Page 20 - Florida Sentinel 5-30-17

National
Black Lives Matter Founders Selected As 2017 Peace Prize Recipients
Black Lives Matter founders Opal Tometi, Patrisse Marie Cul- lors, Alicia Garza. The movement has been awarded the Sydney peace prize.
Murderer Of The Charleston 9 Pleads For Mercy
Dylan Roof is in a federal prison in Indiana.
TERRE HAUTE, IN —- He showed no mercy when gun- ning down nine black wor- shippers in June 2015, but white supremacist Dylann Roof is now asking a court for mercy in his punishment for the horrific hate crime.
On last Tuesday, Roof asked the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to overturn his conviction and death sen- tence for the racist attack at Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, S.C.
The filing by Roof’s attor- neys was reportedly an ex- pected move in what will likely be years of appeals in his fed- eral case. Earlier this month, the federal judge who presided over Roof’s trial rejected his first appeal, ruling that the conviction and death sentence should stand.
The 23-year-old was sen- tenced to death earlier this year.
In his initial appeal, Roof argued that his crime didn’t fit the definition of interstate commerce needed to make a federal case because he bought the gun and bullets in South Carolina and did not travel out-of-state to the church.
But U.S. District Judge Richard Gergel ruled that Roof had used a telephone to call the church, GPS to find it and that the bullets and gun were manufactured in a differ- ent state.
Roof remains in custody on federal death row in Terre Haute, Indiana.
Bowie State Student Fatally Stabbed By White Supremacist Honored During Graduation
Bowie State senior, Richard Collins, III was murdered by a U.- Md student, who is a suspected white supremacist. Collins was honored at his graduation ceremony.
SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA —- The human rights movement Black Lives Matter has won this year’s Sydney peace prize, according to the Guardian.
Syndey University in Aus- tralia has offered the award since 1998; similar to the Nobel Peace Prize, the Australian prize is awarded to those who promote human rights using nonviolence as a means of combating injustice. Until now, the prize has only gone to an individual peacemaker; the movement's trio will be the first
group to receive the award. Black Lives Matter – which will be honored in Sydney, Aus- tralia in November – was founded by Patrisse Cullors, Alicia Garza and Opal Tometi after the 2013 acquit- tal of George Zimmerman, who had been accused of mur-
dering Trayvon Martin.
The election of Donald Trump as president has fur- ther escalated their mission, and recently, the group helped bailout thirty black mothers
from jail for Mother’s Day.
COLLEGE PARK, MD —- Richard Collins, III was on the precipice of graduation. He had been commissioned as a second lieutenant in the U.S. Army. He was a son, a friend, and an American soldier, but to Sean Urbanski, a member of the “Alt-Reich: Nation”—a racist Facebook group, he was nothing more than a disposable Black body. On May 20th at 3am, Urbanski approached, stabbed and killed Collins.
Collins was honored last Tuesday at the commencement ceremony where he would have walked across the stage.
The gown of Richard Collins, III was draped over a chair in the front row, and his family accepted his business
administration degree.
The historically black
school's commencement was held in a sports arena at the nearby College Park campus of the University of Maryland, where Collins was killed early Saturday.
Moments after the stabbing, witnesses directed officers to a white Maryland student sitting nearby with a knife in his pocket, police said.
Bowie State President Mickey Burnim asked grad- uates to remember Collins.
"Let us pause now in a mo- ment of silence and contempla- tion of what each of us might do to promote greater peace, harmony and love that seems to be so lacking in our country and our world today," he said.
Alabama Governor Signs Bill To Restore Felons’ Voting Rights
Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey has signed a bill restoring thou- sands of Alabama felons’ right to vote.
Voting rights were granted to some felons after the Definition of Moral Turpitude Act was ap- proved.
Before the bill was signed, only five felonies were consid- ered not to be crimes of moral turpitude, but under the new bill, fewer than 50 specific “felonies that involve moral turpitude” will disqualify a per-
Police Chief Placed On Leave
After Road Rage Led Him To
Kay Ivey, Gov. Of Alabama
son from exercising his or her right to vote, according to ThinkProgress.
Arrest Former Pageant Queen
Home Depot Co-Founder Supports
TEXAS —- A Hunt County po- lice chief has been placed on leave after the winner of the 2016 Miss Black Texas pageant ac- cused him of having her arrested after a road-rage incident she said he instigated.
Carmen Ponder, a 23-year- old pre-law student at Texas A&M University-Commerce, said she was arrested and charged with evading arrest Saturday after avoiding Chief Kerry Crews' swerving truck on the road.
Crews could not be reached for comment Thursday, but the chief said that his attorneys ad- vised him not to speak at this time.
A news release from the City of Commerce obtained by a news station says many of the state- ments made about the incident do not line up with the statement given by Crews, who has been placed on routine administrative leave while a third party investi- gation is conducted.
The release says that Crews got into a dispute after he was approached by a motorist, and that the other motorist "failed to comply with [Crews'] requests" and was subsequently arrested
Trump’s Food Stamps Cut - ‘They Are
Being Used To Buy Drugs’
NEW YORK —- Imagine going up to a drug dealer and asking him to swipe your EBT card so you can buy some edi- bles. That’s exactly what Home Depot’s co-founder, Ken Lan- gone, thinks is happening when it comes to how food stamp recipients use their ben- efits.
During an appearance on
Fox News’ Your World With Neil Cavuto on last Wednes- day, Langone waxed on about how Donald Trump’s budget cuts are rightfully targeting the food stamp program and how he feels that, even though it’s been proved otherwise, food stamp fraud is rampant.
“How do we make sure that food stamps are being used for what they’re called, food?” Langone asked. “And this, to me, is part of the problem.”
Langone went on to prove
Ken Langone, one of the founders of Home Depot is all for cutting the food stamp pro- gram.
how idiotic he and his ilk are as he tried to explain his food- stamp-fraud rationale.
“Hell, people use food stamps to buy marijuana—that’s ille- gal—or cocaine, or whatever the hell else people use to get high,” he said. “How do we make sure that we don’t take a system that is well-intentioned that becomes badly abused?”
The chief of police arrested Carmen Ponder in a road rage incident.
for "evading arrest or detention.” But Ponder gave a different account in a statement she
shared on Twitter.
She said she was driving to a
Wal-Mart in Commerce on Sat- urday when she was cut off by a black truck that was driving er- ratically.
After watching the truck drift in and out of the lane and make several abrupt stops, she said, she thought it might be a drunken driver, so she signaled and went around the truck before turning into the store's parking lot.
PAGE 20 FLORIDA SENTINEL BULLETIN PUBLISHED EVERY TUESDAY AND FRIDAY TUESDAY, MAY 30, 2017