Ghana international Majeed Waris is 'looking ahead' following the dramatic collapse of his move to Spanish club Alaves, according to the striker's agent.
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Intro Video
Monday, September 9, 2019
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Angela Bassett preaches about the power of purpose for epic Black Girls Rock speech
In all her fabulousness, ageless actress Angela Bassett stood on the Black Girls Rock stage and accepted the Icon Award and served up a heartfelt lesson and powerful speech about what it means to walk in your purpose.
—Ageless beauty Angela Bassett admits she’s gotten a ‘little bit’ of Botox—
On Sunday, BET aired the BGR ceremony, created by DJ Beverly Bond, and gives voice to the excellence Black women share with the world across the disciplines of music, entertainment, education and more.
Bassett was the recipient of the Icon Award, and shared the ups and especially the downs she experienced despite attaining critical acclaim for tackling roles like playing Tina Turner in What’s Love Got to Do With It. Still, Bassett said her phone stopped ringing and she had to dig deep and walk in her purpose. Through it all she said she maintained her integrity and refused to compromise on that.
“My purpose as a Black woman, as an actress, has always been to portray excellence on the screen, to be proud, unapologetic and without regret,” the Black Panther actress said.
“It hasn’t always been easy, and there have been tough times, days when the phone didn’t ring, even after ‘What’s Love Got to Do With It.’ As well as moments of uncertainty and doubt,” she said. “But what women like my mother, Betty Jane, and my Aunt Golden taught me was that there will be times when you seem to face insurmountable obstacles but that’s when you dig deep into your soul with confidence and fortitude.”
“We have much work to do and, together, we are unstoppable,” she said. “Always remember that our voices, the very power that we hold individually, and all of us collectively, it does matter. Now is not the time to be silent. Find your purpose, pursue it relentlessly, passionately and loudly. Be persistent and win.”
.@ImAngelaBassett gives her acceptance speech at #BlackGirlsRock! pic.twitter.com/MeTeY7cPnA
— BET (@BET) September 9, 2019
Basset, who was introduced by Oscar winning actress Regina King, gave thanks to her family for “giving me the opportunity and the space to be a Black girl who rocks.”
She also gave a nod to Bond, BET and trailblazing women in history, Rosa Parks, Betty Shabazz, Coretta Scott King and yes, Tina Turner.
—Angela Bassett is awesome in Netflix’s touching comedy ‘Otherhood’—
Bassett then took it there when she preached about the nasty rhetoric, typical of Trump and white supremacists, of being told to go back to where you came from.
“So when you’re told you’re not good enough, you tell them, not only am I good enough, I’m more than good enough,” she said. “When they say send her back home, you tell them I am home. I am the foundation of what you call home. When they tell you that you’re angry or nasty, you tell them that they’re mistaken. This is me. This is me being resolute and standing firmly in my truth. And when they say you’re not beautiful, you tell them that you are the descendant of royalty.”
“We have much work to do and, together, we are unstoppable,” she said. “Always remember that our voices, the very power that we hold individually, and all of us collectively, it does matter. Now is not the time to be silent. Find your purpose, pursue it relentlessly, passionately and loudly. Be persistent and win.”
The post Angela Bassett preaches about the power of purpose for epic Black Girls Rock speech appeared first on theGrio.
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Syracuse welcomes Central Park 5 member to coveted campus
Through the eyes of a 14-year-old with a love of basketball and the trumpet in 1989, Syracuse University had everything Kevin Richardson would ever want in a college: Big East idols like Dwayne “Pearl” Washington and Derrick Coleman, along with the spirited band that played at games.
“All of my friends, we all had different teams and mine was Syracuse,” Richardson says today, 30 years removed from those days as a youngster in New York City. “I just had a love for Syracuse.”
Any dreams he had of attending would come to a sudden end that year, when he and four friends were convicted of a rape in Central Park they never committed. As one of the “Central Park Five,” Richardson spent his high school and would-be college years in prison.
To this day, as a 44-year-old father of two, he’s never set foot on the Syracuse campus.
He aims to change that this weekend when he accepts the university’s invitation to visit and lend his name to a scholarship.
A separate student-led effort is pushing for an honorary degree.
“My main goal is just to visit the campus. Anything that happens beyond that is like a bonus,” Richardson said by phone before the visit. “I’m just thrilled just to be connected to the university 30 years later.”
The connection grew out of the recent four-part Netflix series “When They See Us” and a related interview with Oprah Winfrey, where Richardson talked about his dream of playing trumpet in the Syracuse University band.
The series introduced the saga of the Central Park Five to a new generation of justice-minded young people, many of whom weren’t born when it was playing out, Richardson said. Details of the questionable police practices that led to the convictions of Richardson, Antron McCray, Yusef Salaam, Raymond Santana and Korey Wise, all black and Latino teenagers, in the rape of a white woman still resonate today, he said.
The five were exonerated after spending between five and 13 years in prison.
“Now, when they see ‘When they See Us,’ it becomes fresh to them, the story. The story has been around for 30 years, and even before that, and the same thing is still happening,” Richardson said. “So I think kids now are very eager to do something.”
Student Jalen Nash’s petition to award an honorary degree had nearly 6,000 signatures ahead of Richardson’s visit.
“While this dream could never be fulfilled due to circumstance, it is never too late to do the right thing,” Nash wrote.
In the meantime, while on campus with his wife, Johansy, Sunday and Monday, Richardson will meet with beneficiaries of the Our Time Has Come Scholarship program, which will name one of its scholarships for him. He will also talk with student athletes and musicians — though he says it’s been too long since he’s played to join them on trumpet this visit.
“When I was incarcerated, I always thought about what could have happened, so it will be bittersweet because I know that, wow, this could have been me when I was younger on campus,” he said. “But just to be there will surpass the negative things that happened to me in my childhood.”
The post Syracuse welcomes Central Park 5 member to coveted campus appeared first on theGrio.
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MIT named No. 3 university by U.S. News for 2020
For a second year in a row, U.S. News and World Report has placed MIT third in its annual rankings of the nation’s best colleges and universities, which were announced today. Columbia University and Yale University also share the No. 3 ranking.
MIT’s engineering program continues to top the magazine’s list of undergraduate engineering programs at a doctoral institution. The Institute also placed first in six out of 12 engineering disciplines. No other institution is No. 1 in more than two disciplines.
MIT also remains the No. 2 undergraduate business program. Among business subfields, MIT is ranked No. 1 in two specialties.
In the overall institutional rankings, U.S. News placed Princeton University in the No. 1 spot, followed by Harvard University.
MIT ranks as the third most innovative university in the nation, according to the U.S. News peer assessment survey of top academics. And it’s fourth on the magazine’s list of national universities that offer students the best value, based on the school’s ranking and the net cost of attendance for a student who received the average level of need-based financial aid, and other variables.
MIT placed first in six engineering specialties: aerospace/aeronautical/astronautical engineering; chemical engineering; computer engineering; electrical/electronic/communication engineering; materials engineering; and mechanical engineering. It placed second in biomedical engineering.
Other schools in the top five overall for undergraduate engineering programs are Stanford University, University of California at Berkeley, Caltech, and Georgia Tech.
Among undergraduate business specialties, the MIT Sloan School of Management leads in production/operations management and in quantitative analysis/methods. It ranks second in entrepreneurship and in management information systems.
The No. 1-ranked undergraduate business program overall is at the University of Pennsylvania; other schools ranking in the top five include Berkeley, the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, New York University, Carnegie Mellon University, and the University of Texas at Austin.
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Letter from Africa: 'I gave up on catching the train in Ethiopia'
New York man wrongfully convicted of murder is finally free
It took 24 years, but Sundhe Moses is finally free.
Moses was just 19 years old when he was forced into confessing to a crime that he never committed. At the time, the teenager said Louis Scarcella, a New York police detective who has had more than a dozen cases connected to him that were later overturned, beat him until he confessed to the Brooklyn drive-by shooting that claimed the life of a young girl in August 1995.
READ MORE: She’s Free! Cyntoia Brown has been released from prison after serving 15 years
Moses, who was in community college at the time and the father of an 8-month-old boy, was convicted and sentenced to 15 years to life in prison, according to ABC News.
Although Moses was exonerated for the murder of four-year-old Shamone Johnson last year, he still had a felony on his record due to an additional sentence of promoting prison contraband. He received the charge and conviction after he was found to have a marijuana cigarette that contained traces of heroin while serving time for the murder.
“I was going back and forth to court fighting a case, again. Riding back and forth from prison to court, shackled, I can’t describe it,” Moses told ABC News about the additional charge. “I just copped out … it’s not like I knew when I was going home.”
On Friday, prosecutors finally dropped the drug charge under the argument that had Moses not been wrongfully convicted for the young girl’s murder, he would not have been in prison to accrue a new charge.
“The system encountered someone who has been exonerated for a charge, but while in prison for a case they were wrongfully in prison for, they picked up another conviction,” Moses told ABC News. “There wasn’t any case law similar to give a judge direction on how the case should be litigated.”
Moses’ lawyers Kuby and Rhiya Trivedi filed a motion early this year to have Moses’ guilty plea in the promoting prison contraband case thrown out.
“This situation presents the extremely rare case in which the Court cannot say the defendant would have entered a guilty plea to the crime of attempted promoting prison contraband in the first degree had it not been for the conviction on the murder charge,” wrote Clinton County Court Judge Keith M. Bruno in his written decision granting the motion.
Persistent prosecutors instead asked Moses if he would plead guilty to a misdemeanor
instead of a felony, Kuby told ABC News on Friday.
READ MORE: A$AP Rocky finally freed from Swedish prison…for now
“I wasn’t comfortable with that. What if I had a dream to get into politics tomorrow? A
misdemeanor or not, I don’t need that on my record,” Moses told the news outlet.
“As a Black person they think it’s OK to have that on your record. They don’t see it as you shouldn’t have it at all,” Moses explained to ABC News. “They looked at it as ‘Just take it, you’re out, you’re free,’ but I looked at it from a whole other perspective.”
On Friday, Clinton County prosecutors dropped the drug charge “in the interest of justice,” according to Kuby.
The post New York man wrongfully convicted of murder is finally free appeared first on theGrio.
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