As the coronavirus continues to spread, black hair care businesses have started to feel the effects of the virus on the wholesale side of their business.
Due to the restrictions on imports from China, hair care businesses may soon struggle to fulfill customer orders on popular items such as wigs, weaves, and hair extensions from factories primarily based in China. The coronavirus, also known as COVID-19, has already killed six people in the United States and more than 3,000 across the globe.
Shannle Wallace, who oversees District Cheveux in Bowie, Maryland, told WUSA 9 that she made an order for hair extensions from her China-based supplier in January. Her order still hasn’t arrived. The vendor is blaming the delay on the virus.“I just never imagined coronavirus would affect me, being in the states,” Wallace told the station. “Not directly as far as being sick, but my business.”
Wallace also mentioned that the scare has also affected customers worried that the hair they purchase might be contaminated with the virus. “When they get their hair, (they ask), ‘Is it going to be contaminated?’” she added. The CDC had said the virus dies on the surface. “There is likely very low risk of spread from products or packaging that are shipped over a period of days or weeks at ambient temperatures,” the agency wrote on its website. “Coronaviruses are generally thought to be spread most often by respiratory droplets.”
Stephanie Nolan, a beauty entrepreneur and owner of XOXO Virgin Hair based in Prince George’s Country, Maryland, said she is also feeling the effects of the coronavirus. “Due to the coronavirus, and the measures taken to cut down on the virus in China, people aren’t allowed to go to, or really return to, work,” Nolan told WUSA9.
Two Chicago women have started a group to draw attention to the number of Black women and girls abducted in the city.
Rosie Dawson and Roberta Logwood launched “Stop Taking Our Girls” to focus attention and support around finding these missing Black girls. These missing girls don’t always make the news or prompt full-out investigations compared with missing white girls and women. Some may not grasp the magnitude of the problem but Dawson and Logwood know it’s a real issue.
“It’s not an urban legend,” Dawson explained to WGN9. “They are doing it.”
Logwood has firsthand knowledge – because it almost happened to her.
“I was actually a victim,” Logwood told WGN9.
Back when Logwood was 17, she told the station that a man stole her cell phone. She said when she ran after him, she noticed a car pull up alongside her. Logwood said the driver popped his trunk and attempted to sway her to get in so they could go catch the thief.
She ran off instead.
“I did file a police report,” Logwood told WGN9. “The dispatch told me this had happened before and they succeeded in kidnapping the girl.”
More than 50 missing Black women have been killed since 2001, according to a report from the Washington, D.C.-based Murder Accountability Project. Dawson believes the real number is much higher.
“I feel as though, when it comes to Black women, we just don’t count enough for people to care,” she said.
“Stop Taking Our Girls” meets once a month on the first Tuesday to brainstorm strategies to get the word out to stop these abductions. The group has offered a self-defense class and safety information to attendees. They want the culprits off the streets. And they also are working with local officials to “bring awareness” as to the significance of these cases.
“We hear a lot of different things in the streets,” Dawson told WGN9. “So we want to bring awareness to the elected officials, we want the police officers to know we appreciate them, but we need them to appreciate us in this community also.”
The grassroots group is selling t-shirts to raise money so it can eventually start offering rewards to find still missing women and girls.
Martin Luther King III, son of civil rights icon Martin Luther King, Jr., is calling on Republican Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey to stop Thursday’s execution of Nathaniel Woods.
Woods was convicted of capital murder in the 2004 killings of three Alabama police officers. He has long said he was not the person responsible for shooting the officers and that he received poor representation during his 2005 trial, reported ABC News.
King reminded Ivey of his father’s prescient words that “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” He joins roughly 70,000 people who signed a petition on Change.org to halt Woods’ execution.
“In just 2 days, your state, and the state I was born in, is set to kill a man who is very likely innocent,” King wrote in a letter sent to Ivey on Tuesday.
“Killing this African American man, whose case appears to have been strongly mishandled by the courts, could produce an irreversible injustice. Are you willing to allow a potentially innocent man to be executed?”
In his letter, King wrote that Ivey has declined to discuss the case with him in person or over the phone. Gina Maiola, the governor’s press secretary, told ABC News yesterday that Ivey’s office has not yet released a statement on Woods’ case,
Birmingham police officers Carlos Owen, Harley Chisholm III, and Charles Bennett were shot and killed on June 17, 2004, while serving a misdemeanor assault warrant for Woods in Birmingham at what is believed to have been a crack house.
Kerry Spencer confessed to being the sole gunman who killed the police, however, both men were convicted on capital murder charges. Prosecutors argued that Woods and Spencer acted together to kill the officers.
Spencer is also awaiting execution.
Woods has sought to appeal his conviction, citing inadequate representation from his lawyer – mainly for withholding information that says he cannot be convicted of capital murder as an accomplice.
He said his previous counsel also convinced him not to accept a plea deal that would have given him a sentence of 20 to 25 years in prison.
The Alabama Supreme Court and the U.S. Supreme Court denied Woods’ appeal.
In ending his letter to Ivey, King III wrote: “‘My father said, injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere,’ and so I pray that God grants you the courage to do the right thing: to delay his execution.”
WASHINGTON (AP) — Bernie Sanders seized victory in Super Tuesday’s biggest prize, California, while a resurgent Joe Biden scored wins in the upper Midwest and African American strongholds in the South, in a dramatic offensive.
The two Democrats, lifelong politicians with starkly different visions for America’s future, were battling for delegates as 14 states and one U.S. territory held a series of high-stakes elections that marked the most significant day of voting in the party’s 2020 presidential nomination fight.
The clash between Biden and Sanders, each leading coalitions of disparate demographics and political beliefs, peaked on a day that could determine whether the Democrats select their nominee before the party’s 2020 nomination fight will stretch all the way to the party’s July convention or be decided much sooner.
ESSEX JUNCTION, VERMONT – MARCH 03: Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) greets supporters at his Super Tuesday night event on March 03, 2020 in Essex Junction, Vermont. 1,357 Democratic delegates are at stake as voters cast their ballots in 14 states and American Samoa on what is known as Super Tuesday. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
It was increasingly looking like a two-man race.
The former vice president and the three-term senator took aim at each other from dueling victory speeches separated by 2,500 miles (4,000 kilometers) Tuesday night.
“People are talking about a revolution. We started a movement,” Biden charged in Los Angeles, knocking one of Sanders’ signature lines.
And without citing his surging rival by name, Sanders swiped at Biden from a victory speech in Burlington, Vermont.
“You cannot beat Trump with the same-old, same-old kind of politics,” Sanders declared, ticking down a list of past policy differences with Biden on Social Security, trade and military force. “This will become a contrast in ideas.”
Mike Bloomberg’s sole victory was in the territory of American Samoa. The billionaire former New York mayor will reassess his campaign on Wednesday, according to a person close to his operation who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal deliberations.
Elizabeth Warren had yet to post any early wins and lost her home state of Massachusetts to Biden in a devastating defeat.
Sanders, a Vermont senator, opened the night as the undisputed Democratic front-runner. He claimed decisive victories in his home state of Vermont, Utah, and Colorado.
Yet Biden scored wins in Warren’s native Oklahoma and a swath of Southern states including Virginia, Alabama, North Carolina, Tennessee and Arkansas signaled he was cementing his status as the standard-bearer for the Democrats’ establishment wing.
In a sign of his strength across the country, Biden also won Minnesota, a state Sanders had hoped to put in his column.
Biden racked up the victories despite being dramatically outspent by moderate rival Bloomberg, who poured more than $19 million into television advertising in Virginia. Biden, meanwhile, spent less than $200,000.
A key to Biden’s success: Black voters. Biden, who served two terms as President Barack Obama’s vice president, won 60% of the Black vote in Alabama, where African Americans made up more than half the Democratic electorate on Tuesday. Bloomberg earned 25%, and Sanders won about 10% of African American votes, according to AP VoteCast, a wide-ranging survey of the electorate.
LOS ANGELES, CA – MARCH 03: Democratic presidential candidate former Vice President Joe Biden, accompanied by his wife Jill Biden and sister Valerie Biden Owens, takes to the stage at a Super Tuesday event at Baldwin Hills Recreation Center on March 3, 2020 in Los Angeles, California. Biden is hoping his make-or-break victory in the South Carolina primary has influenced Super Tuesday voters to lean toward him. (Photo by David McNew/Getty Images)
The Democratic race has shifted dramatically over the past three days as Biden capitalized on his commanding South Carolina victory to persuade anxious establishment allies to rally behind his campaign. Former rivals Amy Klobuchar and Pete Buttigieg abruptly ended their campaigns and endorsed Biden.
Biden’s win in South Carolina, his first in the 2020 election season, rescued his campaign from the brink after three consecutive weak finishes last month.
Sanders had predicted victory in California, the day’s largest delegate prize. The state, like delegate-rich Texas, plays to his strengths, given its significant factions of liberal whites, large urban areas with younger voters and strong Latino populations.
In Biden and Sanders, Democrats have a stark choice in what kind of candidate they want to run against President Donald Trump in November.
Sanders is a 78-year-old democratic socialist who relies on an energized coalition of his party’s far-left flank that embraces his decadeslong fight to transform the nation’s political and economic systems. Biden is a 77-year-old lifelong leader of his party’s Washington establishment who emphasizes a more pragmatic approach to core policy issues like health care and climate change.
Across the Super Tuesday states there were early questions about Sanders’ claims that he is growing his support from his 2016 bid.
Biden bested him in Oklahoma, though Sanders won the state against Hillary Clinton four years ago. And in Virginia, where Democratic turnout surpassed 2016 by more than 500,000 votes, Sanders’ vote share dropped significantly.
Meanwhile, Bloomberg was trying to look beyond the primary to the November election against Trump, who racked up easy victories in lightly contested Republican primaries across the country.
“We have the resources to beat Trump in swing states that Democrats lost in 2016,” he said Tuesday night while campaigning in Florida.
Warren was also fighting to be optimistic.
Facing a roaring crowd in Michigan, she called on her supporters to ignore the political pundits and predictions as her advisers insist she’s willing to go all the way to a contested convention in July even if she doesn’t claim an outright victory anywhere.
“Here’s my advice: Cast a vote that will make you proud. Cast a vote from your heart,” Warren declared. She added: “You don’t get what you don’t fight for. I am in this fight.”
With votes still being counted across the country, The Associated Press has allocated 309 Biden, 204 delegates to Sanders, 21 to Bloomberg, 19 to Warren and one for Rep. Tulsi Gabbard. The numbers are expected to shift dramatically throughout the night as new states, none bigger than California, report their numbers and as some candidates hover around the 15% vote threshold they must hit to earn delegates.
The ultimate nominee must ultimately claim 1,991 delegates, which is a majority of the 3,979 pledged delegates available this primary season.
___
Associated Press writers Zeke Miller and Brian Slodysko in Washington and Kathleen Ronayne in Los Angeles contributed to this report.
The lineup for the 2020 Tribeca Film Festival, presented by AT&T just dropped and it includes 115 films from 33 countries.
The 19th edition of the annual festival will include a slate of inspiring, uplifting and impact-driven films exploring issues ranging from politics, and activism to Latinx and LGBTQ+ representation, the environment and more.
Fries!from producers Chrissy Teigen and Malcom Gladwell will premiere at the festival along with Citizen Penn, a documentary focusing on Sean Penn‘s relief work in Haiti. Another standout is Don’t Try To Understand: A Year in the Life of Earl “DMX” Simmons and we can’t wait to see what that title reveals about the controversial rapper.
The Laverne Cox-produced film, Disclosure made the list as well asWith Drawn Arms, a documentary about gold medal sprinter and civil rights activist Tommie Smith and his experience at the 1968 Summer Olympic Games in Mexico, with appearances from Colin Kaepernick and Megan Rapinoe and executive produced by John Legend.
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