COMMENTARY: AFRICAN AMERICAN SCIENTISTS AND INVENTORS
by Black Kos Editor, Sephius1
Gerald Anderson "Jerry" Lawson (December 1, 1940 – April 9, 2011) was an American electronic engineer, and one of the few African-American engineers in the industry at that time. He is known for his work in designing the Fairchild Channel F video game console as well as inventing the video game cartridge.
Lawson was born in Queens, New York City on December 1, 1940. His father Blanton was a longshoreman with an interest in science, while his mother Mannings worked for the city, and also served on the PTA for the local school and made sure that he received a good education. Both encouraged his interests in scientific hobbies, including ham radio and chemistry. Lawson said that his first-grade teacher helped him encourage his path to be someone influential similar to George Washington Carver. While in high school, he earned money by repairing television sets. He attended both Queens College and City College of New York, but did not complete a degree at either.
In 1970, he joined Fairchild Semiconductor in San Francisco as an applications engineering consultant within their sales division. While there, he created the early arcade game Demolition Derby out of his garage. In the mid-1970s, Lawson was made Chief Hardware Engineer and director of engineering and marketing for Fairchild's video game division. There, he led the development of the Fairchild Channel F console, released in 1976 and specifically designed to use swappable game cartridges. At the time, most game systems had the game programming stored on ROM storage soldered onto the game hardware, which could not be removed. Lawson and his team figured out how to move the ROM to a cartridge that could be inserted and removed from a console unit repeatedly, and without electrically shocking the user. This would allow users to buy into a library of games, and provided a new revenue stream for the console manufacturers through sales of these games. The Channel F was not a commercially successful product, but the cartridge approach was picked up by other console manufacturers, popularized with the Atari 2600 released in 1977......Read More
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News round up by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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A San Francisco mother has filed a lawsuit alleging that the city kept her teenage son locked in a cell for days even though a judge determined that there was no reason that the boy should have been arrested in the first place and ordered his release.
On June 29, 2017, Tureko Straughter’s 15-year-old son was booked into a juvenile detention center after being arrested for a nonviolent property crime, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. The same day, at 2 p.m., San Francisco Superior Court Judge Braden Woods found “there was not sufficient probable cause” for the teen’s arrest. So Woods released the child to his mother.
But according to court documents, one probation detention officer, Samuel Nwigwe, concluded that the child had given officers a fake name. Nwigwe assumed that the boy somehow changed his criminal record to reflect that he had no prior arrest history.
The officer found it suspicious that another child had the same birth date, last name and address as the boy in custody. So Nwigwe decided to keep the juvenile mastermind locked up, defying the judge’s order to set the teenager free.
It turns out that Tureko Straugter has twins.
Straughter went to see her son for three tightly supervised 45-minute visits during his detention. The teen slept in a locked cell for four days before he was granted release by Woods during another hearing July 3.
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How one American city chose to tackle crime, combat racism, and reckon with the legacy of police brutality. The New Republic: Peace Officers
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On a spring morning last year, in the Keith Creek neighborhood of Rockford, Illinois, Eric Thurmond stopped his patrol car on a street shrouded by trees and veined with cracks. The homes on the block were modest and weathered, many of them low-end rentals that had been chopped up into multiple units. The surrounding streets were cratered with foreclosures and vacant properties. Thurmond, a rookie on the Rockford police force, had been shown the statistics documenting the neighborhood’s decline—burglaries, shootings, home invasions. It was not a desirable place to live. But he would be moving there in less than two weeks. He was part of Rockford’s newest experiment in policing—a program designed to help cops put down roots in high-crime sections of the city. The police department had procured a house for him. He would be living there rent-free for a minimum of three years, with his only mission to serve the community—to be a good neighbor.
Thurmond got out of his cruiser to inspect his new home, a brick and wood-paneled bungalow with peeling paint above the brim of a beveled awning. As he stood on the front steps, he noticed a neighbor peeking at him from behind makeshift curtains. The neighbor—a scruffy-bearded white man in jeans and a T-shirt—came outside to meet him. He looked concerned. Thurmond is 25 years old, built squat and burly like a washing machine, with a laid-back manner and a round, cherubic face. Realizing how the arrival of a uniformed officer must look, he assured the man that there was nothing to worry about. No crime had been committed. He wasn’t responding to a call for service, just checking out the house prior to his move. He described the police residency program, extending a hand as he introduced himself.
“You going to have cameras up?” the man asked, his eyes scanning the front of Thurmond’s bungalow.
“Yeah, if anything happens in the neighborhood, I’m going to be able to see what’s going on.” To Thurmond, it sounded assuring. The man nodded and turned away.
A few days later, when Thurmond returned to measure the inside of the bungalow for furniture, his neighbor was gone. The rental was trashed, the family leaving behind chairs and garbage bags stuffed with clothes. Other people on the block told Thurmond that the guy had been selling drugs. Cars used to pull up at the house at all hours of the night, they said, and after an exchange, they sped off. The landlord knew about the drug deals, but he said he’d been unable to carry out an eviction. One woman mentioned her repeated calls to 911, saying the police had done nothing. When Thurmond related all of this to his superiors, they were thrilled. He hadn’t even moved in his belongings and he had already made the neighborhood safer.
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More than 50,000 people dead. More than 4 million displaced. A quarter of a million children severely malnourished and at imminent risk of death.
That’s what five years of horrific civil war have done to South Sudan, a country that is only seven years old. Now, the men at the center of the carnage are about to meet face to face for the first time in two years to try to broker a peace deal.
South Sudan’s civil war broke out in late 2013 when troops loyal to then-Vice President Riek Machar clashed with forces loyal to President Salva Kiir.
The conflict quickly escalated. Because the two men represented rival ethnic groups with longstanding tensions and a history of violence, the political fight quickly morphed into an all-out ethnic conflict, with people loyal to both sides taking up arms and slaughtering each other. More than 1,000 people were killed and another 100,000 were displaced in the first week of fighting alone.
Since that time, both sides have committed atrocities. In late November 2016, United Nations experts took a 10-day trip to the country. What they found was horrendous: widespread ethnic cleansing, burning villages, looming starvation, and gang rape “so prevalent that it’s become ‘normal.’”
Football players holding South Sudanese flags
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ADE AYEYEMI’S office in Lomé, the capital of Togo, is a good place to think about crossing borders. Ghana is ten minutes’ drive away. From his window the boss of Ecobank can watch trucks rumble along the seafront, some bound for Burkina Faso, a day’s journey, or Mali, perhaps another day on. At night, cargo ships twinkle offshore. From here Ecobank’s vision—“to integrate the continent”, Mr Ayeyemi says—is clear. Whether it will be profitable is less obvious.
Ecobank was founded in 1985 by business leaders with backing from the Economic Community of West African States, a regional bloc. It has branches in 33 countries, more than any other African bank (see chart). It is not alone in its ambitions. Nigeria’s United Bank for Africa (UBA) wants to make half its profits elsewhere in the continent by 2022. South Africa’s Standard Bank recently opened in Ivory Coast, its 20th African country. Moroccan banks are trekking across the Sahara.
African bankers have long preached some version of what Tony Elumelu, UBA’s chairman, calls “Africapitalism”: the idea that far-sighted, home-grown businesses can drive development. In Nigeria banking reform in 2005 set off a wave of consolidation. The survivors were heftier and more profitable, with capital to invest abroad. Kenyan banks have used their edge in innovation, such as mobile banking, to push into neighbouring markets.
Regional banks are now filling gaps left by their European and American rivals, which are retreating from a continent they once dominated. Barclays sold a majority stake in its African business last year. Other global giants have also reduced their exposure to African markets, which they judge too small and too risky in an era of tightened regulation. African banks work closer to the ground. “Banking is a relationship game,” says Ugochukwu Nwaghodoh, chief financial officer of UBA. “We have local knowledge.”
The pan-African vision often clashes with the reality of a fragmented continent. Africa’s regional banks earn lower returns and grow more slowly than domestic rivals, calculate consultants at McKinsey. One problem is the wide diversity of regulations and markets. Another is that banks are too small outside their core markets to grow organically, says Olamipo Ogunsanya, an analyst at Renaissance Capital. Some have made risky acquisitions, inheriting loan books with hidden troubles. Most banks, she argues, would do better to focus on a few key countries.
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SIERRA LEONE is one of the world’s poorest countries. From 1991 to 2002, it suffered a devastating civil war that claimed 70,000 lives and wrecked the health system. What little remained of it was gutted by an Ebola outbreak in 2014, which killed lots of doctors and nurses. As a result, the country has only some 400 doctors to treat its 7m people. Corruption also makes the nation sicker. Most people have to pay bribes to doctors and nurses for basic treatments.
Nonetheless, Sierra Leone is doing better at beating back neglected tropical diseases (NTDs) than almost anywhere else in Africa. Fifteen years ago as much as half the population was infected with the worm that causes onchocerciasis, or river blindness. Many villagers in the south-east used to think it was perfectly normal for people to go blind after 30, says Mary Hodges, from Helen Keller International, a charity that works on blindness and malnutrition. Yet by 2017 only 2% of people carried the worm, and there had been no new cases recorded of people going blind from onchocerciasis in a decade. Elimination is expected by about 2022.
There are several reasons why Sierra Leone has pulled off this remarkable feat. Paradoxically, one is the extraordinarily high prevalence of NTDs. Because the entire population was exposed to at least one NTD, the government made it a priority early on, says Dr Joseph Koroma, who managed its programme. And instead of dealing with these diseases separately, Sierra Leone tackles them all at once. Each year it provides drugs for four major diseases to everyone at risk. Treating people at roughly the same time reduces the chances of them reinfecting one another. It also saves money because health workers can visit each village only once instead of several times a year.
Ending the stigma is also important. Radio programmes where panels of experts, victims and local leaders answer calls from listeners about their concerns have helped to break down misconceptions and encourage people to get treatment. It is no good just lecturing villagers about how river blindness is caused by the black fly when they think it is witchcraft, says Dr Hodges.
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Activists in Mississippi ― the only U.S. state to still incorporate the so-called Confederate battle emblem into its state flag ― burned the controversial banner in front of the governor’s mansion on Monday.
“This flag needs to burn,” said organizer Danyelle Holmes, of Jackson, according to The Associated Press. “We’re burning the hate out of their hearts. We’re burning the hate out of our state.”
Approximately 30 demonstrators burned the Confederate battle flag and the Mississippi state flag to chants of “No hate in our state,” the Clarion-Ledger reported.
The protest was held in support of the Poor People’s Campaign, a national call for “moral revival,” its organizers said.
“People are hurting in Mississippi and that’s why they burned replicas of the state and Confederate flags,” the organization said in a statement to HuffPost. “We’re building a fusions movement across the state and around the country to confront systemic racism and lift people out of poverty.”
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