was in attendance, Beyonce’s bestie Michelle Williams did show up in support of her Destiny Child’s partner and praised Bey.

“Just excitement and how now is the time [for] different voices, different experiences and what she is going to bring to it. And because of her two little girls, of what she’s passing on for her family is really awesome,” said Williams about Beyonce’s movie role.

The new adaptation of “The Lion King” movie features Beyoncé, Donald Glover (who voices the role of Simba), James Earl Jones (who stars as the voice of Mufasa), Chiwetel Ejiorfor (Scar), Seth Rogen (Pumbaa), Billy Eichner (Timon) and John Oliver (Zazu). The movie also features Amy Sedaris in a new character that was written intentionally for this movie adaptation.

READ MORE: Beyonce and Blue Ivy go on an Easter egg hunt at Target

“The Lion King: The Gift” will be released on July 19 when the movie hits the screen.

According to movie projections, this new adaption of “The Lion King” is expected to bring in a huge opening weekend box office tally.

The post Beyonce and Blue Ivy hit the red carpet in formation for ‘The Lion King’ Hollywood premiere appeared first on theGrio.

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The Best Xbox One Console Bundles and Deals for 2019

Deals on the Xbox One X and Xbox One S consoles, along with some games and accessories you'll want.

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