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R.I.P. Colin Powell: The former top soldier and diplomat for the United States died on Monday from complications of COVID-19, his family reports. Powell had been fully vaccinated, but was at greater risk because he was immunocompromised: He had had multiple myeloma, a cancer of plasma cells that suppresses the body's immune response, CNN reports. Powell, born in Harlem of Jamaican parents, rose to become the country’s first African American national security adviser, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and secretary of state. He was 84.
Barbados says goodbye to the queen: Fifty-five years after independence from Britain, this Caribbean nation is removing Queen Elizabeth II as its head of state. The move, which takes effect next month, follows Black Lives Matter protests and Britain’s deportation threats to thousands of legal U.K. residents from the Caribbean who arrived before 1973, the CBC reports.
Reparations in action: Next month, in one of the first such programs in the U.S., the city of Evanston, Illinois will award 16 older Black residents who experienced housing discrimination $25,000 each in “housing reparations.” The money will be paid toward a mortgage balance, down payment on an Evanston home purchase, property taxes, or home improvement contractor, Jesse Washington writes for The Undefeated. Evanston has pledged $10 million over a decade to begin repairing the damage caused by official city policies. It’s funded by a tax on recently legalized marijuana sold in Evanston.
Nazi-tainted paintings? A Zurich museum’s big expansion is under scrutiny after disclosures that several of its new paintings may have been obtained under duress from Jewish families persecuted by Nazi Germany. The paintings had belonged to Swiss industrialist George Bührle, who bought more than 600 artworks—some of them looted from Jews by the Nazis—between 1936 and 1956, the New York Times reports.
The murals rise again: For 44 years, the outsize wall paintings were banned in a Southern California town after a mural of a gun-toting Mexican independence-era woman soldier caused consternation among white leaders (and was later erased). Last week, a massive streetside mural by a local art collective was unveiled in the city of El Monte, the Los Angeles Times reports. “This is just the beginning,” Mayor Jessica Ancona says. See it.
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