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BALTIMORE BURNS “Violent protesters hurled bricks and torched businesses and cars Monday, injuring at least 15 police officers, as authorities tried to restore order with an emergency curfew and the National Guard following the funeral for Freddie Gray, the 25-year-old who died in police custody last week.” Here’s a timeline of Freddie Gray’s funeral and resulting escalation of violence, as well as a primer on how a rumored “purge” prompted mayhem. And take a look at photos of the chaos, as well as the front page of The Baltimore Sun. [Arthur Delaney and Julia Craven, HuffPost]

TA-NEHISI COATES: THE RUSE OF NONVIOLENCE “When nonviolence is preached as an attempt to evade the repercussions of political brutality, it betrays itself. When nonviolence begins halfway through the war with the aggressor calling time out, it exposes itself as a ruse.” [The Atlantic]

GAY MARRIAGE CASE REACHES SUPREME COURT Arguments begin today in the case, which the justices are expected to rule on in June. [AP]

NEPAL DEATH TOLL COULD SURPASS 10,000 The death toll currently stands at 4,349. Take a look at this map of the horrific damage. [Reuters]

UN PROBE CONFIRMS ISRAEL FIRED ON 7 SCHOOLS IN 2014 STRIKES “Israel fired on seven United Nations schools during the 2014 Gaza war, killing 44 Palestinians who had sought shelter at some sites, while Palestinian militants hid weapons and launched attacks from several empty U.N. schools, a U.N. inquiry found.” [Reuters]

CHILDHOOD OBESITY LINKED TO JUST ONE HOUR OF TV A DAY Turn off the tube. [Kate Bratskeir, HuffPost]

WHAT’S BREWING

BEHIND FACEBOOK’S NEW SUICIDE PREVENTION TOOL “Upon seeing any comments from a friend implying self harm, users are given the option to contact their Facebook friend, another friend or a suicide helpline. From there, the person will be notified that a friend is concerned about them and asked if they’d like to call a friend or message a suicide prevention expert.” [HuffPost]

WE’D LIKE SOME OF APPLE’S CASH PILE Slip us some of that $193.5 billion, will yah Tim Cook? [USA Today]

RESUME TYPEFACES TO RULE THEM ALL Ditch the Times New Roman — you can do it. [Bloomberg]

MARIAH CAREY KNOWS HOW TO BELT A BREAK-UP BALLAD Oh, Nick Cannon, you done her wrong. [HuffPost]

WE CANNOT WAIT FOR ERIC MATTHEWS’ RETURN On “Girl Meets World.” [HuffPost]

WHAT THE ARRIVAL OF APPLE PAY MEANS FOR YOU Prepare for the invasion of mobile payments. [NYT]

WHAT’S WORKING

HOLLYWOOD AGEISM NEEDS TO GO Because who doesn’t want to watch a show with Jane Fonda. [HuffPost]

ON THE BLOG

POWERLESSNESS AND THE AMERICAN PEOPLE “The companies we work for, the businesses we buy from, and the political system we participate in all seem to have grown less accountable. I hear it over and over: They don’t care; our voices don’t count. A large part of the reason is we have fewer choices than we used to have. In almost every area of our lives, it’s now take it or leave it.” [HuffPost]

BEFORE YOU GO

~ Viola Davis is set to develop and star in an HBO Harriet Tubman biopic.

~ Google everyone.

~ How many pizzas you should order.

~ Rubik’s Cube domination.

~ Congrats to Nikki Reed and Ian Somerhalder, who got married over the weekend.

~ We’ll watch Lake Bell’s reinvention of the rom-com any day.

~ Ellen Pompeo speaks out about the “Grey’s Anatomy” controversy (we’re still mad, Shonda, we’re still mad).

~ Penelope Cruz can rock a red leather jumpsuit.

~ All the Apple watch problems.

~ Kale massaging is a thing all you yuppies out there need to be doing.

Send tips/quips/quotes/stories/photos/events/scoops to Lauren Weber at lauren.weber@huffingtonpost.com. Follow us on Twitter @LaurenWeberHP. And like what you’re reading? Sign up here to get The Morning Email delivered to you.

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I used to be so busy I didn’t have time to pee. My email inbox was so overloaded that NBC’s IT department gave me special dispensation for more storage. I had two phones and a pager, and sometimes they beeped all night.

It was exhausting. And it was exhilarating.

I told myself I was getting a lot of important things done. Plenty of people wanted to see me. There were big problems to solve and important questions people wanted me to answer. For years, I never turned down a work request. I was always “on.”

It took a bike crash and months of recovery for me to question the pace of my life and wonder: what was I running away from? The answer to that question changed my marriage and my life.

What’s Your Real Commitment?
Busyness is a common complaint in the professional circles Meg and I lived in. Many smart, driven executive types we knew claimed to have everything they wanted and yet constantly complained about never having enough time to enjoy it.

And then I learned that the best way to see what someone is really committed to is to look not at words, but at results. Sort of a corollary to the rule that “actions speak louder than words.”

So judging by the results, everyone I knew — including myself — was committed to being busy. Why?

Busyness: the Socially Acceptable Addiction
Busyness is one of the few socially acceptable addictions in our society. Like all addictions it has some powerfully attractive features — like adrenaline, one of the most addictive brain chemicals — and some useful downsides.

The adrenaline jolt I got from overstuffed agendas and looming deadlines was a reliable source of excitement. There was hardly a greater high to validate my existence than racing through 30 Rock with videotape for the network satellite player.

But if that was the junkie high that got me hooked, other benefits kept me in the grip of busyness. One of the best things about being busy is that I had a great excuse for not doing things I didn’t want to do, like racing around on Saturday mornings for the kids’ sporting events when really what I wanted was time to myself and with my family.

What Are You Not Facing?
Yes, I learned that busy people are seen as heroic figures just trying to do their best to meet high expectations. Even if they are missing out on large swaths of family and social life, busy people get a huge pass from almost everyone.

I had a growing awareness that my reality was different: I was staying busy to run away from the things I most feared.

Instead of wondering whether I was in over my head at work, I could point to my packed calendar as proof that I was a valuable member of the team. Instead of facing that I didn’t know how to connect with my young daughter, I could busy myself with responding to email or a ringing phone. It was all very convenient.

That pretty much ended after my bicycle collided with an SUV. Not only did eight days in the hospital (and months on mind-bending pain killers) give me a forced break with busyness, the near-death experience gave me some perspective. I was happy to be alive and suddenly felt the impetus to actually make some changes instead of just talk about them.

The True Cost of Busy
On one of the many hazy post-crash days, I actually sat down and listed the things I was avoiding. I clearly saw the cost of my busyness, on my own health and enjoyment and on all of my close relationships.

That’s when I saw I had a choice: stay busy and glide along the surface of my relationships or slow down and make time to face my fears, inadequacies and unknowns. So even though I didn’t have a big answer to creating rich relationships, I found lots of little ways to begin letting go of the cult of busyness and open the way to deeper connection.

Tim Peek is a certified executive coach who advises leaders and their teams on using disruption, consciousness, and strategy to create their desired future. www.peekdisruption.com and www.conscious.is/who-we-are

Meg Dennison is a certified conscious leadership coach who has reinvented herself many times. She coaches busy women midpoint in their life or career to consciously create their next step based on genius and life goals. www.megdennison.com

Together, Meg and Tim write about how they turned around what had become a stale and uninspiring 28-year marriage to return to the passion and purpose to their lives. Motivated executives come to Meg and Tim for help reinvigorating their careers, companies and intimate relationships.

Click here to get their free report and weekly blog delivered to your inbox.

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Abu Dhabi – Backed by an impressively lavish lobbying and PR machine – more expensive than any other middle eastern country – the United Arab Emirates (UAE) is eager to show that it’s a safe and stable business environment, and a dependable U.S. military ally. “United in Security” with the U.S., declared the UAE state media this week, reminding readers it’s the “only Arab country to join the U.S. on six military operations over the last 25 years” (First Gulf war, Afghanistan, Somalia, Kosovo, Libya and ISIL).

Abu Dhabi Crown Prince Sheikh Mohammed Bin Zayed Al Nahyan met with President Obama, Vice President Joe Biden, and Defense Secretary Carter in Washington last Monday to discuss, according to him, “new steps to enhance the already deep security between the U.S. and the UAE.”

Sheikh Mohammed is a regular visitor to DC, commanding red carpet treatment and access to the highest possible levels of the U.S. government. He is likely to be back in a couple of weeks representing UAE at the Camp David conference of Gulf leaders.

He’s also head of the feared state security system, the UAE’s Stasi, which regularly suppresses freedom of speech and ruthlessly suffocates civil society voices of those who are critical of the regime. In recent months, the attacks on dissidents have intensified. In November 2014 the UAE cabinet announced a list of 83 “terrorist organizations.” These included two American NGOs, the Council on Islamic-American Relations and the Muslim American Society.

Previously tolerated local civil society organizations have been disbanded, including the Association of Teachers and the Association of Jurists. Former heads of the Jurists Association are now political prisoners, including renowned constitutional scholar Dr. Mohammed al Roken. He’s one of dozens serving long prison sentences after being convicted in a mass unfair trial in 2013. Reports of torture in custody have intensified in recent years, and only a tiny handful of dissidents are currently in the country and out of jail. These include prominent Human Rights Defender Ahmed Mansoor, named this week as a 2015 finalist for the internationally prestigious Martin Ennals Human Rights Defender Award. Nearly all peaceful dissent in the UAE is silenced, both on and offline. Abuse of migrant workers’ rights persists, and no labor union is allowed to exist to protect them.

Meeting me in secret this week in the UAE, human rights activists told me there is now a zero tolerance policy for peaceful criticism of the Emirati regime. “It’s got so much worse in the last few years,” said one. “Ten years ago arrests without warrants or disappearances happened but they were rare. Now they’re common.” Even relatives of political prisoners have been targeted in recent months, some hit with arbitrary travel bans that prevent them from leaving the country.

They blame Shiekh Mohammed’s state security for tampering with official government files holding their ID and other information. They said that dates of birth have been changed so that adults are officially registered as children, or other details modified, making it impossible for them to get drivers licenses and other essential documents. This administrative harassment has sent people into an endless bureaucratic loop, preventing them from getting or renewing passports, applying for school, opening bank accounts, and generally operating normal lives. The denial of a security clearance amounts to a denial of a job. Many activists are unable to support themselves financially, some are sleeping rough.

“It’s a soft repression but very effective,” one activist told me. “State security basically runs the country, no matter who the official government is. It’s unaccountable, omnipotent, and scares everyone.”

Families of detainees live in fear of reprisals by the state security apparatus. Three sisters who were summoned to a police station in Abu Dhabi in mid-February have not been heard from since. The three women are sisters of Issa Khalifa al-Suwaidi, a political prisoner convicted with Al Roken and 67 others, who is serving 10 years in jail. These three women are part of a pattern of forced disappearances by the authorities.

Crushing dissent in the UAE is typically done in the name of anti-terrorism. The UAE regime presents a false stability versus democracy binary as justification for its crackdown. Officials claim a modern country has been built in a generation because strict authoritarianism has enabled galloping economic development. They point to the United States as a key part of this boom – the UAE is America’s largest trading partner in the Middle East with a 90 percent growth in trade over the last decade and over 1,000 U.S. companies in the country.

Washington has continued to support the dictatorship politically and militarily, arming it with a vast array of weapons as the repression has intensified. As part of the White House’s Countering Violence Extremism initiative, there are plans for a U.S.-UAE social media partnership based in the Emirates, where criticizing the regime on Twitter typically means a long jail sentence. The irony seems lost on Washington, where President Obama has rightfully identified a key problem in the Gulf autocracies as “a belief that there are no legitimate political outlets for grievances,” and has promised to raise it with the leaders at Camp David next month.

“Those might likely to turn to extremism here are those under pressure from the government, those who living conditions are threatened, those without hope and those not allowed to live normal lives. Repression will create radicalism,” said one activist.

President Obama said “America’s support for civil society is a matter of national security,” but that’s not how it seems to dissidents in the UAE. Those I met this week are largely scared into silence, feeling abandoned by Washington and cynical that the U.S. means what it says about protecting is values of free speech.

“It’s all talk, American talk, supporting human rights. They never back it up, just keep selling weapons to our government while it puts lawyers in jail,” said one Emirati rights activist.

When they meet next month, President Obama should look beyond UAE’s fancy PR campaign and ask Sheikh Mohammed why peaceful critics are in jail, why their lawyers are intimidated from representing them and their witnesses harassed, and why the UAE thinks the best way to fight terrorism is with repression.

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The sun has only barely begun to peek over the horizon but the faint brightness of the early morning sunrise stirs me in my sleep. I start to wake and for a brief moment I feel almost normal — perhaps even happy — suspended in a blissful state of ignorance as the sleep begins to leave my body and my mind wakes and adjusts to its surroundings.

Almost within the same instant, I am paralyzed, I can’t move or breathe, and an overload of anxiety begins to fill every fiber of my being. Reality sets in and I am suddenly all too aware that I am under a bridge and surrounded by cold concrete ringed with the piercing smells of asphalt and urine.

There were always moments like this, moments where I’d have to remind myself where I was and who I’d become. My mind seemed to be going through this process of rejecting its surroundings — unable to fully accept the present — I would constantly find myself lost in vivid memories of my past as if my psyche was trying to remind me of who I was, and then within the same breath, I’d feel the harsh pangs of depression arise as I remembered my reality.

I was homeless, forgotten, abandoned, and alone. A product of the Texas foster care system, I had no one.

My life was reduced to two pairs of cloths, a well-worn backpack, and the streets. By day, I begged strangers for their change; and by night, I was turning tricks for a place to stay, a shower, a hot meal, or whatever resources I could trade my body for.

That was my reality.

The many years I had spent growing up in foster care took away any chances I had at a normal life. I lived in over 20 different homes — sometimes moving every six to eight months — never staying in one place long enough to create support systems, build community, or establish roots. Sometimes, I think that maybe this was for the better because almost all of the 20-plus homes I lived in were imbued with abuse.

By the time I was 18, I had been raped and beaten more times than I care to remember — often by the very people the state of Texas was paying to “care” for me.

On the streets, I found out very quickly that there aren’t a lot of resources for homeless youth in Houston, especially if you’re gay. I remember once being turned away from the Covenant House — a homeless shelter that caters to youth — after an intake worker determined I was gay and erroneously suggested that I “probably had AIDS” and would be a risk to other youth in the shelter.

So I learned to make due with what I had. Most nights, I would wonder the streets in Montrose until someone picked me up. Sometimes I’d get lucky and they’d let me spend the night, but more often then not, I’d be forced to sleep on the roof of a shopping strip in the north side of Houston — no more than 10 blocks away from the group home I was living at when I aged out of the system and into homelessness.

I spent the next six months on the streets doing this over and over again, living day-to-day, surviving through the street economy — alone, ashamed and guilt-ridden.

One day in August of 2010, I was in downtown Houston searching for an air-conditioned space and a restroom and ended up wondering into the University of Houston-Downtown.

That day, the course of my life changed.

Youth who age out of the foster care system in Texas are eligible to utilize a tuition waiver that covers the complete costs of tuition and fees at state-funded institutions of higher education within the state.

It was on that fateful day in August that I found out about this waiver, and with the help of university staff I registered for classes and applied for financial aid. I spent the majority of my first semester homeless, struggling to keep up with my course work — but eventually, I would receive a refund check for about $2,000 that I used to get my first apartment.

I live in that very same apartment today, and in May of this year, I will graduate from the University of Houston-Downtown with a bachelor’s degree in social work.

My life was, still is, and will always be worth something.

I wasn’t a lost cause, a degenerate, or a waste of space. I was a human being, a person, and a youth, who because of my life’s circumstances ended up on the streets. But with the right opportunity, I was able to surpass those circumstances and accomplish so much in such a short period of time.

I’ve advocated for greater protections for foster youth, testifying countless times before committees in Congress and the Texas legislature. I’ve worked to elect progressives to public office — most recently, working for Senator Wendy Davis’ gubernatorial campaign. I’ve won national leadership awards from the Human Rights Campaign and the National LGBTQ Taskforce, and I’ve even had the chance to intern on Capital Hill for Senator Patty Murray inspiring her introduction of the 2014 Tyler Clementi Higher Education Anti-Harassment Act.

Yes, at one point in my young life I was homeless, but by the grace of God I am now a strong, resilient and intelligent contributing member of my community.

I am worth something — and so is every other homeless youth.

My life is proof that we can change the future of thousands of youth forced into homelessness by simply valuing their lives, making investments into their futures, and recognizing that they are worth more than a few bucks and some leftover lunch.

I share my story to tell you that there is hope, there is life after homelessness, and our lives do matter. We are the future. Invest in us, value us, recognize our worth, and watch us sore to unimaginable heights.

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