Woman saves premature baby girl

DyTashia Smith

News

On January 28, in Queens, New York, a moment of terror turned into a miracle. A premature baby girl, Mikayla, was saved by Fernanda Avellaneda by performing CPR on the child.

Before giving birth, the child was three months early; she was due in the month of April. Mikayla’s mom, Alana Goins, a first time mom, considers her to be a miracle, after she had been left in a toilet for almost 15 minutes.

Junior, Hailey Hunsberger said, “This is really a miracle. The lady that saved this child should be majorly rewarded.”

When Mikayla started to arrive, Goins started to panic.

When it was announced that Goins was giving birth upstairs in her room, According to Daily News, Avellaneda called 911, then ran to the room herself.

Avellaneda said she reached the room and stated to bang on the door but heard only crying and frantic mumbling. Goins finally managed to open the door.

Avellaneda said, “She was crying and crying and crying. I couldn’t even make out what she was saying. I just understood ‘The baby’s in the toilet.’ So I went to the bathroom. And sure enough the baby was in the toilet.”

According to ABC News, Avellaneda started performing CPR after rescuing the tiny listless girl and placing her in the kitchen sink. After a few moments, she realized the baby was breathing on her own.

Sophomore, Jayla Smith said, “Mrs. Avellaneda is a strong woman, I don’t know how she managed to give CPR I’m still trying to figure out how the baby survived.”

An ambulance arrived and six FDNY paramedics took over, putting an oxygen mask on baby, wrapping her in aluminum blanket and rushing her to Elmhurst Hospital. Mikayla, recovered at the hospital with her mom.

Goins said, “I was shocked. I didn’t think I was going to have my baby at six months, I didn’t think the baby was going to survive. But she did, thanks to her!”

 

What is @RebelLive on twitter?

Sports Reporter

Lucy DeShields

The @RebelLive twitter page is a student ran page about all the sports at James F. Byrnes High School. The person who runs it is a sophomore named Michael Covil.

Covil is the manager for the varsity football and boys’ basketball teams. He gives play by play coverage of the games he goes to. He also takes pictures for the varsity football teams.

He started the twitter page his freshman year when he was taking pictures for the C-team football and people kept asking for them. The page made it easier for people to get pictures and see what was going on at games even if they could not make it to a game.

Covil said, “I started the page for other people to be able to see what was going on at games they could not be at and the page as gotten popular since then.”

Covil travels with football and basketball teams so the information he talks about is usually right as it happens in a game.

He knows the struggle of not being able to drive and he thought the page would be able to be used for the away games that are late at night or too far to drive to.

Covil said, “I do not get any benefits from having the page, I just do it to be convent and to have fun.”

Covil is going to continue the page until he graduates and wants everyone to be involved with the school’s sports.

Kobe Bryant’s last game

Lucy DeShields

Sports Reporter

Kobe Bryant played his last game Wednesday April 13, 2016 against the Utah Jazz winning the game 101-96.  Kobe has played his whole NBA career with the Los Angeles Lakers.

The ticket price for that game ranged from $729- $27,500, the tickets in the nosebleed section were in the 700s price range.

At the Staple Center in Los Angeles, they sold $1.2 million worth of merchandise. The most expensive piece of Kobe merchandise was a $38,248 hat made of lamb and snake skin, it also hat 3.5 ounces of 18 karat gold on the front of the hat.

Sophomore Taylor England said, “The reason that he never went to a different team could be because the Lakers were giving him everything he wanted.”

Bryant has played 20 seasons with the Lakers and has made over $603 million during his career. He has made 33,464 points his whole career. Bryant is third in the NBA for points scored and has won five NBA championships.

This season was difficult for Bryant because of injuries. During this season he has had sore right shoulder, more right shoulder problems, back pain, and a torn rotator cuff.

Sophomore Madi Davis said, “That after retirement that Kobe might take a few days off to spend with his family and then go back to do other thing in NBA other than playing.”

Kobe’s final game he made 60 points which was big for him. He is said to be one of the best NBA players.

Malia Obama attending Harvard University

Katie Cogburn

News Reporter

Malia Obama will be attending Harvard University in the fall of 2017 after taking a gap year. The White House announced Sunday that she will be a member of the class of 2021, according to CNN.

“I think it would be hard to be the president’s daughter while you’re in school because I think that everyone would want to ask questions about the president,” said sophomore Brooke Egan.

Obama said at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner on Saturday that his family plans to stay in Washington for two years after his presidency ends so that their youngest daughter, Sasha, can finish high school.

“I think Malia waited to tell everyone because she is always in the public eye,” said sophomore Brooke Egan.

Malia Obama’s year-long gap before her first year at Harvard is a route taken by about 80 to 110 admitted students. Higher education experts take the year-off as a way to travel, engage in a long-special project or otherwise use the time in a constructive and meaningful way.

“I think it would be hard to be the president’s daughter because you wouldn’t know if your friends are your real friends,” said sophomore Brooke Egan.

Malia Obama is far from the first child of a president to make a college decision while her father occupied the Oval Office. Chelsea Clinton began her undergraduate studies at Stanford University in California in the fall of 1997-before her father, Bill Clinton, departed office in early 2001. George W. Bush’s twin daughters began college just months before their father’s election in 2000.

“I think it will be good for Malia to go to college because she will live a normal life and she would live in a dorm,” said sophomore Brooke Egan.

 

Harry Potter Part Eight

Katie Cogburn

News Reporter

Harry Potter is back for another round of magic, struggles with the darkness and parents. This time, Harry is the dad, struggling with his own son, according to CNN News.

“I think that the Harry Potter series became too big and I don’t like the genre of Harry Potter series” said junior Rachael Ottom.

The eighth installment of the Harry Potter series, the two-part play,” Harry Potter and the cursed child,” will be published as a book this summer, author J.K. Rowling announced on her Pottermore website Wednesday.

The “special rehearsal edition” script book will be available at midnight on July thirty-first, a day after the Harry Potter play opens in London. The newest Potter installment, the first official Harry Potter story to be presented on stage, is an original new story by Rowling, Jack Thorne and John Tiffany, and is written by Thorne.

“I know people that love the Harry Potter series but I don’t like the genre of the books,” said Ottom.

We last saw Harry saying goodbye to his children at Platform Nine and Three-Quarters, nineteen years after the Battle of Hogwarts, in the epilogue of “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.”

“I don’t like the genre that has wizards and what is in the Harry Potter series,” said Ottom.

“Harry Potter and the Cursed Child” picks up after that scene, with the father of three Harry Potter employed at the Ministry Magic. Both Harry and his son Albus struggle with their family legacy and against the darkness.

Rowling’s best –selling, seven-volume Harry Potter series was published between 1997 and 2007 and has sold over 450 million copies worldwide.

Woman missing since 1974 is found

Katie Cogburn

News Reporter

Indiana State Police said that shortly after giving birth to her third child in 1974, Lulu Ann Gillespie-Miller, felt she was too young to be a mother at the time and signed her children over to her parents in Laurel, according to Channel Five News.

“If someone close to me left without a reason, I would be very mad and shocked,” said math teacher Matthew Begley.

Detective Sergeant Scott Jarvis took the cold case in January 2014 and discovered Richmond Police had a case of a deceased unidentified woman found in 1975. The woman was buried in an unmarked grave in the Earlham Cemetery in Richmond.

“I think that the family of the woman that went missing is shocked and they have a lot of questions to ask her why she left,” said Begley.

A search warrant was obtained in December 2014, and a body was found from an unmarked grave for DNA analysis. A DNA sample was also obtained from Gillespie-Miller’s biological daughter, Tammy Miller, for comparison.

“If someone close to me went missing without saying anything, I wouldn’t stop looking until I found them,” said Begley.

But while waiting for results, the police began to investigate the trail of a woman with similarities to Lulu Gillespie-Miller, who had lived in Tennessee in the 1980’s, then later in Texas. Further investigation led to a woman living in a small town in South Texas since the 1990’s and probably still living under an alias.

“I think that her children probably cannot get her trust back and I think they are feeling the same way the family is feeling,” said Begley.

On Thursday, Texas Rangers went to a home and met a woman who admitted that her name is actually Lula Gillespie-Miller, now sixty-nine. Although Gillespie-Miller could offer no explanation as to why she left her life behind in 1974, she did hive consent to the police for her contact information to the given daughter, Tammy.

“I would think that running away would be for someone that was a teenager, but I think that she should have talked about what she was going to do before she left,” said Begley.

 

College student makes his own braces

Katie Cogburn

News Reporter

Amos Dudley, a twenty-four-year old digital design major at New Jersey Institute of Technology, felt self-conscious about his teeth. So, he decided to 3-D print his own braces and documented the DIY project in a recent blog post, according to The Huffington Post.

“I think that what he is doing is good and I don’t think I could have done something like this,” said junior Janet Medina.

His braces totaled less than sixty dollars, and after wearing them for about sixteen weeks, his teeth are straighter. Dudley wrote on his blog after creating his own DIY braces that he feels he can freely smile again and that is what is important.

“Even though I haven’t had braces before, I would have wanted to get the braces that he made,” said Medina.

Dudley had braces back in high school but explained that he failed to keep up with them. He mentioned on his blog that he avoided smiling for a while because he was unhappy with his teeth.

“I am unhappy with my teeth and I would want to get the braces he made because they are so cheap,” said Medina.

Braces like invisalign can get pricey, costing up to eight-thousand dollars. After, studying some images of the clear braces, something dawned on him- they looked like they had come from a 3-D printer.

“I would want to do something like he did and make something by myself and it turned out big,” said Medina.

So he decided to use the school’s 3-D printing equipment and scanned the models of his teeth. He then modeled non-toxic plastic molds around them to make twelve sets of braces. He used animation to help figure out the adjustments in each set of braces- a process that many orthodontics use.

“If I chose a price, I wouldn’t choose the price as low as he did, even though it does sound nice for the price of braces,” said Medina.

Dudley, who does not recommend attempting this at home, told Huff Post that he did not consult an orthodontist for his project. But the student did get information from journal articles and textbook. And though this was a financially friendly alternative to buying braces, and he said that he did not undertake the project to save money- he was also up for the challenge.

“I would also hope that the braces are popular and it sells fast to people everywhere,” said Medina.

 

Ferguson’s new police chief

Hannah Druce

News

The city of Ferguson, Missouri, swore in Delrish Moss as its first African-American police chief on Monday. “Let’s go to work,” Moss told the crowd at his swearing-in ceremony.

A longtime veteran of the Miami Police Department, Moss was selected from 54 applicants to fill the role. He is expected to help rebuild the Ferguson Police Department after racially charged protests broke out over the 2014 shooting death of African-American teenager Michael Brown by a white police officer.

Moss said Monday the task before the department was to bring “nobility” back to police work. “If you work hard, if you stay honest and committed, if you maintain respect for the community and do your job well, we will get along just fine,” he said, addressing the police officers in attendance.

According to CNN, Moss may be new to the department, but the problems he faces are not. He’ll be tasked with healing a fractured community in the spotlight since Brown’s shoot off.

He’ll have to navigate a mostly white police department in charge of a majority black city. And he’ll be expected to reform the department under the wary eye of the U.S. Justice Department.

According to CNN, Moss said he is up to the task. It’s a job he’s been training for his entire life, starting with his childhood in Miami and throughout his 32 years with the Miami Police Department.

“I think this is a job based on my previous career that I’ve been training my entire life for,” he told CNN’s Sara Sidner. Moss is replacing Tom Jackson, who resigned last year after a Justice Department report cited racial bias in Ferguson’s criminal justice system.

Sophomore Kelsey Bean said, “If it were me being put in charge I would feel immensely overwhelmed by the pressure put on me every day.”

According to CNN, the report called for reforms after finding what they called a “pattern and practice” of unconstitutional police conduct in the city. The federal government sued in February after the Ferguson City Council balked at some terms of a negotiated deal, but the city averted further legal woes in March by unanimously agreeing to accept a Justice Department overhaul of its troubled police force and municipal courts.

Sophomore Willie Watts said, “Hopefully this will help for people to realize that there are good people out there and there are good people that become cops for the right reasons; to protect people.

In its report last year, the Justice Department highlighted a policing system that uses arrest warrants as generators of income. The report described police practices “shaped by the city’s focus on revenue,” not public needs.

Apple Going Small

Hannah Druce

News

Apple CEO Tim Cook took the stage at Apple’s Cupertino campus to introduce a smaller, four-inch version of the iPhone, called the iPhone SE.

The key marketing words for Apple products have usually been thinner, faster, and bigger. IPhones have grown up over the past nine years, going from the original 3.5-inch display to the iPhone 6S Plus’ 5.5-inch screen.

Apple went in the opposite direction and announced a new iPhone that is actually smaller. Cook also introduced a new iPad Pro, new Watch bands, and some software updates.

According to CNN, it looks like the iPhone 5S, Apple’s last 4-inch phone released in 2014, but has the same processor and graphics performance as the iPhone 6S. Inside is Apple’s A9 chip, which doubles the speed of the iPhone 5S. It can use Hey Siri, the hands-free voice assistant, has a 12MP camera, and shoots 4K video.

The smaller iPhone is an attempt to appeal to fans of more pocket able devices. Last year, Apple sold 30 million phones that were 4-inches and smaller. A chunk of Apple customers have resisted upgrading to the recent 4.7-inch and 5.5-inch smartphones.

Junior Jesse Blackwell said, “I really don’t mind the smaller phone; the size is more convenient for many.”

The 16 GB iPhone SE starts at $399 but will be free with a two-year contract or $17 a month on an installment plan. The company will start taking orders for the phone on March 24, and it will be available on March 31.

According to CNN, Apple’s other big hardware news is that it took the iPad Pro and make it smaller. Also called the iPad Pro, the new 9.7-inch version includes many of the same powerful features as the larger 12.9-inch Pro model.

Sophomore Kathleen Martinez said, “I think the small devices could possibly cause a few issues at first, but I think everything will work in favor of Apple and their products.”

The screen is less reflective but brighter and has more color saturation, for all those pros using it as a primary work device. It has a true tone display that measures the color temperature of ambient light with new light sensors and adjusts the screen accordingly.

The smaller iPad Pro works with the Apple Pencil stylus and new line of snap on keyboards the company introduced in with the original iPad Pro. People really like using the cameras on their tablets, for some reason, so the new iPad Pro has a 12-megapixel camera and a LED back-facing flash.

Beyoncé’s new album

Faith Sexton

Entertainment Reporter

Beyoncé released a new album on April 23, 2016. Her new album is titled Lemonade.

Lemonade is based on marriage, politics, and story-telling.

Lemonade is a “visual album” which has a music video for each song.

Sophomore Sarah Arthur said, “I think it is good that Beyoncé can write songs about her life and perform for her fans who can relate to her lyrics.”

On Saturday night there was a special on HBO broadcasting Beyoncé’s new album. The show lasted for an hour and showed 12 out of 13 music videos.

Lemonade includes 12 songs, a digital booklet, and the Lemonade film for $17.99 on ITunes.

Junior Steven Greer said, “I think Beyoncé is a talented singer but it is possible that her songs could spark controversy or cause a disagreement because some people disagree with others and what their songs are about.”

The music videos include home videos including Beyoncé’s father, her wedding, and her pregnancy.

Greer said, “I think it is going to be a successful album because Beyoncé opened up about her life and has shared precious memories with the whole world.”

Beyoncé’s Lemonade album relates to her life and to black womanhood using visuals in her music videos.