NJ student accepted to all 8 Ivy League schools.

Ifeoma White-Thorpe, Morris Hills High School (NJ) has been accepted to all eight Ivy League schools and also Stanford. Watch her story below.

Rep. Hakeem Jeffries: No Tax Reform Without Trump’s Tax Returns

Last night in Washington, Representative Hakeem Jeffries (D-New York 8th Congressional District, Brooklyn, Queens) took to the House floor demanding that President Trump release his tax returns.

Jeffries, a member of the House Judiciary and House Budget Committees, presented a privileged resolution which would delay any tax-reform legislation until the House Ways and Means Committee has had the opportunity to review Trump’s tax returns and determine how and if the president could benefit from tax-code changes.

The “privileged” resolution means that the House would have to act within two legislative days.

Jeffries argued that the House of Representatives shall:

-Immediately request tax return information of Donald J. Trump for tax years 2007 through 2016 for review in closed executive session by the Committee on Ways and Means, as provided under Section 6103 of the Internal Revenue Code, and vote to report the information therein to the full House of Representatives.

-Postpone consideration of comprehensive tax reform legislation until after the elected representatives of the American people in this House have been able to review Trump’s tax returns and ascertain how any changes to the Tax Code might financially benefit the President of the United States.

Jeffries stated that the American people deserve transparency concerning the President’s financial conflicts of interest and possible involvement with Russia.

[SOURCE: bklyner.com]

Dawn Staley leads South Carolina women to NCAA women's basketball championship!

Dawn Staley didn't win an NCAA title as a player, although she went with Virginia to the Women's Final Four three times. She has finally won her college championship, as the coach of the South Carolina Gamecocks! She becomes the second black woman to coach a team to a women's championship. Carolyn Peck coached Purdue to a championship in 1999.

For the first time in four years, women’s college basketball has a new top team and it wears garnet and black. The South Carolina women’s basketball team is the new national champion, winning a national title for the first time in program history.

The Gamecocks beat Mississippi State 67-55 in Dallas on Sunday afternoon, completing the run through the postseason all the way to the crown in Dawn Staley’s ninth season.

USC made the whole run without senior center Alaina Coates, who missed the NCAA Tournament with an ankle injury. But what the Gamecocks had was more than enough — and all of it is expected back next season.

Junior forward A’ja Wilson led the Gamecocks with 23 points, while Allisha Gray — the star against Stanford on Friday in the Final Four — again came up huge for South Carolina with 18 points.

Read more: CHAMPS! South Carolina women’s basketball wins first national title

Library of Congress, Smithsonian buy newly discovered photo of Harriet Tubman

An old photo album containing a rare portrait of the legendary underground railroad conductor Harriet Tubman has been jointly acquired by the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, the institutions said Friday.

The new image depicts Tubman as a much younger woman than she appears in other known pictures. It is among 44 rare images in the album, including the only known photograph of John Willis Menard, the first African American man elected to the U.S. Congress.

“We are so thrilled,” Gayle Osterberg, a Library of Congress spokeswoman, said Friday in an email.

“The institutions have agreed to joint ownership and will digitize the photographs as soon as possible,” she wrote. “The intention is to make them as widely available as possible through online images everyone can use.”

Read more: Library of Congress, Smithsonian buy newly discovered photo of Harriet Tubman

Must Read: My Life, My Love, My Legacy by Coretta Scott King & Rev. Dr. Barbara Reynolds

The life story of Coretta Scott King―wife of Martin Luther King Jr., founder of the Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change (The King Center), and singular twentieth-century American civil and human rights activist―as told fully for the first time, toward the end of her life, to Rev. Dr. Barbara Reynolds.

Born in 1927 to daringly enterprising parents in the Deep South, Coretta Scott had always felt called to a special purpose. While enrolled as one of the first black scholarship students recruited to Antioch College, she became politically and socially active and committed to the peace movement. As a graduate student at the New England Conservatory of Music, determined to pursue her own career as a concert singer, she met Martin Luther King Jr., a Baptist minister insistent that his wife stay home with the children. But in love and devoted to shared Christian beliefs as well as shared racial and economic justice goals, she married Dr. King, and events promptly thrust her into a maelstrom of history throughout which she was a strategic partner, a standard bearer, and so much more.

As a widow and single mother of four, she worked tirelessly to found and develop The King Center as a citadel for world peace, lobbied for fifteen years for the US national holiday in honor of her husband, championed for women's, workers’ and gay rights and was a powerful international voice for nonviolence, freedom and human dignity.

Coretta’s is a love story, a family saga, and the memoir of an extraordinary black woman in twentieth-century America, a brave leader who, in the face of terrorism and violent hatred, stood committed, proud, forgiving, nonviolent, and hopeful every day of her life.

CHECK THE BOOK OUT