Hasta La Gadget!

After persevering through trying times, one college student wore her cap and gown with pride. 

Bianca Jeannot, a 22-year-old who attended the College of New Rochelle in New York, has been through a lot. She has experienced homelessness and also had to work multiple jobs to support and care for her brothers while attending college, ABC News reported. 

Recently, the student saw her hard work come to fruition as she graduated from the school with honors, WABC reported. 

“It is an accomplishment I’ll carry with me for the rest of my life,” Jeannot said, according to Hudson Valley News Network. “I wouldn’t change anything for the world, because it’s my life, and it’s made me who I am today.”

The 22-year-old, who maintained a 3.8 GPA in school, graduated with a degree in English as well as a forensic science certificate, the outlet reported. She was the first person in her family to graduate from college.

While these accomplishments are already impressive, Jeannot had to power through many obstacles to get there. 

According to WABC, the recent grad and her family spent about seven years living in homeless shelters. Following her mother’s death, Jeannot became the head of her household at just 18, and had to support her older brothers Michael Jeannot, who has Down syndrome, and Paul Santons, who has stage 4 kidney disease, ABC News reported. 

So while she attended school, Jeannot worked. And she worked hard. 

“I worked up to four jobs at a time, three on campus and one outside of campus,” she said. “I worked for marketing, I worked for the admissions house on campus, I worked for payroll, the IT department.”

In addition to caring for her brothers, she still managed to be active on campus, even founding an anime club and serving as editor-in-chief of the school’s literary magazine Phoenix, Hudson Valley News Network reported. 

“She’s the head of her household. She commutes back and forth, and she does it with a spirit of optimism and gratitude that’s rare in people even decades older,” Professor Daniel Smith told WABC.

Now, fresh out of college, Jeannot is looking to pursue a career in animal welfare. She told Hudson Valley News Network that she’s excited for the future. 

“There’s only one way to look, and that’s forward.” 

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Beach rankings are a dime a dozen, but if you’re looking for the authority on the matter, Dr. Beach is it.

Every year, Stephen P. Leatherman, a coastal scientist who teaches at Florida International University, evaluates the nation’s beaches based on 50 hand-selected criteria. He scores everything from sand softness, air temperature and wave size to creature comforts, safety features and even two types of noise (transportation and crowds).

His annual lists can be so powerful that when Hawaii’s Waimanalo Beach topped last year’s list, locals — and even Leatherman himself — worried the fame would ruin the quaint and quiet beach.

Unsurprisingly, beaches in the Aloha State have dominated the top spot for the past few years, and 2016 is no exception. But the east coast also makes a strong showing in the top 10. Florida takes up at least three spots — proving that the west coast might not actually be the best coast. 

If Dr. Beach’s rankings reveal anything, it’s that America’s shores are looking mighty fine.

So, which sandy spots made the doctor’s short list this year? Scroll down to find out.

We don’t know what you do for a living, but we do know you likely need a break. And, nearly halfway through the year, we’re challenging you (yes — busy, overworked, financially stretched you) to #TakeABreak. During the month of June, we’ll help you nail down how many vacation days you have at your disposal, figure out where to go, and plan a trip you can actually afford. For 30 days of travel tips, cheap flight hacks, vacation ideas and wanderlust galore, sign up for our Take A Break action plan here!

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Hanako, the world’s loneliest elephant, has died.

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To the untrained eye, Hillary Clinton’s new anti-Trump ad may appear to cast the blame of the financial crisis and subsequent foreclosures on Donald Trump, but to the millions of people who were there to witness the carnage, it casts a much more negative light on her.

To the casual observer the ad makes Trump look like the sleazy opportunist that he is, but it also makes the democrats and Clinton look disingenuous and smug.

The ad opens up with a picture of Trump with his signature sh*t eating grin plastered across his face with an overlay stating, “In 2006, Donald Trump was hoping for a real estate crash.”

The text fades to, “9 million Americans lost their jobs. 5 million people lost their homes.” Que the ominous music and scenes of destitute neighborhoods and then another shot of a grinning Trump followed by, “And the man who could be our next president was rooting for it to happen.”

Then the coup de grâce: Audio from Trump during an interview in 2006, before the mortgage crisis.  “I sort of hope that happens, because then people like me would go in and buy,” Trump says. “If there is a bubble burst, as they call it, you know, you could make a lot of money.”

So what’s the problem? The problem is that as much as I hate to admit this, Donald Trump and people like Donald Trump did not cause the financial crisis or the mortgage and foreclosure crisis. People like Donald Trump may have profited from the crisis and taken advantage of rock bottom prices once people lost their homes. They may even have done so with little or no compassion for the people who suffered and who continue to suffer from the reckless and unregulated actions that caused the crisis, but they did not cause it. They did what businesses and investors do. They saw an opportunity and profited from it. Albeit at other people’s misfortune.

While one could argue that it was scummy, sleazy, and even heartless, it was not illegal. It may have been, by some standards, unethical, but you’d be hard pressed to find someone on Wall Street that would agree with you on that point. It’s business and it’s what we’ve come to expect from the financial sector.

Elizabeth Warren has come out, to a degree, in close to the same vein during a recent speech, saying:

What kind of a man does that? What kind of a man roots for people to get thrown out of their house? What kind of a man roots for people to get thrown out of their jobs? What kind of a man does that? I’ll tell you exactly what kind of a man does that. It is a man who cares about no one but himself. A small, insecure money-grubber who doesn’t care who gets hurt so long as he makes a profit off it.

Good point. And she’s right. What kind of man does that, and do we want him in charge of and representing the country? Do we want a man who would not think twice about swooping in and buying up homes that once belonged to people who had lost everything through no fault of their own and due to the irresponsible actions of Wall Street? Do we want our president (or anyone representing us in government) to be that uncaring and void of compassion? Should a man who wants to be president of the “greatest country in the world” be able to sleep at night knowing that he profited from his constituents’ pain and suffering, much less that he hoped for it? Do we want to give a man like that the power and ability to be able to trigger another financial crisis just for his own personal profit?

What the Clinton ad does, however, is disingenuous. The ad portrays Trump as a predator. The grin, the ominous music, the destitute buildings, and the huge over-sized foreclosure sign all point to Trump as the cause, when he was merely a hyena picking at the carcass of someone else’s prey.

While it might be fair to say that Trump is a scumbag for proudly voicing and admitting to being an opportunist post-crisis, the real cause of the crisis were Clinton’s close pals.

The real perpetrators were the banks who caused the crisis. If you’ve seen (or read) “The Big Short” you know that is what investors do – they take advantage of the market. What the banks did, by comparison, was to short the market while advising clients to bet in the other direction — causing unions, hedge funds, pension funds, and the like to get slammed. It was a Ponzi scheme.

The companies responsible for this have agreed to pay huge settlements while taking no direct responsibility for any of the wrongdoing — even though they have been accused of using fraudulent documents to kick people to the curb, among other things. Companies like Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and JP Morgan Chase.

One of those names, Goldman Sachs, should stand out among the rest as the Wall Street behemoth that has paid Clinton $675,000 for three speeches – a subject of debate and contention with Senator Sanders and his supporters. The other companies equally large are, along with Goldman Sachs, among Clinton’s top six donors, having contributed in the neighborhood of $800,000 each to her campaign. Apparently, Wall Street wasn’t threatened significantly enough by Hillary’s admonition to “cut it out” when she went down there to keep them from throwing money at her.

None of this is a big secret, nor is it some vague insider information. It’s a topic that I and many others have written about for years after the crisis. It does beg the question, though, as to whether the Clinton campaign is smug enough to think that we’re that stupid or that we’ve forgotten. And why would she give Trump enough ammunition to very credibly prove her hypocrisy?

Tony Trupiano and I had a conversation about this and other issues on today’s episode of T&Z Talk. You can listen to it below and don’t forget to subscribe to the newsletter at tandztalk.com.

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After a few rounds of rumors and leaks, Samsung has finally formally announced the Galaxy C5 and, somewhat more invisibly, the Galaxy C7, the first two members of the OEM’s “C” series. While still pretty much China-only, like the Galaxy A line, there is a chance the two will find their way to other markets. If so, Samsung will be … Continue reading