Anna M. Mangin made a major contribution to household needs in the 19th century. with her invention of the pastry fork. Anna was born Anna Matilda Barker in October 1844 in the state of Louisiana. On her 1877 marriage application, she listed her parents as Jacob Barker and one P. [Polly?] Shelton. Jacob Barker was a prosperous planter, merchant and politician who was in his late sixties at the time of Annie's birth. It is of note that Barker, a native of Maine, worked closely with Rhode Island merchant Rowland G. Hazard who, using Louisiana state laws, was able to free over one hundred Northern-born African-Americans who had been enslaved. It is possible that Annie arrived in Nantucket, Massachusetts through the ministrations of Barker, Hazard, and African-American minister, activist, orator and Underground Railroad conductor Charles Bennett Ray; it is known that Annie was taken in by Ray's sister, seamstress and business woman Elizabeth S. Ray and her husband, shoemaker and merchant Abraham M. Nahar, a native of Surinam. Annie was adopted by the childless couple and was known as Annie Mattie Nahar.
In 1870, Annie returned to New Orleans, where she took on the position of principal of the Coliseum School. By 1873, she had moved to lodgings at the corner of Napoleon avenue and Dryades street.
By 1877 Annie was the "principal of one of the McDonogh Schools that had been established from a bequest by a wealthy slave owner who left his estate for the support of free schools for children regardless of color" when she met Andrew Fitch Mangin, a thirty-four-year-old African-American native of Monroe, New York who was employed at various times as a coachman and a teamster. He was described as a man with "more than average natural shrewdness and intelligence."
On August 17, 1877, Andrew and Annie married in New Orleans and moved to New York City where Annie embarked on a new career as a cook and as a caterer while Andrew went into business with his brothers and operated a hauling and moving business from a yard on Gold Street in Manhattan On January 7, 1879, Annie gave birth to their only surviving child, a son she named for his father.
To hear Andrew Mangin tell it, his wife first came up with the concept of a simplified manner of making pastry by an improvement to the pastry fork, and "then and there described it to him. The description was so clear and minute that Mr. Mangin often says, when speaking of the incident, 'I saw that fork just as plain as I see you now.' " Andrew Mangin went out to his tool shed and whittled a prototype of the fork out of yellow pine. Once Anna approved the model, Andrew had a more substantive model of the fork made, first from iron, and then from white metal. Anna Mangin received the patent for the pastry fork on March 1, 1892.
The pastry fork had many uses, including beating eggs, thickening foods, making drawn butter, mashing potatoes, making salad dressings, and most importantly, kneading pastry dough. "The curved piece at the upper end of the handle is what Mrs. Mangin calls the cutter or trimmer for pie crust."The pastry fork improved the lives of many people, and eventually led to more electric mixing inventions that are used to this day. Kneading pastry dough by hand is a grueling process that can cause arm cramping and other pains. Also, the dough often does not get fully incorporated when mixed by hand. If the dough does not fully incorporate during the kneading process, then it will not rise, resulting in a dense, and in most cases, underbaked consistency.
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News round up by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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Book Richardson doesn’t sleep much past 5:30 a.m. anymore.
That was around the time seven years ago that FBI agents pounded on his door, barged in, handcuffed him and dragged him away while his 16-year-old son, E.J., looked on helplessly.
“Ever since then, everyone looks at me differently,” the former University of Arizona assistant coach told The Associated Press about his arrest, part of a sting designed to clean up college basketball. “And I don’t fall back to sleep when I see that time come up on the clock.”
He is one of four assistant coaches — along with a group of six agents, their financial backers and shoe company representatives — who were arrested in the 2017 federal probe aimed at rooting out an entrenched system of off-the-books payments to players and their families that, at the time, was against NCAA rules.
All four assistants — Richardson, Lamont Evans, Tony Bland and Chuck Person — are Black. Of the 10 men arrested, only one was white.
“Low-hanging fruit,” the 51-year-old Richardson said when asked why Black men took the brunt of the punishment. “Who do you see all the time that’s out there? Black assistants. Who is forging the relationships? Black assistants.”
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Pale marble pavers crisscross the Terrazzo, the plaza at the heart of the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado that cadets traverse daily, on the way to class, the library and meals. In their first year, cadets must run and keep to the narrow marble strips whenever they are on the 20-acre Terrazzo. Reuters: Two Black cadets and the struggle for diversity at an elite US military institution
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Pale marble pavers crisscross the Terrazzo, the plaza at the heart of the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado that cadets traverse daily, on the way to class, the library and meals. In their first year, cadets must run and keep to the narrow marble strips whenever they are on the 20-acre Terrazzo.
Tusajigwe Owens doesn’t take short cuts. He is one of 112 Black cadets in the class of 1,071 freshmen that started at the academy in June 2022. Running the strips helps instill a sense of urgency and attention to detail that “absolutely matters for the success of yourself and the success of your team,” he said. Older cadets share coping strategies such as organizing schedules to minimize Terrazzo trips, or walking when the marble is slippery in wet weather. “They would rather see you succeed,” Owens said.
Not everyone will. The graduation rate for Black cadets has for the last decade averaged 66%, compared to an overall graduation rate of 80%.
That gap has frustrated the Air Force’s stated objective of increasing diversity in its officer corps. Only 6% of officers identify as Black, compared to about 17% among enlisted members of the Air Force, according to the Air Force Personnel Center. Those figures have changed very little in the last 20 years, according to an Air Force spokesperson.
By comparison, around 13% of America’s population is Black.
On June 29, days after Owens finished his first year, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down race-conscious admissions at Harvard University and the University of North Carolina in a case brought by Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA), a group that argues that affirmative action policies discriminate against white and Asian American people. Chief Justice John Roberts exempted military training academies from the decision, citing the U.S. government argument that the legitimacy of the armed forces would be undermined by having an overwhelmingly white officer corps leading much more diverse enlisted ranks.
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The future of inclusion at elite B-schools may look a lot like the present at Berkeley’s Haas, where affirmative action has been off the table for almost 30 years. Bloomberg: Building Diversity When Affirmative Action Is Banned
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For top-flight American MBA programs hoping to enroll underrepresented minorities, last year was difficult, and nowhere more so than at the University of California at Berkeley’s Haas School of Business. Only about 6% of an incoming class of 244 identifies as Black or Hispanic, the lowest share in the past 10 years, according to figures the school made public in its latest class profile.
Berkeley, like most of its peers, is drawing fewer US students these days, and underrepresented minorities— Black, Hispanic, Native American and Pacific Islander students—have become even less represented on campus. This is true at most top MBA programs, according to data collected by Bloomberg Businessweek. Still, only the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business enrolled a share as low as Haas. (Because of the complexity—and ambiguity—in how schools collect and present racial demographic information, the figures reported here exclude the handful of multiracial people each year who identify as an underrepresented minority and may be a slight undercount.)
Haas has worked under a constraint that few of its peers have faced, until now. As a public university in California, Haas has been barred from considering race in admissions since 1996, when voters in the state passed Proposition 209. Within a few years, minority admissions to Haas plummeted, from 14% before the ban to just 5%. Over the past six years, the school has spent millions of dollars and built up an office of five people focused solely on becoming more inclusive.
With the US Supreme Court’s decision last June banning affirmative action nationwide, every other American business school has boarded the same boat. “When these classes come out, they’re going to be way out of whack,” says Eric Allen, a founder of Admit.me Access, a website that helps underrepresented minorities apply to B-school. Haas’s experience may well serve as a lesson for other schools hoping to attract more Black, Hispanic and Native American candidates in the face of changing rules.
The first thing other selective business schools can expect, after a drop in minority enrollment this fall, is constant monitoring by opponents of affirmative action, says Peter Johnson, who joined Haas’s admissions team in 1999 and eventually became director of the full-time MBA program before leaving in 2022. In the years after Proposition 209 passed, Johnson says he and his colleagues frequently fielded data requests from anti-affirmative-action activists. “I think they thought, ‘We know those people don’t agree with us, so they must be cheating somehow.’ We weren’t cheating. The data was pretty clear on that point.”
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The men came for Kwagala at the beer joint she runs in eastern Uganda, shouting that she was teaching homosexuality to their children. They kicked and punched her. “I ran as fast as I could, thinking to myself, ‘This is my day, this is how I die’,” recalls Kwagala, a trans woman whose name we have changed for her safety. When the police arrived they locked her up for three days and charged her under Uganda’s Anti-Homosexuality Act, which became law last May. Her attackers went free; she faces life in prison if convicted.
On April 3rd the country’s constitutional court upheld the core provisions of the law. Those include long prison sentences for “promoting homosexuality” and the death penalty for “aggravated homosexuality”, including for anyone deemed a serial offender. The judges did strike down some sections, such as a duty to report gay people to the police. But they argued that the law reflects Uganda’s history, traditions and culture, likening their reasoning to that of America’s Supreme Court when it overturned abortion rights in 2022. The judges leant on “public sentiments and vague cultural-values arguments” rather than upholding human rights, says Nicholas Opiyo, lead counsel for the petitioners.
Ten years ago the same Ugandan court struck down an anti-gay law on procedural grounds. This time activists had challenged the act on both process and substance, and lost. The decision contrasts with court rulings in Botswana in 2019 and Mauritius in 2023, where judges decriminalised gay sex. It will send ripples across Africa, including in Ghana, where President Nana Akufo-Addo is under pressure to sign into law a recent anti-gay bill.
Africa’s anti-gay reforms are not driven by presidents, who are wary of the diplomatic fallout, but by ambitious lawmakers and religious leaders, sometimes with friends in right-wing American groups. Although Uganda’s president, Yoweri Museveni, makes homophobic remarks in public and has done nothing to stop the law, allies of his have privately told Western diplomats of their reservations. That could be because America has imposed visa restrictions on Ugandan officials, warned business of the reputational risks of operating in Uganda, and removed duty-free access for its exports. The World Bank has suspended new loans.
For lgbt people in Uganda, where 94% of citizens say they would not want a gay neighbour, the law has made a bad situation worse. They have been evicted, sacked, outed, threatened, assaulted, arrested and subjected to forced anal examinations. Rights groups recorded 300-plus cases of abuse in the first eight months of last year alone. Much of the hostility comes from ordinary Ugandans who have been “radicalised into hatred”, says Frank Mugisha, a gay-rights activist who was a petitioner in the court case.
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Calvin Riley Sr.'s routine traffic stop becomes a legal nightmare. Video shows TPD Officer Oliver pouring out a sealed bottle of liquor and tossing it in Riley's passenger seat, before arresting him for a DUI. Our Tallahassee.: VIDEO SHOWS TALLAHASSEE POLICE OFFICER PLANTING EVIDENCE DURING DUI ARREST
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The police stop, initiated by a white 26-year-old recruit of the department, would zigzag several potential legal avenues for police to arrest Riley; ultimately, after planting evidence of an empty liquor bottle in Riley’s car, they would arrest him for driving under the influence and driving with a suspended license. Riley says He says the night ‘nearly ruined his life.’
After initially stopping Riley and getting his information, Oliver calls in backup and discusses the particulars with Officer Margaret Mueth who arrived at the scene. Oliver asks Mueth to contact Riley under the pretext of verifying his address to check if she thinks he is under the influence of something. “I feel like I’m getting some indications, I’m not really sure. I can’t really smell anything right now,” Oliver says to Mueth, indicating that her sense of smell was diminished.
Oliver, in comments captured by her body-worn camera, tells Riley that he smells like marijuana. Oliver, who says he doesn’t smoke weed, took offense to Oliver’s comments.
“You lie,” Riley says in the video.
At various moments in the forty-four-minute-long body camera footage, Officer Oliver seems to go from charge to charge, looking for a way to arrest Riley. In Florida, officers have discretion whether to ticket or arrest someone driving with a suspended license for the first offense. If an individual commits a second offense, it is mandatory for the officers to take them into custody and make an arrest. Riley received a suspended license notification just weeks before the stop on March 7th.
Officers Mueth and Oliver discussed the interaction in Oliver’s car before approaching Riley again. Mueth testified that they formulated a plan: ask Riley to submit to a voluntary field sobriety test, and if he refused, they would exercise their voluntary discretion to arrest him for a first-time offense of driving with a suspended license.
When officers asked Riley to perform a voluntary roadside sobriety test, Riley refused.
They didn’t tell him the consequences for refusing the then-optional test.
Despite initial claims that Riley smelt like marijuana, by the time they had placed Riley in the back of Oliver’s patrol car, officers began to claim that Riley smelled like alcohol.
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