Kelvin “Chuck” Mattocks was at a doctor’s appointment in downtown Boston one October Friday when his boss called. Mattocks was supposed to be off, but his supervisor at the drain companysaid he needed him to finish a job in the city.
Mattocks, 53, agreed to forfeit his day off, and by lunchtime, he and co-worker Robert “Robby” Higgins, 47, were working in a 12-foot-deep trench in front of a townhouse in an upscaleneighborhood in the city’s South End. They were installing a sewer line when, suddenly, the walls of the trench collapsed.
The gunman in the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump is believed to have flown a drone around the Pennsylvania rally site ahead of time in an apparent attempt to scope out the site before the event, a law enforcement official said Saturday.
The drone has been recovered by the FBI, which is leading the investigation into last Saturday’s shooting at the rally by 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks.
Crooks fired multiple rounds from the roof of a building adjacent to the Butler Farm Show grounds, where Trump was speaking, before being fatally shot by a Secret Service counter sniper. The existence of the device and its use at some point before the shooting could help explain why Crooks knew to fire from the point.
A Jan. 6 defendant with a long history of ties to white supremacist groups — and who appeared to raise a Nazi salute atop the Capitol steps — was sentenced Friday to nearly five years in prison for his violent role in the attack.
“We fought a world war to beat back the Nazis,” said U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell as she sentenced South Carolina’s Tyler Dykes to 57 months in prison. “The defendant thinks there’s something attractive about Nazi ideology.”
Adidas has pulled images of the model Bella Hadid from adverts promoting a sports shoe first launched to coincide with the 1972 Munich Olympic Games.
The German-based sportswear company said it was “revising” its campaign after criticism from Israel over Hadid’s involvement.
The SL72 trainers, described by Adidas as a timeless classic, were promoted by Hadid, an American whose family has its roots in Palestine.
The model, who previously drew the ire of the Israeli government for allegedly chanting the slogan “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”, has been accused of antisemitism.
Israel’s official account on X said it objected to Hadid as “the face of [the Adidas] campaign” in a post that noted that “eleven Israelis were murdered by Palestinian terrorists during the Munich Olympics”.
TVNL Comment: Palestinians are Semites, Addidas cowards.
Boeing faces fresh questions about the safety of its aircraft after an engine fire on a transatlantic flight from Edinburgh caused an emergency landing soon after takeoff.
Flames were seen by passengers briefly shooting from the engine of a Delta Air Lines 767 soon after it took off for New York in February last year, after a turbine blade broke off during takeoff.
The flames subsided while the plane was airborne but it made an emergency landing at Prestwick airport south of Glasgow, where ground crew noticed fuel leaking from the plane’s right wing.
The Air Accidents Investigation Branch, the UK government agency that investigates aviation safety, has written to the Federal Aviation Administration in the US asking it to take action with Boeing, which has its headquarters in Virginia.
Thousands more public servants will soon see their student loan balances reduced or erased, the Biden administration announced on Thursday. The relief is part of the administration’s efforts to overhaul the nation’s Public Service Loan Forgiveness program (PSLF).
“This is relief that will bring real change in [borrowers’] lives, and marks another win for this Administration’s relentless and unapologetic work to fix a broken student loan system,” said U.S. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona in a statement.
The Biden administration approved roughly $1.2 billion in student loan relief for about 35,000 borrowers who work in public service, including as firefighters, social workers and teachers. Under PSLF, borrowers in qualifying lines of work can have their remaining balances forgiven on eligible loans after making 120 monthly payments.
As of Thursday’s announcement, the Biden administration had discharged $69.2 billion in debt through PSLF for over 900,000 borrowers.
Bernice Johnson Reagon, an American civil rights activist who used her stirring alto and lyrics to fight racism, died on Tuesday at age 81, her daughter said on Wednesday.
“As a scholar, singer, composer, organizer and activist, Dr Reagon spent over half a century speaking out against racism and systemic inequities in the US and globally,” said daughter Toshi Reagon, who like her mother is a musician and activist, in announcing her death on Facebook.
No cause of death was given.
Born in 1942 in Dougherty county, Georgia, she became active in the civil rights movement at Georgia’s Albany State College, a historically Black institution that now is a university, according to a biography on her website.
Reagon was a member of the original Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee Freedom Singers, formed in 1962. The Freedom Singers performed to raise money for SNCC projects and to rally activists.
In an online SNCC archive, Reagon is quoted describing her early work. At one of the first large meetings she helped organize in Albany, she was asked to lead a song and started an African American spiritual: “Over my head, I see Trouble in the Air.” She replaced “trouble” with “freedom,” and said that “by the second line everyone was singing”.
In 1973 she formed Sweet Honey in the Rock, an a cappella group of African American women. Among the best-known of the Johnson compositions the group performed was Ella’s Song, with its driving refrain – “we who believe in freedom cannot rest, we who believe in freedom cannot rest until it comes” – and other lines inspired by the speeches of another pioneering civil rights figure, Ella Baker. Ella’s Song can still be heard at demonstrations today.
She also was a music scholar who studied the African American spiritual. She was professor emeritus of history at American University and curator emeritus at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History.
Domestic Glance
