News about Our Lives.

 

The unjust shooting in California during the Chinese lunar year holiday caused 11 people to be killed. In Monterey, California, police were dispatched. One hero disarmed the murderer. The shooter was a coward. It was the worst mass shooter in Los Angeles County's history. The killer (who had hundreds of rounds of ammunition in his home) harmed people in a dance studio. The shooter fled into the white van. He was found in Torrance, California. The murderer committed suicide when authorities were near the van. The community is mostly Asian American. We see the epidemic of anti-Asian hate crime violence continuing. Gun violence is terrorism. Guns are not divine nor should be worshiped as such. Gun violence doesn't discriminate. It has ruined the lives of people of every background. Two kids were killed in a Des Moines location in Iowa recently. There was another shooting in the Yakima, Washington state area where he killed 3 people at a gas station. We have to reckon with the fact that we face a gun violence epidemic. There is no other way to put it. We know what the solution is. Yet, some are afraid of political consequences, but we have no fear. Guns must be really regulated in America for real.

I don't know if a recession will come about in the near future or not, but we have Google laying off 12,000 workers as tech jobs face new layoffs. These cuts will impact jobs internationally not just in America. Many cuts are done to ensure the profitability of the $1.27 trillion global technology conglomerates without regard to the dignity of regular workers in those companies. The corporate elites have been ruthless economically for generations. So, this news is not shocking. The company of Alphabet has cut works too along with Amazon, Microsoft, Salesforce, and Cloud Software Group in 2023 alone. Many Millennials and Generation Z people (who were born between 1981 and 2012) started tech careers many years ago. There laid off workers in all economic sectors. The Federal Reserve has increased inflation rates on workers (which results in the prices of goods and services going up rapidly) without allowing the super-wealthy to pay their fair share of taxes. This is part of the global crisis of capitalism. The only solution is a redistribution of wealth, democratically controlled resources, and a revolutionary change in the system to benefit the people collectively, not just the 1%.

Many people are shocked at classified documents found at Pence's Indiana home. A lawyer for former Vice President Mike Pence discovered about a dozen documents marked as classified at Pence's Indiana home last week. Pence has turned those classified records over to the FBI. The FBI and the Justice Department's National Security Division have launched a review of the documents and how they ended up in Pence's home. This comes after Trump and President Biden had classified documents found in their homes too. Pence's team notified congressional leaders and the relevant committees of the discovery. Pence said that he was unaware of the existence of sensitive documents and immediately cooperated with the National Archives including any other legitimate authorities that are dealing with the matter at hand. People are trying to figure out how this occurrence transpired.

There are many Oscar nominations in the year of 2023. It was part of history. Many of the Best Picture nominees are Avatar: The Way of Water, The Fablemans, Tar, Top Gun: Maverick, Women Talking, and other films. Best Director nominations are Martin McDonagh (for The Banshees of Inisherin), Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert (for Everything Everywhere All at Once), Steven Spielberg (for The Fabelmans), Todd Field for Tarr, and Ruben Ostlund of Triangle of Sadness. Best Lead Actor nominees are Austin Butler, Colin Farrell, Brendan Fraser, Paul Mescal, and Bill Nighy. Best Lead Actress nominees are Cate Blanchett, Ana de Armas, Andrea Riseborough, Michell Williams, and Michell Yeoh. Best Supporting Actor nominees are Brendan Gleeson, Brian Tyree Henry, Judd Hirsch, Barry Koeghan, and Ke Huy Quan. Best Supporting Actress nominees are Angels Bassett (for the film Black Panther: Wakanda Forever), Hong Chau, Kerry Condon, Stephanie Hsu, and Jamie Lee Curtis. There are other categories too. We shall see what the end results will be on the 95th Anniversary of the Oscars. Diversity, new types of artistry in films, and the newer generation of actors and actress expressing their talents to the world represent some of the many themes of this important time in cinema history.

Yesterday was the Birthday of Sister Ayanna Howard, and she is 51 years old. STEM is part of our culture, and she has been a roboticist, entrepreneur, and educator for years. She is now the dean of the College of Engineering at Ohio State University. By March 2021, Howard is the first woman to lead the Ohio State College of Engineering. As a child, she was interested in robots. Her favorite TV show growing up was The Bionic Woman. Howard earned her B.S. in engineering from Brown University in 1993 and her M.S. and Ph.D. in electrical engineering from the University of Southern California in 1994 and 1999, respectively. Her thesis Recursive Learning for Deformable Object Manipulation was advised by George A. Bekey. Howard also has an MBA from Claremont Graduate University. Howard worked in artificial intelligence and at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory. She founded Zyrobotics which was used as a therapy and educational system for children with special needs. Howard said in 2020 that companion robots can fill the gap left by social distancing as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic in America. By 2021, Ayanna Howard received the Athena Lecturer Award from Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) for her Contributions to Robotics, AI, and Broadening Participating in Computing. In June 2022, Howard was elected a trustee of Brown University. I wish Sister Ayanna Howard more Blessings. 

By Timothy