Months after announcing that her contract with record label X3M Music would not be renewed, music star Simi has officially launched her very own company – Studio Brat.
Simi shared the exciting news in a statement to her fans saying:
The norm is to do a formal and proper press release, with big, impersonal words – but this is me and you.
We started with true laughs, constructive criticism, silly jokes and personal moments. We’re gonna keep it that way.
All I’ve ever wanted was to live my dreams – to do it on my terms, but for you. Each step I’ve taken has brought me here. This is only the beginning of the best part of my journey. I hope that you stand with me, fight with me, love with me and grow with me. My team and I have continuously put our hearts into it. Like Michael Jackson said, “Don’t stop till you get enough…” We never want to let you down. Proof: I’m using a Michael Jackson quote.
So, with a heart full of excitement, I introduce Studio Brat to you. It’s Ours. Let’s do what we do! 💙
On August 15th, 1999, one Rosemary Khaveleli Onyango, pregnant at the time, went to the hospital, expecting to give birth to triplets, but delivered twins instead.
The twins were placed in an incubator at Kakamega County Teaching and Referral Hospital in Kenya, for a week due to low birth weight after which Onyango took them home.
But the twins were not identical. Onyango had her doubts, but she let them go and raised the girls – Melon and Mevis.
Fast forward to April 2018, her daughter Melon met her lookalike, named Sharon, on Facebook. The two connected and they had an online altercation, accusing each other of impersonation.
Melon Lutenyo and Sharon Mathias
In December of that year, the two met at a bus-stop, following constant mention by their peers and teachers of their striking resemblance.
Sharon had participated in a high school music festival where Melon’s school had also participated.
Melon’s teachers and classmates were surprised to see someone that looked exactly like her at the festival, even though she wasn’t participating.
Her classmates took Sharon’s photo and showed it to Melon.
Out of curiosity, they contacted each other and informed their parents about it.
In April 2019, both families decided to seek professional help to find out if they children were related.
The recently released results revealed that Sharon and Melon are twins.
Melon Lutenyo and Sharon Mathias
“Ms Rosemary Khaveleli Onyango could not be excluded as the biological mother of the twins who have compatible obligatory maternal allelic profile with a 99.999 per cent probability,” the result stated.
The result also disclosed that Onyango is not the biological mother of Mevis. 12 out of 23 loci tested showed a mismatch. (Three or more mismatches are considered grounds of exclusion of paternity/maternity).
The test also showed that Mevis is the biological daughter of Angeline Omina, the woman who raised Sharon as her child.
Omina gave birth to her child at the same hospital where Onyango delivered her twins, just a day prior – August 14th, 1999.
Melon Lutenyo, Sharon Mathias and Mevis Imbaya
Both families have said they’ve agreed not to sue the hospital, but The Standardreports that the Office of the Director of Criminal Investigations said it will still pursue the case against the hospital.
The report added that the hospital provided proof that the two mothers gave birth there, but said it did not have documents showing mode of delivery, dates, as well as other details.
Nikki Howard and her sister Jaqi Wright’s Furlough Cheesecakes will now be available in 100 Walmart stores in the DMV,WJLA reported.
The ingenious sisters were among the 800,000 people affected by the federal government shutdown. Bills piled up. Their savings served as the only way to keep food on the table and roofs over their heads.
“We prepared for rain, but we got a monsoon,” Wright, who worked at the Department of Justice, told NBC Washington.
So the pair of furloughed federal workers took a leap of faith and chose to start a cheesecake business to make a way for themselves. Now, the two are making bank through their Furlough Cheesecake. “Cheesecake has been my weakness since I can remember,” Howard said in January.
The government shutdown began on December 22 and lasted for over a month, making it the longest shutdown in American history. Howard and her sister were compelled to make best of the situation.
“How do I look at my child and say, ‘I can’t send you back to school’?” asked Howard, a former Food and Drug Administration worker.
Within the first week, Furlough Cheesecake received 100 orders outside of the DMV including Atlanta, Indiana and Texas.
The sisters’ story quickly gained national attention, attracting comedienne Ellen DeGeneres, who placed a $20,000 order. Since going viral, business has been consistently booming. The pastry makers no longer have to work their federal jobs.
Furlough Cheesecake is their full-time job now. Walmart will have smaller, mini versions of their cheesecakes available sometime in August.
The adorable little three-year-old, who tugged at America’s heart when her photograph looking up at the official portrait of former FLOTUS Michelle Obama went viral, has captured the moment further in a children’s book.
Now, the toddler, along with her mom, Jessica Curry, is the author of a book titled Parker Looks Up, which tells the story of two young friends visited a museum where they are enthralled by the paintings that they encounter.
“Parker’s every day moment became an extraordinary one, and my sincerest hope is that our book will continue to resonate that moment’s power and promise, its hope and dreams, its inspiration and indelible impact with Parker, her generation, and generations to follow,” Curry told Essence. “After all, with their inner and profound insight and wisdom, our children are truly our future.”
Parker rose to national attention when an image of her looking up at the Obama portrait, by artist Amy Sherald, captured the attention of many people across social media. Curry told media outlets that Parker was transfixed by Michelle’s portrait.
“In further discussion with (Parker) yesterday and today, I realized that she believes Michelle Obama is a queen, and she wants to be a queen as well …” Curry said, according to PEOPLE Magazine.
And then when the girl dressed as Obama for Halloween, in a custom-made gown by Alisha Welsh of Magnolia Lake Children’s Clothing, Obama tweeted her approval.
Curry now says she hopes the book will inspire children to dream big and to keep looking up.
Dominican American writer, Elizabeth Acevedo added some color to the Carnegie Medal’s lily-white roster when she won the award this week.
Acevedo is the first person of color to receive the honor in its 83-year history, according to The Guardian. The Carnegie Medal is the top honor for children’s book writers in the United Kingdom.
Acevedo won the prize for The Poet X,a novel about Xiomara, a Dominican girl who uses slam poetry to “understand her mother’s religion and her own relationship to the world.”
“Xiomara Batista feels unheard and unable to hide in her Harlem neighborhood. Ever since her body grew into curves, she has learned to let her fists and her fierceness do the talking,” read a synopsis on Acevedo’s website.
“But Xiomara has plenty she wants to say, and she pours all her frustration and passion onto the pages of a leather notebook, reciting the words to herself like prayers — especially after she catches feelings for a boy in her bio class named Aman, who her family can never know about.”
Acevedo was inspired to write the book while she taught middle school English in Maryland. Katherine, a former student, refused to read assigned books because “none of these books are about us.”
“I felt like this student had given me a challenge, or at least permission to write a story about young people who take up space, who do not make themselves small, who learn the power of their own words,” the writer said in her acceptance speech.
“I write for us. I write for us to see ourselves depicted with tenderness and nuance and ferocity and unflinching honesty,” she told Hip Latina in May. “I hope young Latinx readers, particularly if they are Afro-Latinx, see that they are allowed to be the heroes, they are allowed to live loudly and colorfully and with their whole selves. I hope they know they are seen and loved and that I’m rooting for, and cheering on, their triumphs.”
Her second novel, With the Fire on High, was released in May and centers around Afro-Latinx cuisine. Acevedo’s culture provides her with plenty of material.
“I have no other basis for comparison in regards to my identity, except for my own upbringing, but I think what being my parents’ child ultimately does is make me aware of the different ways we can tell stories,” she said.
“The jokes and riddles and folktales I grew up with at home become entwined with the hip-hop, first generation, hood stories of the world I live in outside of the house. My writing is an homage, and hopefully upliftment, of the many intersections my body houses.”
Acevedo is currently working on her third novel, Clap When You Land. The story about “sisterhood, love, and loss” will be released in 2020.
Mary is a survivor of rape in South Sudan, and her story is a point of interest following the disasters in the region.
Initially, her husband was shot, and then, soldiers killed her young sons, ages 5 and 7. What’s more, they snatched her daughter from her hands, leaving her with nobody.
Mary hails from the Nuer tribe in South Sudan.
Recently, the people have been experiencing a power struggle between the country’s President Salva Kiir, of the Dinka tribe, and his Vice President, Riek Machar, a Nuer.
They fought this war based on ethnic reasons, and the Northern part of the country has been turned into a wasteland.
According to the United Nations, 50,000 people have been killed, and close to 4 million people face famine, 2.2 million fled their homes, and they have all told the story of severe maltreatment, torture and manslaughter.
Among these people who suffered the adverse effects of the war, Mary and her family members were some of the people who sought freedom and looked forward to gaining refuge. They were at a U.N. peacekeeping base in Bentiu when they encountered Kiir’s forces on the road in June 2014.
According to Mary, 27, the soldiers told her that they perceive the Nuers to be rebels, and the reason her sons were killed is that they don’t want them to grow up becoming fighters.
“We don’t kill the women and the girls,” the soldiers told Mary.
“They said they would only rape us. As if rape were different than death,” Mary adds.
Mary retreated to a safe house in neighboring Uganda run by Make Way Partners, an American Christian organization that provides housing, medical care and schooling for South Sudanese orphans and victims of human trafficking.
Following the murder of her husband and sons, five soldiers forced her to watch them rape her 10-year old daughter, Nyalaat.
“I couldn’t even see my little girl anymore. I could only see blood.” Mary says. After they had raped her daughter, they played a game of taking turns with mother and daughter, raping them both.
Within a few hours, Nyalaat died and Mary says that she wanted to die too. However, Mary didn’t give up. She rather made it to a U.N. camp for civilians displaced by war.
This didn’t stop the soldiers from attacking evebtuaeve. The violence continued, and the soldiers were still able to make their way into the camp and rape all the women they were able to get their hands on.
Mary adds:
“IT HAPPENED TO ALL OF US: LITTLE GIRLS, GRANDMOTHERS. THEY DIDN’T CARE. IF YOU CALM DOWN WHEN THEY ARE RAPING YOU, THEY WON’T BEAT YOU. BUT IF YOU RESIST, THEY WILL BEAT YOU, EVEN SO MUCH TO USE THE GUN IN YOU.”
The CEO of Instagram has expressed his disappointment that Selena Gomezdeleted the app after it made her ‘depressed’.
Gomez, once the most followed person on the platform and now the third (after Cristiano Ronaldo and Ariana Grande), has been honest about her struggles with social media, Instagram in particular, and mental health.
She recently announced she’d stopped personally using it after it left her feeling low and affected her self-esteem.
‘I used to use it a lot but I think it’s become really unhealthy for young people, including myself, to spend all of their time fixating on all of these comments and letting this stuff in,’ she told Kelly Ripa and Ryan Seacrest on their show. ‘It would make me feel not good about myself and look at my body differently,’
Gomez has now deleted her Instagram account on a colleague’s phone instead of hers, so she can just access it when she wants to share something with fans.
Selena at Cannes Film FestivalTONY BARSONGETTY IMAGES
In response to her latest comments, Adam Mosseri – the CEO of the app – has said the singer’s criticism of Instagram left him feeling ‘disappointed’ but would love to talk to her about it to collaborate on ways to improve the platform.
‘I would love to hear from her,’ Mosseri told BBC Radio 1 Newsbeat. ‘If there’s something specific that she thinks is working or not working about the platform, I’d love to hear. We like the criticism, we like to have the conversation.’
However, Mosseri also questioned whether Gomez’ experience of Instagram – where she currently holds 152 million followers, is inundated with comments and likes and looked to as a role model – can be compared to the average user’s experience.
Adam Mosseri at a Facebook conferenceJUSTIN SULLIVANGETTY IMAGES
‘She has over 100m followers,’ he said. ‘It’s a whole other world.’
Marijuana Pepsi Vandyck (yup, that’s her real name) graduated from Wisconsin’s Cardinal Stritch University in May with a Ph.D. in Leadership for the Advancement of Learning and Service in Higher Education. She wanted to prove to the world that, despite having a rather unique name, she could make it in life.
Marijuana Pepsi is her legal name — and no, she doesn’t smoke and she’s not a huge fan of soda.
“Vandyck” was added after she married her current husband Fredrick in 2017. The 46-year-old, who grew up between Chicago, Illinois, and Beloit, Wisconsin, says she used to question why her mom gave her such an odd name (her sisters are named Kimberly and Robin).
“It makes it difficult sometimes,” Vandyck previously admitted to TODAY.
Her mom apparently believed her name would take her places. And in reality, she has gone places. Vandyck lives on a farm in Pecatonica, Illinois, with her husband (they have four children — her 16-year-old son, as well as three children and a grandchild on her husband’s side). In addition to teaching and running a performance coaching company, Vandyck started an annual scholarship award for African American students enrolled at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater.
But it wasn’t always easy. Vandyck was constantly teased growing up, especially in junior high. She dreaded when teachers conducted roll call.
“Every single class, the teacher is taking attendance out loud, and as they slowly get down through the J’s, I’m just like here it comes. ‘Marianna? Marijuana?’ And all the students turn to see who it is,” she said.
Vandyck used these situations to her advantage and wrote her thesis on the topic: “Black names in white classrooms: Teacher behaviors and student perceptions.”
For her dissertation, she spoke with other Black students who had unique names. They also opened up about those tense moments when teachers would pause on their names during roll call.
Today, she is proud to call herself Dr. Marijuana Pepsi. In a way, she thanks her mother, and she admits her name may have given her a sense of resilience.
“I’ve grown into my name because I am a strong woman,” she told TODAY. “I’ve had to be.”
A North Carolina teenager is heading to college for free after she received more than $1 million in scholarships.
Ny’Quasia Brown has been on the road to since middle school. She began taking high school courses when she was in the eighth grade, and consequently, she’s graduating high school after only three years. As she prepared to graduate, Brown began applying for scholarships to pay for college. Due to her efforts, she secured $1.5 million in scholarshipsfrom 87 schools.
“It was very overwhelming,” Brown told WCNC. “It just felt like all of my hard work had honestly paid off.”
The 16-year-old overcame several obstacles to get to this point. She was raised by a single mother while her father was incarcerated.
“He’s my best friend, he’s my other half. And with him gone I know I have to fill his shoes that he would want me to,” Brown said. “I do everything I do because of him and my uncle.”
Brown admitted there were challenges, but she knew she had to keep going. She also worked two jobs and played basketball along with her studies.
“I know it gets hard, it gets very hard. You miss that other parent, but you can’t lose the vision,” Brown said. “Because at the end of the day you have to think, ‘what would that parent want you to do.'”
The White Oak High School senior credits her mother and godparents for ensuring she keeps her priorities in check.
“I feel so lucky because some people don’t have any parents,” Brown said. “My mom made sure I don’t feel any less than a child with two parents.”
The young scholar also has a network of friends who act as accountability partners.
“I have my five friends that when I’m down and say ‘guys I can’t do this’ they always push me to continue,” Brown said. “We’re gonna be great.”
Brown had an array of choices, but she already had her mind made up, according to HBCU Buzz.
“I’ve always wanted to go to an HBCU (historically black college or university),” Brown said. “When I started doing my research, I looked at colleges that ranked high in the nation where I knew I could also get a great education.”
She is headed to North Carolina Central University (NCCU) to study political science and has dreams of becoming a lawyer. Her mom, Crystal Gill, believes she can do it.
“Ny’Quasia is very independent and has a mind of her own, and I support her,” Gill said. “I see her being a successful attorney. She will be phenomenal and make changes in the world.”
Her principal, Dr. Christopher Barnes, spent years watching Brown work toward her goals.
“My first interaction with Ny’Quasia showed me she was a very vocal and confident freshman,” he recalled. “She has become intense and determined about success beyond high school,” Barnes said. “Her ability to know what she is after, where she is going and how to get there is admirable. She is a mold-breaker.”
Brown has simple advice for students who want to follow in her footsteps.
“Leadership is very important; take advantage of every opportunity you are given,” she said. “Place God first. Utilize your full potential. God has blessed me with a community and family that have supported me when I couldn’t do it for myself. Always remember that you have to sow a seed.”
The statue of the woman is nearly 23 feet tall. Her head is wrapped and she stares straight ahead while sitting barefoot, but regally, in a wide-backed chair, clutching a torch in one hand and a tool used to cut sugar cane in the other.
In Denmark, where most of the public statues represent white men, two artists on Saturday unveiled the striking statue in tribute to a 19th-century rebel queen who had led a fiery revolt against Danish colonial rule in the Caribbean.
They said it was Denmark’s first public monument to a black woman.
The sculpture was inspired by Mary Thomas, known as one of “the three queens.” Thomas, along with two other female leaders, unleashed an uprising in 1878 called the “Fireburn.” Fifty plantations and most of the town of Frederiksted in St. Croix were burned, in what has been called the largest labor revolt in Danish colonial history.
“This project is about challenging Denmark’s collective memory and changing it,” the Virgin Islands artist La Vaughn Belle, one of two principal forces behind the statue, said in a statement.
The unveiling comes at the end of a centennial year commemorating the sale by Denmark of three islands to the United States on March 3, 1917: St. Croix, St. John and St. Thomas. The price: $25 million.
Though Denmark prohibited trans-Atlantic slave trafficking in 1792, it did not rush to enforce the ban. The rule took effect 11 years later, and slavery continued until 1848.
“They wanted to fill the stocks first” and ensure enough slaves would remain to keep plantations running, said Niels Brimnes, an associate professor at Aarhus University and a leading expert on colonialism in Denmark.
Three decades after slavery formally ended on what today are known as the United States Virgin Islands, conditions for the former slaves had not improved significantly.
That continued injustice fomented the uprising on St. Croix.
Mary Thomas was tried for her role in the rebellion and ferried across the Atlantic to a women’s prison in Copenhagen. The statue created in tribute to her, called “I Am Queen Mary,” sits in front of what was once a warehouse for Caribbean sugar and rum, just more than a mile from where she was jailed.
The only other tribute to Denmark’s colonies or those who were colonized is a statue of a generic figure from Greenland.
The two artists, Jeannette Ehlers, left, and La Vaughn Belle, were inspired by Mary Thomas, who with two other female leaders known as Queens unleashed an uprising in 1878 on St. Croix.CreditNikolaj Recke
The Danish artist Jeannette Ehlers, who teamed up with Ms. Belle to create the “Queen Mary” monument, said, “Ninety-eight percent of the statues in Denmark are representing white males.”
The torch and the cane bill held in the statue’s hands symbolize the resistance strategies by those who were colonized, the artists said in a statement. Her seated pose “recalls the iconic 1967 photograph of Huey P. Newton, founder of the Black Panther Party.”
And the plinth on which her chair rests incorporates “coral cut from the ocean by enslaved Africans gathered from ruins of the foundations of historic buildings on St. Croix.”
Henrik Holm, senior research curator at Denmark’s National Gallery of Art, said in a statement: “It takes a statue like this to make forgetting less easy. It takes a monument like this to fight against the silence, neglect, repression and hatred.”
He added: “Never before has a sculpture like this been erected on Danish soil. Now, Denmark is offered a sculpture that addresses the past. But it is also an artwork for the future.”
The preferred self-image of this country of 5.5 million is that of a nation at the forefront of democratization and a savior of Jews during World War II.
And even though the Vikings raped and pillaged their way around the shores of Britain and Ireland, the Viking Age is generally a source of national pride and amusement in Denmark.
Over the centuries, Danes have not undergone a national reckoning about the thousands of Africans forced onto Danish ships to work the plantations in Danish colonies in the Caribbean, historians say.
“It may have to do with the narrative of Denmark as a colonial power saying, ‘We weren’t as bad as others,’” Professor Brimnes said. “But we were just as bad as the others. I can’t identify a particular, humane Danish colonialism.”
In a speech last year, the Danish prime minister, Lars Lokke Rasmussen, expressed regret for his country’s part in the slave trade — but he stopped short of an apology.
“Many of Copenhagen’s beautiful old houses were erected with money made on the toil and exploitation on the other side of the planet,” he said.
“It’s not a proud part of Denmark’s history. It’s shameful and luckily of the past.”A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A9 of the New York edition with the headline: Nodding to a Colonial Past With ‘Rebel Queen’ Tribute. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
