June 24, 2023 at 12:48AM
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Special 529 Plan Can Help Parents Save Thousands on Tuition at Private Colleges - The Wall Street Journal
Whenever a person of color appears in a Disney project, like the new live-action iteration of “The Little Mermaid,” the racial vitriol automatically comes with the territory. Even in an age where we watched Meghan Markle become a literal Princess and a member of the royal family with our own two eyes, the heated conversation around race rages onward.
Whether it’s an album cover, film or TikTok dance, the racism, misogyny, and obsessive comments over what Black people can and can not become is exhausting and unnecessary. We live in a multicultural world where stories are no longer seen through a monolithic lens. With Disney features alone this issue has become even more pronounced. Remember when Brandy was Cinderella in 1997? Or when Princess Tiana hit the scene in “The Princess and the Frog” in 2009?
This predictable racism escalated even further when plans to produce a live-action version of “The Little Mermaid” were announced starring singer/actress Halle Bailey. Enraged fans were not silent in expressing their discontent. “Why does Ariel need to be Black? Why is the studio trying to erase my childhood” the arguments went. Let’s be clear, Hans Christian Anderson’s book (from which this all originated) and the 1989 animated film are still widely available and accessible to audiences — no one is erasing anything.
Is this any different than when Shuri was introduced in “Wakanda Forever?” Or Miles Morales’ entrance in “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse?” Yes and no. Black women always have our presence questioned, undervalued and/or marginalized, especially in the cinematic landscape. Even when Shuri appeared in no less than 10 Marvel comic books, when Letitia Wright was named the Black Panther, many diehards heralded the end of this franchise.
Did anyone have a similar reaction when actress Hailee Steinfeld was announced to take the mantle of Hawkeye or when Natalie Portman showed up as Lady Thor in “Thor: Love and Thunder?” Somehow having a Black female lead in the Marvel Cinematic Universe is going to crumble the studio and bring the franchise to its knees.
These white women may have received some social media backlash to their casting, but with Ariel and Shuri the one-two punch of race and gender-based vitriol hits on a level that feels massively unfair.
It may sound trite, but representation truly does matter. The sheer joy on the faces of little girls posted in videos from around the globe hugging and running into the arms of an Ariel that looks like them is tangible proof of the significance of this type of cultural representation.
Seeing the 1989 animated version meant everything to marine scientist/host Danni Washington, inspiring her to enter the world of science. Just like Ariel, that decision came with unforeseen challenges. While Bailey has received criticism over being cast in “The Little Mermaid,” Washington was fighting her own racial battles as a Black woman in the scientific sector.
“Black people in these spaces [weren’t] typically included. Now, there’s a network of scientists around the world with B.W.E.E.M.S (Black Women in Ecology and Marine Science) devoted to pushing the bounds of science and elevating Black Women who continue to drive innovation in ecology, evolution, and marine science despite being historically overlooked and isolated in the field,” she said.
Washington continued, “Having a Black woman onscreen to look up to, whether it’s me in the science space or Halle, representation matters and that’s important to me.”
Entertainment and culture journalist Brooke Obie couldn’t agree more. “While I absolutely roll my eyes at stories that tell girls to do anything for a man, let alone give up their voice – I love that little Black girls are seeing this and getting their imaginations expanded about what’s possible,” she said. “Ariel is curious and passionate and adventurous; she longs for a life beyond what she’s known and craves the freedom to make her own decisions rather than adopting the views of her overbearing father. Having a Black girl express these desires to a global audience matters.”
While “The Little Mermaid” has grossed over $259 million domestic, the film was hit with review-bombing overseas that softened its international performance (its worldwide total currently stands at $472 million). Representation matters, in spite of these kinds of reactions.
This generation of young girls is the same generation who have been privileged enough to see a Black President and a superhero who transcended the big screen into real life with Chadwick Boseman’s portrayal of Black Panther. Hope and imagination is all the youth of today can cling to in a world swirling with hate and controversy over where, how and why Black people fit into the artistic landscape.
Let this generation have a Black Ariel. Let them be the generation that can foster and break this cycle of racism. Let’s view art with an open mind and not be so quick to judge with selective amnesia. Like John Boyega said when met with backlash over being cast in “Star Wars: The Force Awakens,” “To whom it may concern … Get used to it.”
June 24, 2023 at 04:28AM
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Cultural Impact Is Defining the Success of ‘The Little Mermaid’ (Commentary) - Yahoo Entertainment
The bangs of incoming and outgoing shelling are the soundtrack of Ukraine’s frontline. But its president warned this week that the counteroffensive should not be seen through the lens of a Hollywood movie.
Just outside the newly liberated villages of Neskuchne and Storozheve, Ukrainian soldiers take shelter in destroyed houses vacated by the Russians, waiting for orders to fire mortars at enemy lines.
It’s busy. The men of the 35th Marine Brigade transfer newly arrived American-made 120-millimeter mortar rounds to their temporary hideout. They clean and prepare them for launch and scribble messages on the shells for their enemy. Another group get the coordinates and adjust the mortar for better aim.
The drone flying overhead is their eyes on the enemy line across the fields. When they hear the buzz of the drone engine, the soldiers occasionally peek up to check if it’s theirs or the Russians’.
Then they wait, sometimes for hours, to fire.
The sounds cloud the blue sky. The bangs of outgoing artillery and mortar rounds cut through the tranquillity of abandoned fields. Shells whizz through the sky in the familiar whistle of incoming rounds along with the successive pops of Russian grad rockets. The booms of impact intersperse the non-stop exchange of fire.
Occasionally, a soldier flinches when the sound gets louder and closer.
“There are moments that you want to hide, but you just sit and wait,” says Yuri, a UK-trained soldier, resting in a small protective trench. It is his third day on the job.
But like the long waits of the soldiers, the Ukrainian counteroffensive is a slow grind.
Russian soldiers took positions in the destroyed and abandoned village houses. Now Ukrainians fear they could be booby-trapped.
Sarah El Sirgany/CNN
Russian President Vladimir Putin says there is a lull in the counteroffensive. But Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky warns against expecting fast results. “Some want some sort of Hollywood movie but things don’t really happen that way,” he said in a BBC interview. Each side claims the other has suffered heavy losses.
This strip of small villages in the Donetsk region were liberated on June 10, a day before Zelensky announced the counteroffensive was underway. Since then, the Ukrainian military has not announced substantial gains on the southern or eastern frontlines.
For the soldiers who walked through these villages a day after liberation, it’s bittersweet.
“The main thing I felt was anger, because when you go through the villages, your imagination can picture how it was before the war. People were living here. People had good houses. You can see their belongings inside. And now we enter the village and see it in ruins, we get angry,” says Matyoriy, a 35th Marine soldier.
As soon as the 120-mm American-made mortar rounds were delivered, they were cleaned and prepared for firing.
Mark Phillips/CNN
The soldiers of the 35ths Marine Brigade wait for the coordinates and the orders to fire.
Sarah El Sirgany/CNN
The thuds of artillery and roving drones punctuate every sentence.
The road to their position snakes through destroyed houses hugged by overgrown gardens. A line of collapsed roofs jut through the untrimmed trees. Neskuchne had a pre-war population of around 700 people. Hardly anyone stayed there after Russia occupied the villages at the beginning of the invasion, but signs of the life that once was are still visible.
A blue and white metal fence surrounds a charred, roofless house that spewed out its broken furniture. A small satellite dish hangs to the front of a house punctured by bullets and shrapnel.
These houses and the surrounded fields could be booby-trapped and mined, Ukrainian soldiers warn. It’s not all that the Russians left behind. A blood-soaked stretcher left by the retreating troops lays on the side of the road. Nearby, there’s a decomposing body of a Russian soldier. Ukrainian soldiers say many corpses were collected earlier and many more could still be in the fields.
“I only start to realize what’s really happening and how much we took after I see it on the news, when they draw a map and I see how much ground we took. I start to realize that we really did it,” Matyoriy adds.
The radio beeps with the orders for the soldiers. They fire multiple rounds towards the Russian line, a couple of miles away. The loud booms keep ears ringing. The soldiers sit back and wait for the next order.
June 23, 2023 at 12:49PM
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These villages were liberated in Ukraine’s grinding counteroffensive. They’re little more than ruins. - CNN
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June 22, 2023 at 05:36AM
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Marjorie Taylor Greene calls Lauren Boebert a 'bitch' on House floor - New York Daily News
Hal Steinbrenner is not concerned yet — but it’s safe to assume Yankees fans are.
The Yankees’ owner said Wednesday on “The Michael Kay Show” he was unsure why Yankees fans are so angry with the team’s struggles.
“They are upset,” Steinbrenner said about Yankee fans. “I’m a little confused, this year, being the third week of June, why they’re so upset, but they’re upset and that’s gonna get my attention, of course.”
“Nobody is on the hot seat right now,” Steinbrenner later added. “Let’s get through the season. Let’s see what happens.”
Some of that fan frustration manifested on the field on Wednesday when struggling veteran Josh Donaldson was booed for grounding into a double play in the bottom of the sixth inning during a 3-1 victory over the Mariners.
It was an unsurprising episode in the Yankees’ disappointing Donaldson saga — the 37-year-old third baseman, acquired before the 2022 season, has just a .642 OPS this year in 19 games, despite his hefty $21 million contract.
Donaldson also missed two months with a hamstring strain that he suffered in the firs week of the season.
He has been below average offensively for his entire tenure as a Yankee, hitting .212/.297/.381 over two seasons while the Yankees have expected him to be an important offensive contributor.
Donaldson has been an expensive failure for the Yankees.Getty Images
Yankee fans are quick to turn on struggling sluggers, as they gave former outfielders Aaron Hicks and Joey Gallo the same treatment during their elongated skids in the Bronx.
The Yankees, who sit in third place in the AL East behind a dominant Rays team and an upstart Orioles squad, hold a 7-9 record in June, experiencing a particularly debilitating rut on the offensive end following superstar Aaron Judge’s toe injury on June 3.
Many of those offensive struggles can be attributed to a slumping trio of veterans the Yankees rely on for offense: Anthony Rizzo, Giancarlo Stanton and DJ LeMahieu all have an OPS under .600 over the last 14 days.
Steinbrenner, nonetheless, offered a vote of confidence in his veterans, saying “there’s no way” Stanton, Rizzo and others don’t improve.
Steinbrenner reiterated that he’s confident his team will turn it around.Charles Wenzelberg / New York Post
The Yankees owner seemed to be taking the long view when asked to assess the season.
“I would say that if we can march into the playoffs with 90 percent of our intended team that we expected to be on the field every day, 90 percent, and we don’t perform well in the playoffs, I’m going to start asking the questions even then,” Steinbrenner said.
June 22, 2023 at 08:49PM
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Hal Steinbrenner 'little confused' by angry Yankee fans as they boo Josh Donaldson - New York Post
Fury has been a fixture of the MMA news cycle since late May, when he responded to a segment on Rogan’s popular podcast The Joe Rogan Experience by pouring gasoline onto the flames of an ongoing debate regarding him and UFC heavyweight champion Jon Jones. In the segment, Rogan confidently predicted that Jones would handle business if he and Fury were ever locked in a room together and only one man was allowed to leave.
For Fury, the entire discussion has seemingly jumped the shark.
“To be honest with you, all this talk of a me and Jon Jones fighting in a cage is absolutely ridiculous,” Fury said at a recent Q&A session in Bangtao Muay Thai & MMA Gym in Phuket, Thailand, as reported by Bloody Elbow. “Like, I’m the lineal world heavyweight champion. The man who beat the man going back to John L. Sullivan. Why would I even dream of going in a cage and wrestling and all that? It’s not my thing.
“It was actually Joe Rogan, little s***bag, who [started this]. Just out of the blue, there was no talk of me or Jon even fighting. Jon’s a great guy, probably the GOAT of MMA. [Rogan] said, ‘Oh, if Tyson Fury goes in a room with Jon Jones he’s going to get absolutely smashed to bits.’ Like, if someone goes in the room with me and it’s no holds barred, you’re going to have to kill me to stop me.”
“He didn’t say an MMA fight or a boxing fight, he said go in a room together and Tyson Fury’s not walking out,” Fury added. “So I don’t know where it all started and Jon said something and I said something and we’ve being going back and forward.
“There was never talk of me saying I was going to go in a cage with Jon Jones and go in there and get my arm snapped off. No way. The thing was, I offered Jon, ‘You want to walk in a boxing ring and make some real money, then come and fight me.’ But zero chance of me going in an MMA game and rolling around and all that. Zero.”
Earlier this month, Fury claimed in a live Twitter Space that the UFC had already sent him a formal offer for a “hybrid rules fight” with Jones.
Jones isn’t the first UFC heavyweight champion to be linked to Fury, however. The lineal boxing king and Ngannou have also gone back and forth over a potential superfight for years, with Ngannou even making a surprise appearance in the ring alongside Fury in April 2022 following Fury’s win over Dillian Whyte at Wembley Stadium. Ngannou’s desire to box a heavyweight star was actually one of the tipping points that led to his exit from the UFC. Despite that newfound freedom, a bout between Ngannou and Fury has not materialized.
In his Q&A, Fury addressed Ngannou as well — and pointed out the long history boxers have of failing miserably when trying to transition over to an MMA fight with MMA rules.
“I’ve offered to fight Ngannou in a cage under boxing rules with four ounce gloves on and guess what’s happened? His a**hole fell out,” Fury said.
“Obviously my forte is not taking people down and all that sort of stuff, it’s different for me. It’s like, ‘Yeah, I’m going to fly a jet plane.’ I don’t know how to fly a jet plane, I have no idea. In a stand-up sport, in punching combat, whether it’s in a cage, in a phone box, whatever it’s going to be, if they want to do that, then no problem. But definitely not, I’m not going into any MMA fights.”
“It doesn’t fare well for boxers,” Fury added. “I’ve only ever known one boxer to win, and that’s Ray Mercer when he knocked out Tim Sylvia with one punch, and that was it. All the rest of them, James Toney got done by Randy Couture, quite a few of them have been done quite quickly. Because a boxer’s thing is, he stands up and he stands side-on [stance] and a shoot takes them down and [then the MMA fighter can] punch them up.
“So yeah, it won’t be something that I’m interested in, at all. But if them lads want to come over into my boxing world, then they are more than welcome.”
June 22, 2023 at 04:30AM
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Tyson Fury rips ‘little s***bag’ Joe Rogan for starting ‘absolutely ridiculous’ debate over Jon Jones - MMA Fighting
The thought of laying eyes on the wreck of Titanic has tantalised the world since the ship’s rediscovery in 1985. Now the five people aboard the submersible Titan, currently lost in the Atlantic, will almost undoubtedly end up paying the ultimate price for their desire to see the sunken liner on the ocean floor.
Superpowers spend billions, largely in vain, to track each others’ nuclear deterrent submarines through far shallower waters
Having joined nuclear submarines at sea myself, I feel physically sick thinking about what is probably playing out aboard OceanGate Expeditions’ stricken vehicle. Realistically there is the slenderest of chances that the five people onboard will be rescued before their oxygen runs out.
Late last night there was a glimmer of hope when an underwater banging sound was picked up by a Canadian P8 aircraft flying over the area. Trapped seafarers know to bang on the hull with a metal object at the top and the bottom of each hour, while rescuers cease their engines to keenly listen for any sound. The sonobuoys the P8 dropped into the sea are designed to find submarines operating in relatively shallow waters, not a tiny submersible stranded far below at 3,800 metres, so it is remarkable if they have managed to find Titan.
But while this is a genuine breakthrough, it still leaves rescuers with a formidable, near impossible task ahead of them.
It’s most likely that Titan is currently sitting on the ocean floor near the wreck of the famous liner. If this is the case, the biggest issues which now hamper the rescue mission are the depth of water and surrounding seascape.
Deep water currents may have carried Titan some way before it came to rest or it could be lying amidst all the debris from Titanic as she sank, making a 6.7 metre-long pod harder to pick out.
The submersible would require a specialist sonar to pinpoint her location, such as the one that rediscovered Titanic in the first place. But nearly all underwater rescue equipment is for the military and so is designed to retrieve sailors from nuclear and diesel submarines operating in far shallower waters. It has been suggested that Nato’s Submarine Rescue System – currently sitting on the Clyde – could be mobilised. But searchers know there’s no point: its mothership is only cleared to operate to 610m depth and its remotely operated vehicle to 1,000m.
There are a tiny cluster of submersibles worldwide which can dive as deep as Titan but it is probably not realistically possible to get one of them to a remote part of the Atlantic, hundreds of miles off Cape Cod, in time. Even if this is achievable, unlike military submarines, Titan has no large escape hatch which a rescuing vehicle might be able to latch onto.
Regretfully here, again, is another harsh, damning twist. Most submersibles are manufactured in pairs, so that one can rescue the other in an emergency. Titan, meanwhile, is a bespoke one of a kind.
Still, there remains the merest crumb of hope.
The P8’s passive sonobuoys may not just pick up the banging, but find a good line of bearing. Perhaps another submersible capable of operating at that depth could be brought there, find Titan, then somehow manage to attach floatation bags to it and inflate them in time. But a senior naval source likened this to a miracle, pointing out that superpowers spend billions, largely in vain, to track each others’ nuclear deterrent submarines through far shallower waters.
There is another possibility. The submersible may have been able to surface and it is possible the banging came from there. Titan is fitted with a mechanism which, if jettisoned, allows the vehicle to rise from the depths of the ocean. But even if this has been successfully deployed, those inside are still in danger as they were bolted into the submersible from the outside and have no means of opening the vehicle. Crucially, Titan is not thought to be equipped with an emergency sonar transponder or beacon, to blast out a signal alerting rescue teams to its location.
Bobbing in the swell, those on board would probably by now be wracked by seasickness, in addition to starting to experience the effects of dwindling oxygen levels.
Even if Titan is on the surface, patrolling Navy aircraft – while adept at seeking out Russian submarines with the help of a frigate and Nato submarine – would struggle to pinpoint a small target amid oceanic waves and swell. And if she is floating on the waves it means Titan will drift, making tracking by maritime patrol aircraft almost impossible.
The Royal Navy hasn’t lost a submarine since HMS Affray in 1951 because of relentless, unyielding oversight and an obsession with safety which would make most civilian’s eyes water. There’s a backup for the backup, and a backup for that too. Fledgling submariners cannot even sit down in their mess until they’ve earnt their dolphins’ badge by passing a chunky engineering and safety course.
The Royal Navy always retains a respectful regard for the ocean. The first time I joined a destroyer in the South Atlantic over 20 years ago, we were lashed by 40ft waves, which crashed over the bridge and twisted metal ladders on deck. Such was the fierceness of the winter storm that the young sailors onboard fearfully looked to their captain to see his reaction. They had already realised that the sea is a cruel and unforgiving mistress. For those unused to life at sea, being trapped in a cramped submersible, desperately waiting for help to arrive must be a harrowing, soul-shredding experience.
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While it’s been reported that Titan’s passengers set out with 96 hours of air supply, the vehicle’s ability to absorb carbon dioxide is unknown. Condensation may be an issue, as well as severe cold if there has been a power failure.
Sitting crippled in the darkness, slowly succumbing to the effects of a depleting oxygen supply was the fate of those in Russian Oscar II class submarine Kursk, after she sank in the summer of 2000.
The sailors’ lives slowly ebbed away until hypothermia probably sent them to sleep. This, heartbreakingly, is the probable ending of this, the grimmest of accidents.
June 21, 2023 at 06:16PM
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There's still little hope that the Titan will be found - The Spectator
