Page 14 - Florida Sentinel 8-16-19

News From Around The Nation
Baton Rouge African American Museum Vandalized A Month After Founder’s Death
Jeff Bezos Is Quietly Letting His Charities Do Something Radical, Whatever They Want
When starting Amazon more than two decades ago, Jeff Bezos decided to build a reputation as an aggressive micromanager.
When starting the Day One Families Fund, his new bil- lion-dollar charity, Bezos de- cided to try something remarkably different.
Just after he became the world’s richest man one year ago, Bezos, who had until then been conspicuously ab- sent from the world of serious charitable giving, announced that he would give $2 billion to bolster homelessness serv- ices and early childhood edu- cation in the U. S. He quickly sent $100 million to two dozen well-regarded nonprof- its working to provide shelter to homeless families across the country.
And since then, he has done something that even the nonprofits receiving his mil-
JEFF BEZOS
lions remark is highly un- usual: He has given them life- changing money with virtually no restrictions, formal vet- ting, or oversight, according to Recode’s interviews with eight of those funded by him and others familiar with his donations.
Funders of Bezos’s stature typically cast an open call for proposals, spending months poring over applications from nonprofits and sometimes in- sisting on site visits, inter- views, and reams of financial data. Bezos’s team instead quietly cold-called the non- profits he was already inter- ested in backing, asked them for a few 500-word answers, and then wired them millions of dollars in cash or Amazon shares within about six weeks of making initial contact.
Funders require nonprof- its to fill out reports as often as every quarter, outlining the recipients progress on the funder’s own favorite dozen- plus metrics. Bezos does re- quire an annual report, but he doesn’t even send a rubric; nonprofits can effectively cre- ate their own accountability and send him whatever type of update they want.
Shown in the photograph are images from the African Amer- ican museum in Baton, Rouge.
Baton Rouge’s African American history museum was found vandalized on Monday —exactly one month after its 75-year-old founder, Sadie Roberts-Joseph, was mur- dered.
Police were investigating the damage, including shattered windows and benches that were flipped over at the Louisiana institution, The Ad- vocate reported.
Images posted on Facebook also show a wrecked outdoor garden and chairs and other furniture pushed over or bro- ken.
It’s unclear when exactly the Odell S. Williams African- American Museum, which is closed on Mondays, was trashed.
The institution’s founder was also a community activist who reamed up with local cops in anti-violence initiatives.
She was found suffocated in the trunk of her car last month.
One of her tenants, 38-year- old sex offender Ronn Jer- maine Bell, who owed Roberts-Joseph about $1,200 in unpaid rent, was ar- rested for her murder.
The Murder Capital For Blacks? It’s Not Chicago
New York, Los Angeles, or even oft-maligned Chicago.
No. This infamous honor goes to Middle America, specif- ically Missouri.
According to the Kansas City Star, a study by the Vio- lence Policy Center has found Missouri to have the highest rate of black homicide victims in the nation.
And the horrifying designa- tion isn’t new. The state has been No. 1 on this sorrowful list for most of the decade, the news site reports.
But in light of last week’s mass shootings in Ohio and Texas, the reason behind Mis- souri’s shame, according to ex- perts, will probably come as no surprise: lax gun laws.
“If you want to hunt an ani- mal in Missouri, you must at-
MISSOURI
tend a hunter’s safety educa- tion course and obtain a li- cense,” Kansas City Police Chief Rick Smith wrote in a blog post, the Star reports. “But recent state legislation has removed any requirements on carrying or using a gun around people.”
Hackers Were Told To Break Into U. S. Voting Machines, They Didn’t Have Much Trouble
LAS VEGAS — As Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) toured the Voting Village on Friday at Def Con, the world’s hacker conference extraordinaire, a roomful of hackers applied their skills to voting equip- ment in an enthusiastic effort to comply with the instruc- tions they had been given: “Please break things.”
Armed with lock-pick kits to crack into locked hardware, Ethernet cables and inquiring minds, they had come for a rare chance to interrogate the machines that conduct U. S. democracy. By laying siege to electronic poll books and bal- lot printers, the friendly hack- ers aimed to expose weaknesses that could be ex- ploited by less friendly hands looking to interfere in elec- tions.
Wyden nodded along as Harri Hursti, the founder of Nordic Innovation Labs and one of the event’s organizers, explained that the almost all of the machines in the room
were still used in elections across the United States, de- spite having well-known vul- nerabilities that have been more or less ignored by the companies that sell them. Many had Internet connec- tions, Hursti said, a weak- ness savvy attackers could abuse in several ways.
Wyden shook his head in disbelief.
“We need paper ballots, guys," Wyden said.
After Wyden walked away, a few hackers ex- changed confused expressions before figuring out who he was.
“I wasn’t expecting to see any senators here,” one said with a laugh.
In the three years since its inception, Def Con’s Voting Village — and the conference at large — has become a desti- nation not only for hackers but also for lawmakers and members of the intelligence community trying to under- stand the flaws in the election system that allowed Russian hackers to intervene in the 2016 election and that could be exploited again in 2020.
This year’s programming involved hacking voting equipment as well as panels with election officials and se- curity experts, a demonstra- tion of a $10 million experimental voting system from the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, and a “part speed- dating, part group therapy" session where state and local election officials gathered with hackers to hash out chal- lenges of securing elections.
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