Hurricane Isaias may reach wind speeds of about 75 mph when it reaches Florida, according to the National Hurricane Center.
Category 1 storm, Hurricane Isaias, landed in the Bahamas with winds of about 85 mph. Many buildings and trees were blown over and the storm caused wide-spread damage.
Although the storm is moving away from the Bahamas and towards the U.S., Trevor Basden, the director of the Bahamas meteorology department, told residents to “continue to hunker down”.
Tropical Storm #Isaias is expected to strengthen again this evening, and hurricane conditions are expected along portions of the FL east coast on Sunday with tropical storm conditions expected to begin tonight. Rush preparations to protect life and property to completion. pic.twitter.com/uvSOjcPA2b
While on the way to Florida, Isaias was weakened to a tropical storm, but experts say that it may be upgraded once again, according to Reuters.
“Don’t be fooled by the downgrade. We do think it will be upgraded back to a hurricane later on this evening,” said Florida Governor Ron DeSantis today.
On Friday, both Florida and North Carolina declared states of emergency for many counties due to the imminent landing of Hurricane Isaias.
All COVID-19 testing sites were closed and people living in affected areas were told to buy seven days worth of food and supplies in order to stay in their homes when the storm hits.
Hurricane Isaias may reach wind speeds of about 75 mph when it reaches Florida, according to the National Hurricane Center. They also said that the storm could bring heavy rains and cause flooding during the weekend and into the beginning of next week.
“While current projections have the eye of Isaias remaining at sea, the situation remains fluid and can change quickly,” said DeSantis, according to Reuters. “The state of Florida is fully prepared for this.”
Many public areas including beaches and parks were closed on Friday. Experts say that the storm could become a Category 2 hurricane, with wind speeds being close to 110 mph.
Florida has a well-trained hurricane response team, but with the added pressure of controlling the coronavirus, there is less focus on storm preparation.
“It’s not a perfect system,” said Frank Rollason, Miami-Dade’s director of emergency management, “but what we’re facing to today with COVID, we’re trying to avoid packing all of those people into the emergency operations center.”
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Twitter users are also saying that Trump’s move to ban TikTok could be due to Cooper’s constant mockery.
Sarah Cooper, 35, has become a viral sensation over the past few months because of her Trump-impersonating TikTok videos.
With Trump now threatening to ban the social media platform over concerns that the Chinese government is accessing Americans’ data, Cooper is doubling down.
Her latest video called “How to tick tock,” shows Cooper in a bathroom, with her hair blowing in the wind as she reenacts Trump’s announcement.
“We may be banning TikTok. We may be doing some other things. There are a couple of options. But a lot of things are happening, so we’ll see what happens. But we are looking at a lot of alternatives with respect to TikTok.”
Twitter users are also saying that Trump’s move to ban TikTok could be due to Cooper’s constant mockery. Trump blocked Cooper after her initial videos went viral.
I’m pretty sure your awesome vids are why he wants to ban it.
But Cooper has proven that a TikTok ban won’t stop her from her comedic critiques.
In regards to one of her videos, in which Cooper reenacts Trump’s descriptions of his “impressive” cognitive test, the comedian let her Twitter followers know that she didn’t even record it on TikTok. The video has over 10 million views on Twitter.
In her video, “How to Empty Seat,” Cooper does a brilliant job acting along as Trump’s real voice can be heard boasting that his rally will be packed with 22,000 people.
6,200 people actually showed up, according to Tulsa officials, and many speculators say TikTok users rallied together on the app to sabotage Trump’s attendance. This could be another reason for Trump’s dislike for the app.
He only wants to ban TikTok because they outsmarted him regarding the Tulsa rally.
Cooper initially went viral last May after creating a lip-sync video mocking Trump’s suggestion that the coronavirus could be cured by the injection or consumption of common disinfectants.
Trump’s comments were so concerning that Lysol and Dettol has to make a statement against consumption of their products.
“I feel like we’ve been gaslighted for years, being told it is totally normal for a president to say things like this,” Cooper added. “It is a very validating thing to see something remind you that, no, this is actually ridiculous and we can all agree on that.”
Cooper told MSNBC in May that “she takes the subtext of what he has written extemporaneously,” and gives it back to the world. She even calls herself the Trump whisperer.
theGrio’s Blue Telusma and Tonya Pendleton contributed to this report.
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Prosecutors have yet to present William Haymon’s case to a grand jury.
William Haymon celebrated his 16th birthday and his 511th day in jail on July 14th. Haymon has been in the rural Lexington, Mississippi jail for months and there is no telling when he will be released.
Mississippi has no rules regarding the length of time a person can be detained without being formally charged. Haymon cannot be released on bail, though he is technically innocent in the eyes of the law.
Prosecutors have yet to present Haymon’s case to a grand jury so it can consider whether the state has sufficient evidence to pursue a conviction against Haymon.
Akillie Malone-Oliver, the local district attorney who prosecutes the state’s 21st judicial district, blames the delay on heavy turnover within the city’s police force. But the problem is bigger than that and is characteristic of ongoing concerns facing Mississippians who have the misfortune of being arrested, according to experts.
Haymon’s attorney, Lawrence Blackmon, has alleged that the county does not have grounds to hold him. Blackmon asserts that his client is being illegally detained and that his constitutional right to a speedy trial is being violated.
He is concerned that Haymon, who would be entering the 10th grade in the fall, will experience long-lasting harm due to his prolonged imprisonment during his youth.
DA Akillie Malone Oliver & Sheriff Willie March : Release William Haymon to his Mother. – Sign the Petition! https://t.co/D5t71vVXDE via @Change
Sebrenda Tillman, Haymon’s mother, voiced her concerns to The Appeal. “As long as he’s been there, what are you holding him for? Somebody ain’t doing their job,” she complained.
In June 2013, when Haymon was 13-years-old, he was arrested for allegedly robbing a senior citizen at gunpoint. He waived a preliminary hearing and was released on a $25,000 bond.
However, in February 2019, Haymon arrested again for aggravated assault involving a gun. State law prevented him from being granted bail for the second alleged crime.
After the public defender assigned to Haymon’s aggravated assault case died in January, Blackmon agreed to represent the teenager for free. Despite filing a petition and a motion seeking Haymon’s release, the teenager remains in jail.
Circuit Court Judge, Jannie Lewis-Blackmon, no relation to Haymon’s attorney, ruled that Haymon’s right to a speedy trial had not been violated. According to a transcript of the proceeding, Judge Lewis-Blackmon said that “the reason for the delay outweighs the length of the delay.”
Due to Covid-19, Haymon’s mother, Sebrenda Tillman has been unable to visit him since March. Since his incarceration, Tillman has celebrated his last two birthdays by putting money in his account.
“He’s trying to hold up,” she told The Appeal. “I worry about him, some nights I can’t sleep because he’s my baby,” she said.
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Marcus Shute Jr., a 34-year old lawyer from Nashville, raised a few eyebrows when he decided to grow his locks in 2002. But he still refuses to cut his hair in hopes to make a point that his personal appearance should not affect his professional career! In fact, Shute is a well sought-after lawyer and he runs his own law firm in Nashville, Tennessee.
“Many times during my matriculation through undergrad/law school and in my professional career I was told I would not be successful as an attorney if I didn’t cut my locs,” Shute said in an interview with The Shade Room.
Shute also said he had experienced being disregarded for promotion even though he technically deserved it just because he “did not fit the look.” At one time, he said a judge even mistook him as a client instead of a law student.
Despite that, he chose to be authentic and not to conform to the industry’s so-called standards. His experiences also inspired him to open his own law practice. He wanted most of his colleagues and clients to relate to him.
“The law industry, like any other industry, is a microcosm of the real world. It needs acceptance, inclusion, and diversity, but it needs to be more than empty lip-service and to be done in a meaningful way,” he said. “Less than 5 percent of attorneys are black. And even fewer are in a position to hire at their firm, one of the reasons I founded Shute Law.”
Another season, another apocalypse for the Umbrella Academy. | Netflix
The show finds the right mix of feelings and zippy superpowers in its stellar season two.
The dysfunctional family of seven ex-superheroes known as the Umbrella Academy have two things in common: They all were born on the same day, and they’re all working — some more consciously than others — through the trauma of their father’s abuse.
Beneath the end-of-the-world, blow-up-the-moon stuff, the first season of Netflix’s fizzy live-action adaptation of The Umbrella Academy, Gerard Way and Gabriel Ba’s Eisner Award-winning comic book, had that emotional heart too. In season one, we met the Hargreeves kids, now adults, all puzzling out their lives when their dad, Reginald Hargreeves, dies. His death brings them all together, forcing them to confront unanswered questions about forgiveness, abuse, and family — questions they buried with time.
With their bad dad dead, finding closure should be easier for the kids. Or at least, that’s what they believed. Their hope is that any of their trauma or scars will die with the person who caused them. But complicating matters is that these superpowered humans have to stop the end-of-the-world event they inadvertently caused.
Despite having powers like superstrength, marksmanship, communing with the dead, and psychic manipulation, they failed. But instead of dying with the rest of humanity, they time traveled to go back before the apocalypse to try again to stop it. They now find themselves scattered in Dallas at the beginning of the 1960s.
That first season spent a lot of time laying all of this out, making some parts of it feel a little like a chore. But all that time spent on extreme exposition pays off in a flashier, more entertaining, tighter second chapter.
Season one of Umbrella Academy set the board, and season two plays the game.
There’s a lot more zapping and superpower-ing in season two, which should appease comic book fans who want to see superheroes do that kind of thing. But it also swings for something way more emotionally resonant, wanting to comment on the imperfect, human way we heal and the gulf between people wanting to change their ways and actually doing so. And in its best moments, The Umbrella Academy’s second season manages to balance both humanity and superheroics without sacrificing either.
The Umbrella Academy uses superpowers to tell a very human story about complicated relationships
Netflix
Allison, a.k.a. The Rumor, a.k.a. #3.
One of the core devices in Umbrella Academy is that the Hargreeves are each known by a number, assigned to them by their father: There’s Luther (#1), Diego (#2), Allison (#3), Klaus (#4), Five (#5), Ben (#6) and Vanya (#7). It’s like they’re players on a basketball team whose names you never learned. Or in the Academy’s case, the numbers are a way to differentiate the seven different superpowers they possess. The dark edge is that reducing your kids to a number is just one of several emotionally abusive things Reginald Hargreeves, the patriarch of the family, did.
Hargreeves developed his adopted children into a superhero team, putting them through relentless physical training, teaching them violence, pitting them against each other, and punishing them when they failed. They ultimately did fail when the world needed them most, resulting in Ben’s death and the disappearance of Five, hence the disbandment. And they failed again at the end of last season, as Vanya’s power manifested itself to destroy the moon before all of them, including Ben, decided they could save the world if they just time traveled.
Believing you can avert an armageddon that you and your siblings caused is in itself a slightly egotistical thing to do. But these are the Hargreeves, and they’re truly the only ones who can stop it.
After jumping through that portal, the adult Hargreeves kids are separated and spread out in various pockets of time before November 22, 1963 — the day President John F. Kennedy is shot in Dallas and around 26 years before they were all born. It also turns out that, although they’ve timed-hopped, there’s another cataclysmic event happening that they need to stop. But that’s very difficult to do when the siblings aren’t in the same place or even the same time.
As tantalizing as that mysterious, encroaching doomsday itself is, the best stuff about the second season is how we get there and how we get the Hargreeves siblings on the same page.
The time jump forces the siblings, for some brief moments, to live independently from one another. Time travel, for the siblings, is a forced immersive therapy of sorts. These brothers and sisters, their feelings, and their identities were so tightly tethered to one another. Now they’re forced to live as if the others, and their father, don’t exist.
Which means we see each of them try to heal their lifelong wounds in their own way.
Luther (Tom Hopper), with his superstrength, becomes a bodyguard by day and an underground fighter by night to dull the pain. Diego’s (David Castañeda) superhuman marksmanship is no use in the mental institution he’s stuck in, but he’s plotting every day to get out. Klaus (Robert Sheehan) drinks and drinks and somehow starts a cult. Five (Aidan Gallagher) is the only bridge to the others, thanks to his time-hopping powers.
And then there’s Allison (Emmy Raver-Lampman), who can force people to do anything by preceding an action with the phrase “I heard a rumor” (such as, “I heard a rumor that you ate a cheesecake”), who’s unfortunately plunked down in 1961. Unlike her white siblings, Allison faces an added threat from their 1960s time traveling because of America’s segregation laws and rampant racism. White privilege, it seems, extends to time travel.
The central conceit in Allison’s story is that she could easily change the world around her by “I heard a rumor you weren’t a flagrant racist”-ing everyone around her, but she never says that. The show purposely doesn’t spell out exactly why she doesn’t, allowing you to come to your own conclusions about why the racism she’s facing is too overwhelming to be fixed. Or maybe the excuse is that she isn’t powerful enough to stop the racism. Or that racism is more complex than simple actions to be commanded one way or another.
Or maybe Allison’s afraid of how much she’s truly capable of.
In season one, Allison lost custody of her daughter when her ex-husband revealed that he caught Allison using her rumor power to make their daughter fall asleep. Even though Allison loves her daughter, she still used her powers to make her daughter do something against her will. Allison gets a stark lesson in the human consequence of her powers, something her father encouraged her to use and allowed her to ignore the fallout from.
We actually do see her use her powers in a “Whites Only” diner in a late-season episode. The diner’s manager has been a racist prick over and over again. She rumors the manager into serving her coffee. She’s so enraged with him, though, that she tells him to fill her cup until it spills over and over, scalding his hands raw and red. Skin sloughs off. He still pours. She can’t stop inflicting pain.
Allison could have easily just rumored the man to serve her and stop him when the coffee cup was full, saving him the burns. But she inflicts pain upon him because it feels square with the racism and injustice she’s been fighting in this timeline and because punishment and pain are what her father taught her.
What’s fascinating is that the show goes to great lengths to show that Allison isn’t a villainous person. This scene doesn’t happen until after Allison has refrained from using her powers against injustice for the majority of the season. Instead, her lapse shows us that being “good” or being healed isn’t a one-and-done fix. Healing and bettering yourself require constant work.
Netflix
Vanya, a.k.a. #7.
In that same vein, Allison and the Hargreeves siblings confront an ugly truth when they re-connect with Vanya (Ellen Page): They each had treated her as badly as their father had.
Before being teleported to the 1960s and before adult Vanya fully unleashed her power that brought a piece of the moon crashing down, the adult siblings locked her away in a padded room because they thought she was too dangerous. Instead of sticking up for her or protecting her from their father’s abuse when they were kids, they neglected her and treated her as the problem.
This is the kind of behavior you’d expect from people whose entire family life is training, punishment, and competition, but while it’s explainable, it’s not excusable. Ultimately, the siblings spend this season learning how to ask for forgiveness and being able to forgive each other.
This isn’t to say that everything in Umbrella Academy’s second season is ooey-gooey touchy-feely.
Since we know what everyone’s powers are now, the show loosens its grip on the exposition and allows for more of its signature, music-cued fight sequences and action scenes peppered throughout the season. This includes an explosive armageddon with all the siblings going full force — rumoring people until brains explode and faces melt, crumpling artillery shells with their bare hands, Kraken-like tentacles flinging soldiers around — that happens in the first seven minutes of the first episode.
But viewers already know by season two that Umbrella Academy is always ready to deliver spectacle. It’s just that this season, it’s finally ready to deliver everything else at that same level.
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Another season, another apocalypse for the Umbrella Academy. | Netflix
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