As Zimbabwe's economic crisis bites, one man tells the BBC how shortages are crippling his business.
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Intro Video
Tuesday, August 13, 2019
London officer appears on Nigerian Big Brother
Monday, August 12, 2019
Joshua Akinotanhe plays several instruments and looks set for stardom.
INTERVIEW: Chaunte Wayans brings the laughs on ‘Tiffany Haddish Presents: They Ready’
Tiffany Haddish is doing her best to bring some of her fellow, female comedians on her ride to fame in her new Netflix special, Tiffany Haddish Presents: They Ready. In it, she features six female comedians she has gotten to know and love over the years.Haddish hosts and executive produces the series along with Emmy-nominated Wanda Sykes and Page Hurwitz.
One of the hilarious women you’ll meet on the special is Chaunte Wayans, a less-famous (for now) member of the infamous Wayans family. We caught up with the comedian to find out how she has navigated the comedy world with such a famous last name, and what it’s like to put her sexuality on full display.
Some folks may recognize Chaunte Wayans from Wild’N Out, but she certainly hasn’t reached the level of fame as many of her family members.
“I think in the beginning it was a little bit, more of I was adamant about starting a name for myself. When I first started my stage name was New York. It was so corny. It was about not having people feel like things were coming to me because I am a Wayans. It was like, ‘No, I’m really funny,'” she explains.
“There’s always pros and cons. When I first started I only had five jokes or less and people would use me to get people to come to their shows. I would be doing five minutes and they would have me on the billboard above the headliner. It was like, ‘What is happening right now?’”
Tiffany Haddish apologizes to fans after comedy show falls flat
Chaunte is the daughter of Elvira Wayans. In one of her first jokes of her set, Wayans jokes that she comes from the “poor” side of the Wayans family.
“They got five kids a piece and all this stuff so they give us opportunities and give us money here and there but they can’t take care of a family of a trillion people and still have money themselves,” she says of her super successful uncles that include Marlon Wayans, Keenan Ivory Wayans, and Marlon Wayans. “My mom and my other aunts and uncles didn’t ‘make’ it. They weren’t famous.”
She also discussed her journey as an openly lesbian comic.
“Being a Black woman and a lesbian has made it a harder road for me. I get a lot of men, even in the gay world, who tell me I should show a little cleavage, or maybe let my hair out or wear some heels. If people saw me wear heels I would probably set myself back further. People have this image of what they think you should look like and the problem with that is people start looking the same,” she says.
“My whole career, I always felt like I will make it if I just stay true to myself. At a certain point, I learned that you could build a real fanbase that believes in your journey and will fall in love with you without you having to change. I tried to get a little sexy and it was very awkward. My jokes didn’t land the same.”
“I get a lot of people that come up to me after my set, even pastors who say ‘ I don’t really believe in what you’re doing but that was funny.’ It’s a way to start a conversation. A lot of people are afraid of things. You’ve got people getting killed or committing suicide because of their identity and so when you are able to connect to somebody else through laughter, that opens up a conversation that hopefully brings new ideas out so these tragic things don’t have to happen,” she continues.
“Being black and being LGBTQ and even being a woman are all things that are important to represent. It allows you to have a voice. That is my main purpose, to be able to show there are different sides to all of us.”
Check out the trailer:
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FGM ‘no longer just an African problem’
Black-Owned Allstate Franchises are in ‘Good Hands’
Kevin “Scooby” Hutchins, owns three Allstate franchises in Wichita, Kansas. Allstate Insurance was founded in 1931 and it continues to be a proven leader in the competitive field of insurance and financial services. It is consistently ranked among the Fortune 100 companies, and franchise owners say that Allstate is unique among all other insurers because the franchisee owns the economic interest in their business.
Hutchins spoke about running successful Allstate franchises in this exclusive interview with Black Enterprise.
Black Enterprise: Let’s start with how you got into the business.
Hutchins: I worked for several major corporations such as Sears and MCI, and frankly, I got tired of losing my job due to no fault of my own. I could be a top performer and give the company everything I had, but still wasn’t immune to downsizing or businesses closing. I wanted to have more control over my life, and I knew owning my own business, while not easy, would give me that control.
So, that started me on the path. My first stop was Edward Jones to study securities. I didn’t even know what a security was—outside of the one that stood outside of the mall. That didn’t quite work out, and I moved on to health insurance, obtaining my health and life certifications. I started working at Western & Southern Life Insurance but quickly realized that I could be earning a lot more.
What made you land on Allstate Insurance as the right investment for you?
During my research, I determined that Allstate had the earning structure I was looking for. While the investment is significantly higher than some of the other franchise brands ($100K in accessible, liquid capital), I knew that whatever I built belongs to me. As an Allstate agency owner, you own equity in the business you build and earn repeat revenue from policy renewals. That’s not the case for most insurance agencies.
Owning your own book of business opens up a world of possibilities. Allstate has bonus opportunities of 3%-4% of your book size, as well as many other great sales incentives. And of course, if you choose to sell your business, you have a valuable asset that can be sold to a qualified buyer.
But it’s even more than just that. I recently leveraged my book of business to purchase the entire building that we were leasing office space in.
It’s not necessary to invest in a franchise to get into insurance sales, right?
True. But the behavior of most people isn’t to seek out an insurance broker, and that’s where strong name brand recognition can make all the difference. Almost everyone is familiar with the Allstate tagline “You’re in good hands”; and that’s very valuable in establishing trust.
You opened your first office in 2006 and grew to three offices and a book of business worth close to $8 million. How have you been able to be so successful?
When I first started, I just wanted to make enough money to cover my $70K salary I made at MCI. Once I got into the business and realized I hit that $70K number in the first six months, I had a completely different mindset. After that, sales increased incrementally, and rather than paying myself more in a salary, I reinvested that money back into the business.
I opened my second location two to three years later, and my third location in 2010. But with expansion, I had to make some changes. Rather than working in the business, I had to shift to working on the business. It wasn’t easy because I really enjoyed sales, but in order to grow, you have to shift your mindset. This meant hiring a sales manager, a service manager, and several reps that focus on new sales and those that handle policy services. Insurance has an 85% retention rate, so that’s where you want your focus to be—customer retention. We realized we could do twice the volume if had specialized teams—one doing one thing and the other doing another.
Where do you see your business headed?
While we’ve done well, I have my eye toward being a top performer in this business. We have a model where we’re looking to reach $20 – $30 million in sales. That’s what’s really nice about being a part of a franchise like Allstate. I can achieve that goal without having to reinvent the wheel. I’ve been able to speak with and learn from top performers and implement some of their processes as well as some of my own that I learned along the way. Having worked in a corporate environment, I’m able to use what I liked about that world and avoid the things I didn’t like.
What advice do you have for people looking to get into the Insurance field and/or business in general?
Well, specifically for the insurance industry, you have to know that you’re working for the residual income. You have to look at it as selling over a long period of time—that’s your paycheck.
I call the first 90 days the “peanut butter and jelly” stage, as that’s what you need to be prepared to be eating. Because I wanted to really focus on building my niche in the business, I paid all of my bills for the business, in advance, for 90 days. I didn’t want to be selling out of desperation. This lowered my stress and allowed me to be genuine with potential customers.
My other advice would be that when you hit bonuses or exceed revenues in the first three years of your business, use that money to reinvest. Once you get past year three, you should be at a certain revenue level that allows you to ease up a bit and possibly do other things. Insurance is a teeter-totter business; as your sales drop, your residuals kick in.
What makes a good Allstate Insurance owner?
You must be comfortable speaking with people you don’t know, and you have to genuinely care about people. Having worked in telemarketing, I know that there are good people that take pride in doing their jobs, and those that will do anything for a dollar. In this business, your ability to care about people and their families is what is going to get you in business and keep you in business.
Because insurance is not a tangible product, customers have to believe that you’re selling them what they need. When I first started my business, a majority of it came from consumers that had terrible damage from hail and freeze storms the prior year. When they went to file a claim with their carrier, I ended up getting referrals for customers that had bad experiences with other agents. While Allstate has its motto, I have one as well: I take care of every customer like I would my mother.
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New type of electrolyte could enhance supercapacitor performance
Supercapacitors, electrical devices that store and release energy, need a layer of electrolyte — an electrically conductive material that can be solid, liquid, or somewhere in between. Now, researchers at MIT and several other institutions have developed a novel class of liquids that may open up new possibilities for improving the efficiency and stability of such devices while reducing their flammability.
“This proof-of-concept work represents a new paradigm for electrochemical energy storage,” the researchers say in their paper describing the finding, which appears today in the journal Nature Materials.
For decades, researchers have been aware of a class of materials known as ionic liquids — essentially, liquid salts — but this team has now added to these liquids a compound that is similar to a surfactant, like those used to disperse oil spills. With the addition of this material, the ionic liquids “have very new and strange properties,” including becoming highly viscous, says MIT postdoc Xianwen Mao PhD ’14, the lead author of the paper.
“It’s hard to imagine that this viscous liquid could be used for energy storage,” Mao says, “but what we find is that once we raise the temperature, it can store more energy, and more than many other electrolytes.”
That’s not entirely surprising, he says, since with other ionic liquids, as temperature increases, “the viscosity decreases and the energy-storage capacity increases.” But in this case, although the viscosity stays higher than that of other known electrolytes, the capacity increases very quickly with increasing temperature. That ends up giving the material an overall energy density — a measure of its ability to store electricity in a given volume — that exceeds those of many conventional electrolytes, and with greater stability and safety.
The key to its effectiveness is the way the molecules within the liquid automatically line themselves up, ending up in a layered configuration on the metal electrode surface. The molecules, which have a kind of tail on one end, line up with the heads facing outward toward the electrode or away from it, and the tails all cluster in the middle, forming a kind of sandwich. This is described as a self-assembled nanostructure.
“The reason why it’s behaving so differently” from conventional electrolytes is because of the way the molecules intrinsically assemble themselves into an ordered, layered structure where they come in contact with another material, such as the electrode inside a supercapacitor, says T. Alan Hatton, a professor of chemical engineering at MIT and the paper’s senior author. “It forms a very interesting, sandwich-like, double-layer structure.”
This highly ordered structure helps to prevent a phenomenon called “overscreening” that can occur with other ionic liquids, in which the first layer of ions (electrically charged atoms or molecules) that collect on an electrode surface contains more ions than there are corresponding charges on the surface. This can cause a more scattered distribution of ions, or a thicker ion multilayer, and thus a loss of efficiency in energy storage; “whereas with our case, because of the way everything is structured, charges are concentrated within the surface layer,” Hatton says.
The new class of materials, which the researchers call SAILs, for surface-active ionic liquids, could have a variety of applications for high-temperature energy storage, for example for use in hot environments such as in oil drilling or in chemical plants, according to Mao. “Our electrolyte is very safe at high temperatures, and even performs better,” he says. In contrast, some electrolytes used in lithium-ion batteries are quite flammable.
The material could help to improve performance of supercapacitors, Mao says. Such devices can be used to store electrical charge and are sometimes used to supplement battery systems in electric vehicles to provide an extra boost of power. Using the new material instead of a conventional electrolyte in a supercapacitor could increase its energy density by a factor of four or five, Mao says. Using the new electrolyte, future supercapacitors may even be able to store more energy than batteries, he says, potentially even replacing batteries in applications such as electric vehicles, personal electronics, or grid-level energy storage facilities.
The material could also be useful for a variety of emerging separation processes, Mao says. “A lot of newly developed separation processes require electrical control,” in various chemical processing and refining applications and in carbon dioxide capture, for example, as well as resource recovery from waste streams. These ionic liquids, being highly conductive, could be well-suited to many such applications, he says.
The material they initially developed is just an example of a variety of possible SAIL compounds. “The possibilities are almost unlimited,” Mao says. The team will continue to work on different variations and on optimizing its parameters for particular uses. “It might take a few months or years,” he says, “but working on a new class of materials is very exciting to do. There are many possibilities for further optimization.”
The research team included Paul Brown, Yinying Ren, Agilio Padua, and Margarida Costa Gomes at MIT; Ctirad Cervinka at École Normale Supérieure de Lyon, in France; Gavin Hazell and Julian Eastoe at the University of Bristol, in the U.K.; Hua Li and Rob Atkin at the University of Western Australia; and Isabelle Grillo at the Institut Max-von-Laue-Paul-Langevin in Grenoble, France. The researchers dedicate their paper to the memory of Grillo, who recently passed away.
The work was supported by the MIT Energy Initiative, an MIT Skoltech fellowship, and the Czech Science Foundation.
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Want to Pay Less Taxes? Hire Your Kids!
Are you a business owner? Have you ever considered hiring your child to work for you during summer vacation, winter break, or after school? Not only will your child gain valuable work experience, but you’ll benefit from a smart tax-savings strategy.
The Tax Cuts & Jobs Act brought many changes to the tax world, including the standard deduction amounts that enable taxpayers to enjoy a certain amount of tax-free income. Prior to tax reform, the standard deduction for single filers was $6,350. That means the first $6,350 that a person earns is not taxed. Starting with the 2018 tax year, single filers hit the jackpot with a standard deduction of $12,000, almost doubling previous exclusion amounts.
This increased standard deduction isn’t just for working adults. It is applicable to kids, too. If you hire your child to work in your business, you can compensate your child up to $12,000 in wages without incurring income taxes and other taxes that kids under 18 are exempt from paying. The salary you pay your child can be deducted as a business expense from your business income, subjecting you to lower tax liability.
“Building generational wealth is about getting the right information and using it,” says Dr. Lynn Richardson, celebrity financial expert and author of The Symphony: A Guide to Creating and Balancing Multiple Streams of Income. “Getting a $12,000 tax deduction per child minimizes your taxes by thousands, allows you to get back more money, and exposes your child to entrepreneurship at an early age. This is the single-largest game-changer that many people don’t know about.”
There are different rules for different types of businesses, so make sure you talk to a trusted tax professional and CPA to map out the best plan for you. Hiring your child can be a huge business benefit, but you need to make sure you do it correctly to avoid the IRS spotting any red flags.
Here are some things to consider to get you started:
Determine the Best Job Description
If you are the sole proprietor of your own business, consider employing your child (under the age of 18) for certain tasks. Start by writing a list of all the things you may need help with for your business. Next, identify ways that you can use your child’s natural gifts and strengths to advance your business needs and goals.
In Richardson’s latest book, she shares a list of job ideas for your child. For example, your child can help with social media, event planning, or customer service. If you have a younger child, you can use them as a model in still photos to promote your business! Once you’ve found a match between your child’s skills and the needs of the business, you can successfully create an appropriate title and job description.
Maintain Appropriate Records
You want to think about creating an employment contract, onboarding documentation, timesheets, and tax forms to ensure you remain compliant with the IRS.
“Work with your CPA to put your kids on the payroll and [to] keep you abreast of the amount of money you can pay your child before their income reaches higher tax brackets,” says Jeff Wilson II, author of The Lies Our Parents Were Sold and Told Us and principal CPA at The W2 Group accounting firm.
Documentation is key. You also want to have the right professionals by your side to ensure you have the right documentation to support your child’s work.
Create More Opportunities for Your Child
It’s not just about reducing your taxes and giving your kids income to use now. It’s about teaching your child business and money strategies that they can use to create a financially successful future.
Encourage your child to save their money in a retirement account or contribute cash directly to the account. For example, if your child contributes money to a Roth IRA, they are saving for retirement and can use the money (without penalty!) toward qualified educational expenses or for a down payment on a home if needed. Creating smart savings and investing strategies now can help your child accumulate $1 million before they reach 50!
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Georgia high school football team investigated after bloody bullying incident caught on video
A Georgia high school has launched an investigation into a locker room fight caught on video by members of a football team after a mother complained her son was bullied.
—Black father and son chased by white man on horse draped in confederate flag and carrying a rope—
A concerned mother reached out to a local station to report that her son, a football player at Roswell High School, had suffered a black eye and a concussion after being bullied into fighting a fellow teammate.
The mother of the boy seen in the video, who asked to remain anonymous, told WSBTV her son was attacked in the Roswell Hornets locker room.
“When he turned around I noticed that he had a black eye,” the mother said. “I asked him what happened, and he said he was surrounded in the locker room and forced to fight.”
The video appears to show two boys surrounded by a group of other players who appear to be egging them on to fight as they scream obscenities.
“Once I saw the video and him egging him to hit him again, calling my son names … putting a camera in my son’s face, a bigger kid was pushing my son,” she said. “My son’s face was very bloody and nobody cared about stopping the fight and just stood there and continued to want the boy to hit on my son.”
She said the fight followed weeks of her son getting bullied by and teased by classmates. The victim’s mother said her son suffered a concussion and since the ordeal, she said her son is afraid to return to school for fear of retaliation.
—Black father shot dead by white man after white supremacist rant—
She said her son now is abandoning off his dream to play professional football.
“If you were to ask him what he wanted to be when he grew up, he’d say NFL player,” she told WSB. “His favorite player is Julio Jones and he wanted to be just like him.”
The Fulton County School system released a statement which was forwarded from Athletics Director, Steven Craft:
“Fulton County Schools is aware of an incident that occurred between two athletes last week at Roswell High School. We are currently investigating the incident. Fulton County Schools will continue to hold our student athletes to the highest standards, and we expect them to always promote great sportsmanship towards their teammates and opponents. We expect our athletes to be leaders on the field, in the classrooms, and in our communities. Failure to comply with these expectations will not be tolerated, and we will continue to hold our athletes accountable to the highest standards.”
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Tissue model reveals role of blood-brain barrier in Alzheimer’s
Beta-amyloid plaques, the protein aggregates that form in the brains of Alzheimer’s patients, disrupt many brain functions and can kill neurons. They can also damage the blood-brain barrier — the normally tight border that prevents harmful molecules in the bloodstream from entering the brain.
MIT engineers have now developed a tissue model that mimics beta-amyloid’s effects on the blood-brain barrier, and used it to show that this damage can lead molecules such as thrombin, a clotting factor normally found in the bloodstream, to enter the brain and cause additional damage to Alzheimer’s neurons.
“We were able to show clearly in this model that the amyloid-beta secreted by Alzheimer’s disease cells can actually impair barrier function, and once that is impaired, factors are secreted into the brain tissue that can have adverse effects on neuron health,” says Roger Kamm, the Cecil and Ida Green Distinguished Professor of Mechanical and Biological Engineering at MIT.
The researchers also used the tissue model to show that a drug that restores the blood-brain barrier can slow down the cell death seen in Alzheimer’s neurons.
Kamm and Rudolph Tanzi, a professor of neurology at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital, are the senior authors of the study, which appears in the XX issue of the journal Advanced Science. MIT postdoc Yoojin Shin is the paper’s lead author.
Barrier breakdown
The blood vessel cells that make up the blood-brain barrier have many specialized proteins that help them to form tight junctions — cellular structures that act as a strong seal between cells.
Alzheimer’s patients often experience damage to brain blood vessels caused by beta-amyloid proteins, an effect known as cerebral amyloid angiopathy (CAA). It is believed that this damage allows harmful molecules to get into the brain more easily. Kamm decided to study this phenomenon, and its role in Alzheimer’s, by modeling brain and blood vessel tissue on a microfluidic chip.
“What we were trying to do from the start was generate a model that we could use to understand the interactions between Alzheimer’s disease neurons and the brain vasculature,” Kamm says. “Given the fact that there’s been so little success in developing therapeutics that are effective against Alzheimer’s, there has been increased attention paid to CAA over the last couple of years.”
His lab began working on this project several years ago, along with researchers at MGH who had engineered neurons to produce large amounts of beta-amyloid proteins, just like the brain cells of Alzheimer’s patients.
Led by Shin, the researchers devised a way to grow these cells in a microfluidic channel, where they produce and secrete beta-amyloid protein. On the same chip, in a parallel channel, the researchers grew brain endothelial cells, which are the cells that form the blood-brain barrier. An empty channel separated the two channels while each tissue type developed.
After 10 days of cell growth, the researchers added collagen to the central channel separating the two tissue types, which allowed molecules to diffuse from one channel to the other. They found that within three to six days, beta-amyloid proteins secreted by the neurons began to accumulate in the endothelial tissue, which led the cells to become leakier. These cells also showed a decline in proteins that form tight junctions, and an increase in enzymes that break down the extracellular matrix that normally surrounds and supports blood vessels.
As a result of this breakdown in the blood-brain barrier, thrombin was able to pass from blood flowing through the leaky vessels into the Alzheimer’s neurons. Excessive levels of thrombin can harm neurons and lead to cell death.
“We were able to demonstrate this bidirectional signaling between cell types and really solidify things that had been seen previously in animal experiments, but reproduce them in a model system that we can control with much more detail and better fidelity,” Kamm says.
Plugging the leaks
The researchers then decided to test two drugs that have previously been shown to solidify the blood-brain barrier in simpler models of endothelial tissue. Both of these drugs are FDA-approved to treat other conditions. The researchers found that one of these drugs, etodolac, worked very well, while the other, beclomethasone, had little effect on leakiness in their tissue model.
In tissue treated with etodolac, the blood-brain barrier became tighter, and neurons’ survival rates improved. The MIT and MGH team is now working with a drug discovery consortium to look for other drugs that might be able to restore the blood-brain barrier in Alzheimer’s patients.
“We’re starting to use this platform to screen for drugs that have come out of very simple single cell screens that we now need to validate in a more complex system,” Kamm says. “This approach could offer a new potential form of Alzheimer’s treatment, especially given the fact that so few treatments have been demonstrated to be effective.”
The research was funded by the Cure Alzheimer’s Fund and the JPB Foundation.
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Serena Williams breaks down and leaves match after suffering from back spasms
Serena Williams was forced to retire her match due to unrelenting back spasms that brought the tennis icon to tears.
—Serena Williams and Naomi Osaka top Forbes list of highest paid female athletes—
On Sunday, Williams was only 16 minutes into the finals match in Toronto against Canadian Bianca Andreescu when she took a medical timeout and made the difficult decision to stop.
Andreescu was ahead 3-1. A ref announced that Williams would retire, rendering a decision that gave Andreescu the Rogers Cup win, a first for Canada since 1969, but her second WTA Premier title this season, The Daily Mail reports.
During an emotional moment for Williams, Andreescu walked over to her and knelt down and held her hands to comfort Williams as she wept.
“I watched you your whole career. You’re a f–king beast.”
Serena Williams had to retire from the Rogers Cup with an injury, and her opponent Bianca Andreescu came over to comfort her. Respect 🙏
(via @Sportsnet) pic.twitter.com/GX9NDMaNrk
— Bleacher Report (@BleacherReport) August 11, 2019
“Serena, you made me cry,” Andreescu told the 23-time Grand Slam winner.
“I know how it is to pull out of tournaments, it’s not easy.
“This wasn’t the way I expected to win. You are truly a champion.
“I’ve watched you win so many times, you are truly a champion on and off the court.
“I’m speechless right now. This has been a dream come true.”
Williams said thank you to her Toronto fans for the support.
“I’m not a crier, but, thank you guys,” Williams said during her acceptance speech for second place.
“I’m sorry I couldn’t do it today. I tried but I just couldn’t do it.”
—Serena Williams invests in Black start-up that could save lives of expectant mothers—
You are still magic Serena. Know that.
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Black father shot dead by white man after white supremacist rant
A beloved North Carolina barber and father of three was shot dead after a confrontation with a man spouting racial slurs.
—Black home buyer finds Ku Klux Klan application during showing of cop’s house—
On August 6, Julius “Juice” Randolph Sampson Jr. was killed outside the BJ’s Restaurant & Brewhouse, in Winston-Salem after a fight broke out inside with Robert Granato and spilled outside the facility where gunshots erupted, The Winston-Salem Chronicle reports.
When the Winston-Salem Police arrived, Sampson was pronounced dead at the scene.
According to reports, Granato spouted white supremacist views and got into a heated argument and an altercation inside the brewery with Sampson before taking it outside and brandishing a weapon before discharging it, killing him.
After the killing made headlines, the #JusticeForJuice hashtag went viral for Sampson who was a well-known barber at the Supreme Legacy Barbershop.
Sampson had reportedly recently married and was a father of three.
Sampson’s wife said in a statement on Facebook, “I want the world to know the amazing young man that was senselessly snatched away from me and our family. I want awareness and justice for my husband. My husband wasn’t an animal that deserved slaughtering.”
—Family of Black man whom white cops led with leash, says he is mentally ill —
Granato’s social media accounts revealed the 22-year-old’s support of white supremacist groups and one photo shows him with weapons while another shows him with a shirt that says ‘Murica’ while flashing the infamous white power symbol.
Granato is being held without bond and charged with first degree murder. He is also charged with carrying a concealed handgun after consuming alcohol.
According to WFDD, Police Chief Catrina Thompson stated at a press conference, that what investigators have found so far doesn’t warrant a hate-crime charge.
“Detectives have found no evidence to indicate that this crime was motivated by race,” she said. “Should any evidence to the contrary be developed, detectives and prosecutors will review that evidence and the appropriate charges that evidence would support.”
More than 100 people took part in a vigil in the restaurant parking lot where Sampson died.
Mayor Allen Joines released a statement on the shooting.
“On behalf of our entire city, I offer sincere condolences to the family of Mr. Julius Randolph Sampson Jr.,” he said. “Please be assured that the city is fully investigating this terrible tragedy. While we are uncertain as to the totality of the crime, please be assured that we will investigate all aspects of the persons involved and take any and all appropriate action as a result of the investigation.”
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Black father and son chased by white man on horse draped in confederate flag and carrying a rope
A Black man in Texas driving along a road was chased down by a white man who had a rope in hand while riding on horseback draped with a Confederate flag.
SHOCKING: Black man in Texas led by white police officers on horses with leash
The same week two white Texas cops on horseback came under fire for walking a Black man to jail while tied to a leash, a copycat incident pops up with James Ragland who said he and his son Judah endured a “terrifying experience – a terroristic threat from a white man with a rope.”
On August 5, Ragland, a former columnist for the Dallas Morning News, wrote on Facebook that he was antagonized by a man later identified as Grant Williams after he left a relative’s home near Marshall, Texas, The Daily Mail reports.
Ragland said after he and his son were on their way to drop his nephew off and encountered two adults and two kids on horseback. He was in his car and proceeded to drive along a road toward them but Williams instead trotted his horse in the middle of the road, blocking his path.
The other family members road their horse past Ragland’s car, he said. But Williams, “just stopped in front of our car and glared at us.”
“Then, he turned the horse sideways to more completely block the road, and he turned to face us down – I kid you not – like a gunman in the Wild West,” Ragland said.
Ragland said it was a disturbing moment that got even more concerning.
“I’m perplexed, but not yet alarmed. But then the guy guides his horse to the driver’s side and stops. I glance over and he’s just staring me down. I roll the window down, thinking he had something to say, but he just sizes us up. I finally say, “Nice horse.”
‘”Thank ya,” he says back.
He then says, “These are Texas roads.”
“These are TEXAS roads,” he said even louder,” Ragland wrote.
The man then made mention of the out of state tag and plates.
‘”It’s a rental,” I shot back. And without missing a beat, the guy declared loudly again, “BUT THESE ARE TEXAS ROADS!”‘ Ragland wrote.
“What the eff does that mean?” Ragland finally asked the man.
Ragland explained that he finally pulled off after the man seemed to reach back for something that he assumed was a gun. As he sped away, Raglan said the man was “still yelling and making threatening gestures.”
Once he dropped his nephew off, Ragland said he returned down that same old town road and encountered the crazy man again. The next time, Williams said he “charges from his property on the north side and runs right out to our car, and for one frightening moment I thought he was going to dart in front of us.”
—Family of Black man whom white cops led with leash, says he is mentally ill —
“But as I sped up to avoid him, he pulled alongside our car and chased us for a mile while yelling and throwing the f… you sign initially before reaching for something on his right side,” Ragland said.
He son was scared and yelled for Raglan to drive faster to get away from the “angry white dude on horseback in full pursuit.”
Ragland said he contacted the Harrison County Sheriff’s Office to tell them about the disturbing ordeal, but after promising to send officers to Williams home, he said the police department hasn’t done much.
“I’ve learned a lot in short order about how injustice manifests itself culturally and institutionally. Since the #HarrisonCountySheriff’s office won’t do its job, I will take other legal steps to protect the public, and hold an untruthful and unrepentant #GrantWilliams accountable,” Ragland wrote.
Ragland posted a picture of Williams and who was on his horse with a Confederate flag.
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Beaver Works Summer Institute concludes its fourth year
Nearly 1,000 students, instructors, and guests packed into MIT's Johnson Ice Rink on Aug. 4 to kick off the final event for the 2019 Beaver Works Summer Institute (BWSI). It was a full day of competitions and demonstrations — the culmination of four weeks of hard work and dedication from the students and staff. The event, held at various locations on MIT campus, was a fitting end to what many of the students described as a transformational experience.
Now in its fourth year, the BWSI offers hands-on STEM learning to rising high school seniors, and now to middle school students, through project-based, workshop-style courses. The program is run jointly by MIT Lincoln Laboratory and the School of Engineering and this year admitted more than 250 students from 27 states and more than 130 schools. This year's BWSI featured 10 courses — Autonomous RACECAR Grand Prix, Autonomous Air Vehicle Racing, Autonomous Cognitive Assistant, Medlytics: Data Science for Health and Medicine, Build a CubeSat, Unmanned Air System–Synthetic Aperture Radar (UAS-SAR), Embedded Security and Hardware Hacking, Hacking a 3-D Printer, Remote Sensing for Crisis Response, and Assistive Technology — plus one middle school RACECAR class.
At the MIT Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics Building 31, teams of students from the UAS-SAR course were challenged to create an image of a covered space with a hidden pattern underneath. To do this, the teams each flew a small UAS around an enclosed room. The UAS was equipped with a radar that the students had built and tested during the course. Afterward, the teams answered visitors' questions and gave informal presentations about their radars.
"In addition to obtaining more hands-on experience, the people that I have met and bonded with made this program a moment in my life that I will never forget," says Swanyee Aung, a student in the UAS-SAR class from the Bronx High School of Science in New York.
Fiona McEvilly, a teaching assistant (TA) for the course, took the UAS-SAR class in 2018 and was excited to return and participate in a different way. "This year I was able to help BWSI grow and expand, and I'm still learning more as a TA this year," she says. “BWSI is such a great opportunity.”
Meanwhile, students from several of the courses displayed their work with posters and demonstrations in the MIT Stratton Student Center (Building W20).
Shuen Wu, a homeschool student from Minnesota who took the Medlytics course, explained his team's work, which was to design a prototype web application that would help physicians and patients identify disease from symptoms and then recommend treatment. The Medlytics course focused on the intersection of data science and medicine, allowing students to apply advanced machine learning and data mining to real-world medical challenges. "I really like the fact that we spent a lot of time actually working on projects," Wu says. "The best way to learn coding and statistics is to just do it."
One team of students from the Build a CubeSat course designed and constructed a prototype of a CubeSat called SLOOP that would inform people responding to oil spills about how to take action quickly and efficiently. "We learned a lot about how spacecraft and satellites are built and got to experience building something faithful to an actual spacecraft," says Kemal Pulungan, a student from Troy High School in New York.
Back in the Johnson Athletics Center, two floors above the ice rink, students from the Autonomous Air Vehicle Racing class completed an obstacle course race made of bridges and rings hanging at different heights in the air. Each team developed algorithms that allowed an Intel drone to autonomously navigate the race course. The winning team completed the course in one minute and 32 seconds.
In the afternoon, the BWSI students, staff, and guests gathered again in the Johnson Ice Rink to watch the RACECAR grand prix. RACECAR was the very first course offered in BWSI — and remains the largest course, with 57 students enrolled this year. For this event, the ice rink was converted into a racetrack with obstacles such as a graveyard, car wash, and giant windmill. Students programmed RACECARs (Rapid Autonomous Complex Environment Competing Ackermann-steering Robots), designed by MIT and Lincoln Laboratory, to navigate the track by using inertial sensors, lidar, and cameras.
This year was the first that middle school students were admitted to a modified version of the RACECAR course. Their course is based on the high school version, with students learning software coding and controls for programming their own RACECAR vehicles.
"This was a real opportunity for middle school students to be exposed to the basics of programming, computational thinking, computer vision, and robotics," says Sabina Chen, the middle school RACECAR instructor and an MIT graduate student. "Throughout the program, students were encouraged to think critically and work as a team to complete complex coding challenges. BWSI RACECAR Middle School may be one of the few programs that currently exist to teach not only computer programming, but also computer vision and autonomous driving, to students at this age."
In his opening remarks, Robert Shin, the director of Beaver Works and head of the Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance and Tactical Systems Division at MIT Lincoln Laboratory, challenged the outgoing students to keep the ball rolling by becoming mentors to the next generation of engineers. One goal of BWSI is to continue expanding to bring the program to more and more students across the country and the world. In line with this goal, this year's program included teams from Mexico participating in the RACECAR and CogWorks courses and a team from Nauset High School on Cape Cod competing in RACECAR. In addition, the Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology in South Korea provided TAs to several BWSI courses and plans to adopt the BWSI curriculum next year.
"I know it’s a cliché to say that BWSI was a transformational experience, but that's honestly the best description for my time here," says Emily Amspoker, a student in the Embedded Security and Hardware Hacking course from Kent Denver School in Colorado. "Before I started the online part of my course, I knew very little about the subject. Fortunately, throughout both the online and in-person class, I've learned more about embedded systems and cybersecurity than I could have fathomed just a couple of months ago. More importantly, I feel like I've grown to become a better teammate and person by collaborating and overcoming problems with students from across the country who are also passionate about STEM."
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Star Wars News: But Really, What Are Sith Troopers?
African Champions League: Mamelodi Sundowns lose in Congo
White comedian says she lost movie role over old blackface comedy sketch
Funny girl Sarah Silverman just confessed that she got blowback from wearing blackface for a comedy sketch for her now cancelled show—and it cost her a role in an upcoming film.
—Leslie Jones lands Netflix standup special to kick off in D.C.; warns Trump not to come—
Silverman revealed on The Bill Simmons Podcast that back in 2007, on The Sarah Silverman Program, she wore blackface and regrets it. And she’s now feeling the backlash over that decision.
“I recently was going to do a movie, a sweet part, then at 11 p.m. the night before they fired me because they saw a picture of me in blackface from that episode. I didn’t fight it,” Silverman admitted to Simmons, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
But Silverman said the reality of that choice stung, while using the moment to shade the person who replaced her.
“They hired someone else who is wonderful but who has never stuck their neck out. It was so disheartening. It just made me real real sad, because I really kind of devoted my life to making it right.”
Silverman criticized the corrective nature of comedy culture now, calling it a “dangerous place” for comedians who have erred in the past with questionable material.
“I think it’s really scary and it’s a very odd thing that it’s invaded the left primarily and the right will mimic it,” Silverman said.
She added: “It’s like, if you’re not on board, if you say the wrong thing, if you had a tweet once … everyone is, like, throwing the first stone. It’s so odd. It’s a perversion. … It’s really, ‘Look how righteous I am and now I’m going to press refresh all day long to see how many likes I get in my righteousness.'”
—Robin Thede wants Black women to feel seen on ‘A Black Lady Sketch Show’—
“It’s OK to go, ‘Wow, look at this back then. That was so fucked up looking at it in the light of today of what we know,’ but to hold that person accountable if they’ve changed with the times, like for me … I held myself accountable. I can’t erase that I did that, but I can only be changed forever and do what I can to make it right for the rest of my life,” she said.
Silverman said a comedian shouldn’t be defined by their jokes of the past.
“If I look back on my old self and don’t cringe, there’s something wrong. Because if you’re putting yourself out there, it’s not going to be timeless,” she said.
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