MINORITY, WOMEN, AND DISABLED VETERANS

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52,002 people engaged through climate-related education and outreach.

172 acres, 85 sites, and 36 homes/structures treated for climate resiliency. Go to ClimateActionCorps. ca.gov to learn more and apply.

Governor Newsom Calls for Federal Investigation of High Natural

Governor

SACRAMENTO – As millions of California families experience soaring gas utility bills, Governor Gavin Newsom took action today urging the federal government to investigate the recent price spike affecting the Western U.S. and highlighted the state’s action to provide relief to Californians.

In a letter to the federal agency responsible for regulating wholesale natural gas, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), the Governor requested that the agency “immediately focus its investigatory resources on assessing whether market manipulation, anticompetitive behavior, or other anomalous activities are driving these ongoing elevated prices in the western gas markets.”

Additionally, millions of Californians will soon see relief from high utility bills – with credits of $90 to $120 showing up on gas and electric bills as soon as next month.

On Thursday, the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) voted to accelerate the California Climate Credit to help California families with high gas bills. The $90-$120 credit will be applied to residential utility customer bills starting in March for customers of PG&E, Southern California Edison, San Diego Gas & Electric, and Southern California Gas Company. Customers of Bear Valley, Liberty, PacifiCorp, and Southwest Gas will also receive an accelerated credit of varying amounts.

Tomorrow, the CPUC and the California Energy Commission will host an en banc hearing to examine the causes and impacts of the recent spike in natural gas prices.

“Millions of California families are opening their utility bills to sticker shock – and we’re taking action now to provide relief to help with those high gas bills,” said Governor Newsom. “We know this provides only temporary relief from soaring bills. That’s why I’m asking the federal government to use its full authority to investigate the spike in natural gas prices and take any necessary enforcement actions. We’re going to get to the bottom of this because Californians deserve to know what’s behind these exorbitant bills.”

Manager Nazeehah Khan said:

The bill, introduced by Senator Cortese and sponsored by CAIRCA, aims to create a statewide policy ensuring the right to religious clothing, grooming, and headwear for individuals held in local and state correctional and detention facilities.

In a statement, CAIR-CA CEO Hussam Ayloush said:

“Individuals who have been detained or incarcerated deserve to be treated with dignity and respect. At the very least, the Constitution guarantees them the right to exercise their faith. CAIR’s civil rights attorneys regularly receive complaints from Muslims in correctional and detention facilities, who are often denied the right to wear the hijab and other forms of religious clothing and grooming.

“We would like to thank Senator Cortese for introducing the religious accommodations bill on a state level. This bill will proactively protect the religious rights of not just Muslims, but also our Sikh and Jewish neighbors and other religious minorities.”

In a statement, CAIR-CA Policy & Government Affairs

“At the heart of ensuring civil rights is recognizing a person’s humanity. Whether you are Muslim, Christian, Jewish, Sikh, or a member of any other faith, the ability to practice your faith is essential to the rehabilitation process. We thank Senator Cortese for his leadership in recognizing the value of religious expression for all and we look forward to working with the Senator’s office to make this bill a reality in California.”

Over the last decade, CAIRCA has represented incarcerated Muslim women across the state who have had their hijabs forcibly removed and denied religious headwear and clothing accommodations. While CAIRCA has been successful in advocating for policy changes within individual counties, such as Long Beach, Orange County, and Santa Clara, this bill would provide the opportunity to address the issue proactively by implementing a uniform policy across California for both state and local detention facilities.

SEE: How CAIR-LA, Local Chaplain Maria Khani, and Shura Council Helped Improve Meals for Incarcerated Muslims During Ramadan CAIR-CA is a chapter of CAIR, America’s largest Muslim civil liberties and advocacy organization. Its mission is to enhance understanding of Islam, protect civil rights, promote justice, and empower American Muslims.

Here’s How This New Orleans Entrepreneur Earned $1.2M Under 9 Hours With His Fruit-Infused Hookah Brand, Blakk Smoke

Atiya Jordan

(Image:Instagram /@blakksmoke / Screenshot)

For Blakk Tatted, the owner and visionary behind the groundbreaking Blakk Smoke hookah brand: Plan A always had to work. He leveraged his resilience and grit to lead him to where he is today, attracting $1.2 million in under nine hours.

Some may call him an overnight success thanks to his loyal customer base. The New Orleans native believes just that.

“My journey wasn’t overnight,” Tatted said, according to a July interview with Zenger News.

“I look at myself as an overnight success, which is not a bad thing. That is a blessing because none of us would choose to wait 10 to 20 years if we had the option. We put in the work for years, waiting for that one day and that one moment to hit.”

The 33-year-old music artist and entrepreneur is celebrated in his hometown as the “New Orleans Dip King.” The crown brought a large following on Instagram and Facebook as he captured viewers with his viral comedic skits, dip moves, and showcasing of business products.

“Things today are far beyond what I could’ve imagined or even prayed for,” Tatted said in an interview for Authority Magazine, of his early mistakes and failures.

“The reason grit and resilience [led] to my success is because I was adamant about not giving up. I never created a Plan B because Plan A had to work.”

The fame would establish a fan base that would provide ongoing support to his business endeavors all the way. Tatted grew tired of putting money in major corporations’ pockets, so he launched Blakk Smoke, a passion-turned-multimilliondollar hookah brand offering premium, real fruit-infused hookahs and accessories to the masses. With this brand, Tatted has created a remedy. According to the brand’s website, hookah lovers can enjoy the countless flavors without the “lightheadedness, headaches, and scratchy throats” attributed to tobacco and nicotine.

“I hated that despite never smoking anything else, I was still getting horrible side effects from smoking hookah with nicotine/ tobacco,” Tatted recalled in the magazine interview.

“This made me passionate to create a healthier alternative to smoking hookah without the option of having to inhale nicotine and tobacco. That’s where I can honestly say it started for me.”

That’s right — Blakk Smoke has zero tobacco and zero nicotine in its products. He is also proud to have released a line of on-the-go hookah pens earlier this year. The portable pens come in several flavors, including blueberry mint, sweet bubble gum, tropical fruit, and more.

Tatted’s milestone is no easy feat, but he credits the overflowing sales to his intentional connection with his customer base.

“My trigger point is to connect with people, genuinely build a bond and connect because today, you have internet cousins and people you talk to more on social media than your own family,” Tatted said, per Zenger News.

“If you connect with your audience and show people you care and are humble, and appreciate their support, then the support and sales will come. It makes them feel an obligation to support you. It’s like, I’m buying from my cousin right now,” he continued.

From launching his portable pens to smashing athletic sponsorships, Blakk Tatted is only looking forward. Even celebrities are backing the revolutionary product.

Media coverage of the devastating earthquakes in Turkey and Syria

Harrowing video and excellent explanatory journalism helped the world try to comprehend the earthquakes and aftershocks

Tom Jones | Poynter

The numbers are almost impossible to comprehend.

More than 3,500 people, as of Monday evening, have died from the massive earthquakes and aftershocks that struck Turkey and Syria. Two earthquakes measuring 7.8 and 7.5 were followed by aftershocks in frigid winter weather. The impact could be felt as far away as Lebanon, Jordan, Israel and Egypt.

Here is a harrowing video of one of the aftershocks and its aftermath caught on live TV.: https://www.reuters.com/ video/watch/dramatic-footageshows-turkey-quake-liveid759968217?chan=8gwsyvzx

The sound alone is frightening.

According to Reuters, the reporter in the video, Yuksel Akalan, said, “As we were heading to the rubble to (film) search and rescue efforts, there were two consecutive aftershocks with a loud noise, and the building you are seeing on my left was brought down to earth. There was a lot of dust. A local resident is coming and he is covered in dust.”

Akalan then met a woman running from the other direction with her children. He lifted the woman’s daughter and then tried to calm her.

The video is just a snapshot of the nightmare.

There are reports of nearly 80 aftershocks, and many of those fortunate enough to survive are left sleeping outside in freezing temperatures.

Khalil Ashawi, a photojournalist based in Syria, told CNN, “It’s a disaster.

Paramedics and firefighters are trying to help, but unfortunately, there is too much for them to deal with. They can’t handle it all.

Entire families have been killed.

Seven to eight people from the same family, all gone. These are the sort of situations I am seeing and hearing about today. It is freezing at the moment, and there are so many people sleeping in the streets right now because they have no homes to go to.

Why was this quake so deadly?

The Washington Post’s

Credit: Shutterstock

Carolyn Y. Johnson wrote, “The grim death toll is a result of several factors: the sheer size of the quake; the fact that it struck relatively close to the surface; and its proximity to where people live. Monday’s quake originated just about 11 miles below the surface. That means the seismic waves did not have to travel far before they reached buildings and people on the surface, leading to more intense shaking.”

Johnson’s story goes into exceptional detail about why this earthquake was so destructive. It’s an example of some of the excellent explanatory journalism that helped us better understand what happened.

The Wall Street Journal’s Eric Niiler and Nidhi Subbaraman write, “How the Turkey-Syria Earthquake Occurred: Behind the Science of the Catastrophe.”

The Associated Press’ Mehmet Guzel, Ghaith Alsayed and Suzan Fraser — reporting from Adana, Turkey — noted, “The quake piled more misery on a region that has seen tremendous suffering over the past decade. On the Syrian side, the area is divided between governmentheld territory and the country’s last opposition-held enclave, which is surrounded by Russianbacked government forces. Turkey, meanwhile, is home to millions of refugees from the civil war.”

They added, “In the rebel-held enclave, hundreds of families remained trapped in rubble, the opposition emergency organization known as the White Helmets said in a statement. The area is packed with some 4 million people displaced from other parts of the country by the war. Many of them live in buildings that are already wrecked from past bombardments.”

More superb work

Check out this impressive visual journalism in The New York Times from Pablo Robles, Agnes Chang, Josh Holder and Lauren Leatherby.

The piece shows detailed maps of the earthquake that struck Turkey and Syria. In addition, there are haunting before and after photos of areas badly damaged by the earthquake. For example, one photo shows the immaculate Yeni Mosque in June 2020. Then next to it, the Yeni Mosque today, looking like a crumpled sand castle on a dirty, dusty beach.

Also, the Times has “After the Quake: Photos From Turkey and Syria.”

Both pieces are powerful journalism that show the impact of this devastating disaster.

So is this piece from The Washington Post’s Adam Taylor, Joe Snell, Olivier Laurent and Lauren Tierney: “Maps, photos and videos show earthquake’s widespread destruction.”

U2OPIA Technology (MWBE) Cyber Security Firm Licenses Two Federal Labs Technologies

Creating a new methodology for real-time cyber security monitoring the Department of Agriculture (USDA), the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) that have garnered multiple awards, including the USDA Office of Procurement and Property Management HUBZone — Historically Underutilized Business Zone — Contractor of the Year.

U2opia Lab Partnership

“ORNL will help us become one of the premier organizations in the country in cyber space. Special thanks to the scientists at ORNL, as well as the Small Business Office at ORNL and DOE headquarters. They deserve special recognition for being our champions,” said Smith.

U2OPIA Technology (MWBE) Cyber Security Firm Licenses Two Federal Labs Technologies...continued

UT-Battelle manages ORNL for the Department of Energy’s Office of Science, the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States. The Office of Science is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, please visit energy. gov/science.

For more information on U2opia Technology, please contact us using U2opiatech.com

Tyre Nichols Almost Made it Home...continued from page 1

About 50 skateboarders also gathered in front of the National Civil Rights Museum to honor Tyre Nichols. Nichols was a regular at Tobey Skate Park. Cameron Blakely regularly skates there and said Nichols was “laid back” but a skilled skateboarder who was always trying new moves. He spraypainted “Justice for Tyre Nichols” on his board.

“Tyre ripped. He was actually doing stuff, and that’s why I want to keep it going. Just in case people forget and they don’t talk about him, there it is on my board,” Blakely said.

Last Saturday afternoon in Nashville about 100 demonstrators gathered in the grass behind City Hall. Members of the Black Nashville Assembly passed out petitions containing the same five demands protesters in Memphis want. They held an hour-long vigil including a ceremony honoring past victims of police violence and wellknown civil rights leaders who have died.

Longtime activist Theeda Murphy started to name them and as she called out “Ashay” — a Yoruba term for amen — someone spilled a bit of water on the ground for each one. Then the crowd started in, adding people like Fred Hampton, Eric Garner, Briana Taylor, Sandra Bland, Emmett Till, Nat Turner, Bell Hooks, Andrew Young, Ella Baker, Thurgood Marshall, Billie Holliday, Mohamed Ali, W.E.B Du Bois, Ida B. Wells, Harriet Tubman, James Baldwin, and Frederick Douglas. That went on for several minutes.

‘We need the police. We don’t need the killing.’ from the hardware, is invisible to malware, and is resilient to internet service interruption. Heartbeat offers efficiency, scalability, and flexibility by implementing a data collection process with low computational requirements, is fast, and uses mechanisms that are present in almost all modern computing systems.

Local pastor-activist Howard Jones talked about civilian Community Oversight Boards (COB), noting Memphis and Nashville have them.

ORNL’s technologies are integrated into U2opia’s anomaly detection system to deliver advanced security capabilities with an artificial intelligenceinformed visualization tool. The software can be deployed quickly with no added hardware and limited human engagement.

(Black PR Wire) -- U2opia

Technology, a consortium of technology and administrative executives with extensive experience in both industry and defense, has exclusively licensed a package of two technologies from the Department of Energy (DOE) and Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) that offers a new method for advanced cyber security monitoring in realtime.

“Identifying and quickly responding to attempted cyber security attacks is an urgent need across government and industry,” said Susan Hubbard, Deputy for Science and Technology at ORNL. “ORNL’s leadership in cyber resilience has led to the development of two powerful tools that will enable a more secure business environment.”

The licensing package pairs two technologies developed in ORNL’s Cyber Resilience and Intelligence Division: Situ, a system for identifying and visualizing suspicious behavior from streaming cyber security data, and Heartbeat, a system that collects power trace measurements directly from the hardware to identify changes.

U2opia Leadership U2opia, a woman-, minorityand disabled veteran-led company, led by Maurice Singleton III, the Chief Executive Officer, and Chaired by Joaneane Smith. Over the last 23 years, Smith’s information technology solutions company, GCS, based just outside of New Orleans, in Harvey Louisiana, has successfully executed multiple assignments on behalf of the U.S. Navy, Army, Air Force,

One product, developed by a team led by John Goodall, combines anomaly detection and data visualization to provide a distributed, scalable, streaming platform for discovering and explaining suspicious behavior to enhance situation awareness. Situ helps network operators discover and understand events that would otherwise go undetected. It reduces huge volumes of network data to a manageable number of events to be examined. This powerful tool is currently used at ORNL to detect abnormal cyber events.

The other product, developed by a team led by Stacy Prowell, detects attacks by focusing on the physical behavior of the device being protected. The Heartbeat system collects power trace measurements directly traffic stop,” Jones said. He said reform is long overdue and until police understand that they work for the community there will be no progress.

“With these new protocols that are unknown to ‘bad actors,’ it is our intention to improve the online security of SharedServices and Cloud computing with proprietary software.” said Maurice Singleton III, the Founder of the consortium.

The data visualization development team includes Kelly Huffer, Joel Reed and Dave Richardson. The technology was supported by funding through ORNL’s Lab Directed Research and Development program, the Department of Defense, DOE and DHS. Heartbeat was supported through the lab’s Technology Innovation Program.

For more information about ORNL’s intellectual property in information technology and communications, email ORNL Partnerships or call 865-5741051.

“We want the police. We need the police and police are needed in Memphis. But we don’t need the killing. We don’t need the police to be the judge, jury, and executioner. We have to stop that,” Jones said.

When members of the Memphis special violent crime squad stopped and dragged him from his car, Tyre Nichols was on his way back from taking photos of the sunset at a local park. They beat and pepper-sprayed him while he was on the ground, and at one point Nichols broke free and ran for his life.

He was almost home when a member of the Scorpion Squad tackled him. Other officers arrived and then they kicked and pummeled Nichols on the street corner, just 100 yards from the apartment where he lived with his mom and stepdad. He called out for his mother three times before he lost consciousness.

Two EMTs on the scene called for an ambulance but offered Nichols no help for 19 minutes except to prop him back up against a police car. They have been fired. Several police stood around Nichols’ collapsed body. One cop can be heard on video bragging about the “haymakers” he landed on Nichols, who was finally transported to St. Francis Hospital 32 minutes after the beating stopped. He died three days later.

Nashville has had special flex units deployed in high crime neighborhoods in the past that led to two killings during traffic stops. One unit has since been disbanded but there is another one, the Titans unit that worries him. He has a meeting scheduled with the police chief and the Nashville COB February 23 to talk about police reform.

“We have to do better in Nashville, in Memphis, all over the country because too many people are being killed during a

Nichols family attorney Ben Crump likened his death to the Rodney King beating in Los Angles in 1991. At Nichols funeral February 1, Vice-president Kamala Harris called for the swift passage of the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act. Rev. Al Sharpton called out the five black police officers charged in Nichols’ death and invoked Martin Luther King Jr., who was killed in Memphis in 1968.

“In the city that Dr. King lost his life … you beat a brother to death,” Sharpton said.

“You don’t stand up to thugs in the street becoming thugs yourself. You don’t fight gangs by becoming five armed men against an unarmed man. That ain’t the police, that’s punks,” he said.

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Clifton Harris /Editor in Chief Investigative Reporter sbamericannews@gmail.com

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