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Candidate for Dayton Mayor Where are you from? If Dayton, be neighborhood-specific. I was born in Clanton, AL. My parents moved to Dayton when I was two months of age. I grew up in West Dayton and Jefferson TWP neighborhoods; Mercer, Adelite, Louella, Millicent, and Derby. What is your educational and professional background? Vietnam War Veteran. Central State University, B. S. Industrial Technology, Art Design and Education. Wright State University, Masters in Art Administration Education Professional Background McCall’s Janitor, Frigidaire Punch Press Operator, Dayton Public Schools Teachers Aide, Teacher, Elem. & H. S. Coach. Dayton Education Association President. Ohio Education Association Lobbyist. Annie E. Casey Foundation Director. Dayton Public Schools Director of Government Relations. Have you held any other elected positions? What positions? Dayton Education Association President, Vice Pres & Treasurer. Dayton School Board President. State School Board. Dayton City Commission. If elected what will be your top priority? Economic Development, Jobs & Safe Neighborhoods. Why should people cast their vote for you? Long, Dedicated, Ethical & Consistent history of working for the people of Dayton, young and seasoned. What local charitable organizations do you support? Kappa Alpha Psi and all fraternities and sororities United Way Dementia Jack and Jill NAACP DPS Parity Dayton Central State University Men of Color Churches

When the helicopter careened into a California hillside on the morning of Jan. 26, 2020, killing Kobe Bryant and the eight others on board, the initial response around the world was shock. Then, it was: How? How did this seemingly routine trip to a youth basketball game end in tragedy? How did the helicopter that Bryant used for years suddenly crash? How could this possibly have happened? Nearly one year later, the facts surrounding the crash – from the pilot's experience, to the weather conditions, to the helicopter's safety features – are known. And a final determination on what caused the crash is now just weeks away. The National Transportation Safety Board is set to release its final report on the incident on Feb. 9, including a proximate cause and subsequent safety recommendations. In the meantime, the board has released 1,852 pages of factual evidence collected during its investigation , including interview transcripts, email records, text messages, photos, meteorological reports and video footage from cameras in the area. "Accident investigation is really like putting a puzzle back together," said Anthony Brickhouse, a former NTSB investigator who is now an associate professor of aerospace safety at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University. "(It's) really a meticulous process. It’s not something that happens overnight. It requires a lot of digging, a lot of research." As investigators put the finishing touches on that final report, here's everything we know about the crash, based on documents released by the NTSB to date . The flight At 8:39 on the morning of the crash, pilot Ara Zobayan sent a text message to the small group of people coordinating Bryant's trip – including his drivers, concierge and a representative from the helicopter company. "Heli at OC," Zobayan wrote. "Standing by." Thirty minutes later, the helicopter was in the air, traveling from John Wayne-Orange County Airport to Camarillo, California, where the passengers would then be driven to a youth basketball game in nearby Thousand Oaks. Bryant was joined on the flight by his 13-year-old daughter, Gianna; John and Keri Altobelli and their daughter, Alyssa; Sarah Chester and her daughter, Payton; and Christina Mauser, an assistant coach. The helicopter flew north for about 15 minutes before slowing down and circling near Glendale to make way for air traffic at a nearby airport. Then it followed a highway into the hills near Calabasas, flying between 400 feet and 600 feet above the ground. "You just going to stay down low at that for all the way to Camarillo?" an air traffic controller asked Zobayan. "Yes sir," the pilot replied. "Low altitude." Minutes later, there was a shift change at the Southern California TRACON, which provides air traffic control services to airports in the region. And the helicopter was heading into increasingly mountainous terrain, where visibility that morning was poor. When the new air traffic controller contacted Zobayan, the pilot said he was climbing above the clouds, to 4,000 feet. Instead, the helicopter got no more than 1,600 feet above the ground before banking left and descending rapidly, crashing into the hills. "That combination of the low-lying stratus layer, and also the relatively high-rising terrain – (it's) a common and, really, a deadly combination," said Jack Cress, a former helicopter pilot in the U.S. Marine Corps who is now an instructor in the Aviation Safety & Security Program at the University of Southern California. The helicopter Bryant regularly traveled by helicopter during and after his NBA career , in part to avoid the oft-gridlocked traffic in Los Angeles. And he regularly chartered flights with Island Express Helicopters, including 13 trips in 2019. In fact, the helicopter involved in the crash – a Sikorsky S-76B – was the same machine that transported Bryant to his final game with the Los Angeles Lakers in 2016. Cress said the Sikorsky S-76 is generally well-regarded among pilots and has a strong safety record over decades of use. He noted that it has been the "helicopter of choice" for Queen Elizabeth II, among other top dignitaries, since 2009. "They just don't fall out of the sky," pilot Kurt Deetz, who previously flew Bryant in the same helicopter, told CNN last year . The NTSB has examined the helicopter itself as part of its investigation, including both maintenance records and physical evidence obtained at the crash scene. It said in a preliminary report last year that the engines had been found near the wreckage and showed "no evidence of an uncontained or catastrophic internal failure." "I haven’t seen anything in the data that I’ve looked at that would suggest that there was anything physically wrong with the helicopter, that would cause an accident," said Brickhouse, who reviewed the NTSB's public docket of the crash . The helicopter did, however, lack two notable components. It did not have a flight recorder, colloquially known as a "black box," that could have provided additional data for investigators. Nor did it have a terrain awareness and warning system, known as TAWS, which notifies pilots when they get dangerously close to the ground. The weather conditions One witness told the NTSB that she was preparing to meet a friend for a hike at a nearby trailhead when she saw a helicopter disappear into clouds that were obscuring the tops of trees. Another witness reached out to the investigators to advise them that the area near the crash is "predisposed to channel fog up from the coast." "We heard the helicopter flying normally, but couldn't really see it because it was extremely foggy and low clouds," a third witness reported in an email. "I was thinking to myself of (sic) why a helicopter would be flying so low in very bad weather conditions." The weather on the morning of the crash has become a key component of the NTSB's investigation. Its meteorological report spans 394 pages and includes satellite images, surface observations, photos, maps and other assorted data. Investigators even compared footage from cameras in the area, perched behind home plate at three youth baseball fields, to estimate visibility at the time of the crash. The weather was also a topic of conversation among Bryant's travel coordinating team prior to take-off. Zobayan, the pilot, fielded inquiries about it via text message the night before the flight and the morning of. "Should be OK," he replied. Pilots typically fly under visual flight rules, where they can see where they're going, or instrument flight rules, where they primarily rely on the aircraft's instruments because their vision is obscured. But the conditions that morning prompted Zobayan to take off under special visual flight rules, a sort of middle ground between the two. "That term in itself is not scary," Cress said. "But when you’re having to contend with low visibility, and low clouds, and variable terrain – and that’s quite variable up there – then special VFR does get scary." The weather that morning has also been at the center of multiple lawsuits filed by Bryant's wife, Vanessa, and the other victims' families against the helicopter company and Zobayan's estate . The families argue that Zobayan should not have flown in adverse conditions, and that Island Express Helicopters should have had regulations in place to prevent him from doing so. The Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department and Los Angeles Police Department later said low clouds and fog in the area had prompted them to ground their own helicopters on the morning of the crash. The pilot Zobayan, 50, first became interested in flying when he emigrated from Lebanon in the 1980s, his girlfriend of seven years told investigators. He got his private pilot certificate in 2001 and had flown more than 8,500 hours at the time of the crash, including 1,250 in the Sikorsky S-76. For several years, Zobayan was one of only two pilots who flew Bryant for Island Express Helicopters, according to Deetz, who was the other. "He's always been a great pilot, performed really well, very proficient," Luca Dell'Anese, an instructor who oversaw Zobayan's training checks for several years, told the NTSB. "He always demonstrated sound judgment ... during the training." Zobayan was reprimanded once by the FAA , in 2015, for flying into busy airspace without clearance. He was counseled on the incident but not required to undergo any remedial training. Investigators have questioned whether Zobayan became spatially disoriented in the fog just before the crash. One NTSB document mentions the possibility that he might have experienced a "somatogravic illusion," a phenomenon in which gravitational forces can confuse the body in the absence of visual cues. In other words, Zobayan might have felt like the helicopter was climbing as it banked toward the hillside. "You can get yourself in a bad spot, because your body is lying to you," said Cress, who is also the principal officer at Vortechs Helicopter Analytics. "It doesn’t know that you’re both turned and attempting to climb." Cress also wonders if Zobayan might have felt pressure to complete the flight on time that day – pressure that might have kept him flying through the fog, into hilly terrain, when perhaps he should have turned around. "There would’ve been a lot of professional pressure within himself – 'I’ve done this kind of thing, I know this terrain, I can do this. This guy in the back really wants to do it, and I’m going to do everything I can,' " Cress said. "He just got in too deep." The next steps While the NTSB's determination on the cause of the crash is not admissible in court, its findings on Feb. 9 will likely provide a road map for lawyers in the wrongful death lawsuits filed by the victims' families. The final report will also give the NTSB an opportunity to make safety recommendations to the FAA, which can then choose whether or not to enact them. Robert Clifford, a lawyer who specializes in aviation litigation, said it often takes a tragedy for important safety reforms to be taken seriously. "A person of the stature of Mrs. Bryant, advancing the cause of enhanced safety for her husband and daughter," Clifford said, "maybe she can make change." Brickhouse, meanwhile, noted that the NTSB has been making some of the same safety recommendations to the FAA "for the past 15, 16 years" without luck. The board first recommended that TAWS be required on helicopters, for instance, in 2006 after a helicopter crashed in the Gulf of Mexico, killing 10 people. The FAA didn't adopt it. "Because (this) was a high-profile accident," Brickhouse said, "it’ll be interesting to see if some of those recommendations will be enacted." USA TODAY Sports is marking the first anniversary of the helicopter crash that killed Kobe Bryant and eight others with a six-day series of stories, photos and videos looking back at the Lakers legend and the aftermath of his death. More at usatoday.com Contributing: The Associated Press Contact @Tom_Schad. Published 6:34 AM usatoday.com

Hall of Famer and one-time home run king Atlanta Braves legend Henry Louis “Hank” Aaron passed away this morning at the age of 86. He leaves behind an indelible legacy on and off the baseball diamond. Aaron was born in Mobile, Alabama in 1934, the son of Herbert and Estella Aaron. He played in sandlots and started his pro career in the Negro Leagues in 1951. He made his way through the minor leagues until age 20. Aaron then made his Major League Debut and started his 23-year-career with the then-Milwaukee Braves. He recorded his first of 755 home runs on April 23, 1954 in a game against the St. Louis Cardinals. His first season saw him finish fourth in the rookie of the year voting as he hit .280 with 13 home runs and 69 RBIs. It was just the start of what became one of the most legendary careers in baseball history. By the time he was in just his fourth season, he hit 44 home runs, drove in 132 RBIs and won the National League MVP award. The 1957 season started a lengthy run that saw Aaron hit at least 25 home runs in every season until 1973. During this time, Aaron and the Braves moved from Milwaukee to Atlanta where Aaron became a living legend on the field. It was the 1974 season that saw Aaron smash his way into the national consciousness. On April 8, 1974 Hammerin’ Hank, as he was known, crushed a 1-0 pitch from Los Angeles Dodgers pitcher Al Downing over the left field wall at Fulton County Stadium and broke Babe Ruth’s long-time home run record of 714 home runs in a career. Aaron would play a few more seasons before calling it a career on October 3, 1976. He immediately transitioned into a role with the Braves as director of player development, a position he held until 1989. He then became a senior vice president for the Braves, a title he held for decades. Aaron remains baseball’s runs batted in leader with 2,297 and total base leader with 6,856. Hammerin’ Hank finished his career with 755 home runs, an all-time record that stood for decades until Barry Bonds passed him and finished with 762 home runs. His #44 jersey was retired by both the Atlanta Braves and Milwaukee Brewers. On August 1, 1982, Aaron was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York. In 1999, the 25th anniversary of Aaron breaking the home run record, Major League Baseball established the Hank Aaron Award that is given to the best overall hitter in each league. He later received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President George W. Bush and was inducted as a Georgia Trustee by the Georgia Historical Society in 2010. In 2016, Aaron was presented with the Order of the Rising Sun, one of Japan's highest honors for his work with the World Children's Baseball Fair. But Aaron was more than just a baseball player. He fought every day for decades through horrendous racism in the deep south and the rest of the country. He was repeatedly called the N-word, faced death threats, and had rocks and other items thrown at him throughout his career. Still, even as he dealt with a level of racism and hatred that few athletes will ever face; he remained a quiet and humble man. "I was a baseball player number one," Aaron said in his last interview with CBS46. "I loved the game of baseball and I felt all along that if I continued to play; it would give other black players a chance to play and they wouldn't have the kind of things I was going through." In his bio from the Baseball Hall of Fame, a quote from the greatest boxer ever, Muhammad Ali accompanies it that reads Hank Aaron was, “The only man I idolize more than myself.” A fitting tribute to towering man who left his mark on the baseball field, society, and the fabric of America. The Atlanta Braves issued a statement from Chairman Terry McGuirk about the passing of Aaron that read: We are absolutely devastated by the passing of our beloved Hank. He was a beacon for our organization first as a player, then with player development, and always with our community efforts. His incredible talent and resolve helped him achieve the highest accomplishments, yet he never lost his humble nature. Henry Louis Aaron wasn’t just our icon, but one across Major League Baseball and around the world. His success on the diamond was matched only by his business accomplishments off the field and capped by his extraordinary philanthropic efforts. We are heartbroken and thinking of his wife Billye and their children Gaile, Hank, Jr., Lary, Dorinda and Ceci and his grandchildren. Copyright 2021 WGCL-TV (Meredith Corporation). All rights reserved. https://www.cbs46.com/news/hall-of-famer-henry-hank-aaron-dies-at-86/article_71a37148-5cc4-11eb-9cdf-1bbe85006da2.amp.html

by Brakkton Booker , NPR News January 22, 202111:05 AM ET Lloyd Austin, a retired four-star Army general, has been confirmed by the Senate, making him the first Black secretary of defense in U.S. history. The Senate approved President Biden's nomination for Pentagon chief in a near-unanimous 93 to 2 vote. Austin's nomination was approved despite concerns raised on both sides of the aisle that he hadn't been out of uniform for the legally mandated seven-year period. The National Security Act of 1947 created the rule to ensure civilian control over the military is maintained, but also permits a waiver if lawmakers in both the House and the Senate approve. Those votes too passed in bipartisan fashion, clearing the way for Austin's confirmation. "The safety and security of our democracy demands competent civilian control of our armed forces. The subordination of military power to the civil," Austin, 67, said during his confirmation hearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee on Tuesday. He also attempted to allay fears of some committee members who raised concerns of setting dangerous precedent by allowing two defense secretaries waivers in four years. He promised to surround himself with "experienced, capable civilian leaders" and to hire a chief of staff who "will not be a military person." Austin becomes just the third Pentagon chief to serve after receiving a waiver. He joins George Marshall, a retired general of the Army nominated in 1950 by President Harry Truman, and retired Marine Gen. Jim Mattis, former President Donald Trump's first defense secretary in 2017. Austin served more than 40 years in the Army, and headed U.S. Central Command, the Pentagon's key post leading military operations in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Yemen. He served as commander of the theater from 2013-2016, making him the first Black general to hold the post. With much of Austin's expertise focused on nations in which the U.S. is at war, some lawmakers raised questions about his readiness to tackle other global threats, in particular from China and Iran. "I think China is ... our most significant challenge going forward," Austin said Tuesday, while referring to Iran as a "destabilizing force" in the Middle East. Another challenge facing the new defense secretary are concerns of extremism within the ranks of the military. Those fears have been heightened since the deadly Jan. 6 insurrection at U.S. Capitol that was set into motion at the urging of former President Trump. An NPR investigation found that nearly 20% of the people charged in the Capitol complex breach as of Thursday have served or are currently serving in the military. Concerns about extremist elements within the ranks of the military are not new, of course. During his confirmation hearing , Austin called it a "critical" issue and said that better screening is needed for military recruits. He also shared an anecdote with lawmakers about when he was working with the 82nd Airborne Division in North Carolina years ago. "We woke up one day and discovered that we had extremist elements in our ranks and they did bad things," Austin said, without providing details. "The signs for that activity were there all along. We just didn't know what to look for or what to pay attention to." "But, we learned from that," he said.

Rev. Silvester Beaman, a graduate of Wilberforce University, the nation's first, private HBCU , will deliver the benediction at the inauguration of Joseph R. Biden, Wednesday, January 20th. Beaman, a native of Niagara Falls, New York, has pastored Bethel AME Church in Wilmington, Delaware for more than 25 years. As a close friend and confidant of, and spiritual advisor to the Biden family, Beaman was asked to deliver the prayer by President-elect Biden. Introduced to each other by Joe Biden, the President-elect's deceased older son Beau and Beaman were good friends. The minister prayed with the younger Biden before his overseas Army deployment and during his fight against brain cancer. Beaman credits the elder Biden with helping him navigate the political arena in Wilmington when he began his pastoral duties at Bethel AME in 1993. He says his benediction will focus on diversity, inclusion, and healing the nation. "I am proud to represent God, my family and my alma mater, Wilberforce University." - Rev. Silvester Beaman Beaman is a member of Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity, Inc. Wilberforce University was founded in 1856 and is the nation's oldest, private, historically black college (HBCU). Located in Greene County, Ohio near Dayton, the four year, accredited university is a member of the United Negro College Fund, the LINK Library Consortium and the NAIA Athletic Conference. According to HBCU.com, Wilberforce is one of the top five HBCUs in the Midwest.

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