by Rachel Lamb, executive editor
- Journalists from several major news corporations were kept out of President Trump’s press conference. This included journalists from the New York Times, Buzzfeed News, CNN, Politico, BBC, and The Huffington Post.
- The Academy Awards were this past weekend; Moonlight won the Oscar for best picture. It beat the favorite, La La Land, which was mistakenly announced as the winner of Best Picture, causing confusion and a lot of memes.
- Another Oscar moment was when Asghar Farhadi won for the Salesman as the best foreign language film. Farhadi, who is Iranian, did not travel to the U.S. for the Oscars in protest of President Trump’s travel ban.
- Democrats elected former labor secretary Thomas Perez as the chairman of the Democratic party, beating Keith Ellison, who represented a more liberal side of the party.
- The Trump administration retracted an Obama administration directive that protected transgender students and allowed them to use the bathrooms with the gender they aligned with.
- Kim Jong Un’s step- brother, Kim Jong Nam, was killed by a VX nerve agent, which is a weapon of mass destruction under international agreements. Intelligent reports suggest Kim Jong Un ordered his assassination.
- Trump issued new immigration directives that increased the number of people eligible for deportation.
- Chesed Shel Emeth cemetery, a Jewish cemetery, was vandalized and over 100 tombstones were knocked over. This follows over 160 bomb threats to Jewish community centers and synagogues so far this year.
- President Trump is expected to release plans to repeal and replace Obama care in the next few days following his speech to the joint sessions of congress. He is also expected to announce his revised travel plan in the coming week.
- Hidden Figures overtook La La Land in earnings, proving a point in a industry with fewer women and people of color as leading roles in movies.
