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National
Black Legislators In Maryland Pushing For Diversity In Billion $ Marijuana Industry
WAR IN THE STREETS: Girls, 11 And 12 Among 27 Shot In Chicago Over Weekend
CHICAGO, IL —- Gun vio- lence in Chicago continues to outpace last year as 27 peo- ple, including two young girls, were shot this weekend.
The Chicago Tribune re- ports that the girls, 11 and 12, remained in critical condition and on life support Monday after being shot in separate South Side attacks that were 30 minutes and 4 miles apart on Saturday night.
According to data kept by the Tribune, nine children aged 14 or younger have been shot this year: a 3-year-old boy, a 5-year-old girl, an 11- year-old girl, a boy and girl both 12, a 13-year-old boy, a 14-year-old girl and two 14- year-old boys, and the shoot- ings have occurred mostly in police districts long known for violence.
Takiya Holmes, 11, was sitting in a parked car with family members when she
Takiya Holmes and Kanari Gentry Bowers.
was hit in the head by a stray bullet around 8 p.m. on Sat- urday night.
Doctors have told Holmes’ relatives that the prognosis is “not good.”
A half-hour after the Holmes shooting, 12-year- old Kanari Gentry Bow- ers was shot in the head while playing with friends at Henderson Elementary
School in the West Engle- wood neighborhood.
Bowers remains on life support and has not re- sponded to family members. Her family told reporters that on at least three occasions paramedics and hospital staff were unable to detect her heartbeat.
There is no one in custody in either shooting.
Yale Changes Residential College Named For White Supremacist After Criticism
Yale President Peter Sa- lovey announced that the university would rename Cal- houn College to honor one of Yale’s most distinguished graduates, Grace Murray Hopper.
Salovey made the decision with the university’s board of trustees — the Yale Corpora- tion — at its most recent meeting. “The decision to change a college’s name is not one we take lightly, but John C. Calhoun’s legacy as a white supremacist and a national leader who passion- ately promoted slavery as a ‘positive good’ fundamentally conflicts with Yale’s mission and values,” Salovey said.
This decision overrides Sa- lovey’s announcement in April 2016 that the name of Calhoun College would re- main. “At that time, as now, I was committed to con- fronting, not erasing, our his- tory.
Calhoun is notorious in American history for his ef- fectiveness in protecting slav- ery and promoting bigoted ideas about Black people in the era prior to the Civil War.
Yale is not alone in chang-
Yale’s Calhoun College will be changed to Grace Hopper College.
ing names or symbols that honor people whose bigotry was once tolerated, but is no longer. Harvard University's law school dropped a seal that was the family seal of Isaac Royall, Jr., who was honored as a major early donor to the law school, but was also involved with the slave trade in the 18th cen- tury.
Centre College recently changed the name of McReynolds Hall to the building's street address, fol- lowing a request by students who did research on James Clark McReynolds, a Supreme Court justice from 1914 to 1941 who is consid- ered among the more bigoted justices of his era.
McReynolds frequently left the bench if a female or Black lawyer argued before the Supreme Court. He was also known as an anti- Semite, refusing to talk to Louis Brandeis for three years following Brandeis's appointment to the high court because Brandeis was Jewish.
FYI: Geraldo Rivera, former talk show host, cur- rent Fox News contributor, and most importantly, the man who didn’t find anything in Al Capone’s vault, de- cided to resign from his vol- untary position at Yale University after the school decided to change the name of a residential college that honored a slavery supporter.
ANNAPOLIS, MD --- The leaders of the Legislative Black Caucus of Maryland are strongly pushing for more di- versity within the legal mari- juana industry.
Marijuana has contributed to the mass incarceration of African-Americans and of course, now that is being legal- ized nationwide, there are few to no Black faces within the realm of the billion dollar in- dustry.
These Black leaders in Mary- land have introduced bills that will ultimately "change the membership of the 16-person Maryland Medical Cannabis Commission to better reflect the diversity of the state, while requiring the agency to rescore applications for cultivation li- censes and give extra weight to Black-owned businesses," ac-
cording to The Washington Post.
Despite provisions in 2014 that called for more diversity among growers, most opera- tions are still led by white exec- utives.
While the details of the legis- lation are still being drafted, it's said to kill the commission out- right and recreate it as a divi- sion of the state health department.
The attorney general's office has responded to the matter saying, "State officials must demonstrate racial disparities in the medical marijuana in- dustry or similar industries be- fore offering racial preferences in licensing. The cannabis com- mission is hiring a consultant to advise on whether to con- duct such a study," according to The Washington Post.
Four Charged In Facebook Live ‘Torture’ Of Disabled Man Plead ‘Not Guilty’
Jordan Hill, Tanishia Covington, Tesfaye Cooper and Brittany Covington.
CHICAGO, IL — The four people accused of torturing a white, mentally disabled man in an attack that was streamed to Facebook Live, drawing out- rage across the nation, pleaded not guilty at their arraignment before a Cook County, Ill., judge, the Chicago Sun Times reports.
All the defendants’ assistant public defenders entered the pleas on behalf of their clients. Their next court date will be March 1.
Tanishia Covington, 24, Brittany Covington, 18, Jordan Hill, 18, and Tesfaye Cooper, 18, are accused of holding a schizophrenic white man captive in a West Side apartment last month, forcing him to drink toilet water and cutting his scalp with a knife while making him proclaim, “I love black people.”
While the man was being tor- tured during the several-hour ordeal, one of his tormentors allegedly said on video: “I don’t give a f— if he is schizo- phrenic.”
Someone in the apartment also said, “F— Trump” and “F— white people” and Hill, a classmate of the victim, called up the man’s mother and asked for $300 ransom for his safe return, prosecutors said.
Hill, who is a classmate of the victim, called the man’s mother and asked for $300 ransom for his safe return, prosecutors say.
The attack drew outrage across the city and the country, even prompting a response from then-President Barack Obama.
Last month, Amy Campan- elli, the Cook County public defender, criticized pretrial news coverage of the case.
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