Late last week Finnish mobile startup Jolla launched a crowdfunding campaign for a tablet running its open source Sailfish OS, smashing past its initial funding goal of $380,000 in a couple of hours. It has since pushed past the $1 million mark, with around $1.18M now pledged from more than 7,370 backers of the Indiegogo campaign. Read More
WASHINGTON (AP) — Divisive and flamboyant, maddening and beloved, Marion Barry outshone every politician in the 40-year history of District of Columbia self-rule. But for many, his legacy was not defined by the accomplishments and failures of his four terms as mayor and long service on the D.C. Council.
Instead, Barry will be remembered for a single night in a downtown Washington hotel room and the grainy video that showed him lighting a crack pipe in the company of a much-younger woman. When FBI agents burst in, he referred to her with an expletive. She “set me up,” Barry said. Barry died Sunday at 78. His family said in statement that Barry died shortly after midnight at the United Medical Center, after having been released from Howard University Hospital on Saturday.
The year was 1990, and crack cocaine had exploded in the district, turning it into the nation’s murder capital. In his third term, the man known as the “Mayor for Life” became a symbol of a foundering city.
Federal authorities had been investigating him for years for his alleged ties to drug suspects, and while he denied using drugs, his late-night partying was taking a toll on his job performance.
The arrest and subsequent conviction — a jury deadlocked on most counts, convicting him of a single count of drug possession — was a turning point for Barry. He had been elected to his first term as mayor in 1978 with broad support from across the city. With his good looks, charisma and background in the civil rights movement, he was embraced the dynamic leader the city’s young government needed. The Washington Post endorsed him in each of his first three mayoral runs, although the 1986 endorsement was unenthusiastic.
Barry’s six-month term in federal prison was hardly the end of his political career. But it forever changed how it was perceived. To some, he was a pariah and an embarrassment. But to many district residents, particularly lower-income blacks, he was still a hero, someone unfairly persecuted for personal failures.
Barry returned to the D.C. Council in 1992, representing the poorest of the city’s eight wards. Two years later, he won his fourth and final term as mayor. The electorate was starkly divided along racial lines, and Barry advised those who had not supported his candidacy to “get over it.”
“Marion Barry changed America with his unmitigated gall to stand up in the ashes of where he had fallen and come back to win,” poet Maya Angelou said in 1999.
Barry’s triumph, though, was short-lived. In 1995, with the city flirting with bankruptcy from years of bloated, unaccountable government, much of it under Barry, Congress stripped him of much of his power and installed a financial control board. Barry held authority over little more than the city’s parks, libraries and community access cable TV station. He decided against seeking a fifth term.
Barry spent a few years working as a municipal bond consultant, but he couldn’t stay away from politics. In 2004, he returned to the council, again representing Ward 8, where he remained beloved. Many constituents still referred to him as “Mayor Barry,” and he was re-elected in 2008 and 2012.
Barry was born March 6, 1936, to Marion and Mattie Barry, in the small Mississippi delta town of Itta Bena, and was raised in Memphis, Tenn., after the death of his father, a sharecropper.
While an undergraduate at LeMoyne College (now LeMoyne-Owen College), Barry picked up the nickname “Shep” in reference to Soviet propagandist Dmitri Shepilov for his ardent support of the civil rights movement. Barry began using Shepilov as his middle name.
Barry did graduate work in chemistry at Fisk University in Nashville, Tenn., earning a master’s degree. He left school short of a doctorate to work in the civil rights movement.
His political rise began in 1960, when he became the first national chairman of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, which sent young people into the South to register black voters and became known as one of the most militant civil rights groups of that era.
Barry’s work with the committee brought him to Washington, where he became immersed in local issues, joining boycotts of the bus system and leading rallies in support of the city’s fledgling home rule efforts.
In 1970, The Post wrote: “Four years ago widely considered a young Black Power Militant with almost no constituency, (Barry) has become a man who is listened to — if not fully accepted — on all sides.”
Barry’s activism propelled him into local politics, first as a member of the Board of Education and then in 1974 as a member of the first elected city council organized under home rule legislation.
In 1977, he was wounded by a shotgun blast in the Hanafi Muslim takeover of D.C.’s city hall. A young reporter was killed. The shooting was credited with strengthening him politically.
In 1978, he defeated incumbent Mayor Walter Washington — the city’s first home rule mayor — in the Democratic primary and went on to easily win the general election.
Barry’s early years in office were marked by improvement in many city services and a dramatic expansion of the government payroll, creating a thriving black middle class in the nation’s capital. Barry established a summer jobs program that gave many young people their first work experience and earned him political capital.
In his second term, the district’s finances were rockier, and some of his appointees were caught up in corruption scandals.
The city’s drug-fueled decline mirrored Barry’s battles with his personal demons, leading to the infamous hotel room arrest on Jan. 19, 1990. The video of Barry was widely distributed to the media and made him infamous worldwide.
A few months after his arrest, long-time civil rights advocate and educator Roger Wilkins, a past supporter, wrote in The Post: “Marion Barry used the elders and lied to the young. He has manipulated thousands of others with his cynical use of charges of racism to defend his malodorous personal failures.”
Even after his comeback, controversy continued to dog Barry. Several times after his 1990 arrest, Barry sought treatment or counseling for problems with prescription medications or other substances. In 2002, he made an attempt to seek an at-large seat on the D.C. Council but abandoned his bid amid allegations of renewed illegal drug use.
In 2006, Barry was given three years of probation after pleading guilty to misdemeanor charges for failing to file tax returns from 1999 to 2004. As part of a plea bargain, he agreed to file future federal and local tax returns annually, a promise prosecutors later said he had failed to keep.
In 2010, he was censured by the council and stripped of his committee assignments for steering a government contract to a former girlfriend. The council censured him again in 2013 for accepting cash gifts from city contractors.
Barry played the role of elder statesman in his later years on the council, but he sometimes exasperated his colleagues with his wavering attention at meetings and frequent, rambling references to his tenure as mayor.
He suffered numerous health problems over the years. In addition to kidney failure, he survived prostate cancer, undergoing surgery in 1995 and a follow-up procedure in 2000. In late 2011, he underwent minor surgery on his urinary tract. In early 2014, he spent several weeks in hospitals and a rehabilitation center battling infections and related complications.
In a statement Sunday, current Mayor Vincent C. Gray expressed deep sadness after learning about Barry’s death. Gray spoke with Barry’s wife, Cora Masters Barry, late Saturday and shared his condolences and sympathies with her. The couple was long estranged but never divorced.
“Marion was not just a colleague but also was a friend with whom I shared many fond moments about governing the city,” Gray said. “He loved the District of Columbia and so many Washingtonians loved him.”
Mayor Gray said that he would work with Barry’s family and the Council to plan official ceremonies “worthy of a true statesman of the District of Columbia.”
Barry was married four times and is survived by his wife, Cora, and one son, Marion Christopher Barry.
The agonizing book chapter title “Stealing Children’s Innocence in Egypt: Media Literacy, Human Rights and Roads of Violence” hit the nail on the head.
It rang a familiar bell and could well apply to many developing countries going through uncertain transitions.
According to author Ibrahim Saleh, an Egyptian professor of political communication at South Africa’s University of Cape Town:
On a daily basis, Egyptian children endure all sorts of violence in the media and in other respects inside and outside their homes, especially within the current fluid political situation in Egypt. Children are witnessing the trauma of such clashes, especially that many young children have been seen at demonstrations and there have been disturbing reports of some groups deliberately bringing in vulnerable children. Some reports suggest that certain political organizations are offered money in exchange for sending street children into a demonstration area.
He said violence against children was tied to poverty, unemployment, drugs, inadequate or abusive parenting practices and real-life adult models of violent problem-solving behavior.
Saleh’s views in “Young People, Media and Health: Risks and Rights,” are unnerving.
Young People Media & Health (Abu-Fadil)
His observations dovetail with a video clip seemingly shot with a mobile phone of a private tutor in English slapping a boy around for not getting his lesson right.
The teacher called the boy “hiyawan” (Arabic for animal), in this context a moron, while another boy in the room looked on and laughed.
The recipient of the blows also laughed at first before telling his instructor he’d had enough and asking him to stop.
The comments by Egyptian viewers on the video clip’s YouTube page were rather telling.
Screen shot of Egyptian boy ducking from abusive private tutor’s blows
Most found the boy’s attitude “asal” (meaning honey, or adorable) and the incident comical, albeit the boy “ghabi” (dumb) for not learning his lesson properly.
One viewer wrote: “Funny videos, I’m Egyptian and I’m proud to be Egyptian.”
Saleh saw links between different kinds of violence in society and the media. He shed light on whether (or not) children’s rights were protected in Egypt and the role media literacy could play in addressing this societal crisis.
The adverse effects of media reporting are still impeded by many social and cultural issues, are seldom recorded statistically, and, even if reported, are usually only recorded in terms of broader family incidences. Moreover, with the lack of more child rights protection, media texts and visuals will continue to recreate and disseminate violent themes and radicalism in a positively packaged culturally mediated context.
He said Egypt was caught in a vicious cycle of violence against children where a paradox lies in the pseudo-culture that continues to brag about its religious and conservative structure, while keeping silent and even being disinterested in child maltreatment, peer victimization and children’s exposure to violence in the family, school, community and media.
Book co-editor Cecilia von Feilitzen’s chapter “Mediated Violence and Related Risk Factors” focused on research, film and television, children’s personalities and relationships, video and computer games, and violence on the Internet.
“The ‘UN Convention on the Rights of the Child‘ stresses the important function performed by the media, that the child shall have access to information and material aimed at the promotion of his or her well-being and health and that s/he shall be protected from information and material injurious to his or her well being (from Article 17),” she wrote.
The International Clearinghouse on Children, Youth and Media published the 202-page book. The clearinghouse falls under the umbrella of Nordicom, Gothenburg University’s Nordic Information Centre for Media and Communication Research in Sweden
Another chapter is a policy statement by the American Academy of Pediatrics’ Council on Communications and Media that zeroed in on children, adolescents, obesity and the media.
“It is increasingly clear that the media, particularly TV, play an important role in the etiology of obesity,” it said, adding that there were no data relating other media to obesity.
Sweet treats (Abu-Fadil)
The statement said children and teenagers who watch more TV tend to consume more calories or eat higher-fat diets.
Young people are enticed by advertising, marketing and commercialization of just about everything, explained Susan Linn in her chapter “Too Many Screens, Too Much Stuff.”
“While billions are spent around the globe to eradicate and treat pediatric diseases, as much money or more is also spent inculcating and/or exacerbating health problems for children,” she said.
The book includes valuable insights into sexualization and children’s relationship with the media, and the impact of excessive media exposure on sleep and memory.
A major section is dedicated to the right to participation, with Rafael Obregon and Angela Rojas Martinez providing a view on a child- and adolescent-centered approach in Latin America.
Young TV interviewee (Abu-Fadil)
Arvind Singhal examined a radio show in Nepal called “Chatting With My Best Friend” during which young listeners can engage “in open, honest and authentic conversations about their body, sexuality, health and interpersonal relationships.”
The book is thoughtful and well researched. Parents, educators, health experts and people in the media would do well to read it.
You can use 3D printing to make a handful of electronics, such as antennas and batteries, but LEDs and semiconductors have been elusive; you usually need some other manufacturing technique to make them work, which limits what they can do and where…
FERGUSON, Mo. — The mother of Michael Brown, the 18-year-old shot by a police officer in this suburb of St. Louis on Aug. 9, urged protesters to stay peaceful Saturday night as they waited to find out if a grand jury will indict police officer Darren Wilson for killing her unarmed son.
“I just want y’all to be careful. Don’t agitate them, don’t let them agitate y’all. I don’t want nobody getting hurt,” Lesley McSpadden told the crowd gathered along Canfield Drive, just feet from where her son was killed. While most protesters do not expect Wilson to be indicted in Brown’s death, McSpadden urged demonstrators to keep faith.
“We all willing to do something, but I don’t want nobody getting hurt, see what I’m saying?” she said. “Because when it’s time to walk into the courtroom, I want all y’all with me.”
Brown’s father, Michael Brown Sr., has made similar pleas for peace in recent days, as have Attorney General Eric Holder and President Barack Obama.
Following the emotional message from McSpadden, and after the crowd joined hands in a circle around the memorial for a prayer, a small number of protesters marched down West Florissant Avenue for the second time that evening, passing boarded-up storefronts.
“Rain, sleet, hail, snow, hell no, we won’t go,” they chanted as rain fell from the night sky.
Soon, about a dozen police cars came driving along West Florissant, and a number of them pulled into a parking lot behind a building. When demonstrators saw where the vehicles were sitting, they headed toward them to protest along a fence. The police left the area, and the small group of demonstrators continued marching along the street.
Eager to get a truly TV-oriented gaming PC without waiting until the official Steam Machine launch in 2015? Alienware is more than happy to oblige: at long last, it’s shipping the Alpha console. You can now shell out $549 or more to get a living…
Chocolate and booze are two of life’s great pleasures. And they taste so delicious together — a few slivers of dark, cacao-rich chocolate with a glass of single malt whisky or a rich, sweet port wine or a fine sipping rum or… I could go on, but I don’t want to get drool all over the keyboard.
But when it comes to combining spirits with chocolate, it’s not so easy. Sure, you’ve got your Godiva liqueurs and the like, which can make a nifty boozy milkshake, but it’s not something for a spirits connoisseur to take seriously. Which is where Selvarey and Solbeso come in. Released this summer, they both use cacao, but that’s where the similarity ends. In fact, it’s almost unfair to mention one of the pair when discussing chocolatey booze. Which didn’t stop me, because these are both excellent spirits, and they’re both worth your time. Confused? Read on.
SELVAREY CACAO RUM (35% ABV, aged 5 years, $30). Hmmm… a chocolate-infused rum that’s being endorsed by Bruno Mars. I like “Locked Out Of Heaven” as much as the next guy, but let’s just say my hopes were not high that this could avoid suckiness. Then I tried it. Not only does it not suck, it’s absolutely delicious, in a guilty-pleasure kind of way. How could a spirit that’s vaguely reminiscent of those booze-filled chocolates not be? But seriously, this stuff is wonderful. Part of the secret is that the rum itself is an excellent 5-year-old from Panama (Selvarey makes a white rum that’s also excellent).
But the real kicker is that the chocolate tastes like chocolate, not some chemicalized pseudo-chocolate syrup. That’s because actual cacao beans are macerated in the rum — you can even see a little bit of cacao sediment at the bottom of the bottle. And while it tastes like a booze-filled chocolate, it doesn’t share the thick, syrupy elements. And surprisingly, it’s not overly sweet, just full of smooth, rich, chocolatey goodness. I poured this at a party not long ago and the crowd went wild. I haven’t mixed it in cocktails yet, but I can only imagine mixologists more advanced than I having a field day with it.
SOLBESO DISTILLED CACAO SPIRIT (40% ABV, $30). This is a strange one — it’s distilled from cacao, so the first thought is chocolate, right? Wrong! It’s actually distilled from the cacao fruit, not the bean that’s used to make chocolate. I tasted my first cacao fruit not long ago, and it’s surprising — a little lychee-like in texture, with a flavor that’s vaguely like a mango, with a little added acidity. The fruit goes bad mere hours after it’s picked, so it’s pretty tough to work with, but the folks at Solbeso are working with cacao farmers in Latin America to juice and sun-dry it quickly enough to turn it into booze. The result is not Godiva in any sense, although I do taste a hint of chocolate. Whether it’s my mind playing tricks on me or not, I couldn’t tell you. Anyway, it’s quite to pisco in its earthy, slightly funky flavor. As such, it makes for a mighty nice Solbeso sour. Which will confuse consumers who want to use it to make a chocotini, but I hope a little more than usual that you’ll go out and try it after reading this caveat. To have a spirit not succeed not because it’s bad but because it confounds expectations would be downright depressing.
A 9-month old girl in East New York’s Brooklyn was allegedly shot by her father while he was cleaning an illegal, non-registered gun, police said on Saturday.
UPDATE: Father was cleaning illegal gun when it accidentally discharged, struck the baby http://t.co/aJjI8QVa1H pic.twitter.com/3o9D7f1Pyy
— Eyewitness News (@ABC7NY) November 23, 2014
The father and the mother were taken into custody, with charges pending for the father, WABC reported. The identity of the 47-year-old father had not been released.
The baby girl was shot in the abdomen on Saturday afternoon at an apartment on Sutter Avenue, and was taken to the hospital, WPIX reported. The baby was to undergo surgery Saturday night, and was in stable condition, according to WABC.
Police said the father was cleaning an illegal, non-registered colt 45 in the apartment when it accidentally discharged. The father had been charged with possession of an illegal weapon in the past, police told WNBC.
Last week, a 9-year-old girl in Newark was wounded when her 12-year-old brother accidentally shot her while playing with a loaded handgun found in the home.
LOS ANGELES (AP) — A bighorn sheep escaped from the Los Angeles Zoo on Saturday and died after being struck by a driver who fled the scene, authorities said.
The adult female sheep escaped an exhibit just before noon and traversed the Santa Monica Mountains from the area in Griffith Park where the zoo is located, zoo spokeswoman April Spurlock said.
Witnesses reported seeing the ewe being hit by a car near the Greek Theatre in the Los Feliz section of the city, near the entrance to the park, police said.
Zookeepers, park rangers and a police helicopter joined the search after the animal was reported missing. When zoo personnel and veterinarians got to the sheep, they tranquilized the animal to bring it back to its habitat but it died at the scene, Spurlock said.
“It’s suspected that it died after being hit, but we won’t know the cause of death until a necropsy is performed,” she said.
She said an investigation was underway to determine how the sheep escaped.
“We looked at the habitat, and we’re not sure how it got out,” Spurlock said.
The ewe was one of five bighorn sheep in the zoo exhibit.
The desert bighorn sheep has been listed as endangered since 1998 due to loss of habitat, disease brought by domestic sheep and cattle and predation.
They didn’t see a comedian. They saw the “king of the world.”
Long before there was a Dr. Cliff Huxtable, before rumpled sweaters and a collective anointing as America’s dad, Bill Cosby was magnified a hundredfold in the eyes of the young models and actresses he pulled into his orbit.
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