Atlanta Man Becomes One of Georgia’s First Black Male Teachers of the Year

Johnathon Hines, a teacher at Barack Obama Elementary School in Atlanta, has been recognized as Georgia’s Pre-K Teacher of the Year. He is the first Black man to receive the award, and hopes to continue inspiring his young students!

“Now I have the opportunity to inspire other males in early childhood. And that’s definitely one of my biggest goals,” Hines told 11 Alive. “I know how hard it is to be a teacher. The love and passion that you have to have to come in the classroom every single day. It’s definitely a calling, and that is my calling.”

Hines has always been very passionate about teaching. He believes it is important that a child would first love learning which he does unconventionally and energetically through dancing and singing.

“Cause I feel like when a child is engaged, the more they will learn,” he explained. “When I was in school I didn’t really enjoy the story, or the story was boring. Pre-K is the first year a child will experience school, so I want their first encounter to be a loving, nurturing encounter. And also allow them to have fun and still be a 4-year-old.”

One of the most rewarding parts of his job is seeing his little students learn. Hines currently teaches 22 students that he treats like his own child.

“What I love most about my job is seeing the growth in my children,” he added. “Sometimes students come in being only able to recognize a few letters. But by May they are able to write their first and last names, read a short story. But even grow as a person. They develop self-confidence. They develop social and emotional skills. The growth is really important in pre-K.”

Moreover, Hines hopes he could get to inspire other men, especially Black men, to consider taking a career path in teaching.

“I have the opportunity to inspire other males to get inside of the classroom,” he said. “It speaks volumes because there’s so many teachers in the state of Georgia and to be the number one pre-K teacher means a lot.”

This article was originally published by BlackNews.com.

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Peter Strzok would like to clear a few things up

"I’m sorry to bother you. But it turns out Trump just accused me of treason.”

Peter Strzok, who was still an FBI employee that day in January 2018 and couldn’t respond to the president’s attack, was appealing to his boss: “The bureau can’t let this stand,” he pleaded.

“I’m sorry, Pete,” came the response. “We’re not going to say anything.”

Nearly three years later, Strzok — who led the FBI’s Russia investigation, dubbed Crossfire Hurricane, until he was removed over several anti-Trump texts he’d sent during the election amid an affair with a colleague — is finally able to speak publicly and on his terms for the first time since he joined the FBI more than two decades ago.

And he has a lot to say.

Strzok’s new book, obtained by POLITICO ahead of its release next week, recaps the full arc of Crossfire Hurricane from the perspective of an enterprising counterintelligence expert who perceived Donald Trump and his campaign team not necessarily as criminals but as compromised by a foreign adversary. And he worries that there’s still much we don’t know, because the bureau was never able to do the kind of deep dive into Trump’s business records he wanted.

The investigation began as a pure counterintelligence inquiry — an attempt to understand who, if anyone, on Trump’s campaign team had been offered help by Russia to undermine Hillary Clinton. The probe kicked off with a tip from an Australian diplomat, Alexander Downer, who told the FBI that he had heard from a Trump campaign staffer about a Russian overture to the campaign after the leak of hacked Democratic National Committee emails.

The FBI’s probe soon zeroed in on four possibilities of who might have received that offer, according to Strzok: Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, foreign policy advisers Carter Page and George Papadopoulos, and soon-to-be national security adviser Michael Flynn. It turned out to have been Papadopoulos. But by the time they figured that out, Trump had been elected president—and Strzok’s team had uncovered so many suspicious contacts and communications between the campaign and Russians that they began debating whether to open a case on Trump himself.

“I hadn’t wanted to investigate the president of the United States,” Strzok recalls in the book, titled “Compromised: Counterintelligence and the Threat of Donald J. Trump.” But that conviction, he writes, had been “eroded” by Trump’s behavior toward the Russians and, once in office, his ongoing attacks on the FBI’s investigation. Four months into Trump’s presidency, according to Strzok, the discussion at the bureau had shifted from whether a case on Trump should be opened at all to whether there were any compelling arguments against it.

In Strzok’s telling, by May 16, 2017, there weren’t. So Strzok’s team, with permission from then-deputy FBI director Andrew McCabe, opened a counterintelligence case on the president that proved far more complicated than many at the FBI had anticipated.

“When you step back and look at it, its fucking huge,” Strzok said in an interview this week.

At the time the FBI opened the case, Trump’s financial disclosure forms detailed his ownership of more than 500 limited liability companies (LLCs), Strzok pointed out. Investigators would need to root through those records to identify areas where Russia might have financial leverage over him, not only now but 30 and 40 years ago. “That's a massive, massive undertaking,” Strzok said.

And despite his belief that tracing money was the most critical investigative trail the probe could follow — “even more than proving contacts with Russia,” he writes — Strzok is fairly confident that that thread was never tugged at, let alone unraveled, after he was removed from the investigation in August 2017.

“I was trying and struggling to figure out the right way to staff this and dive into it in an effective way,” Strzok said. By late May 2017, special counsel Robert Mueller had taken over the Russia probe and its many offshoots, including the Trump counterintelligence case, and Strzok was leading the 40-or-so FBI agents on loan to the special counsel’s office.

Three months later, though, Strzok was taken off the investigation after a series of anti-Trump text messages he’d written in 2016 were discovered by the Justice Department’s inspector general.

“My thinking before I left was: We can do this, but it’s going to be big, take a ton of resources, and it’s going to be super noisy. Because at some point, we're going to have to start to go out and get all those financial documents,” Strzok recalled. “We hadn’t gotten there by the time I was sent back to the bureau.” After his removal, Strzok had lunch with his successor on the special counsel’s team and implored him “to do a comprehensive counterintelligence look, because FBI headquarters is not going to do it,” he said.

After nearly two years, Mueller released his final report in April 2019. It outlined the Trump’s campaign’s extensive contacts with Kremlin-linked actors before, during, and after the election, and led to dozens of indictments and multiple guilty pleas and convictions, including of Manafort. But the report showed no signs of a holistic examination of Trump’s decades in the business world, including his company’s myriad real estate transactions with several Russians suspected of ties to organized crime and the many opaque deals, masked through shell companies, that helped Trump’s companies stay afloat throughout the years.

“I personally don't see how they could have done [the counterintelligence investigation] because I don't know how you do that without getting tax records, financial records, and doing things that would become public,” Strzok said of Mueller’s team. “Had they done it, I would have expected to see litigation and screaming from Trump. And the absence of that makes me think it didn’t occur.”

Would it be occurring now? He’s doubtful. “With an attorney general who now says there was no basis to open this investigation at all,” Strzok said, it’s unlikely FBI Director Chris Wray and his deputy have been pushing the issue. “I’m sure the senior levels of the FBI were more than happy to have it off their plate, and just say, ‘Mueller’s got this.’”

He notes in his book that FBI and DOJ leaders had distanced themselves so much from the Russia investigation by early 2018 that one FBI senior executive, deliberately out of the loop, referred to Manafort as “Manifold” during an internal FBI town hall.

The mystery of the missing Trump probe deepened this week when The New York Times reported that former deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein had made sure that a counterintelligence investigation never happened, ordering Mueller to narrow his investigation to finding crimes and refrain from looking into the president’s finances.

Strzok said he didn’t see evidence of that while he was still leading the investigation.

But he emphasized how suspicious he and other senior FBI leaders were of Rosenstein’s motivations, and recalled a meeting he had with the deputy attorney general just before Mueller’s appointment that “raised alarm bells in my head.” Rosenstein asked Strzok to stay behind after an intelligence community briefing about Russia’s attack on the 2016 election, and asked about the FBI’s case on Trump campaign associates. “Why did he want this information, exactly, and what was he planning to do with it?” Strzok wondered in his book.

The mistrust was indicative of the bureau’s siege mentality after Trump fired FBI director James Comey, a move that finally triggered the FBI’s decision to open a case on Trump himself that included potential obstruction of justice as well as the counterintelligence element of Trump’s relationship with the Russians. Trump had justified Comey’s dismissal using a memo from Rosenstein outlining Comey’s alleged mishandling of the Hillary Clinton email investigation, and “we were wondering, is Rosenstein in on this?” Strzok said. “We were still trying to figure out how high the threat went, and whether Rosenstein was going to order Andy [McCabe] to close all these investigations.”

The suspicions that a broader conspiracy was at work extended to the president’s then-national security adviser, retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn. In late 2017, Flynn pleaded guilty to lying to Strzok and another FBI agent about his conversations with the former Russian ambassador, Sergei Kislyak — the result of an encounter that has become the source of endless controversy and legal debate ever since.

Strzok and the other agent knew the truth when they interviewed Flynn: that he had asked Kislyak for Russia to hold off on retaliating for the new sanctions the Obama administration had imposed in response to the Kremlin’s election interference.

The FBI had “developed intelligence,” Strzok writes in his book, on Flynn’s conversations with Kislyak during the transition period, in the form of phone transcripts. So why interview Flynn at all if you knew the truth, the FBI’s critics have asked, and if you weren’t simply trying to trap him in a lie?

“At the end of the day, the big issue is not whether Flynn lied,” Strzok says. “The big issue is why Flynn didn’t tell the truth, and whether there was a greater involvement in that lie by others at the White House.”

The Department of Justice has since petitioned a federal judge to drop its case against Flynn, arguing there was no legitimate basis to investigate the national security adviser.

Strzok vehemently rejects that argument. In the “worst case, and we still haven’t eliminated this possibility,” he said, “Flynn didn’t tell us the truth because he was covering for Trump. So the question was not just did he lie — it was, did he lie because he was covering for the president of the United States, who had made a deal with the Russians to help get elected? We couldn’t be certain that this was Flynn acting on his own.”

(According to Mueller, Flynn hadn’t simply gone rogue — in an interview with the special counsel’s office, Flynn said he waited to speak to Kislyak about the sanctions until he could consult with his team. But evidence was never uncovered showing that Trump had ordered Flynn to allay the Russians’ fears about the sanctions.)

Despite detailed reports, including from a bipartisan Senate committee, outlining the campaign’s dense web of Russia ties, Trump and his allies have with increasing success tried to shift public ire to the investigators.

Fanning the flames was a DOJ inspector general report that found more than a dozen problems with surveillance warrants FBI agents had filed to monitor Trump campaign adviser Carter Page, which Strzok still believes was justified — “the facts we understood about Page were more than sufficient to initiate the warrant,” he wrote, citing Page’s past links to Russian intelligence officers “who appeared to have been attempting to groom him as an asset.” The fact that the CIA had at one point been debriefing Page on his contacts with the Russian intelligence officers did not change that assessment, Strzok says.

The warrant had been supplemented by hotly disputed intelligence the bureau had received on Page from the British former spy and longtime FBI source Christopher Steele, which Strzok also defends. “To be sure, as we worked through vetting Steele’s information, we determined that several elements of his reporting were inaccurate,” Strzok reflects in his book. “But the totality of Steele’s material, along with all we had collected by the time we reviewed it, ended debate as to whether we had probable cause” for a surveillance warrant on Page.

“We could verify a little bit of it, we could disprove a little bit of it, but a huge bunch of it we just couldn’t say one way or the other,” Strzok says now of the Steele material. “And I don’t think that’s subsequently changed.”

Strzok is now suing the Justice Department for what he has alleged was an illegal decision — a violation of the Privacy Act — to release his communications in the middle of an ongoing inspector general investigation in early 2018. The decision wasn’t just personally embarrassing, Strzok has claimed, it was also dangerous. That summer, the FBI told him that he’d been on a list compiled by a man named Cesar Sayoc, who at the time had been sending pipe bombs to Trump’s critics.

Strzok says he still receives regular death threats to this day, particularly when Trump tweets about him. He is disillusioned by prosecutors’ move to drop the Flynn case, calling it a miscarriage of justice. And he continues to worry about classified intelligence he saw in 2016 that suggested Russia actually pulled its punches.

“We knew there was information and techniques and means of attack that they could have used that they chose not to, or for whatever reason didn't do, in 2016,” Strzok said in the interview. “So not only did they hold back, but they then had several years to refine those techniques and gather more information that I think they can use both in the runup, during, and after the election, to throw into doubt any number of things.”

Strzok isn’t ruling out a return to government service. “I have a lot of energy and expertise left, and a lot of desire to help and continue to protect America and a desire to do that in a meaningful way,” he said, when asked whether he’d join a Joe Biden administration. “There are a lot of ways to do that, whether that’s in the government or outside of it. Let’s get to November and start rebuilding the country, and then I’ll start figuring out what those next steps are.”

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Colleges’ dilemma: Fight outbreaks or send sick kids home

Frightened students quarantined in dormitories or locked down in hotels. Instant suspensions for not social distancing. Regular tests of residence hall sewage.

American colleges are a mess right now. And public health experts and school administrators are still deciding whether the best strategy is to forge ahead with in-person instruction, send kids home with a Zoom syllabus and risk spreading the virus, or shelter them in place. The last option could be a potentially miserable experience for a teen riding out the pandemic alone in a dorm with ramen noodles and Pop-Tarts.

President Donald Trump has demanded that colleges reopen, with minimal guidance from the federal government on how to safely bring students back or what to do when infections are found. Administrators confronted with thousands of positive cases are improvising on the fly, trying to both prevent new flare-ups and keep the disease from spreading beyond their walls.

“I don’t think there are two universities that have the same protocol,” said Irwin Redlener, director of the Pandemic Resource and Response Initiative at Columbia University. “It’s national chaos.”

The stakes are huge, affecting not just the higher education system but possibly the course of the pandemic if enough schools opt to close and send thousands of asymptomatic youths back to their hometowns and families.

“I think school transmission is going to be driving hot spots for the next couple of months in a lot of places,” said James Lawler, a global health expert at the University of Nebraska Medical Center. “It’s a Catch-22.”

About 20 percent of colleges plan to open exclusively or primarily in person, according to a tracker from Davidson College in North Carolina, while about one-third are primarily or exclusively online.

To keep the virus at bay, some schools are turning hotel rooms into quarantine dormitories, sending scratch-and-sniff postcards to campus denizens and hunting for Covid-19 in the sewage systems.

At the University of Arizona, officials say they prevented a big outbreak by testing dorm wastewater and finding hints of the virus that allowed them to target their testing.

Colby College in Maine and Boston University are requiring daily checks for flu-like symptoms. Alabama State University has screening stations that check a student’s temperature, heart rate and respiratory rate.

Duke University, where less than 1 percent of Covid-19 tests are positive, plans to conduct regular surveillance testing and suspend the dorm key cards of students who don’t show up.

But other schools have been more lenient, offering only sporadic testing and putting the onus on students to self-report.

Just a few miles from Duke, the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, didn't test returning students and within two weeks had to switch to remote instruction, following hundreds of positive tests. Students without symptoms were not tested before leaving campus, despite estimates from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that show 40 percent of those infected are asymptomatic. Some studies suggest that figure may be nearly twice as high for young adults.

The University of Iowa and the University of South Dakota, both in states that have seen a recent surge of cases in the general population, are only advising students to get tested if they have symptoms or have been exposed to someone with a confirmed case of Covid-19.

The University of Iowa this week reported more than 900 students had tested positive. Officials there warned they’d impose unspecified additional safety measures if the positivity rate does not flatten.

The University of Arkansas, where there are more than 600 active cases, on Friday banned all nonacademic gatherings of more than 10 people. The news comes as the state reported a record number of new infections.

Gov. Asa Hutchinson said there are no plans at this point to send students packing.

“The last thing you want to do is send students home,” he said. “That would add to the spread as opposed to being in an environment where you can put restrictions in and guide behavior.”

As of Friday, at least 51,000 students have been infected and thousands more are quarantined, according to a survey from The New York Times. Public health experts fear the numbers could surge when the weather turns cold, forcing students to spend more time indoors where the virus can spread more easily .

Experts caution that mass testing of student populations needs to be done as part of a larger strategy with contact tracing and isolation in order to prevent outbreaks.

“Testing is very important, but it has important limitations,” said Tom Frieden, the former CDC director in the Obama administration. “It's only as useful as what gets done with the testing results.”

Some schools have hired their own contact tracers and isolated infected students in hotels. But that plan doesn't account for what happens afterward, said Tom Inglesby, director of Johns Hopkins University’s Center for Health Security.

“There isn’t a good strategy beyond that,” he said. “Unfortunately, that does mean people going home and bringing the virus with them.”

Deborah Birx, the White House coronavirus task force coordinator, and National Institutes of Health infectious disease specialist Anthony Fauci have both warned against letting infected students skip town, fearing that they could accelerate disease spread.

But some institutions like the University of South Dakota are allowing students to decide. A university spokesperson said the vast majority of on-campus students who are quarantining have chosen to do so at home. The roughly 300 infected students at West Virginia University, where fewer than 2 percent of tests are coming back positive, can remain on campus in an isolation housing unit, self-isolate or isolate at home.

William Hanage, an epidemiologist at Harvard’s school of public health, said he is particularly concerned about the schools unwilling or unable to do mass testing, because they won't likely detect an outbreak until it is too late.

“By the time you become aware of the problem it is likely to already be much larger,” he said. “You are not going to detect outbreaks if you don’t look for them.”

Many of these dilemmas stem from a lack of clarity from the White House about the best path forward.

“Certainly the thing that has made it difficult is the guidance has changed,” said Anita Barken, co-chair of the American College Health Association Covid task force. “Trying to adapt your model to be consistent with the latest information and the latest guidance is frustrating.”

Daniel Fick, the campus health officer at the University of Iowa, said he consulted with the CDC and state health officials and said there are no recommendations for testing large groups of people who aren't showing symptoms.

But Birx said on a call last month that each school should be able to conduct “surge testing.”

Universities are also wrestling with how to protect vulnerable students and staff, including minority populations who have been disproportionately affected by the coronavirus pandemic. The American College Health Association developed guidance for how schools can support people of color, low-income students and other vulnerable groups, including targeted outreach, expanding access to health and telehealth services.

And with data showing that Black people in the U.S. are dying at more than twice the rate of their white counterparts during the pandemic, there is growing concern about the safety of Black students and staff on campuses experiencing a surge in cases across the country. Many private HBCUs have opted for online-only classes this semester.

Compounding matters is the fact that many universities are in cities and states with relatively loose rules around social distancing, offering students plenty of places to congregate and potentially spread the virus.

On Wednesday, West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice closed bars in Monongalia County after photos of mostly maskless West Virginia University students standing in long lines went viral.

Tuscaloosa Mayor Walt Maddox had to close the bars last month after infections surged at the University of Alabama. So far, more than 1,200 students and 166 faculty have tested positive and more than one-third of the school’s isolation space is occupied, according to the university’s Covid-19 dashboard.

Experts say the variable conditions are a reflection of the broader U.S. response and expect more islands of disease when the season changes.

“A school is not a spaceship, a school is not a bubble, it’s a reflection of the community it’s in,” Frieden said.

Joanne Kenen contributed to this report.

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Tillis fights to close gap in critical Senate battleground

BOLIVIA, N.C. — Thom Tillis has struggled to mollify conservatives in North Carolina since joining the Senate six years ago. But standing onstage and addressing volunteers in a county Republican headquarters here this week, he had a message for any base voters still wary of him: You may not love me, but I guarantee you'd hate Chuck Schumer running the Senate.

“Set aside your differences on any minor issue,” Tillis said to the crowd of nearly four-dozen Republicans. “Is there anyone in this room who thinks there's any good scenario where Chuck Schumer gets the gavel? Any? Is there any scenario where it makes sense for President Trump not to get reelected? None. So what we have to do is come together.”

Tillis had just returned from an official event with Trump in nearby Wilmington, where hundreds of Trump supporters braved scorching heat and no shade to see Air Force One touch down at the local airport and hear briefly from the president before he went to a battleship to dedicate the city as an “American World War II Heritage City.”

The first-term senator made his in-person appeal hours later to a crowd seated in folding chairs set up a few feet apart inside the local headquarters, with most but not all attendees wearing masks — including Tillis, who took his off before speaking. The pitch came at an urgent moment in the race: Voting is underway after more than 533,000 absentee ballots were sent to voters on Friday — with Democrats holding an enormous edge in the number of requests so far — and the first debate between the candidates a week from Monday.

North Carolina is shaping up as the most expensive Senate race on the map this November and a critical battleground for the majority. Democratic nominee Cal Cunningham has doubled Tillis’ fundraising this year and consistently led in polling since late spring, though the most recent public survey showed the incumbent only a couple of points behind.

Tillis’ numbers are weaker than Trump’s, but both parties expect a tight race in one of the most polarized states in the nation come November.

“It’s probably going to be however Trump goes, Tillis goes,” said GOP consultant Charles Hellwig, who briefly worked for Tillis’ would-be primary challenger before the candidate dropped out. “If Trump wins the state, I don’t see Tillis not winning as well. But if Trump loses, it’ll be hard to get over the top.”

That sentiment was on display at the Wilmington airport, where a half-dozen voters who spoke to POLITICO said they were enthusiastic about Trump, but tepid about Tillis. Still, almost all said they’d vote for him.

"He's okay. He's flip-flopped a little bit on some issues,” said Joe Quarino, who works at the sheriff’s office in Brunswick County, in the southeast corner of the state. “I'm going to support him obviously because he's a Republican, but he might need to step up his game a little bit.”

Asked about those half-hearted endorsements, Tillis grinned and argued it’s impossible for a Republican senator to be known as well as Trump, even by the party faithful.

“It's like a saying they have in the mountains: ‘When they learn us, they like us…’” Tillis said in an interview, seated in folding chairs on a concrete patio outside the party headquarters. “I'm glad they said they're going to vote for me. I hope to get to know them better in my next six years. But they do know what's at stake."

Cunningham, an Army veteran and former one-term state senator, switched from the lieutenant governor’s race last year and quickly earned consolidated support in the party, routing a liberal primary opponent despite GOP meddling to derail his candidacy.

But much has changed since the March 3, Super Tuesday primary, held just a week before the coronavirus shutdowns began. In an interview on Zoom from his home in Raleigh, Cunningham this week downplayed efforts to nationalize the race and said he’s confident not just in Democratic enthusiasm, but that he can pick off conservative-leaning independents and even some Republicans.

“I'm hearing from voters who feel left behind, left out, not respected by Thom Tillis and his service,” he said. “We're fighting for every one of those votes."

Asked where he could work with Trump, Cunningham cited infrastructure, which hasn’t been pursued seriously in the past four years, and also said he agreed with the president’s concerns about trade, though he criticized how Trump has handled the issue.

Tillis declined to cite any issues where he agreed with Joe Biden, except “if he’s talking about reasonable regulatory policy, maybe.” He said not only was Biden’s agenda radical, but as president he would be “driven by a radical left leadership in the Congress."

Tillis has closely aligned with Trump since the primary scare last year. In the interview, Tillis said Trump was “100 percent” treating coronavirus like a serious crisis and praised the administration’s work with the Senate on the federal response — though he stressed Republicans needed to find agreement within their party on the next round of legislation when the Senate returns to Washington next week to advance further negotiations. He also dismissed a question about Trump’s rhetoric downplaying the severity of the virus.

“The president of the United States is the person who can try to provide people with optimism that this isn't the new normal,” Tillis said. “We've got some people who want to settle for that.”

Cunningham, when asked about where he diverged from Biden, cited “voices within our party” who have pushed for defunding police departments, pointing out he has called for increased investment in law enforcement. He also cited his support for a public option and opposition to Medicare for All and eliminating private health insurance.

When it was pointed out that those were issues where he and Biden agreed, Cunningham said his focus was on Tillis and North Carolinans, but that he was “confident there will be some places where Joe Biden and I diverge, and I'll evaluate those as they come."

The race may be one of, if not the most expensive in Senate history. There’s already been $80 million spent on TV — 60 percent of it by Democrats. Cunningham and outside allies have nearly $50 million booked between Labor Day and Election Day; Tillis and Republicans have nearly $40 million reserved, according to data from Advertising Analytics.

Democratic outside groups have hit Tillis on campaign donations from the pharmaceutical industry, as well as Obamacare repeal and pre-existing conditions. Cunningham’s most recent ad criticized Tillis for not speaking out against Trump over reports of Russian bounties on U.S. service members, which followed an ad from VoteVets that contrasted Tillis with Cunningham’s service.

Republicans have run ads slamming Cunningham as a elitist liberal, running multiple ads attacking him for using a tax credit for home renovation, and for a 2001 vote in the state Senate for a budget that hiked taxes by $1 billion; Cunningham has defended that vote as in best interest of the state facing fiscal challenges. In his most recent ad, Tillis says the Democrat is “being sneaky” about supporting tax increases.

Tillis has also used the filibuster as a wedge in the race, arguing Democrats would undo the 60-vote threshold and bring on a wave of liberal legislation if they take control of the presidency and both chambers of Congress.

Cunningham told POLITICO he wants to reform the filibuster and force the minority party to hold debate on the floor rather than just stifling legislation without debating it. He said he would not support undoing the 60-vote threshold entirely.

“What I've called for is reforming the filibuster, not abolishing it,” Cunningham said. “If it's a straight up-or-down about abolishing it, I wouldn't support abolishing the filibuster.”

Both candidates last week urged absentee voting. Cunningham said in a virtual town hall with College Democrats the massive increase in ballot requests from his party "reflects enthusiasm" — the majority of voters who have applied for absentee ballots have been registered Democrats.

Tillis also implored his supporters to vote absentee — he cautioned about the risk a voter or family member could become infected and make voting on Election Day impossible. He also pointed out that Democrats would have to turn out fewer voters than Republicans on Election Day because they can track returned ballots. "They'll outwork us, if we let them," he said.

As the fall campaign gets underway, campaigning itself has become an issue. Tillis held in-person events over the August recess, many of them visits to small businesses aided by the Paycheck Protection Program — including this week when he met with three leaders at a local business that benefited from the loans who praised the response as essential for their company. Cunningham has held more than 70 virtual events, including four town halls in two days last week, but has not restarted in-person campaigning.

Tillis said he thinks Cunningham is staying virtual to avoid scrutiny that would come with more in-person events and less structured interactions. He also defended his own events as safe, pointing out that he was distanced from voters, almost all of whom wore masks — though a couple people did not have them on, and Tillis removed his mask to speak. He apologized last month for not wearing a mask at the White House for Trump's acceptance speech, saying he fell short of his own standards.

Cunningham said he’s “trying to be incredibly mindful about the risks that a candidate poses to the public by being out and about, particularly with a virus where there's such a high incidence of asymptomatic carrying.”

Nationally, some Democrats have begun to return to the trail, including Joe Biden for the first time this week. Cunningham said his campaign is evaluating as it goes on returning to in-person events. He acknowledged that he’s missing the interactions with voters, but he's covering ground across the state virtually including holding area-specific events to reach more voters.

Republicans argue he could find a safe way to return to the campaign trail if he wanted.

“I don’t care how many TV ads you run — people want to see you. They want to talk to you. They want to know you care about the state,” state GOP chairman Michael Whatley said. “The fact that President Trump has been on the ground more than Cal Cunningham says a lot to me."

It says a lot to Democrats, too.

“The more Thom Tillis pokes his finger in the eye of public health and public safety,” said Wayne Goodwin, the Democratic Party chair, “it underscores how desperate he is.”

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17-Year Old Makes History, Becomes Licensed Pilot Before Graduating High School

At the age of 17, William Moore, Jr. is a licensed private pilot. Even though he hasn’t graduated from high school yet, he is already ready to pursue his instrument rating.

Over the past three years, he attended the Organization of Black Aerospace Professionals (OBAP) Aerospace Career Education (ACE) Academy located in Northern Virginia (NOVA). This Academy provides middle and high school youth with exposure to opportunities in aerospace and aviation through week-long summer camps. The program is endorsed by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), OBAP has served a leading role in establishing ACE Academies nationwide to introduce, educate and guide diverse students towards careers in aviation.

Earlier this year, he interviewed for a scholarship through the East Coast Chapter, Tuskegee Airmen, Inc. (ECCTAI) Youth in Aviation Program (YIAP). He was accepted to attend ground school and completed in the top 5% of his class.

The ECCTAI YIAP covered many of his hours towards dual flight instruction and over the summer he flew at Potomac Airfield through HJ Aviation, LLC. He was honored to learn that his flight school was named after Herbert H. Jones Jr., an original Tuskegee Airman. He had the privilege of meeting Mr. Jones and he encouraged him to remain focused and stay on the path to aviation.

He started his first flight lesson on April 28, 2019, completed his first solo on June 28, 2019 and received his private pilot’s license (PPL) on October 15, 2019 (his birthday). He was selected and awarded a scholarship from Delta Air Lines to attend the National Flight Academy for a 2019 Summer Deployment 19-06. He learned so much and looks forward to attending again.

“We are so proud of our son. He set goals, was determined to pass his FAA exam the first time and also spoke into existence that he would achieve his PPL on his birthday,” said his mother, Kamesha Moore and father William Moore, Sr.

He plans to give back by sharing his experience with his peers in hopes of inspiring them that their dream of becoming a PPL can be achieved through hard work. For example, he is the first to complete the program and was invited and will participate with the incoming class of students.

On October 24, 2019, FAA Administrator Steve Dickson introduced audiences at the National Business Aviation Association to William Moore Jr. He said, “Last week William celebrated his 17th birthday by passing the oral portion of the exam for his private pilot’s license and by taking a flight with his instructor. We need more like Moore.”

His future goal is to become a commercial airline pilot and/or a cargo pilot. In addition, he is also interested in serving his country as a military C-5/C-17/C-130 pilot

Moore will join a small group of African American male pilots. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, figures from last year show less than 3% of US commercial pilots are African American.

This article was originally published by BlackNews.com.

from Black Enterprise https://ift.tt/3lShoWD