Darcy Irakoze, known as Kacaman, contracted the illness on Wednesday and died a day later in Burundi.
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Friday, August 9, 2019
Exhibit planned in honor of Michael Brown on the five year anniversary of his death
Gone but not forgotten, today marks the fifth anniversary of Michael Brown’s death, and he is being honored with a public exhibit of things that were close to heart in an effort to humanize the slain teen.
—Teen who says he accidentally killed teen girl in Russian roulette game, remains in jail—
Brown’s graduation gown, an Arnold Palmer drink can, a bag of Skittles and a Cardinals’ scarf is just some of the items his family wants the world to see at the “As I See You: A Tribute to Mike Brown Jr.” exhibit at the Urban League Ferguson Community Empowerment Center.
The public display opens today in Ferguson to the public through Sunday. It is a recreation of Brown’s bedroom on August 9, 2014, the day he was fatally shot by Officer Darren Wilson.
Just like in previous years, a makeshift memorial with flowers, balloons and a teddy bear will be on display near the Canfield Green Apartments, the place where the 18-year-old Brown died, The St. Louis Dispatch reports.
At 11 a.m. an hour-long memorial will commence, followed by a viewing of the exhibit. From 1 to 6 p.m., there will be a community event with food, vendors, and entertainment at Sam’s Meat Market.
Michael Brown Sr. said the events were organized by The Michael Brown Chosen for Change Foundation, to humanize his son as a “real person” who had dreams.
—Black woman confronts racist shouting ‘white power’ after he runs into her car—
After the Ferguson shooting erupted in 2014, protestors called for Wilson to be arrested and charged. D.A. Bob McCulloch, who won his seventh term as prosecutor just days after Brown’s death, refused to indict Wilson.
But it’s a new day, and McCulloch was voted out, and Wesley Bell was elected as St. Louis County’s first African-American prosecutor.
The “As I See You: A Tribute to Mike Brown Jr.” exhibit, will open Friday from 1 to 6 p.m. and from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday and Sunday at the Urban League Ferguson Community Empowerment Center, 9420 West Florissant Avenue.
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Don Lemon blasts Trump for making visits to mass shooting victims all about himself
CNN’s Don Lemon tore into President Donald Trump for taking a self-centered approach when visiting the victims of the Dayton, Ohio, and El Paso, Texas, shootings.
Trump visited the victims at Dayton’s Miami Valley Hospital, and his White House social media director Dan Scavino Jr. took to Twitter to brag about Trump being treated like a “rock star” as if he was at a concert and not visiting people in crisis.
“..The President was treated like a Rock Star inside the hospital, which was all caught on video. They all loved seeing their great President!”
..The President was treated like a Rock Star inside the hospital, which was all caught on video. They all loved seeing their great President!
— Dan Scavino Jr.🇺🇸 (@Scavino45) August 7, 2019
On Wednesday, the “CNN Tonight” host blasted Scavino for his insensitive tweet, The Huffington Post reports.
“A rock star?” asked Lemon. “How can you boast about that in this context? It would be hard to be more tone-deaf than that, more insensitive, right? Wrong.”
Then Lemon showed footage of Trump speaking at the El Paso Emergency Operations Center and using the moment to criticize Ohio Democrats.
“It’s not about you. It’s not about you. For once. At least today,” said Lemon.
“But we know it’s all about this president. Especially when he’s aggrieved, his feelings hurt by things he saw on TV. So when the president had a chance to speak publicly on this sad day in El Paso, a city in mourning, after a racist mass murder, he used his time to brag about himself and trash some Democrats.”
.@donlemon: “It should surprise none of us at this point that the feelings of the consoler-in-chief seemed most concerned with, while visiting victims, were his own.” #DonsTake https://t.co/KLFCtWbKrM pic.twitter.com/GIM7gZp1cP
— CNN Tonight (@CNNTonight) August 8, 2019
It just wasn’t the time.
—Teen who says he accidentally killed teen girl in Russian roulette game, remains in jail—
Lemon has taken Trump to task before.
Earlier this month, Lemon did not back down despite criticism from President Donald Trump, twice labeling presidential remarks as racist while he was moderating the Democratic debate.
And in June, Lemon doubled down against President Donald Trump’s divisive rhetoric and likened his brand of hate to Hitler’s.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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Thursday, August 8, 2019
New Reality Show Mines Family Albums for Black History
Marcus Garvey once said that “A people without the knowledge of their past history, origin and culture is like a tree without roots.” If you’re scratching your head wondering who Marcus Garvey is, then you’re in need of a black history lesson, and you might start by watching the PBS debut of Family Pictures USA on PBS Aug. 12 and 13.
The brainchild of filmmaker and artist Thomas Allen Harris, Family Pictures USA is the latest outgrowth of an award-winning body of work from this director who has always been driven by a desire to bring the largely hidden and neglected history of black people in America into the light.
An entirely new type of reality show, this new television series reconstructs the histories of resilient communities such as Detroit and Durham, North Carolina, through the memories of longtime residents and the treasured family photographs they share.
Black History Narratives
The result is a compelling and educational show that highlights not only individual family stories, but the weaving together of those stories over the course of generations into the history of a larger community, a city, its economy, its culture, and its hopes. The show stands apart for its simple elegance and narratives that, unlike most reality shows, don’t feel contrived.
When the descendants of Frank Wall, a second-generation Duke University janitor who bequeathed $100 to the school for use in the advancement of black men, share their photos and memories alongside the descendants of George Washington Duke, the white tobacco industrialist for whom Duke University is named, the history of those families, the city of Durham, and its most famous institutions, takes on a whole new meaning.
(Family Pictures USA/Flickr)
Centered on pictures of people who are long dead, the storytelling of their descendants is very much alive, honest, and intimate and Family Pictures USA’s approach to mining these stories also stands apart for its inclusiveness. Says Harris, simply, “You can’t tell American history without including African American history.”
While Harris, who teaches film and African American History at Yale, is always motivated in part by a desire to educate, he admits to being surprised by how much he learns in doing the show. “The stories of black business people who pulled themselves up by their bootstraps that you never heard about or had an image for were pretty amazing. The series helped me understand how towns were formed and how they developed and how people of means and employers shaped culture and people’s lives.”
Breaking Down Stereotypes in Country’s Current Political Tone
Harris, who stepped out from behind the camera to host the series, says it has been the most financially ambitious project he’s directed to date. Leveraging the success of his 2014 award-winning documentary, Through the Lens, Darkly, he and his partners raised $2.3 million largely through grants from the Ford Foundation and others. PBS, which is eager to compete more dynamically with other networks, invested about $250,000. A small network of high net worth African American businesspeople also contributed. In order to complete the series, Harris is still looking to close a $125,000 gap.
Harris, a Harvard graduate who began his career in public television, first produced award-winning shows in his native New York for WNET. He says that even 30 years later, raising money for new film projects remains a challenge.
Thomas Allen Harris (Family Pictures USA)
“Artists are used to networking with other artists, but I don’t know if we’re used to networking with people who think radically differently than we do, who may be business or finance people,” he says. No matter what your background is, to successfully finance a project, Harris adds, “You have to be able to tolerate rejection without any kind of resentment. Persistence and finding those sweet spots of commonality are key.”
Family Pictures USA certainly offers those sweet spots. Especially given the tone of the country as the 2020 election nears; Harris says he hopes the show will help break down the stereotypes and other barriers that divide us, and that through the show’s all-inclusive spectrum of photos, we will come to see ourselves in each other more and lean more into our commonalities.
As he says in a promo, “Once you see our history through family pictures, you’ll never see this country the same way again.”
More articles by Caroline Clarke:
- UNPACKING THE WENDY WILLIAMS EXPERIENCE
- BAD ASS BLACK WOMEN: TIME TO CLAIM YOUR PLACE IN HISTORY
- This Woman May Have Been the First Black Woman Manager in the Fortune 500
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Wendy Williams talks divorce, her estranged husband’s side family and says her ex is NOT running her businesses
The cat’s officially out of the bag.
Wendy Williams has finally confirmed that her estranged husband has a whole new family after it was reported that he cheated with his mistress Sharina Hudson and fathered a baby on the side.
Williams, 55, appeared on SiriusXM’s “Sway in the Morning,” about her impending divorce from Kevin Hunter and wished him and new his new family well.
“I want a divorce like yesterday, I want a divorce two months ago, three months ago. Whenever I found out, four months ago,” she said.
She explained that she wants her divorce and her relationship with Hunter to be cordial, Page Six reports.
“I want a divorce, and I want to be friends with Kevin. I mean, and not because we have a son but because that was real love. I still love him just not in that way.
“You either in or you are out with me,” she continued. “I still have love for him and I wish him the best in his new life with his new family.”
Now that’s growth.
While it has been reported that Williams may have recently softened her stance on her cheating ex-husband and hired him back to run her businesses, on Wednesday, Williams denied that claim while on Fox 5 in New York.
“The only business – I repeat – the only business me and Mr. Hunter are involved with is getting a divorce finalized,” Williams said.
The two had been joined at the hip for more than 20 years as a married couple and together built an empire and had several business ventures together like the Hunter Foundation.
—She’s Free! Cyntoia Brown has been released from prison after serving 15 years—
But when Williams reportedly found out her man had fathered a baby outside the marriage, she ousted him with the quickness, filed for divorce and dissolved her joint businesses.
It appears poppa has rolled his way back into Wendy’s good graces and they have released a joint press statement saying that they will not dissolve their production company, publishing house or charitable foundation.
Stay strong Wendy!
The post Wendy Williams talks divorce, her estranged husband’s side family and says her ex is NOT running her businesses appeared first on theGrio.
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The MIT Press releases a comprehensive report on open-source publishing software
The MIT Press has announced the release of a comprehensive report on the current state of all available open-source software for publishing. “Mind the Gap,” funded by a grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, “shed[s] light on the development and deployment of open source publishing technologies in order to aid institutions' and individuals' decision-making and project planning,” according to its introduction. It will be an unparalleled resource for the scholarly publishing community and complements the recently released Mapping the Scholarly Communication Landscape census.
The report authors, led by John Maxwell, associate professor and director of the Publishing Program at Simon Fraser University, catalog 52 open source online publishing platforms. These are defined as production and hosting systems for scholarly books and journals that meet the survey criteria, described in the report as those “available, documented open-source software relevant to scholarly publishing” and as well as others in active development. This research provides the foundation for a thorough analysis of the open publishing ecosystem and the availability, affordances, and current limitations of these platforms and tools.
The number of OS online publishing platforms has proliferated in the last decade, but the report finds that they are often too small, too siloed, and too niche to have much impact beyond their host organization or institution. This leaves them vulnerable to shifts in organizational priorities and external funding sources that prioritize new projects over the maintenance and improvement of existing projects. This fractured ecosystem is difficult to navigate and the report concludes that if open publishing is to become a durable alternative to complex and costly proprietary services, it must grapple with the dual challenges of siloed development and organization of the community-owned ecosystem itself.
“What are the forces — and organizations — that serve the larger community, that mediate between individual projects, between projects and use cases, and between projects and resources?” asks the report. “Neither a chaotic plurality of disparate projects nor an efficiency-driven, enforced standard is itself desirable, but mediating between these two will require broad agreement about high-level goals, governance, and funding priorities — and perhaps some agency for integration/mediation.”
“John Maxwell and his team have done a tremendous job collecting and analyzing data that confirm that open publishing is at a pivotal crossroads,” says Amy Brand, director of the MIT Press. “It is imperative that the scholarly publishing community come together to find new ways to fund and incentivize collaboration and adoption if we want these projects to succeed. I look forward to the discussions that will emerge from these findings.”
“We found that even though platform leaders and developers recognize that collaboration, standardization, and even common code layers can provide considerable benefit to project ambitions, functionality, and sustainability, the funding and infrastructure supporting open publishing projects discourages these activities,” explains Maxwell. “If the goal is to build a viable alternative to proprietary publishing models, then open publishing needs new infrastructure that incentivizes sustainability, cooperation, collaboration, and integration.”
Readers are invited to read, comment, and annotate “Mind the Gap” on the PubPub platform: mindthegap.pubpub.org
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