BLACK STUDENTS IN NC SEE SPIKE IN HARASSMENT FROM WHITES: In February, extra police were stationed at East Wake High School in Wendell after a threat on social media used the N-word and said they’d “discuss how to get rid of all blacks at east wake.” In February, a social media post showed four Black basketball players from Knightdale High School in the target of a sniper’s cross hairs, and one player hanging from a noose. It led to the cancellation of a basketball game between Knightdale and Raleigh’s Millbrook High. In December 2021, the Johnston County school system announced that its law firm would investigate allegations that Black students were bullied at Princeton High School. Some Black students have publicly talked about white classmates calling them the N-word, telling them to pick cotton and threatening to beat them up. But the Confederate flag is not about racism, it's about heritage! Bullshit.
https://www.newsobserver.com/news/local/education/article259314849.html

LONGEST NC GENERAL ASSEMBLY SESSION IN HISTORY FINALLY ENDS: North Carolina’s part-time legislature’s sessions have become longer and longer over the past decade, culminating in this year’s marathon 199 days. Meanwhile, the pay hasn’t increased in 28 years. Charlotte City Councilman Malcolm Graham represented Mecklenburg County as a Democratic state senator for 10 years. He retired in 2016 because he said it had turned into a full-time job with a completely unpredictable schedule. “I am not independently wealthy. I do not own a business,” Graham told WRAL News Friday. “I was an employee of a private university, and they gave me the luxury of running and serving in public office. But they also wanted me to come to work.” Catawba College political science professor Michael Bitzer says the income limitation on representation is a problem. “That skews, not just the legislature's perspective, but what issues get addressed as well, from a policymaking point of view,” he told WRAL. Bitzer says higher pay would attract more diverse candidates. Session limits might help, too. A lot of states limit how long sessions can run, including Georgia and South Carolina. That forces lawmakers to prioritize what issues they take up, with the budget at the top of the list. House speaker Tim Moore acknowledged this year’s session was too long, and conceded that the growing length of session is making it harder to recruit candidates. Nonetheless, he said session limits don’t work because other states use special sessions to get around them. "Other states"? You and Berger have done it several times, taking advantage of genuine emergencies to pass partisan nonsense and grab power from Governor Cooper.
https://www.wral.com/session-length-pushes-out-younger-more-diverse-lawmakers/20182840/

CAWTHORN CAUGHT ON VIDEO CALLING UKRAINE'S PRESIDENT ZELENSKYY A "THUG": U.S. Rep. Madison Cawthorn called Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky a “thug,” according to video posted by WRAL. The comment was first reported in an opinion article by Karl Rove that was published in the Wall Street Journal on Wednesday. Rove, who was a senior adviser to former President George W. Bush, said Cawthorn made the comments Saturday at a town hall in Asheville. A video clip of the remarks was published by WRAL on Thursday morning. The News & Observer has not yet obtained a copy of the video. “Remember that Zelensky is a thug. Remember the Ukrainian government is incredibly corrupt and it is incredibly evil and it has been pushing woke ideologies,” Cawthorn, a Henderson County Republican, says in the brief clip. After the comments surfaced, Cawthorn tweeted: “Propaganda is being used to entice America into another war. I do not want Americans dying because emotions pushed us into a conflict.” The "comms guy" is a fricking idiot. "Woke ideologies" is nothing more than a baseless trigger in this context, proving who the real propagandists are.
https://www.newsobserver.com/news/politics-government/article259266744.html

SHADES OF GEORGE FLOYD IN SMALL NC TOWN OF PLYMOUTH: A North Carolina sheriff's deputy has been fired after he was captured on video putting his knee on a Black man's neck, and a state agency is looking into the incident. Washington County Manager Curtis Potter said Deputy Aaron Edwards was no longer working for the sheriff's office as of Tuesday, WITN reported. Potter couldn't be reached Friday for additional comment. Sheriff Johnny Barnes said the deputy was fired after an internal investigation and a review of body camera and security footage. The family of the man provided video last week showing him being arrested on a charge of marijuana possession. According to the family, the arrest turned violent when a deputy put a knee on the man's neck and left him lying at the entrance to the courthouse before he was dragged inside. A woman could be heard on the video screaming “Oh, my god!” and “Get some help!” A relative of the man was arrested when she tried to intervene, according to the news report. Barnes said the North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation has been called in to look into whether criminal charges should be brought. Of course criminal charges should be brought, before this dude ends up back in uniform somewhere else.
https://www.wral.com/deputy-fired-after-putting-knee-on-black-mans-neck/20182874/

RUSSIA'S INVASION OF UKRAINE CAUSING GLOBAL FOOD SHORTAGE: The two countries account for almost 30 percent of global wheat exports, almost 20 percent of corn exports, and more than 80 percent of the world supply of sunflower oil. Those exports are stalled for different reasons—in Ukraine by Russia’s invasion, and in Russia by global sanctions—but the net effect is the same. It’s as if Iowa and Illinois, the heart of US grain production, were ripped off the map. Early signs of that damage appeared this week. The first monthly assessment of world food crops published by the US Department of Agriculture since the war began projected that Russian and Ukrainian wheat exports would fall by at least 7 million metric tons this year. Simultaneously, the Ukrainian cabinet voted to ban all wheat exports, along with shipments of oats, millet, buckwheat, and cattle—keeping their products at home for their own people’s needs. The crop crisis in Ukraine has several components. Goods that have already been harvested—last autumn’s corn, for instance—can’t be transported out of the country; ports and shipping routes are closed down, and international trading companies have ceased operations for safety. (Plus, while those crops sit in bins, destruction of the country’s power grid takes out the temperature controls and ventilation that keep them from spoiling.) This year’s wheat, which will be ready in July, can’t be harvested if there’s no fuel for combines and no labor to run them. Farmers are struggling over whether to plant for next season—if they can even obtain seeds and fertilizer, for which supplies look uncertain. (Russia is the world’s biggest exporter of fertilizers; it suspended shipments last week.) Global food prices spiked to an all-time high before the war even began, thanks to the pressure that the Covid pandemic put on supply chains, and wheat prices are now at a 14-year peak. Analysts worry that the countries that buy the most wheat from Ukraine—predominantly in Africa and the Middle East—will have the hardest time paying as prices rise. “Not only do those countries receive a large fraction of their wheat from Ukraine and Russia, 80 percent in some cases, but the bulk of diets in those places is bread,” says Megan Konar, a water and food policy researcher and associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of Illinois. Please remember this when you get ready to complain about your groceries costing a little more. Some will literally starve.
https://www.wired.com/story/the-war-in-ukraine-is-threatening-the-breadbasket-of-europe/