My dad always flew an American flag in our front yard. The blue paint on our two-story house was perennially chipping; the fence, or the rail by the stairs, or the front door, existed in a perpetual state of disrepair, but that flag always flew pristine. Our corner lot, which had been redlined by the federal government, was along the river that divided the black side from the white side of our Iowa town. At the edge of our lawn, high on an aluminum pole, soared the flag, which my dad would replace as soon as it showed the slightest tatter.
My dad was born into a family of sharecroppers on a white plantation in Greenwood, Miss., where black people bent over cotton from can’t-see-in-the-morning to can’t-see-at-night, just as their enslaved ancestors had done not long before. The Mississippi of my dad’s youth was an apartheid state that subjugated its near-majority black population through breathtaking acts of violence. White residents in Mississippi lynched more black people than those in any other state in the country, and the white people in my dad’s home county lynched more black residents than those in any other county in Mississippi, often for such “crimes” as entering a room occupied by white women, bumping into a white girl or trying to start a sharecroppers union. My dad’s mother, like all the black people in Greenwood, could not vote, use the public library or find work other than toiling in the cotton fields or toiling in white people’s houses. So in the 1940s, she packed up her few belongings and her three small children and joined the flood of black Southerners fleeing North. She got off the Illinois Central Railroad in Waterloo, Iowa, only to have her hopes of the mythical Promised Land shattered when she learned that Jim Crow did not end at the Mason-Dixon line. tangie
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A demonstrator at the 1965 march from Selma to Montgomery, led by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to fight for black suffrage.Bruce Davidson/Magnum Photos
Jeffrey Epstein’s apparent suicide inside the federally run Metropolitan Correctional Center in Manhattan shocked the country. How could officials allow one of the most high-profile prisoners in the U.S. to end his life, especially since he had just tried and failed less than a month ago? Conspiracy theories are everywhere: It must be murder at the hands of one of Epstein’s powerful and as-yet-unnamed co-conspirators in his allegedly widespread child sex trafficking operation.
But the truth is almost certainly more mundane. “When there’s more than one possible explanation for an occurrence, the simplest one is usually correct,” said Erik Heipt, an attorney who has litigated a number of jail death lawsuits. “People commit suicide in jails, in prisons, all the time.”
Jail suicides ― which are almost always preventable ― have been the No. 1 cause of jail deaths each year since at least the turn of the century.
In January, as the Senate debated whether to permit the Trump administration to lift sanctions on Russia’s largest aluminum producer, two men with millions of dollars riding on the outcome met for dinner at a restaurant in Zurich.
On one side of the table sat the head of sales for Rusal, the Russian aluminum producer that would benefit most immediately from a favorable Senate vote. The U.S. government had imposed sanctions on Rusal as part of a campaign to punish Russia for “malign activity around the globe,” including attempts to sway the 2016 presidential election.
On the other side sat Craig Bouchard, an American entrepreneur who had gained favor with officials in Kentucky, the home state of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. Bouchard was trying to build the first new aluminum-rolling mill in the United States in nearly four decades, in a corner of northeastern Kentucky ravaged by job losses and the opioid epidemic — a project that stood to benefit enormously if Rusal were able to get involved.
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Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) heads toward his Capitol Hill office in January. (Salwan Georges/The Washington Post)
The Footwear Distributors and Retailers of America (FDRA) is breathing a small sigh of relief as President Trump delays the implementation of additional tariffs on $300 billion of Chinese Goods.
“The announcement today that the Trump Administration will be delaying the additional 10% tariff on some footwear until December 1 is an acknowledgment that tariffs are indeed paid by Americans,” the group’s president and CEO Matt Priest said in a statement. “It is no coincidence that the Administration is allowing certain shoes to come in without raising taxes in hopes that prices do not rise at retail during the holidays. Our industry’s loud unified voice left a clear impression that shoe tariffs are already extremely high, upwards of 67.5%, and any further tariffs would directly raise costs on consumers and cost footwear jobs.”
Priest, also says while the FDRA is pleased with the decision to delay new tariffs on certain shoes, they are not satisfied.
“We will continue to fight for any exclusions on new tariffs and we will fight to delay new tariffs on shoes until the entire tariff threat is lifted off the backs of American families,” he said.
President Trump’s explosive feud with two Democratic congresswomen moved to the international stage on Thursday as Israel denied the lawmakers entry into the country just hours after Trump publicly urged Israel to block them.
U.S. officials said the extraordinary intervention by the president was part of his strategy to sow divisions within the Democratic Party by shining a spotlight on its most liberal members.
Trump blasted the two lawmakers, Reps. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) and Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), tweeting that “they hate Israel & all Jewish people, & there is nothing that can be said or done to change their minds.”
But the actions by Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, his close ally, appeared to unite Democratic Party leaders.
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Reps. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) and Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) at President Trump’s State of the Union speech in January. (J. Scott Applewhite/AP)
It’s 7:20 p.m. when he rolls into Spicy Bite, one of the newest restaurants here in rural northwest New Mexico.
Locals in Milan, a town of 3,321, have barely heard of it.
The building is small, single-story, built of corrugated metal sheets. There are seats for 20. The only advertising is spray-painted on concrete roadblocks in English and Punjabi. Next door is a diner and gas station; the county jail is across the road.
Palwinder Singh orders creamy black lentils, chicken curry and roti, finishing it off with chai and cardamom rice pudding. After 13 hours on and off the road in his semi truck, he leans back in a booth as a Bollywood music video plays on TV.
“This is like home,” says Pal, the name he uses on the road (said like “Paul”).
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Palwinder Singh hauls produce through New Mexico on Interstate 40 on the way to Indiana.
The marshmallow test is one of the most famous pieces of social-science research: Put a marshmallow in front of a child, tell her that she can have a second one if she can go 15 minutes without eating the first one, and then leave the room. Whether she’s patient enough to double her payout is supposedly indicative of a willpower that will pay dividends down the line, at school and eventually at work. Passing the test is, to many, a promising signal of future success.
But a new study has cast the whole concept into doubt. The researchers—NYU’s Tyler Watts and UC Irvine’s Greg Duncan and Hoanan Quan—restaged the classic marshmallow test, which was developed by the Stanford psychologist Walter Mischel in the 1960s. Mischel and his colleagues administered the test and then tracked how children went on to fare later in life. They described the results in a 1990 study, which suggested that delayed gratification had huge benefits, including on such measures as standardized test scores.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement on Tuesday blamed “political rhetoric” and “misinformation” about President Donald Trump’s detention policies after shots were fired into two buildings housing ICE offices in San Antonio overnight.
No one was injured, but “had the bullets gone two inches in another direction, we could be here today talking about the murder of a federal official,” Christopher Combs, the FBI’s special agent in charge in San Antonio, said.
Investigators said at a news conference that multiple shots were fired into the offices of ICE’s Immigration Enforcement and Removal division about 3 a.m.
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Investigators say multiple shots were fired at two floors targeting ICE officials in San Antonio on Aug. 13, 2019.Google
Almost two dozen people in the Midwest have been hospitalized with severe breathing difficulties linked to vaping, and doctors aren’t sure why.
It’s unclear exactly what the patients — many of whom are young adults — had been inhaling or what type of devices they were using. Nor do doctors know where they had purchased the devices or e-liquids.
Some patients said they’d used e-cigarette devices to inhale both nicotine and THC, the psychoactive ingredient in marijuana.
“We know there are certain characteristics in common with these cases, but we have not been able to get to the bottom of exactly what aspect of the vaping habit or product or solvent or oil is causing the injury,” said Dr. Emily Chapman, chief medical officer for Children’s Minnesota, a pediatric health system headquartered in Minneapolis.
National support for legalizing marijuana has been growing rapidly.
Now legalized in 23 states and the District of Columbia for medical use and four states — Colorado, Washington, Oregon, and Alaska — and DC for recreational use, cannabis is big business. Independent analysts have valued the legal industry at $3 billion and rising to $10 billion when including ancillary trades and services.
Cassandra Farrington, the co-founder and chief executive of Marijuana Business Media, puts the industry’s workforce at 60,000.
Others sates are expected to follow suit over the next couple of years, putting an end to cannabis prohibition. With the industry concentrating on making cannabis more of a mainstream and sellable product, a growing crop of businesses are expected to profit from the cultivation and distribution of marijuana.
In the world, human beings are facing various problems. People who are full of greed, anger, and ignorance are seen to be fighting with each other in words and deeds. As the fighting continues, various problems such as civil wars, wars of aggression, and wars of aggression are occurring. As world peace is being destroyed, humans are facing unbearable problems. Innocent children and women are not getting the rights they deserve and deserve. I can't think of one thing every time. What is it? The United Nations. If we look at the responsibilities and duties of the United Nations, I think it is not suitable for solving the problems that are happening in the world today. In fact, the United Nations and the World Security Council, such an organization must rule the world, must be able to give orders, and must have various ways to obey orders. There must be no organization that can influence more than that organization. There should be experts from each country. They can even dominate the superpowers like the US, China, and Britain. Only then will global peace be achieved quickly. Now, if a country with power develops more militarily, economically, or socially than its own country, then powerful countries will jealously seek out enemies and wage war. Or they will attack with fighter jets. In this, innocent people are losing their lives. No one understands the value of a life. You should think about how to achieve global peace by controlling these. If the US continues to be the permanent president of the UN, world peace will never be achieved. If you think carefully, no one sees that they are working for the common good, but for their own benefit, for the benefit of their own country. The permanent president of the UN and the Security Council has rejected this, As a young Rohingya, I have come to realize that only by electing the president and secretary from among the countries in the world through a secret ballot system and governing the world fairly can we achieve global peace. The United Nations and the Security Council are organizations in which any country must govern, give orders, and make them obey their orders. For example, only when a defendant is tried in court can we hold the leaders of the countries in check and control them, can we achieve global peace smoothly. Otherwise, it will not be easy for powerful countries to use various excuses to end this war every year, every year, for the benefit of themselves and their countries. No country's leaders pay any attention to the words of the United Nations and the Security Council. If we look at it in practice, look at the Rohingya issue. Myanmar is a small country. Even that country has been under siege for 8 years. What action can be taken? Why is the UN and the Security Council Powerless? Without such Power, how can the organization bring about global peace? Everyone should think about it. Whether there is a veto or a strong one, all countries in the world can only achieve global peace if they are subject to the UN and the Security Council. Seek peace in the quiet embrace of nature. Peace is an indispensable need of the human race. It is not as if one person can kill another person, and it is as if one country can attack another country, but instead of trying to build peace, we must try to destroy the peace now, and the world is getting hotter and is on the verge of collapse. I especially appeal to all the world experts to urgently try to bring about peace in all parts of the world. Mr, Noor Muhamed Arkhan Rohingya Youth Myanmar
Film and Writing Festival for Comedy. Showcasing best of comedy short films at the FEEDBACK Film Festival. Plus, showcasing best of comedy novels, short stories, poems, screenplays (TV, short, feature) at the festival performed by professional actors.
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(Image: File)
