Senior Resident Superior Court Judge Jim Ammons has granted a request from the police chief of a North Carolina city to release body camera video recorded in the aftermath of the shooting death of a Black man by an off-duty sheriff’s deputy. On Tuesday Fayetteville Police Chief Gina Hawkins filed the petition with the courts asking that the footage be released as she says it will show exchanges between Fayetteville police officers and three witnesses at the scene of the shooting. The decision comes after Walker, 37, was shot and killed earlier this
SaLisa Berrien, a Pittsburgh university trustee, has received a $100,000 Black Founders Fund award from Google for Startups. The award will be used to expand her Tampa-based renewable energy services company, COI Energy. Berrien was recognized in 2021 as one of Google’s 30 Black founders to watch. On top of this funding, she has raised over $2 million for her firm which serves customers throughout Florida and 13 mid-Atlantic states. Berrien plans to expand to California in the near future. From working at electric utilities to Smart Grid, Clean Tech, and Big Data
Children’s publisher Lil’ Libros has acquired worldwide rights to a series of five STEAM-themed books in Spanish and English written by Dr. Ellen Ochoa, the American engineer who became the first Latina woman to go to space. STEAM stands for Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, and Math. The series, titled Dr. Ochoa’s Stellar World, Dr. Ochoa has compiled together experiences and adventures as a NASA astronaut and it aims to celebrate enthusiasm for scientific curiosity, the fundamentals of STEAM subjects, and the American Latino experience among younger readers. “I wish I
Throughout history, engineering was almost entirely the domain of white men, for example, it was in 1892 that The Massachusetts Institute of Technology had its first African-American graduate, Robert R. Taylor. It was only 25 years later, in 1917, that the university gave its first civil engineering diploma to an African-American. Although we’re in 2022 – the pictures are still relatively similar – white men still dominate the industry. The UK has one of the most male-dominated engineering sectors, Male academic scientists outnumber their female counterparts by two to one
DrugStoc co-founders Chibuzo Opara and Adham Yehia launched DrugStoc to serve as a tech-enabled solution that combats the continent’s broken pharmaceutical supply chains through connecting drug store companies with hospitals and pharmacies in Nigeria.
Project Entrepreneur, a UBS program designed to level the playing field for female founders, and Hello Alice, a multi-channel platform that helps businesses launch and grow, announced the winners of its Democratizing the Friends & Family Round program, which attracted 12,000 applications.
India had eight unicorns in 2018, nine in 2019, and 11 in 2020. Last year, the country celebrated 42. Similarly, it took China five years to reach five unicorns between 2010 and 2015, but then saw 21 unicorns in 2016 – and 91 unicorns in 2019. While Latin America has followed a similar trajectory, raising $14.8 billion in 2021 – more than it had raised between 2014-2020 combined – and minting nine of the region’s 17 unicorns. Now Africa, once a continent that was lagging behind in the investment race, is reportedly seeing $1
Michael Jordan and former rival Allen Iverson are among the 90 – or so – investors participating in a just-completed $46 million funding round for Metaplex, a startup that reportedly allows users to build their own Solana-based non-fungible token (NFT) marketplaces. The funding round was co-led by investment firm Multicoin Capital and Jump Crypto, with participation from Solana Ventures, Alameda Research, Animoca Brands, and more than 90 individual supporters. These supporters included legendary basketball player Michael Jordan who last year announced the launch of the HEIR platform on Solana, William Wesley, Allen Iverson, Shari Glazer, RÜFÜS DU
Mary Awodele launched MyTechBestfriend, a career development machine hoping to change the narrative for minority involvement in tech, in September 2020. The initiative was launched during an important period of history as hundreds – possibly thousands – of people in states across the US were unemployed due to companies losing money because of Covid. Some took part in the ‘Great Resignation’ and left their jobs to venture off into a different path while others simply wanted to learn new skills while working from home. Awodele’s own entry into tech began as a
Congolese designer Anifa Mvuemba created a social media firestorm when she gave the world a preview of her collection from her fashion brand, Hanifa, on Instagram Live with a 3D runway presentation. The six looks that makeup Mvuemba’s Pink Label Congo collection undulated on-screen as they moved on invisible figures. 3D models “walked” down the screen with garments draped on their three-dimensional curves. Anifa had been using 3D mockups for a while to convey ideas to her team during sample-making but she told Teen Vogue that “designing content using 3D models and
