https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halima_Dangote

Halima Aliko Dangote is a Nigerian businesswoman. She is the executive director, commercial operations of Dangote Group, an African industrial conglomerate. She is the second daughter of Nigerian billionaire Aliko Dangote. She is on the board of Dangote Group, NASCON Allied Industries Plc, Aliko Dangote Foundation, Endeavor Nigeria, and a member of Women Corporate Directors and president of the board of the Africa Centre in New York.^[1]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deatrich_Wise_Jr.

Deatrich Wise Jr. (born July 26, 1994) is an American professional football defensive end for the Washington Commanders of the National Football League (NFL). He played college football for the Arkansas Razorbacks and was selected by the New England Patriots in the fourth round of the 2017 NFL draft.

https://mayor.baltimorecity.gov

Brandon M. Scott serves as the 52nd mayor of Baltimore, the youngest person to hold his position in over a century. Mayor Scott is committed to ending gun violence, investing in our youth, restoring trust in government, and building a better, more equitable Baltimore for all. In November 2024, he made history as the first Baltimore mayor in 20 years to win re-election.

https://www.npr.org/sections/goats-and-soda/2025/08/17/g-s1-82000/neurosurgeon-neurosurgery-sierra-leone

Dr. Alieu Kamara is the first and only neurosurgeon in Sierra Leone. After starting his practice at the beginning of January 2025, Kamara carries the neurosurgical disease burden — traumatic injuries, spinal paralyses, seizures, brain tumors — of an entire country of eight million people.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viola_Fletcher

Viola Fletcher (née Ford; born May 10, 1914), also known as Mother Fletcher, is an American woman who is the oldest known living survivor of the Tulsa race massacre and a supercentenarian. One hundred years after the massacre, she testified before Congress about the need for reparations.

https://www.toniscott.com/about1

Toni Scott’s exhibitions and installations weave together artistically powerful stories presented through installations, multi-media, photography, painting, sculpture and digital ingenuity, often referencing fraught histories. “Learning of my multicultural family heritage has inspired me to give life to the lost images and stories of history.”  Scott’s “Bloodlines” series is a testament to her goals to inspire, educate, heal, engage, stimulate dialog, and bring together diverse cultures. “In every work, I create resides a commitment to themes that build and enrich humanity.” Scott’s work has been awarded and celebrated internationally. In 2012, she created a solo mixed media installation, Bloodlines, for the California African American Museum.

https://www.npr.org/2025/08/18/g-s1-81562/nduduzo-makhathini-tiny-desk-concert

Whether through his recordings, live in concert or at the Tiny Desk, South African pianist and Zulu healer Nduduzo Makhathini has the ability to transfix an audience with his deeply meditative and engaging music. His work is lush with ancestral invocation, meditations on Blackness and spiritual exploration.

Here, Makhathini presents a cross-section of his works that he has dubbed for the Tiny Desk as the Ntu Sonicities Devotion Suite in Five Movements. His notes on the suite shared with the Tiny Desk team illuminate a thoughtful intentionality that is a hallmark of Makhathini’s work.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nduduzo_Makhathini

Nduduzo Makhathini (born 24 September 1982) is a South African jazz musician from Umgungundlovu, Pietermaritzburg, South Africa.

Coming from a musical family, his love for music began at an early age.^[1] Makhathini has performed with Zim Ngqawana, Simphiwe Dana, Feya Faku, and McCoy Mrubata. Nduduzo completed his Diploma in Jazz Piano at the Durban University of Technology in 2005,^[2][3] and obtained a PhD in music from the University of Stellenbosch in 2023.^[4][5]

https://house.texas.gov/members/95

https://www.texastribune.org/2025/08/19/nicole-collier-texas-house-dps-escort-redistricting-quorum

A Texas House Democrat was confined in the Capitol overnight after she refused a police escort that Republican leaders imposed on lawmakers who participated in a two-week walkout over a GOP mid-decade redistricting plan.

Rep. Nicole Collier, D-Fort Worth, declined on Monday afternoon to sign a slip giving her permission from Speaker Dustin Burrows, R-Lubbock, to leave the House floor with a state law enforcement officer shadowing her.

https://www.nbcconnecticut.com/news/local/for-the-love-of-community-profiling-hartford-pastor-aj-johnson/2229600

In a church in Hartford’s North End, you can find Pastor AJ Johnson on any given Sunday preaching the gospel, leading the congregation his father built.

“He believed the church should be so much more than just singing and dancing on a Sunday. It should change the community where it is.”

At the corner of Westland and Barbour streets in Hartford, Urban Hope Refuge Church became a haven for the neighborhood, especially after the riots of the 1960s set the city on a new course.

https://www.nbcconnecticut.com/news/local/calling-all-brothers-welcomes-hartford-students-back-to-school/3372177

Calling All Brothers welcomes Hartford students back to school

“Imagine Super Bowl weekend and your two best teams are playing, and you’re walking into the stadium, and it’s just energy. It’s electrifying, and it is a place that you want to be,” said Rev. AJ Johnson, with Calling All Brothers.

https://www.npr.org/2025/08/19/nx-s1-5506209/too-much-to-pack-not-enough-hugs-a-kenyan-mans-last-48-hours-in-america-trump-self-deportation

LANSING, Mich. — Five suitcases are scattered around Samuel Kangethe’s living room in his home in West Lansing, a neighborhood lined with tall trees and big front yards in Michigan’s capital. Clothes mixed with finance and accounting books, and somewhere in the chaos are his Air Jordan sneakers.

“I just want to take the clothes that I need,” Kangethe says. “I don’t know, it’s just too much.”

Too much trying to pack 16 years of his life into a handful of suitcases,and deciding what to pack, and what to leave behind.

Kangethe is leaving the U.S., the country where he earned graduate degrees through a student visa, where he worked as an accountant for a beer distribution company and for the State of Michigan, where he fell in love with his wife Latavia and where he became a dad of three: 13-year-old Dwight, 11-year-old Hailey, and 5-year-old Ella.