Quincy Jones: Chicago-born Black music and film icon born and lived in penury, sometimes eating rats for supper then rose to stardom
Over the course of 91 years, Quincy Jones did pretty much everything you could do in the entertainment industry. He was a musician, arranger, composer, solo artist, record company executive, mogul, entrepreneur and a producer not just of music but of films and TV – and, as was noted in Chris Heath’s extraordinary, headline-grabbing 2018 profile piece Quincy Jones Has a Story About That, he had known everyone. “The ghetto Gump”, as he called himself, referring to Forrest, was the thread that linked Dizzy Gillespie and Miles Davis to Dr Dre and the Weekend; a musician who’d appeared with Elvis Presley and Amy Winehouse, Count Basie and Bono, Nat King Cole and Young Thug; the man who had a credit on Sinatra At the Sands and Harry’s House by Harry Styles.
Trump’s pick for education, Linda McMahon, lied about having bachelor’s degree in education
While most of Trump’s appointments are drawn from more recent additions to his orbit, his relationship with McMahon spans decades. In the late 1980s, Trump hosted two consecutive WrestleManias in his Atlantic City hotel. From there, the relationship blossomed not only between McMahon and Trump, but also with Vince McMahon, Linda’s husband and controversial WWE co-founder.
After Ghana told African diaspora ‘Come home’, 524 are now citizens, more Black Americans queuing up
Between 10 to 15 million people were forcibly taken from Africa to the Americas during the trans-Atlantic slave trade, the majority from West and Central Africa. Ghana, then a British colony known as the Gold Coast, was a main point of departure.
Pope refocuses on abortion in New Year Day message as he calls for commitment to protect life
Francis now regularly refers to procuring an abortion as “hiring a hitman to solve a problem.”
Ugandans are so psychologically beaten that they believe China assembles plastic rice and eggs
One thing is true. If there can be fake rice and fake eggs, there can also be fake water melon, fake Avocado, fake banana, fake mango and fake everything which could find their way into supermarkets and markets as unscrupulous people try to maximise dishonest income from unaware customers. And there are unscrupulous people everywhere on the globe; not only in China.
Sacred and the materialities of religion in Uganda: How God finds expression in different cultures and economies
Anthropomorphic (i.e. the attribution of human characteristics or behaviour to a god, animal or object) positions about material cultures, offering relational theories (such as the new animism and the new materialism) that allow indigenous religious materialities to reveal new understandings about the ontological and other potentialities of so-called “things”.
Spiritual colonialism, neocolonialism, conquests: How globalisation turned Ugandans into marionettes and they embraced it gleefully
In Uganda these different colonialisms have been revamped under NRM rule, thereby reversing the independence and development of the country and enhancing the country’s entrenchment in the global debt trap, with the ruling now unable to tick without borrowing from the local and global money markets or attaching the country wealth and natural assets to the creditor countries.
Breakup of United Methodist Church over LGBTQ policies unleashes deadly violence in Nigeria
While the Global Methodist Church, at its general conference in May, lifted its longstanding bans on LGBTQ ordination and same-sex marriage, it also granted local conferences the right to set their own standards. The West Africa Central Conference, which includes Nigeria, restricts marriage to between a man and a woman and instructs its churches to follow national laws on LGBTQ issues, according to the news service.
Kenyan man sentenced to 50 years in jail for killing LGBTQ activist who police say was his lover
Homosexuality is taboo in Kenya and gay sex is punishable by 14 years in prison, although that law is rarely enforced.
Designer babies: While fertility businesses are selling better chance of domestic bliss, families are feeling cheated
I’ve counselled a number of those families in the past 10 to 15 years. People who have children this way often place too much importance on genes while ignoring the environment. It’s like, “This is what our family is going to look like. We’re going to pick a kid, and this is how we’re going to put it together. Mom’s going to be in charge of the whole thing.” It’s like a project or building a company. People don’t always realize they are creating a human being and not a piece of furniture.
