The National School Walkout’s student organizer Kaleab Jegol, 17, EXCLUSIVELY told HL about what the movement hopes to achieve!
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Ex-wife of former White House aide says Hatch has apologized — National Post
WASHINGTON — An ex-wife of former White House staff secretary Rob Porter says she has received a letter of apology from Sen. Orrin Hatch, the Utah Republican who defended his former aide from “a vile attack” after two ex-wives accused Porter of domestic abuse. Porter resigned Feb. 7 after the accusations from Colbie Holderness and…
via Ex-wife of former White House aide says Hatch has apologized — National Post
A single dad walked 11 miles to work every day — until his co-workers found out.
Trenton Lewis’ legs ached from the 11-mile walk he made every morning to get to his 4 a.m. shift. And yet the 21-year-old dutifully did it for seven long months.
He didn’t tell anyone. He’s never been one for excuses — especially when it comes to providing for his 14-month-old daughter, Karmen.
“My pride is strong,” he told CNN. “Whatever she needs, I’m the person who is supposed to provide it for her.”
But his co-workers at a UPS facility in Little Rock, Arkansas, found out. And last week, they decided to make things right.
They asked Lewis to come to a brief union meeting.
When he showed up, his stoic face gave way to disbelief and then a grateful smile as his coworkers handed him keys to a new car.
“I was emotionally moved. My heart just fell,” the young worker recalled.
When Lewis began working at the UPS facility, he had no means of getting to and from work.
“I was banking on my feet,” he said.
So every morning, he walked, and kept most of his colleagues in the dark about his pre-dawn journey.
But every large workforce has that one “queen bee” who knows all and sees all.
For Trenton Lewis, that was Patricia “Mama Pat” Bryant.
“She was like a second mom,” Lewis said. “She actually got upset with me when she found out I was walking to work.”
Bryant and her husband, Kenneth, have both put in almost 40 years at UPS.
“For a young person to decide in their mind ‘if I don’t have a ride, if I can’t get a ride then I’ll walk,'” Kenneth Bryant said. “If a guy can do that, we can pitch in to help.”
The Bryants quietly shared Lewis’ story with their fellow workers and took up a collection to buy their determined colleague a car.
Most of the employees didn’t even know Lewis but were impressed with his grit.
Soon enough, the group raised almost $2,000.
“Everybody that I talked to said yes! The hardest part was reminding them to bring cash,” Kenneth Bryant said. “I told the seller what I was doing and who it was for and he said he was willing to work with me on a price.”
Bryant wanted everything to be perfect for the big reveal. He even went as far as fixing a small nick on the bumper.
The group lured Lewis to the parking lot for that brief “union meeting.” Kenneth Bryant reached into his pocket, pulled out the keys to the 2006 Saturn Ion and stunned Lewis.
“God always has something for you,” said Lewis. “I’m never going to forget this ever.”
Lewis thanked his co-workers profusely.
His first ride in the car was to pick up his daughter for a bite to eat.
Cops took $22 million cash stuffed in buckets from his home. But he won’t lose it all.
The Miami Lakes man found with $22 million in suspected marijuana cash stuffed in orange buckets inside his house pleaded guilty Wednesday — but he won’t be losing all his money to the feds.
Luis Hernandez-Gonzalez agreed to let the U.S. government take $18 million of the cash. He’ll get to keep about $4 million, plus his house, his business and five Rolex watches.
The 46-year-old pleaded guilty Wednesday in federal court to money laundering and structuring bank deposits to avoid reporting the true amounts to the government.
U.S. Judge Robert Scola will sentence Hernandez-Gonzalez on April 20 — coincidentally, the annual day marijuana fans celebrate the plant. He faces up to 30 years in prison, but his defense lawyers are hoping to get him a sentence below the bottom of the sentencing guidelines, which is five years behind bars.
Hernandez-Gonzalez made national news when detectives raided his Miami Lakes home in June 2016, discovering most of the cash in 24 orange Homer’s All-Purpose buckets from Home Depot. They were hidden in a secret compartment above a closet. An additional $600,000-plus was found at his business.
The story was first reported by the Miami Herald.
Miami-Dade narcotics detectives hauled away the money in a pickup truck, then spent more than a day exhaustively counting the huge stacks of bills. Investigators raided his businesses and home after he was caught on a phone wiretap giving growing advice to Miami marijuana growers arrested by federal agents in Tennessee.
Hernandez-Gonzalez is well-known in the marijuana trade. He ran Blossom Experience, a North Miami-Dade store that sells fans, lights, fertilizers and other equipment for indoor gardening. Cops believe that the business, while legal, caters to marijuana traffickers growing weed in clandestine labs inside homes.
But his defense lawyers long insisted the money was legitimately earned from selling equipment. However, because he sells to legal marijuana growers in other states, no banks would take his cash, they claimed.
Hernandez-Gonzalez was first charged in state criminal court for marijuana trafficking and money laundering. A few months after his arrest, a federal grand jury indicted him on federal charges stemming from the same cash seizure.
Antitrust Chief Makan Delrahim Praises John Oliver for ‘Last Week Tonight’ Segment — Variety
WASHINGTON — When John Oliver skewered lax enforcement of antitrust laws in a segment last year on “Last Week Tonight,” he had a fan in the Trump administration: Makan Delrahim, the chief of the Justice Department’s antitrust division. “He did a great piece, about 17 minutes on antitrust law, and he goes through all this,…
via Antitrust Chief Makan Delrahim Praises John Oliver for ‘Last Week Tonight’ Segment — Variety
Two Space Rocks Will Fly Safely Past Earth This Week.
Two space rocks will make close flybys past Earth this week, but they pose no threat to our planet’s safety.
The two asteroids are called 2018 CB and 2018 CC, and they were both discovered Sunday (Feb. 4) through an automated telescope search called the Catalina Sky Survey, according to NASA’s Minor Planet Center. The Catalina telescopes belong to just one of many observatories worldwide that regularly scan the sky to track and search for space rocks, also known as asteroids.
While the majority of asteroids in Earth’s solar system orbit in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, asteroid flybys of Earth happen several times a year. The last known close asteroid flyby was on Sunday (Feb. 4). The flybys are useful to astronomers because the researchers can examine the asteroids relatively close-up, gaining more information about the space rocks’ size, shape and composition.
You can watch livestreams of this week’s flybys courtesy of the Virtual Telescope Project, which uses remote-controlled telescopes to track near-Earth objects. (More details on the broadcast times are below.)
Both 2018 CB and 2018 CC are roughly the same size as a 17-meter (56-foot) space rock that exploded over Cheylabinsk, Russia, in 2013, causing property damage and thousands of injuries. 2018 CB is about 12 to 38 meters in diameter (39 to 124 feet), while 2018 CC’s diameter is estimated to be 9 to 28 meters (30 to 91 feet), according to the Minor Planet Center.
Unlike Chelyabinsk, however, both asteroids will fly past Earth instead of hitting it.
2018 CC will fly by today (Feb. 6), at 12:58 p.m. EST (1958 GMT), with a closest approach of about half the distance between Earth and the moon. The Virtual Telescope Project will start livestreaming views from a telescope in Arizona at 5 a.m. EST (1000 GMT), and from a telescope in Italy at 3 p.m. EST (2000 GMT).
2018 CB will zoom past Earth on Feb. 10 (Saturday) at 5:06 a.m. EST (1006 GMT), at 20 percent of the distance from the Earth to the moon. The Virtual Telescope Project will livestream this event from Italy only, starting Feb. 9 (Friday) at 3 p.m. EST (2000 GMT).
NASA and its Planetary Defense Coordination Office are among several agencies that regularly examine the sky to look for near-Earth objects such as 2018 CB and 2018 CC. Telescopes around the world and in orbit provide information about asteroids to NASA; details about those small bodies are typically uploaded to the agency’s Small-Body Database Browserwebsite that is available worldwide for scientists and the public to see.
There are currently no known asteroids that pose an imminent threat to life on Earth, but NASA and its partners are figuring out strategies to divert or destroy a potentially threatening object. Future mission concepts include ideas such as nets, lasers, gravitational diversion — or simply blowing up the asteroid.
NASA has a dedicated near-Earth object hunter in orbit called NEOWISE, which is expected to end its mission this year when the spacecraft’s orbit brings the machine into an area with too much sunlight to look for asteroids. A newer proposal by the same team, called NEOCam, failed to make the cut for NASA’s Discovery program in January.NEOCam did, however, receive more funding for another year.
Several asteroid missions are also in progress for the coming years. Japan’s Hayabusa2and NASA’s OSIRIS-RExare both in-flight to their target asteroids, where they will each collect samples to return to Earth. This year, NASA selected two new Discovery-class missions called Lucy and Psyche; between them, they will fly past eight asteroids in the 2020s and 2030s.
In 2005, Congress tasked NASA with identifying at least 90 percent of “potentially hazardous near-Earth asteroids” or those that are at least 140 meters (460 feet) wide and will come to within about 4.65 million miles (7.48 million kilometers) of Earth, or about 20 times the distance from Earth to the moon, according to the agency. NASA was given a deadline of 2020, but just four years later, a National Academy of Sciences reportsaid NASA likely wouldn’t meet the goal unless more funding arrived, and multiple reports since have stated that the agency is behind in meeting the goal. In 2010, the agency met another goal previously set by Congress of finding 90 percent of NEOs 1 km (0.6 mile) wide in 2010, according to NASA.
The Rosa Palmer/Annie Palmer connection and major lies in Jamaican history.
The story of the legendary Rose Hall property, with its Great House as its epicentre of intrigue, witchcraft, jealousy and murder … is intriguing, to say the least.
In Herbert Delisser’s book White Witch of Rose Hall, the author, in the pursuance of the protection of his own integrity, was cautious to point out explicitly that the story is fictitious, which meant in Jamaican parlance that the story was made up. Yet, it continues to be the “official” version of the story of Rose Hall.
A tour of the Rose Hall Great House centres on one of its mistresses — Annie Palmer. The tour guides employed there have been trained to glibly narrate the story of Annie’s prowess and how she was killed in a bedroom, with the bloodstain from her murder still leaving an impression on the mahogany floor of that room, the pattern of which persists until today. This was approximately 187 years ago. Stories abound among the slave population that Annie Palmer, a Haitian miracle worker, was able to come out of her skin, according to some reports. None of this was either true or scientifically possible. Annie Palmer was killed not at Rose Hall but at Palmyra Great House south of the hills of Rose Hall.
Haiti, a former French colony and known to be steeped in the advanced culture of the mother country, France, reflects also one area of significance in French influence back then, which was in the area of beauty culture. So a false hairpiece common to a Haitian upper or middle class white woman but not to an African slave woman, having not seen such a thing before, the impact of the culture shock and fright led the Negro to conclude that, on opening Annie Palmer’s bedroom door, what she saw lying on the mistress’ bed was evidence that the witch had left her skin behind.
Palmyra, part of the Rose Hall Estates, was connected to the Rose Hall mansion by way of a bridle track. The record shows that it was along this track, in the dead of the night, that Annie Palmer would ride with her riding whip in hand and, for no apparent reason except to give vent to her nature, flogged her slaves unmercifully. She also, on one occasion, had the head of her maid (whom she suspected of trying to poison her) hung above the corn house in Palmyra until it festered in the sun.
She met her tragic end also at Palmyra: her strangled body found flung across her bed. And not one of her slaves cared to find the culprit, or came forward to help bury the woman whom they feared and hated… Annie Mary Paterson, aka Annie Palmer, in the month of January 1820, came from Haiti to Jamaica and subsequently married John Rose Palmer, grandnephew of John Palmer. It is claimed that it is at that juncture that Rose Hall became notorious. However, Rose Hall’s prominence dated back to a period long before Annie Palmer’s arrival.
Rosa Kelly, after whom Rose Hall is named, was the first mistress of the famous great house in Montego Bay. She was the daughter of the Rev John Kelly, Anglican rector for the parish of St James. Rosa, the first mistress of Rose Hall, was of a different temperament from her successor Annie Palmer the “White Witch”, who took up residence 43 years after Rosa Palmer’s death at Rose Hall in 1777.
Rosa, the owner of a large number of Kelly slaves, had three husbands. She was first married to Henry Fanning of St Catherine in 1746. Fanning began to build the Great house which cost 30,000 pounds back then. Rosa’s second husband, George Ash, finished it. Her third marriage was to the Honourable John Palmer, custos of St James, a marriage which lasted for 10 years.
Rosa Palmer died leaving a will which stated: “I give and bequeath all my residue of my estate real and personal unto my dearly beloved husband John Palmer, who is most deserving.” By now readers would discern that it was Rosa Palmer who had three husbands and not Annie Marie Palmer “the White Witch of Rose Hall”. Annie did not live long enough. Clearly we should not live in the past, by any means, but it is a wonderful place to visit. For in so doing, those who sought to befuddle and hoodwink us, particularly the descendants of the slaves, will awaken to the ploy and be alert to the integrity … or lack thereof, in respect to the quality of information that long ago, at the time of emancipation, was to be fed to the descendants of ex-slaves.
How was this substantial amount of foolishness passed down to us? It was conspiratorially arranged to feed us the information principally through the school system. The then Colonial Department of Education-whose only aim was to promote British glorification and mystification and the membership of which was controlled by the planters and pen keepers, all descendants of the former slave owners — decided on the curriculum for the children of the former slaves …. meaning us!
This explains why the two history books: History of Jamaica written by Clinton Vane de Brosse Black (Italian lineage with ‘Black’ added for diversion, believability and marketing) and the Making of the West Indies, written by a group including Professor F Augier, did not include the Sam Sharpe Rebellion in their work. There has been some feeble attempt to explain why the Sam Sharpe Rebellion story was not narrated in the two prominent history books used in our education system for well over 30 years, but the truth is that if the authors of those books wanted them to be “accepted” and approved by the Colonial Board of Education,which means making money, then the omission of the Sam Sharpe 1831/32 Rebellion was the way to go. That is what the market — the Colonial Board Of Education — wanted and so the grand and palpable historical omission was nothing more than a strategic business decision by the authors of those two principal Jamaican history books, in the opinion of numerous business-informed and perceptive compatriots.
Additionally, Clinton Vane de Brosse Black was further compromised (or is it compensated?) as he was appointed chief archivist of Jamaica and the rest of the anglophone Caribbean by the British Government in 1955. Given his background, he was more than fully aware of the Sam Sharpe Rebellion which he left out of his History of Jamaica book.
The first time that the Sam Sharpe Rebellion story fully came to light was around 1975 at the time that “Daddy” Sharpe was made a national hero under the leadership of prime minister, the late Michael Manley. Clearly, this was the consequence of a progressive policy change towards the enlightenment of the masses, with the Honourable Arnold Bertram, minister of information and then minister of education, the Honourable Howard Cooke Sr, being the political point men in the whole affair.
Academicians extraordinaire solicitor Richard Hart, professor the Honourable Rex Nettleford, and Kamu Braithwaite, in their inimitable proactive styles, added profoundly substantive texture to the explosion of the Sam Sharpe conversation. This rebellion played a most catalytic role in bringing down the edifices of the system of black enslavement and opened up the mind of our people to not only envisioning that day of freedom from chattel slavery, but to realise it.
Over 137 years passed before the school system began to teach, albeit extremely squalidly, about the Sam Sharpe Rebellion of 1831/32. But other British-approved texts and literature were allowed to “educate” us about English “heroes”: kings, queens and even pirates, buccaneers, privateers, military generals in the battles fought for Great Britain … and to condition us through these “Kakanabu” stories how happy we should be to know that the “mother country” is winning in the world. But we were never taught that each British victory was a further consolidation of our poverty through a deeper entrenchment of the ignorance of the Negro. And how the economic system particularly has been rigged to perpetuate lack of strategic and sustainable ownership for the children of the economic underclass while structurally, through fertile land possession with economy of scale, on the alluvium plains, enriching the heirs and successors of the traditional ruling class and their assorted cabal at the expense of all else.
What the secular education system failed to achieve, the religious system of education, hopefully, would finish. My abhorrence as I write this piece is with the web of deception and disrespect in the reportage of our history, and is absolutely not about resentment towards anyone based on ethnicity or race. I have no time for such wasteful, shortsighted and unchristian preoccupations which, were that the case, would undermine my own moral authority to rebuke what has gone wrong with the recording and propogation of Jamaica’s history.
The two “father-mentors” in my life as a maturing youngster were Hugh Lawson Shearer and Tony Hart, both in whom was no hint of racial hatred of blacks or whites. I have copied their wise examples. The lies, omissions, half-truths and twisting of our history are made manifest, again, by the two tales of Rosa Palmer and Annie Palmer of Rose Hall, St James. This example of officialisation of foolishness in Jamaica’s history is both deep and widespread. And Jamaica’s political independence in 1962 has not changed some things much either.
It is still being taught in our schools, for example, that the Maroons are our heroes!! What a dilemma? For that also is a blatant lie! Much shocking and jaw-dropping information on this particular matter is forthcoming in short order, paving the way, hopefully, for the binary imperatives of confession from and forgiveness of the Maroons. And clearing the way for us all to move on without the albatross of the barefaced, manipulative misinformation and ginnalship masquerading as Jamaican history.
Such a shame, really.
Now, that’s what we’re talking about!
We in this space can hardly contain our excitement over two news items that we believe augur well for the fight against crime and signal that the Jamaican populace seems ready, at last, to rise from its long and costly slumber.
First, it was reported that on Tuesday a prison escapee was found with his hands and feet bound under a bridge in Tivoli Gardens in Western Kingston, and is now back in police custody. He had fled the Denham Town lock-up in September 2016 after being charged with breaches of the Firearms Act.
The police, who were clearly ecstatic upon being alerted by citizens, commended the members of the public who assisted with the recapturing of this fugitive. Interestingly, even though there were signs that corporal punishment might have been administered, the man was taken alive to hospital.
If one is allowed to extrapolate the issues surrounding the single incident, the capture of the fugitive is significant in the context of what is currently happening with the runaway murder rate and efforts to tame the crime monster. What an example for other communities to follow.
Second, and possibly more important, the umbrella organisation of merchants, the Jamaica Chamber of Commerce (JCC), reports that the business sector is in the process of forging a national consensus to develop a credible strategic plan to tackle crime in Jamaica.
Chamber President Larry Watson says the consensus being forged with the Government, Opposition, civil society, and security experts seeks to make Jamaica a safe and secure society by reducing the present 58 murders per 100,000 in thepopulation to no more than 18 per 100,000 by 2025.
“Key performance indicators (KPIs) will be agreed and it is expected that an EPOC-type (Economic Programme Oversight Committee) model of public-private oversight will be employed,” Mr Watson says, noting that the country could be benefiting from an additional four per cent growth each year, if crime is contained.
We also found it encouraging that the JCC has pledged to support measures to ensure that laws are enforced and to deter corruption, which is a monstrous factor behind crime in Jamaica and which has a cancerous hold on the police force.
This initiative involving the business sector should be strongly encouraged and supported by Jamaicans on a whole; doing things like what took place in Tivoli Gardens, finding ways to funnel information to the police about criminal activities, and flushing them out of their hideouts.
We have far more confidence in the actions of citizens against crime than a thousand hypocritical speeches by politicians who are too compromised to undertake any serious, sustained assault on the gunmen.
All Jamaica knows that if the two major political parties were to unite the people to fight crime we would win the battle. But we are hopeful that with the business sector engaged it will force the parties to cut their links with criminals, even if it doesn’t happen overnight.
Moreover, the additional resources that the business sector could mobilise would represent a game changer. Such resources, however, must not fall into the coffers of Government. The recent motor vehicle fiasco, which no security minister should survive, is warning enough.
Mother charges five-year-old daughter rent to teach her about the real world.
A mother has sparked a debate among parents by revealing that she charges her five-year-old daughter rent out of her weekly allowance.
Essence Evans, a mother from Georgia, has received widespread attention after writing a post on Facebook about how she parents her daughter.
“Every week she gets $7 [£5} in allowance. But I explained to her that in the real world most people spend most of their paycheck on bills with little to spend on themselves.
“So I make her give me $5 [£3.60] back,” she wrote.
However, Evans has a hidden agenda, secretly keeping the money to give to her daughter when she grows up.
“Now, what she doesn’t know is the $5 [£3.60] is actually going away in her savings account which I will give back to her when she turns 18,” she explains.
“So if she decides to move out on her own she will have $3,380 [£2,431] to start off.
“This strategy not only prepares your child for the real world. But when they see how much real bills are they will appreciate you for giving them a huge discount.”
Evan’s post has gone viral online, garnering 228,000 reactions and over 300,000 shares.
Many people have praised her innovative idea, with one person commenting on Facebook: “I think this is an awesome way to prepare them!”
However, there are some who disagree with Evans’ point of view.
Someone else expressed the opinion that children shouldn’t have to worry about adult responsibilities, writing: “Let your kid be a kid and enjoy their youth before they have to spend the rest of their life worrying about bills [sic].”
The debate was discussed during a segment on Loose Women, with the panel divided over the topic.
Loose Women panellist Nadia Sawalha believes charging your child rent is a great lesson to teach at such a young age.
Women find a man more attractive when others fancy him, says science.
It looks we find men more attractive when we discover that other women fancy him – at least according to the results of a new study.
Researchers from the Universities of St Andrews, Durham and Exeter now believe that being desired gives men an ‘attractiveness boost’,
The team were testing out the ‘mate copying’ theory – also known as ‘The Wedding Ring Effect’ – a phenomenon that is seen in the animal kingdom, whereby someone is considered more appealing as a prospective mate when they are desired by others or already coupled up.
In the study, which was published this week in the journal Scientific Reports, the team gave 49 women photos of men’s faces and hands.
The volunteers were then asked to rate the attractiveness of each picture, before being given ‘social information’ about how the other women in the study had rated the men.
Interestingly, when the participants then rated the photos for a second time after finding out what the other women had said, the men were considered to be 13% more attractive on average.
‘Women appear to copy the mate preferences of other women but this might simply be because humans have a general tendency to be influenced by the opinions of others,’ concluded research leader Dr Kate Cross.
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