By Ashley Vaughan – Before Juneteenth became an official federal holiday, 94-year-old Opal Lee was on a mission. “I’m not just going to sit and rock, you know?” the determined “Grandmother of Juneteenth” told CNN. “The Lord is going to have to catch me.” Days later, the spirited nonagenarian shouted with delight as she watched Congress pass
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By Chauncey Alcorn Major corporations are celebrating Juneteenth in unique ways this week. The annual June 19 tradition, which falls on Saturday this year, commemorates the day in 1865 when former American slaves in Galveston, Texas, were finally informed of President Abraham Lincoln’s January 1, 1863, Emancipation Proclamation and the end of the Civil War. It took Union
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By Paul LeBlanc States across the country are scrambling to close their government offices Friday after President Joe Biden signed legislation establishing Juneteenth as a US federal holiday. While June 19 — which commemorates the end of slavery in the United States — falls on a Saturday this year, governors across the country announced in
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By Allie Torgan Before the Covid-19 health and economic crisis, the nation’s homeless population was already on the rise. Now, more than a year after the last official population count, many of those working with homeless communities believe numbers are much higher. “I would estimate we’ve got about 8,000 people who are sleeping out on
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Amy Chillag Lakiea Bailey has tried to hide the pain and breathlessness she feels from her disease for most of her life. As a child, she missed weeks out of every school year because of sickle cell — a painful, genetic disease that’s believed to impact 100,000 Americans. Patients’ red blood cells are “sickle” shaped and can
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By Jacob Lev and Ben Church Tennis star Naomi Osaka has withdrawn from this year’s Wimbledon but is planning on returning at the Tokyo Olympics, according to her agent Stuart Duguid. “Naomi won’t be playing Wimbledon this year. She is taking some personal time with friends and family,” Duguid said in a statement on Thursday. “She
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By Eric Levenson The US Navy has denied a request by football team captain Cameron Kinley to delay his military service and try to play in the National Football League. Kinley, Navy’s 2021 class president who graduated last month, had signed with the Super Bowl champion Tampa Bay Buccaneers as an undrafted rookie cornerback and
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By Lisa Respers France Paris Jackson joined friend Willow Smith for Smith’s first “Red Table Talk Takeover” and we learned how incredibly similar the two young women are. Jackson, 23, and Smith, 20, are children of superstars (musical icon Michael Jackson and actors Will Smith and Jada Pinkett Smith, respectively) and the pair talked about
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By Jermont Terry Early Tuesday morning, eight people were shot in one house in the Englewood community, and four of them died. It was the third mass shooting in two weeks in Chicago, and there was yet another one in which five people were shot in West Garfield Park on Tuesday evening. That incident happened
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By Clare Foran and Jessica Dean Legislation moved quickly through Congress this week to establish June 19 as Juneteenth National Independence Day, a US federal holiday commemorating the end of slavery in the United States. The bill overwhelmingly passed the House on Wednesday after the Senate unanimously passed the legislation on Tuesday. But at the same
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