Maryland's university system wrapped up its plagiarism investigation into President Darryll Pines and basically said he's off the hook. The yearlong probe by Ropes & Gray found a couple of his academic papers had some copied text from other authors, but they decided Pines wasn't the one who actually put that stuff in there. Another paper had some weird authorship credits, but again, they said he didn't do anything wrong.
The whole thing started after conservative outlets went after him last year. Pines is Black and an aerospace engineering professor with a massive research catalog, and he's one of several Black academics who got hit with plagiarism accusations recently. The university system put out a short statement backing him up and...
Jo Ann Allen Boyce passed away from pancreatic cancer at 84 in Los Angeles. She was part of the Clinton 12, a group of Black students who integrated Clinton High School in Tennessee back when she was just 14. This all went down before the famous Little Rock situation, and she dealt with angry mobs, constant harassment, and students throwing stuff at her in the halls. Her family eventually bailed to California after things got really bad, and she ended up becoming a pediatric nurse there.
The whole Clinton integration thing was a mess. Some white supremacist dude named John Kasper showed up from New Jersey and started riling everyone up against desegregation. The school got bombed by the KKK later on, and most of the Clinton 12 never...
Trump said he's gonna pardon Tina Peters, this 70-year-old former county clerk from Mesa County in Colorado, who got nine years for messing with voting machines after the 2020 election. Colorado Democrats are calling it total BS and saying the president has zero authority to overrule a state conviction. Attorney General Phil Weiser thinks the whole thing is unconstitutional, and Secretary of State Jena Griswold is saying Trump's just getting desperate because his previous attempts to spring Peters have flopped.
The feds already tried to help her out by getting involved in her federal appeal and even attempted to transfer her to a federal lockup from state prison, where her lawyer says she's stuck in solitary. Peters has become this...
Biden's presidential library fundraising is basically dead in the water right now. His foundation pulled in zero new donations during his final year as president and is running on $4 million from leftover inauguration cash. The foundation expects to scrape together only $11.3 million by the end of 2027, which is nowhere near the $200 million target his team wants. Some major Democratic donors are refusing to contribute because they're mad about how his staff treated them, and others are more focused on opposing Trump.
There's talk about merging the library with a Biden Hall project at the University of Delaware to save money. The university has already raised $22 million for that building, and combining the two projects could help...
Twenty states led by California and New York filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration over a new $100,000 charge for H-1B work visas. The administration claims the visa program gets abused by companies trying to keep worker pay down, but Attorney General Rob Bonta says the massive fee will wreck education and healthcare services across the states. Tech giants like Meta, Google, and Apple rely heavily on these visas to bring in specialized workers when they can't find qualified Americans.
The visa program caps approvals at 85,000 per year, and the whole thing has split Trump's base between tech industry supporters and anti-immigration hardliners. Immigration hawks think the fee will push companies to hire domestically, while...
The Namibian Broadcasting Corporation lost one of its veteran employees when Lucia Engombe passed away at 53 after getting sick at Oshakati State Hospital. She spent 17 years working her way up from assistant producer in the religious department to running the entire German radio service, and she wrote a book about growing up in East Germany during the liberation struggle when hundreds of Namibian kids got sent there for training.
Engombe joined NBC at the turn of the millennium and kept climbing the ladder until she landed the top German service job, where she stayed for five years before bouncing. Her family confirmed she died, but nobody has dropped details about the memorial or funeral yet.
Namibia's health ministry teamed up with Germany's Robert Koch Institute to run a workshop in Windhoek for medical staff who need to handle mpox and Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever cases better. Martha Josef, who helps coordinate mpox response, said the train-the-trainer setup gets regional healthcare workers ready to spot symptoms fast and stop diseases from spreading. The country confirmed its first mpox outbreak after finding two lab-confirmed cases and one probable case in Swakopmund, and one person died from CCHF after eight total cases popped up over the last ten years.
Christian Winter from RKI mentioned that giving health workers the right skills helps them react quickly when outbreaks hit, and the whole thing fits into a 2020...
Six Bangladeshi peacekeepers got killed when a drone slammed into their UN base in Kadugli, which sits in central Sudan's Kordofan region. Antonio Guterres came out swinging and said attacks on UN troops could count as war crimes, while the Sudanese military blamed the hit on the Rapid Support Forces paramilitary group that's been fighting them for over two years.
The Bangladeshi leader Muhammad Yunus confirmed eight more peacekeepers got wounded in the strike, and he wants the UN to hook up his people with emergency help. The UN Interim Security Force for Abyei has around 4,000 personnel watching over the oil-rich disputed zone between Sudan and South Sudan.
This whole mess kicked off when the army and RSF started beefing in April...
A judge in Windhoek told lawyers to chill out and narrow down their massive list of stuff they want the court to decide in a cannabis legalization case. Judge Claudia Claasen looked at the pretrial paperwork showing 78 factual questions and 31 legal ones, and she basically said that's way too much for a special plea hearing. Brian Jaftha from Ganja Users of Namibia and his buddy Borro Ndungula are trying to get weed possession ruled unconstitutional for adults.
The government fired back, saying the whole lawsuit is jumping the gun because the Law Reform and Development Commission is already reviewing cannabis laws. They argued that politicians should handle this instead of courts making the call on how people can use and possess the...
