News — black american

For describing Indonesian island Bali as “queer-friendly” and suggesting she could help foreigners enter the island amid the coronavirus, Black American woman Kristen Gray was deported Thursday. Immigration officials on the island said they deported the 28-year-old for “spreading information that could unsettle the public” and getting involved in “dangerous activities” that could endanger public order.

Gray was arrested three days after posting a thread on Twitter about Bali being LGBT-friendly and praising it for its low cost of living. She also went ahead to promote an e-book, “Our Bali Life Is Yours,” that she wrote with her partner, Saundra Alexander. The couple had left the United States last January largely due to its high cost of living and had planned to stay six months.

However, they continued to stay in Bali after Indonesian authorities halted international travel following the spread of the coronavirus. In the Twitter thread, Gray wrote that their stay has been worth it as they were now paying $400 for a treehouse compared with $1,300 for a studio in Los Angeles. “This island has been amazing because of our elevated lifestyle at a much lower cost of living,” Gray wrote. “Being a digital nomad is everything.”

Balinese are mostly Hindu, though Indonesia is the largest Muslim-majority nation in the world where LGBT people do continue to face discrimination, BBC reported. In a statement, the immigration office in Bali said Gray’s posts on Twitter, which caused a backlash online, could “unsettle the public” as it could suggest that the island was welcoming to gay men and lesbians or that it’s not difficult entering Indonesia during the pandemic.

Gray and her partner, Alexander, 30, were deported on Thursday morning after flying to Jakarta from Bali on Wednesday evening and staying overnight, The New York Times reported. The two boarded a flight to Los Angeles with a stopover in Tokyo, the report added.

Gray had said she was targeted because of her comments on LGBT. “I am not guilty,” she earlier told reporters at the immigration detention center on Tuesday. “I put out a statement about L.G.B.T. and I am being deported because of L.G.B.T.”

Her lawyer, Erwin Siregar, couldn’t agree more. He argued that the deportation of Gray and her partner was “unfair” as they were not even given the opportunity to prove their case in court. “They are good people,” Siregar said of the couple. “They can persuade tourists to come to Indonesia after the pandemic is over without a cent of payment. We should thank them, not deport them.”

An infamous White Supremacist shop and museum in South Carolina that was also the meeting place of the Ku Klux Klan and was once regarded as the “World’s Only Klan Museum”, is set to be converted into a community center in an effort to educate and combat racial injustice.

The project is being spearheaded by Rev. David Kennedy, pastor of the New Beginning Missionary Baptist Church, and Regan Freeman. The two are the founders of the Echo Project – a “nonprofit dedicated to healing racial division and standing against hatred through dialogue, empathy, and understanding.”

Formerly known as the Redneck Shop, the establishment, which is situated on the same building as the now-closed and previously segregated Echo Theater in downtown Laurens, was opened in 1996 until it was forced to ultimately shut down in 2012, according to CNN. The shop once sold White nationalist and neo-Nazi paraphernalia as well as Confederate memorabilia and Klan attire.

“We don’t want to just have a museum to tell this story, the struggle for justice, and the fight against the Klan, but we also want to detail what happened here to make sure it never happens again,” Freeman told the news outlet. “The Echo Theater went from being a segregated movie theater to a literal Klan’s store to being in the possession of a Black minister, and it is about to become a place for reconciliation, justice and healing.”

Following the opening of the shop in 1996 by its previous owners and KKK members, John Howard and Michael Burden, Kennedy actively and vehemently protested against its operation and called for its closure – an action that put him in the bad books of the KKK. The Klan members even contemplated killing him at a certain point.

Things, however, took a very positively shocking turn when Kennedy surprisingly became friends with Burden after the latter had a dispute with his former partner, Howard. Kennedy told CNN he offered Burden security as well as accommodation and food for him and his family despite his background. Their unlikely friendship inspired the 2018 true-life movie, Burden.

After the two established their friendship, Burden, in need of cash, sold the property’s deed to Kennedy and his church, The Post and Courier reported. Burden had earlier become the owner of the property in 1997. A clause in the deed agreement, however, stated Kennedy was prohibited from doing anything to the property until Howard passed away.

The shop was, however, forced to close in 2012 after a judge declared Kennedy and his church as the rightful owners of the property following a 15-year court battle between the preacher and Howard.

With that being sorted, Kennedy later set his sights at transforming the shop, with Freeman eventually partnering with him. The two have so far raised over $375,000 to convert the building into a community center. Upon completion, the new establishment will showcase paraphernalia and memorabilia from the Redneck Shop, as well as set up educational classrooms, all with the aim of fostering remembrance and reconciliation, CNN reported.

The South African activist, Bantu Steven Biko, was born on December 18, 1946. Biko was an African nationalist and socialist at the forefront of the anti-apartheid campaign known as the Black Consciousness Movement in the 1960s and 1970s.

Influenced by Martinican revolutionary, Frantz Fanon, and the African American Black Power Movement, Biko developed and spread the idea of Black Consciousness, that espoused that “blacks had to overcome the feelings of inferiority instilled into them, the ‘oppression within’ before they could deal with whites as equals.” He also popularized the Black Is Beautiful movement which started in the U.S., in Africa.

Biko explains further in his book, I Write What I Like: “This is the first truth, bitter as it may seem, that we have to acknowledge before we can start on any programme designed to change the status quo. It becomes more necessary to see the truth as it is if you realise that the only vehicle for change is these people who have lost their personality. The first step, therefore, is to make the black man come to himself; to pump back life into his empty shell; to infuse him with pride and dignity, to remind him of his complicity in the crime of allowing himself to be misused and therefore letting evil reign supreme in the country of his birth. This is what we mean by an inward-looking process. This is the definition of ‘Black Consciousness’.”

Biko contributed significantly to the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa through his leadership and vision at a time when African National Congress and the Pan Africanist Congress, and its leaders such as Nelson Mandela, were jailed, exiled, or killed. He was highly influential in the grassroots campaigns and youth uprisings which were pivotal for turning the public/international support away from the apartheid government.

Biko was only 30 years old when he died. He was arrested at a police roadblock when he broke a ban restricting him to speak publicly or travel. He was severely beaten and died in a cell alone on 12 September 1977 after what has been reported to be a horrifying 25 days in police custody. More than 20,000 people from around the world attended his funeral.

The South African activist has been commemorated by many institutions, world leaders, including Nelson Mandela, and in song, movies – most prominently the 1987 film Cry Freedom -,  and by businesses such as Google. His work continues through the Steve Biko Foundation spearheaded by his family.

Many of today’s acclaimed cultural movement, including the #WokeMovement, AfricaRising, etc, on Black consciousness, Black pride, and Black awareness and activism, owe a great deal to this man.

California Sen. Kamala Harris is now the first woman vice president-elect in United States history and the first person of color to make it to the second-highest office as Joe Biden wins the presidency.

On Saturday, several media outlets projected that former vice president Biden and his running mate, Harris, won the state of Pennsylvania and its 20 electoral votes, thus earning more than 270 electoral votes in the 2020 presidential election.

“This election is about so much more than @JoeBiden or me,” 56-year-old Harris, the daughter of immigrants, said on Twitter shortly after Biden was projected as the winner. “It’s about the soul of America and our willingness to fight for it. We have a lot of work ahead of us. Let’s get started.”

For two decades in public life, Harris has achieved a lot of firsts: the first Black woman to serve as San Francisco’s district attorney, the first woman to be California’s attorney general, first Indian American senator, and now she will be working by Biden’s side after he named her for the nomination to the number two spot in August amid cheers from supporters including women activists.

Here’s what you should know about the prosecutor-turned-senator whose motto comes from her mom: “You may be the first, but make sure you’re not the last.”

She worked as a deputy district attorney from 1990–98 in Oakland, prosecuting cases of drug trafficking, gang violence, and sexual abuse. Despite her parents not being too comfortable with her career choice, Kamala said she wanted to change the system from the inside, and with that determination, she moved up the ladder, becoming a district attorney in 2004.

At the time, she had made a name for herself in San Francisco, not only through her work as a prosecutor but also through her friendships with the city’s elite and her relationship with former mayor Willie B. They would support her with funding when she campaigned for office to become district attorney in 2004. That same year, she made what has been described as one of her most controversial decisions; Kamala refused to pursue the death penalty against the man who killed San Francisco police officer Isaac Espinoza.

She was heavily criticized for that. And when she ran for California attorney general, many thought she would lose to Steve Cooley, a popular white Republican who served as Los Angeles’ DA. Why? Kamala was a woman of color from liberal San Francisco who opposed the death penalty, but she made it, winning by a margin of less than 1 percent, thus becoming the first woman to hold the post in 2010.

Even though she was criticized during her time as attorney general for not doing enough to cater to police brutality, especially when she refused to investigate the police shootings of two Black men in 2014 and 2015, she did demonstrate political independence while in office.

She clashed with the Obama administration when California was offered $4 billion in a national mortgage settlement over the foreclosure crisis. Fighting for a larger amount, Harris did not sign the deal, and at the end of the day, she was able to secure $20 billion for California homeowners, according to reports.

Getting elected to the U.S. Senate in 2016 also raised her national profile as she went viral for her sharp interrogations of officials and nominees of the Trump administration, including then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions on the Russia investigation during a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing and Brett M. Kavanaugh during his Supreme Court confirmation hearing.

But her most viral moment occurred during her 2020 presidential campaign. During the first Democratic debate, Harris criticized Biden for his position on a federal busing program in the 1970s that benefited minorities, including herself.

Biden looked shocked when Harris told him on the debate stage last July: “There was a little girl in California who was part of the second class to integrate her public schools. And she was bused to school every day,” she said. “And that little girl was me.”

Though Harris’s support increased after that moment, by September 2019 she began falling behind in polling. Her campaign struggled due to internal staff rows and in December, she dropped out of the race.

She, however, continued to have a well-publicized presence, particularly becoming a leading advocate for social justice reform in response to the killing of George Floyd. Her stance silenced critics who had slammed her while she was attorney general over claims she refused to investigate charges of police misconduct though she explained that she was only committed to a fairer criminal justice system.

And amid the protests against police brutality and racial injustice in the United States, it was not surprising that many prominent Black male leaders called on Biden to select a Black woman as his vice presidential running mate to increase his election chances.

In August, Biden picked Harris, and they will be now working toward an equitable and prosperous future for all Americans. “Black women have always been the backbone of this Democratic Party, and oftentimes not valued for our ability to lead,” said Barbara Lee, the congresswoman from Oakland, Calif., who was a co-chair of Harris’ own presidential bid.

“But I tell you now, Black women are showing that Black women lead, and we’ll never go back to the days where candidates only knew our value in terms of helping them get elected. Now they will see how we govern from the White House.”

In life, there is a second chance for everyone who wants to do something meaningful and purposeful with their lives. Often, the environment we grow up in turns to shape and define who we are and what we become in the future. In other cases, the problem is systemic and attempts to break the barriers have often proven daunting or fruitless.

In America, Black people face system-wide challenges such as racism, inadequate housing, severe jail sentences, low access to credit facilities to start a business, police profiling, among others.

Despite these challenges, the Black community has seen some emerging entrepreneurs defying all odds to make it in a political-economic system that has been designed against them. One of such persons is Bun Bydaway, who was in juvenile detention for possessing a firearm when he was 16 years old and has now become a serial entrepreneur.

Bydaway grew up in Wilmington, Delaware, which has been nicknamed “murder town” owing to the widespread gun violence in the community. Owning a gun appears to be a tradition but it also made the community dangerous, according to Bydaway.

Wilmington has consistently ranked among the most violent small U.S. cities on the FBI list. According to one report, young people between ages 12 and 17 are more likely to be shot than in any other city in the U.S. These stats confirm the nature of gun violence in Wilmington. 

While in prison, Bydaway knew he had to chart a new course if he wants to make an impact in his community. The majority of males in his family were either in prison or dead. His father has been away for over six years as well as his uncles. 

His dream of becoming a business owner crystalized after his last time in prison in 2018, he says. “I can’t go back to jail so I had to put my hundred percent efforts into just what I wanted to do for long-term,” he tells Face2Face Africa. While on probation, Bydaway started with his real estate business and later vending machines. “I just started with them and then everything else just came after. I never looked back since,” he says.

He has added other businesses; he co-owns a female clothing brand and has a car rental company where he rents exotic cars. He is also an artiste manager with a music studio. Bydaway is hoping to scale up his business and employ more people in the summer. He is also in the process of getting into the tech space as he is currently working on an app.

What’s more, Bydaway has taken up the mantle of advocating for prison reforms. He is advocating for less jail time and more reform programs for Black teens. He also believes being assigned to therapists could yield a more desired outcome than being jailed.

Bydaway’s journey to becoming an entrepreneur has not been smooth sailing for him. He recalls how he was finding it difficult to reintegrate into his community after his jail time. “I think prison turned me into a man but I think it [kind of] made it worst for me to adapt to society. I lost a lot of time in prison for things I could have been corrected on…Maybe a program or something in society,” he says.

He also remembers making a “lot of mistakes” when he started his business. Nonetheless, he says, “I learned from my mistakes sooner than later but [the] mistakes were costly. I wasn’t really making huge profits, sometimes none at all.”

Reflecting on his journey and his past mistakes, Bydaway is convinced that nothing is too late in this world. He is also motivated by the saying that “no matter how much the odds are stack against you, with determination, you can win.”

“[It is] never too late to make a turnaround,” the amazing businessman says in a piece of advice to all Black youth. “It most likely not going to be easy as the cards [is] stacked against Blacks, he adds. “We must work extra hard to break the chain. Everybody should want to be on the streets and take care of their family if you not going to do it for your self do it for your family.”

Bydaway also believes the U.S. government can play a role in creating opportunities for Black communities. When asked about the role the U.S. government can play to support Black businesses and the Black community in general, the serial entrepreneur called for more education and skills training. “The funding should go where it can count and will make a difference,” he says.

In the first decades of the twentieth century, American citizens went from euphoria to sadness. The Great Depression of 1929 led to the dismantling of the economy and pushed hundreds of people into unemployment. The American way of life, blown to the four corners of the planet as an earthly paradise, became an uncontrolled nightmare, especially for the poorest sections of the population.

Fearing the worsening of the crisis and seeing no signs of improvement in the short term, many people migrated to other countries looking for more decent living conditions. This was the case of the African American Robert Robinson, who suffered not only from the effects of economic collapse but also from the horrors of racism that insisted on scourging a part of the citizens.

On the other side of the world, seven years before the American crash, a countries confederation was founded under the aegis of communism. In mid-December 1922, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) was made official, which brought together interests from different countries aiming at a common goal: to strengthen communism in eastern Europe and in parts of Central and Northern Asia.

The formation of the Soviet bloc had profound consequences, visible to the present days, and facilitated negotiations with foreign powers. Among the agreements signed, it ensured the importation of qualified workers to supply the shortage of professionals in certain functions in the incipient communist industries. There was a great demand for manpower since the Soviets wanted to transform the predominantly rural socialist confederation into an industrialized superpower.

At the height of the Great Depression, the Soviets took advantage of the disintegration of American factories and entered into agreements with capitalist entrepreneurs, including Henry Ford. In the negotiations, it was decided that the Ford Motor Company would build a factory in the Russian city of Nizhny Novgorod and provide all necessary assistance for consolidating the company.

In addition to that, the Soviets were allowed to regularly visit the facilities of the American headquarters (The Ford River Rouge) to study assembly line production techniques and to invite workers interested in spending a season working in the socialist state. Once the agreement was ratified, the factory construction began immediately.

In 1930, a Soviet delegation arrived in the United States and the commissioners spent a few days at The Ford River Rouge headquarters. From this moment on, Robinson’s life would change: resting at home, he received a phone call: the communists invited him to work in USSR.

The offer was tempting, especially in the context of racism, the economic crisis, and the imminent threat of unemployment. The job offer included double the salary that Henry Ford was paying for his work, 30 days of paid vacation, car, housing, free access to and from the communist bloc and some other perks. His role was to be a mechanical engineer, his original graduation at the Stalingrad Tractor Factory – current Volgograd, located 969 km south of Moscow. Robinson did not hesitate, accepted the invitation and left for the other side of the continent.

Born in Jamaica in 1906, Robinson migrated to Cuba in the company of his mother – a Dominican doctor. On the Caribbean island, he had the opportunity to study and graduated as a mechanical engineer. From there, they moved to Dearborn, Michigan (USA), where Robinson got US citizenship and a job at the Ford Motor Company. Being the only black employee in a factory with 700 workers, discrimination was part of everyday life.

Ever since he arrived in the United States, Robinson noticed the treatment that black people received and felt the effects of racism on his own skin. The Ku Klux Klan was very active, terrorizing black people from the north to the south of the country, and racist nationalism was the dogma practiced by white people – whether or not they belonged to the supremacist organization.

With constant killings and explicit prejudice sponsored by the state, Robinson, at 23, feared being the next to suffer lynching, something that had happened to people close to him.

When the soviets made the proposal, he only knew Russia from the travelers’ reports and newspapers circulating in Detroit at the time. He had little information about the Bolshevik Revolution that established communism in the country, but he decided that he would accept the invitation to escape discrimination and save a little money to offer a better life to his mother, who, despite being a doctor, could not find a job. Thus, he joined the entourage of 370 Americans who settled in the USSR and went to work at the Stalingrad Tractor Factory.

Welcomed with enthusiasm by the hosts in the late 1930s, the Americans were housed in new apartments, received supplies regularly, had their own restaurant, medical center, jazz dancing afternoons and even the English newspaper Spark of the Industry. It was a different treatment from the one offered to nationals themselves, who did not enjoy the same privileges. But racism chased Robinson like a shadow and episodes of discrimination, starting from American workers, began to pop up regularly.

One afternoon, while finishing lunch in the cafeteria, he started a discussion with two officers who ridiculed him and called him “filthy black”. The chatter became a beating; the Soviet colleagues separated the fight, but the repercussion of the case ended up going beyond the limits of the factory and reported in the press.

The other workers strongly supported Robinson, including demanding the deportation of the two racist workers, who were judged and expelled by the firm’s board.

Welcome to the Soviet, comrade Robert

The Stalinist machine decided to use the incident for advertising purposes. The case became an example publicized by the Soviets of American racism and US-sponsored violence against black citizens.

Reluctantly, Robinson became a well-known celebrity by the press and the aggression was so publicized that it inhibited his return to the United States. In his autobiography Black on Red: My 44 Years Inside the Soviet Union (Acropolis Books, 436 pages), he wrote about the episode: “In the eyes of the Russians, I became a true hero, the personification of good that triumphs over evil. I was bombarded with letters of support and sympathy sent from different regions of the USSR”.

But it did not stop there. Robinson’s name was frequent in workers’ conversations, guest of honor at several public events, and his fame as a proletarian hero spread all over the places. In 1934, he was promoted to another post, also on a compulsory basis: unanimously, he was elected as a representative of the Moscow Soviet, one of the regime’s most important workers’ councils.

Regarding the election, he later declared: “I was stunned and frantically thinking: What did they do to me? What did I get involved in? I am an American citizen, I am not a politician, I am not a communist, I do not approve either the communist party or the Soviet system. I am not an atheist, nor even an agnostic, I believe in God, I pray to Him and I am faithful only to Him”.

Robinson’s election to the Soviet sparked the anger of US officials in Moscow. Accused of being a communist by his countrymen, he was pressured to return immediately to the United States. He even tried to return to the country, but his reputation as a “communist agitator” undermined any possibility of return and he was forced to remain in the Soviet Union, where he received Russian citizenship.

Here is a parenthesis: the United States had the largest communist party in the world outside the USSR. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, in fact, was known as “red” due to the statist policies he envisaged. But then World War II came, and ideologies took over political guidelines. So, with the “witch hunt”, being a communist was a dangerous charge. Closed parenthesis, let’s continue with the text.

Communism advertising boy, Robinson gave lectures, classes at universities, acted in two movies and gave autographs on the streets of Moscow. But not everything was made of happiness, especially in that acute period of Stalinism. When Sergei Mironovich Kirov, Stalin’s likely successor, was executed by rivals, the preference for American workers ended and the lives of foreigners drastically deteriorated.

In addition, the Stalinist Great Purge, between 1936 and 1938, caused many of Robinson’s acquaintances to disappear. Fearing again for his life, he decided to return to the United States but was prevented by the communists. The fame, although involuntary, took a high price from “comrade yankee”.

The letters he sent to his mother were opened, read and often censored. He had no contact with family members, only workers from the factories he worked in and some neighbors. Annually, Robinson submitted to the Soviet authorities an application for a visa to leave the bloc, but the request was repeatedly denied. Only in 1973, when he obtained clemency from some African ambassadors, he was allowed to visit Uganda.

At 67 years old, he packed his bags and left immediately. In Uganda, he requested refuge and was promptly attended to by dictator Idi Amin. The autocrat dealt directly with Robinson, offered positions at the University, Ugandan citizenship, housing and several other perks. The engineer kindly declined the offer and expressed his desire to restore his American citizenship.

Despite the expressed desire to return to his native country, he stayed in Uganda for a few years where he married an African-American teacher. It was only in 1986 that he managed to revalidate his citizenship and obtain authorization to enter the United States. When he landed, however, he discovered his mother had already passed away years before he was present at the funeral. It was one of the greatest sorrows of his life, he would report later.

During the 44 years he spent in the Soviet Union, Robinson survived Stalinism, the Nazi invasion and experienced the first decades of the Cold War. He was not a communist, but he contributed greatly to the modernization of the Soviet bloc. He left the United States because of racism and seeking better living conditions. However, although he was safe from the Ku Klux Klan, he was forced to serve as an AD boy for the Communist Party in order to survive Stalinism.

Hated by communists and despised by capitalists, he spent his last years ostracized, suffocated by oblivion, until he died in 1994 in a small hospital in Washington, DC, at 88 years old.

Like most kids around the world last spring, João Pedro Mattos Pinto found himself on lockdown because of the raging coronavirus. Unable to go to school on May 18, the 14-year-old Black Brazilian joined his cousins at their house in a favela outside of Rio de Janeiro. When gunfire erupted in the neighborhood, he sent his mother a WhatsApp message: “I’m inside the house. Don’t worry.”

Suddenly, 10 police officers burst into the house, searching for a purported drug trafficker and firing off more than 70 shots. João Pedro was hit in the back. His relatives bundled the bleeding boy into a police helicopter, and he was airlifted away. The police barred family members from accompanying the minor and refused to provide the family with any more information. Police arrested no one in the operation.

João Pedro’s cousin, Daniel, put out a desperate message on Twitter, begging people for help locating him. The #procurasejoaopedro (find João Pedro) hashtag trended on Brazilian Twitter overnight. While more than 1,400 young Black men are killed by police every year in Rio, João Pedro’s disappearance grabbed the headlines. It took his family 17 hours to locate his body in a public morgue.

That was seven days before the world would see the haunting video of a Minneapolis police officer kneeling on the neck of George Floyd; before Black Lives Matter uprisings erupted across the United States, spreading quickly around the world. These two events helped to spark #VidasNegrasImportam (#BlackLivesMatter in Portuguese) protests in Rio de Janeiro and across Brazil, the South American country with the largest population of Black people outside Africa, just ahead of the United States. And in an ironic confluence of events—Joao Pedro’s death combined with the coronavirus—police in Rio were forced to stop almost all operations, at least temporarily, leading to a stark decline in fatal police encounters.

In a world without coronavirus, João Pedro’s death wouldn’t have trended on Twitter, nor would it have been front-page news. But the pandemic and subsequent protests forced Brazilians to focus on anti-Black police violence, which they had long ignored or normalized. Rio activists and lawyers, who had been working against such violence for years, filed an emergency petition asking Brazil’s Supreme Court to stop police operations during the pandemic. And one Supreme Court justice temporarily ruled in favor—with startling results.

One month after Supreme Court Justice Edson Fachin’s June 5 order barring police operations in Rio—except in extreme circumstances—killings by police had dropped 70% compared to the previous 12 years. A study revealed that the suspension of police operations in Rio’s favelas could save more than 400 lives this year alone.

On August 3, a majority of justices on Brazil’s Supreme Court voted to uphold Fachin’s temporary ban on police operations in Rio—a decision that could have broader implications for addressing police violence across the country. The Supreme Court must still determine whether Rio’s state security policing needs to be aligned with national and international human rights standards.

“It is possible that if COVID hadn’t happened, we would not have had a [judicial] decision like we had,” said Wallace Corbo, a lawyer who works pro bono on behalf of the Educafro, an education and social justice nonprofit in Brazil. He started working on the Supreme Court case to stop Rio police operations last year.

“COVID and João Pedro changed everything,” Corbo explained.

The COVID-19 pandemic further unmasked the extent of racial inequities. Although it was the White and wealthy who brought the coronavirus to Brazil from their European holidays, the workers who live in favelas and periphery communities—the Black and poor—were dying at the highest rates. A recent study revealed that 80% of Rio’s coronavirus deaths were registered in the city’s most impoverished areas. And the hardest hit demographic group is older, Black, impoverished men. As of August 27, the country of more than 211 million people had registered more than 117,000 coronavirus deaths.

In many ways, Brazil has emerged as an almost mirror image of the United States, even down to the racial uprising that resulted from a police killing. It is second only to the United States in the number of confirmed cases of coronavirus. And like U.S. President Donald Trump, Brazil’s President Jair Bolsonaro downplayed the virus from the beginning of the pandemic, calling it a “little flu.” Between March and May, two health ministers resigned; their posts remain vacant. The country has yet to implement a national coronavirus plan.

Such lack of coordination and planning leaves favela activists such as Fernanda Viana Araujo, 40, scrambling to provide food and other basic necessities to people quarantined in tight quarters in these neighborhoods. Mothers who supported their families as domestic servants had to stay home. Fathers who earned a living as parking lot attendants had no work. Grocery store attendants continued to work, potentially exposing their families to the virus.

Araujo said her focus recently has shifted to providing COVID-19 testing to residents of Maré, a favela with the highest number of both COVID cases and deaths overall in Rio.

“We normally focus on building our community through culture, art, public policy, and education,” said Araujo, who works with the nonprofit Rede da Maré, which is in the Maré favela. “But we realized we needed to do something to help our people stay alive. And that means giving them food for their table.”

A judge has rejected Dr. Dre’s estranged wife, Nicole Young’s request for $1.5 million to pay for various expenses, such as security.

The former couple revealed they were divorcing in June 2020 with former attorney Nicole citing irreconcilable differences as the reason behind the split.

In the latest legal decision, the judge rejected Nicole's requests because she had already fired a security team Dre had employed and was paying for.

The judge also dismissed her request to expedite Dre paying out $5 million for her lawyer’s fees. Young’s lawyers were in court on Thursday, urging the judge to accept her $1.5 million claim for security since she’s getting death threats.

Part of the reason why the judge rejected her request is because she let her security team go, which Dre was already paying for. She alleged that Dre has been controlling and wanted to bring on her own security, saying Dre warned her that he would fire her security if they didn’t do what he said. Dre’s lawyer told the judge that the hip-hop mogul is inclined to pay Young’s expenses, including security, which the judge accepted.

Young’s lawyers also urged the judge to advance the hearing regarding the $5 million for attorney’s fees, wanting it moved from January to this month. However, the judge said no.

When the judge dismissed Young’s requests, he remarked that he’s working on more crucial domestic violence and custody cases, and her case isn’t anywhere as serious. He noted that if Dre was trying to control Young, then she could file a restraining order against him.

Earlier this month, news surfaced that Young had filed a nearly $2 million a month temporary spousal support request. It’s unclear at this time if that's the same claim as the $1.5 million request she made for security.

Their split has been messy and well-document, with the latest ruling a win for Dre's team.

Nicole has also accused Dre, also known as Andre Romelle Young - of hiding valuable assets after they split, including trademarks for his stage name and "The Chronic" album

This week, Dre responded to Young's $2 million claim, saying, "This all seems like the wrath of an angry person being exacerbated by opportunistic lawyers." He also revealed that he's already paid $5 million in lawyer fees for Young for their divorce.