Saturday, January 11

Journalism

The Women of Color Out to Reclaim Marijuana Culture
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Journalism

The Women of Color Out to Reclaim Marijuana Culture

As marijuana gains some measure of mainstream acceptance as a medical and recreational drug, its industry is becoming more commercialized. And many users, especially in communities of color, want to reclaim its counter-culture significance. The group Women.Weed.Wifi. has started a movement to do just that. The women-led Seattle-based art collective celebrates the stories, lives, and creative endeavors of women of color, using cannabis as a mechanism to explore identity, community, and healing. One in eight American adults say they smoke marijuana. One in eight American adults say they smoke marijuana, according to a 2016 Gallup poll, and as one of the fastest growing markets in the country, the industry is projected to be worth over $21 billion by 2021. Washington and Colorado were the...
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Muslim Man Marries Three Women at Once Because He Couldn’t Afford Three Separate Weddings
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Muslim Man Marries Three Women at Once Because He Couldn’t Afford Three Separate Weddings

Mohammed Ssemanda, a 50-year-old Muslim man from Uganda, made news headlines all over Africa last month, when he married three women in a single ceremony, because he couldn’t afford to marry them separately. Ssemanda, a food vendor from the town of Katabi, in Uganda’s Wakiso district, caused quite a shock when he showed up at the local parish with three women, all wearing white wedding gowns. He told reporters on the scene that his wives all know that he isn’t doing very well financially, but they all agreed to marry him out of love. The 50-year-old added that the women aren’t jealous of each other and know that he will work very hard to support them. Photo: Watchdog Uganda “My wives are not jealous against each other. Good enough, each has got a home and I promise to work harder and ...
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What will the #MeToo movement mean for Cosby’s next trial?
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What will the #MeToo movement mean for Cosby’s next trial?

Jurors couldn’t agree the first time around whether to accept a woman’s story that “America’s Dad,” Bill Cosby, sexually assaulted her over a decade ago. Now he faces a retrial in less than 90 days in a vastly different cultural climate, one in which powerful men from Hollywood to the U.S. Senate are being toppled by allegations of sexual misconduct. The jury in Cosby’s case was deadlocked on charges he drugged and molested a woman in 2004, and the judge declared a mistrial in June. But that was before the revelations about movie producer Harvey Weinstein and the #MeToo movement burst into the public sphere. The shift is clearly on Cosby’s mind. He quipped to a reporter after shaking her hand Wednesday outside a Philadelphia restaurant: “Please don’t put me on MeToo.” Legal experts say ...
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Oprah denies White House ambitions even as the buzz grows louder
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Oprah denies White House ambitions even as the buzz grows louder

Minutes after giving a rousing speech at the Golden Globes Awards that promised “a new day” for women, minorities and the downtrodden, Oprah Winfrey said she has no ambitions to run for president. In a brief interview backstage at the event, Winfrey was told that “Oprah 2020” was circulating on Twitter, and asked whether she planned to run. “I don’t -- I don’t,” the 63-year-old billionaire said. The drumbeat was well underway. “She. Is. Running,” said John Podhoretz, editor of Commentary magazine. “Oprah. 2020,” said Shaun King, the Black Lives Matter activist. The host of the Golden Globes, late-night comedian Seth Meyers, jokingly urged Winfrey to run in his opening monologue, noting that President Donald Trump had reportedly decided to make his bid for the office after he was the but...
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California cities try offer help for minority, low-income marijuana entrepreneurs

Reese Benton’s life has been shaped by the war on drugs. Her mother used crack and died of an overdose when Benton was 16. Her father sold drugs and is currently in prison, on year 20 of a 25-year sentence. “I was a statistic. I was not supposed to make it,” said Benton, 41, who is from San Francisco. But she did. Today, she is a successful hairdresser, styling some of the wealthiest people in the Bay Area. She is also an entrepreneur: Last year, she opened a delivery service for medical marijuana. And now that California legalized the drug for all adults over 21, Benton, who is black, is getting assistance from the city of San Francisco through a program designed to help people whose lives were affected by a crackdown on drugs that disproportionately affected minorities get into the l...
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Ignorant Republicans Didn’t Know That No Black People Willingly Served The South To Keep Themselves Enslaved

The South continues to lie about the Civil War. They’ve done it for eons, with the most prominent lie being that, somehow, the war was not about slavery. Now, they want to put that nonsense into public schools – all under the guise of “honoring” the black people who served in the Confederate Army. There’s just one problem with that: Historians can find absolutely no record of black people willingly serving as Confederate soldiers. According to Walter Edgar, who is the head of the Institute of Southern Studies at the University of South Carolina, says of the situation: “In all my years of research, I can say I have seen no documentation of black South Carolina soldiers fighting for the Confederacy. In fact, when secession came, the state turned down free (blacks) who wanted to volunteer bec...
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Shop Here, Not There: Science Says Reducing Inequality Is Almost That Simple

New research shows that shuttling even 5 percent of consumer transactions to poorer neighborhoods can reduce income inequality by up to 80 percent. Imagine heading out to run errands at all your usual places, and your phone’s “equity app” has a better idea. Siri might say: “Buy your groceries at one of these other stores, just as close as your regular store.” Or: “There are three coffee shops within 2 miles. You haven’t tried this one before.” We already get shopping suggestions when we bring up Google Maps, especially when our smartphones are transmitting our GPS coordinates. A similar type of computation is happening behind the scenes at Facebook and Twitter, whose targeted ads can sometimes be scarily on point. But what if, instead of just boosting sales, those suggestions coming fr...
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The Elite Is Not Who You Think It Is—It Might Be You

To most, the Occupy movement is best characterized by the slogan “We are the 99 percent.” Indeed, a year before Occupy sprang to life, the top 1 percent held roughly 35 percent of the nation’s wealth, while the bottom 50 percent held about 1 percent. But the data tell a more complex story, and the bifurcated way that we define “elite” may need adjustment. As senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, Richard Reeves describes in his new book, Dream Hoarders, that while the top 1 percent overwhelmingly receives a disproportionate share of economic gains, the upper middle class is also "hoarding" resources. Families in the 80th to the 99th percentiles—or those earning at least $112,000—have made out pretty well over the past 35 years. Since 1980, incomes for the top 1 percent skyrocketed, a...
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