Lend Me a Tubman, Channeling Trouble
Thursday, April 21, 2016
Vol. 5, No. 112
$35 Plus Change: After months of discussion about putting the faces of influential women on US currency, abolitionist Harriet Tubman will bump Andrew Jackson from the face of the $20 bill to a corner of the back. Treasury Secretary Jack Lew also announced that images of women will appear on the back of new 5s and 10s.
Originally Lew was going to replace Alexander Hamilton on the 10, but the first secretary of the treasury suddenly rose in popularity with the Broadway musical “Hamilton.”
Hamilton stays while the back of the bill will have pictures of suffrage leaders Lucretia Mott, Sojourner Truth, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Alice Paul and Susan B. Anthony.
Abraham Lincoln will remain on the front of a re-designed fiver that will have on the other side images of singer Marian Anderson, Eleanor Roosevelt, and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Katrina Cleanup: Five New Orleans police officers accused of shooting six unarmed people and killing two of them in the chaos after Hurricane Katrina 10 years ago, have pleaded guilty in federal court. The five face sentences from three to 12 years.
The officers had responded to a call on the Danziger Bridge and ended up opening fire. They claimed that someone shot at them first, which turned out to be a lie.
The Migration Crisis: The United Nations says that as many as 500 migrants died in the Mediterranean last week when an overloaded boat capsized somewhere between Libya and Italy.
If true, it would be the worst migrant disaster since a year ago when 800 migrants died off the shore of Libya.
Nation: Michigan’s attorney general has filed criminal charges against two state employees and a Flint city worker accused of misleading the federal government and altering test results concerning Flint’s contaminated water supply.
>Volkswagen and the federal government have reached an agreement for the company to buy back half a million diesel cars sold with software that cheated emissions tests and allowed the vehicles to spew more pollution than allowed by law.
> The former professional wrester and porn star known as “Chyna” was found dead in her Redondo beach, Calif. apartment after returning from a trip to Japan, her real name was Joanie Laurer and she was 45.
World: The United Kingdom is celebrating Queen Elizabeth’s 90th birthday — Charlie, you are never going to get the job.
Measured Diagonally: ABC’s morning talk host Kelly Ripa appears to be on strike after the sudden news that her co-host Michael Strahan is moving over to a full time job with Good Morning America. Ripa was given 10 minutes notice before the public announcement that Strahan was leaving and didn’t showed for work yesterday. Word is she won’t appear until Tuesday at the earliest.
Strahan, formerly a bruising defensive end for the New York Giants, turned into a surprisingly congenial television host on ABC’s “Live: Kelly and Michael.” But Ripa is one of the most popular people on television and she’s angry about having been kept in the dark. CNN’s Brian Stelter quotes a source saying, “She is beyond angry. Beyond.”
>ESPN has fired baseball analyst Curt Schilling, a former All-Star pitcher, for posting objectionable comments about transgender people on Facebook.
He uploaded a picture of a fat man wearing a wig and women’s clothing with the comment, “LET HIM IN! to the restroom with your daughter or else you’re a narrow-minded, judgmental, unloving racist bigot who needs to die.” Nice.
It wasn’t the first offense for the outspoken and sometimes incredibly dense Schilling. Last summer he was suspended for comparing Muslims to Nazis.
Naked Lunch: A new all-natural restaurant called The Bunyadi is preparing to open in London in June. They promise “wood-flame grilled meals served on handmade clay crockery and edible cutlery, in a space void of the industrialized-world’s modern trappings.” Also, no chemicals, no artificial colors, no electricity, no gas, no phone and no clothes. It will be a naked restaurant. They claim to have a waiting list of 8,000 people.
-30-
Leave a Reply