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Hip hop champ Brandie Blaze turns struggles into ‘Broken Rainbows’

Published Thu, 20 Feb 2025 19:15:30 GMT

Brandie Blaze wanted to make a sonic telenovela. Instead the Boston hip hop champion made an album about her personal pain and triumph.To follow up her second album, 2019’s “Late Bloomer,” Blaze dreamed up a fictional concept album – a sort of murder mystery that plays out over a set of banging hip hop tracks. The album got a boost when Blaze won a LAB Grant from the Boston Foundation to help her make it. Then the project took an unexpected personal turn.“As I was writing, I realized that the album started to mirror my life,” Blaze told the Herald. “I was in a relationship that was emotionally abusive… I realized as I was writing these songs that it wasn’t a fictional story anymore. It was about my life and what I was going through.”“It became this super personal album that I did not intend on doing,” Blaze added.Blaze put her struggles into her songs. Into her wise and mighty, raw and catchy songs.Those songs make up “Broken Rainbows,” an LP that comes out April 20 and gets a relea...

Dear Abby: Mom needles daughter about her tattoos

Published Thu, 20 Feb 2025 19:15:30 GMT

Dear Abby: I am tattooed. I have 11 spread over my body. I grew up with strict rules. My mom always said no piercings (other than ears) or tattoos while I was under her roof. I got my first tattoo at 22 while away at college. I had to tell her about it because of a family beach vacation. She was disappointed. I have continued to get inked throughout my life. Every time she noticed a new tat, she voiced a negative opinion.We live in different states now, so the subject of my tattoos hasn’t come up lately. A year ago, she was here to visit and didn’t say one word about my ink. I’m planning to have more work done this summer and I’m afraid that when she visits, she’ll be critical of me again, even though I’m 32, have an above-minimum-wage job, and my husband and I own our own home. What can I do or say to get her to keep her comments at bay? — Tatted in MontanaDear Tatted: What you say to your mother is, “You know I love you, Mom. Thank y...

China’s Xi to meet Brazil’s Lula in Beijing

Published Thu, 20 Feb 2025 19:15:30 GMT

BEIJING (AP) — Chinese leader Xi Jinping was due to meet visiting Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva on Friday in Beijing as the leaders seek to boost ties between two of the world’s largest developing nations.The meeting comes on the second day of Lula’s visit to his country’s most important trading partner and ally in his bid to challenge Western-dominated economic institutions.The visit included the swearing in on Thursday of former Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff as head of the Chinese-backed New Development Bank, which is funding infrastructure projects in Brazil and elsewhere in the developing world. That NDB portrays itself as an alternative to the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, which often impose loan conditions that developing nations criticize as punitive. The Brazilian government says the sides are expected to sign at least 20 bilateral agreements, underscoring the improvement in relations since Lula took over from predecessor Jair Bolsonaro in ...

Florida GOP passes 6-week abortion ban; DeSantis signs it

Published Thu, 20 Feb 2025 19:15:30 GMT

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (AP) — The Republican-dominated Florida Legislature on Thursday approved a ban on abortions after six weeks of pregnancy, a proposal signed into law later in the day by GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis as he prepares for an expected presidential run. The ban gives DeSantis a key political victory among Republican primary voters as he prepares to launch a presidential candidacy built on his national brand as a conservative standard bearer. The governor’s office said in a statement late Thursday that he had signed the legislation.The six-week ban will take effect only if the state’s current 15-week ban is upheld in an ongoing legal challenge that is before the state Supreme Court, which is controlled by conservatives. The policy would have wider implications for abortion access throughout the South in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision last year overturning Roe v. Wade and leaving decisions about abortion access to states. Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi hav...

Warmly welcomed, ‘Cousin Joe’ jokes of staying in Ireland

Published Thu, 20 Feb 2025 19:15:30 GMT

DUBLIN (AP) — In Ireland this week, well wishers have lined the streets to catch a mere glimpse of President Joe Biden. Photos of his smiling face are plastered on shop windows and one admirer held a sign that read: “2024 – Make Joe President Again.”No wonder Biden keeps joking about sticking around. Back home, Biden’s approval rating is near the lowest point of his presidency. And even some Democrats have suggested he shouldn’t run for reelection. On trips within the U.S. to discuss his economic and social policies, Biden often gets a smattering of admirers waving as he drives by, and friendly crowds applaud his speeches. But the reception doesn’t compare with the overwhelming adoration he’s getting here in the old sod. Expect more of the same on Friday when Biden wraps up his visit to Ireland by spending a day in County Mayo in western Ireland, where his great-great grandfather, Patrick Blewitt, lived until he left for the United States in 1850. The l...

Workers at anti-poverty World Bank struggle to pay bills

Published Thu, 20 Feb 2025 19:15:30 GMT

WASHINGTON (AP) — Andre Blount has been serving food to dignitaries at World Bank headquarters for nearly 10 years and says he has gotten exactly one raise — for 50 cents. This week, as leaders from around the world are in D.C for the spring meeting of the poverty-fighting organization, Blount and his coworkers are trying to bring attention to what they see as a galling situation:The workers who put food on the table for an organization whose mission is to fight poverty are themselves struggling to get by. Union leaders say a quarter of the World Bank food workers employed as a contract laborers through Compass Group North America receive public benefits, like SNAP, or food stamps, just to make ends meet.“It’s sickening,” Blount, 33, said as he joined red-shirted union members this week on a picket line outside the development bank on a hot afternoon. “They go around the world looking for how to help people, but you have hundreds of employees in D.C. who are struggling.”Inside...

Top 2024 hopefuls to address NRA convention after shootings

Published Thu, 20 Feb 2025 19:15:30 GMT

INDIANAPOLIS (AP) — Last year it was Uvalde. Now it’s Nashville and Louisville. For the second year in a row, the National Rifle Association is holding its annual convention within days of mass shootings that shook the nation. The three-day gathering, beginning Friday, will include thousands of the organization’s most active members at Indianapolis’ convention center and is attracting a bevy of top Republican presidential candidates — enough that it could help shape the early part of next year’s GOP primary race.It illustrates the stark reality that such shootings have become enough of the fabric of American life that the NRA can no longer schedule around them. Nor do they really want to: The convention falls on the second anniversary of the mass shooting at a FedEx facility in Indianapolis that killed nine people. The NRA calls the convention “one of the most politically significant and popular events in the country, featuring our nation’s top Second Amendment leaders.” Repub...

Shinkai sticking to what he knows best: Japan, youth, anime

Published Thu, 20 Feb 2025 19:15:30 GMT

TOKYO (AP) — Makoto Shinkai doesn’t yet know the story he will tell in his next film, only that it will be about what he knows best. For one, it will be set in Japan, filled with those breathtakingly gorgeous landscapes he draws on his animation storyboards.If he were to set his film outside Japan, he would have to live in that city for at least several months.The narrative will almost certainly star a young hero or heroine, or both, with hearts of gold, who fearlessly embark on their coming-of-age journeys.All his recent films have those characteristics. It’s all he knows, Shinkai says, with a humble laugh.“I am not the kind of person with varied interests or many skills. I can only do one thing. I can only make my animation,” he told The Associated Press in a recent online interview from Los Angeles.He can’t even think of filmmakers or animators who have influenced him, except for being profoundly affected by Hayao Miyazaki’s “My Neighbor Totoro,’’ when he saw it as a ...

Landmark law saved whales through marine industries change

Published Thu, 20 Feb 2025 19:15:30 GMT

PORTLAND, Maine (AP) — On a breezy spring day, scientists and conservationists methodically conducted experiments near 15 North Atlantic right whales that occasionally spouted and surfaced in a bay south of Boston.The pod of adults and calves is about 4% of the worldwide population of a marine mammal that almost disappeared from the planet after many decades of commercial whaling. There now are only a few hundred of the behemoths, which can weigh 70 tons (63.5 metric tons) and subsist on small ocean organisms.Although right whale numbers are dwindling, conservationists attribute their continued survival to the U.S. Endangered Species Act. The landmark federal law — a half century old this year — has forced the fishing and commercial shipping industries to take important steps to help protect the critically endangered whales. And it’s spurred government agencies and scientists to undertake research.David Wiley, research ecologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Admini...

‘A reflection’: Stampede tarp auction an indicator of Alberta’s booming economy

Published Thu, 20 Feb 2025 19:15:30 GMT

CALGARY — The amount of money that was flowing freely at the annual Calgary Stampede canvas auction Thursday night was just the sort of gusher that Alberta’s oil and gas industry likes to see.The event is typically considered a bellwether for Alberta’s energy industry, as many sponsors that pay to have their company names on chuckwagons competing in the festival’s rodeo are players in the energy sector. The province has traditionally had a boom and bust economy tied to the price of oil. With the price of West Texas Crude around $82 a barrel the sector is definitely in a boom position right now.Last year with the sport returning after the COVID-19 pandemic the 27 rigs taking part in the event raised $2.1 million or roughly $77,800 per bid.This year the total hit $2.75 million dollars or about $102,000 for each chuckwagon team.“We’re delighted that there were a few competitive bids which drove some numbers up and it’s about the families and what the...