29 May 2018

NPR DAILY HEADLINES: 'Spider-Man' Scales Building To Save Dangling Child; Macron Offers Him Citizenship; Starbucks Closes For Training; Hidden Lives Of Sharks; Korea 28&29MAI18

THIS is amazing and thank God this man was able to save this child. Watch the video of him climbing the balconies, he is like spider-man!

'Spider-Man' Scales Building To Save Dangling Child; Macron Offers Him Citizenship

May 28, 201810:32 AM ET

LAUREL WAMSLEY

Twitter

French President Emmanuel Macron speaks with Mamoudou Gassama at the presidential palace in Paris, on Monday. Macron offered Gassama citizenship for his "heroic act" in saving a four-year-old.

Thibault Camus/AFP/Getty Images

A four-year-old dangled from the fifth-floor balcony of an apartment building in Paris. As people below watched in terror, one man sprung to action.

Mamoudou Gassama, a 22-year-old immigrant from Mali, began scaling the building, hoisting himself from balcony to balcony. A man on the neighboring balcony emerges and leans around a partition to grasp the child.

Gassama reaches the child and lifts him to safety — even as he is still astride the balcony.

‏ @Adil__Brown

Les héros ne portent pas de cap.  #Paris

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The dramatic episode, captured on video, quickly went viral. And it turned Gassama into a national hero in France, where he was living illegally.

"Congratulations to Mamoudou Gassama for his act of bravery that saved the life of a child last night," Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo tweeted on Sunday. "He explained to me that he arrived from Mali a few months ago while dreaming of building his life here. I replied that his heroic gesture is an example for all citizens and that the City of Paris will obviously be keen to support him in his efforts to settle in France."

On Monday, French President Emmanuel Macron invited Gassama to the presidential palace for a meeting.

"I ran. I crossed the street to save him," he told Macron, the AP reports. "When I started to climb, it gave me courage to keep climbing." God "helped me," he said. "Thank God I saved him."

"Bravo," said Macron, nodding with awe. For his "heroic act," Macron said Gassama would be rewarded with papers to allow him to stay in France legally, French citizenship if he wants it — and that the Paris firefighters brigade would welcome him with a job.

"France is a will, and Mr. GASSAMA has demonstrated with commitment that he had it!" Macron tweeted after the meeting.

The AP reports that Gassama had arrived in Europe after crossing the Mediterranean from Libya to Italy, where he has the papers to stay legally. But his older brother has lived in France for decades, and wants to join him there.

French newspaper Le Monde reports that child's father is being charged by authorities for parental neglect.

Daily Headlines

Tuesday, May 29, 2018

FIRST UP: What you need to know now

A high-ranking North Korean official is set to travel to New York this week.

Just days after President Trump abruptly called off the planned summit with North Korea, the country’s former head of military intelligence is coming to the U.S. to discuss a potential summit. Kim Yong Chol is a veteran of diplomacy with South Korea who is considered to be Kim Jong Un's right-hand man. He is expected to arrive on Wednesday. Read more.

Starbucks is closing more than 8,000 stores Tuesday for racial bias training.

Many Starbucks stores will be shut down for several hours on Tuesdayafternoon so some 175,000 employees across thousands of stores can discuss racial bias and respect. This comes in the wake of two black men being arrested in a Philadelphia store last month. The company says the training is intended to help employees navigate the challenges of Starbucks' mission to be the "third place" — the place where people spend time outside of work and their home. Read more.

After insisting he wasn’t quitting, a Virginia representative says he won’t seek re-election.

Republican Rep. Thomas Garrett says he's dropping his re-election bid due to alcoholism and a desire to be with his family. Garrett, who represents Virginia's 5th Congressional District, last week was the subject of news reports that he and his wife routinely demanded that office aides perform menial tasks — a practice prohibited by House ethics rules. Read more.

IN THE NEWS: Digging deeper

Schmidt Ocean Institute

Great white sharks have a hidden life that just became a lot less hidden.

Scientists used to think great white sharks moved up and down the western coast of North America, snacking in waters with lots of food close to shore. Almost 20 years ago, Stanford marine biologist Barbara Block started putting tags on the sharks that could track their movements.

She and other researchers noticed that the sharks were actually moving away from these food-rich waters and heading more than a thousand miles off the coast of Baja California in Mexico, an area thought to be an ocean desert with very little life. So the scientists tagged some 30 great white sharks last fall, and then they set off on a research vessel to find them.

Sure enough, the animals were indeed swimming to this remote place, which the researchers have nicknamed the "White Shark Cafe."

What it means: This area was no desert after all. Scientists discovered "a complete food chain, a ladder of consumption, that made us believe that there was an adequate food supply out here for big animals like tunas and the sharks," says scientist Bruce Robison. This revelation underscores just how much we still don’t know about oceans.

Why it matters: Robison says all the information they gathered could help build a case for why the "White Shark Cafe" should be officially protected by the U.N. cultural agency. UNESCO is considering recognizing and protecting it by making it a World Heritage Site.

Mini-golf played a surprisingly big role in desegregating public spaces.

Miniature golf was wildly popular across the country during the Great Depression, including in Washington, D.C. By 1930, there were more than 25,000 courses nationwide, and upwards of 30 in the nation's capital alone — on rooftops, in vacant lots, and, eventually, on government land.

An 18-hole mini-golf course on the federally managed East Potomac Park opened on May 9, 1931, with long, leisurely fairways, stone barriers, and miniature reconstructions of the White House, Capitol Building and Mount Vernon. It was a hit (or should we say hole-in-one) with the mini-golf-crazed locals.

The National Park Service managed many of Washington's public recreation facilities, including the mini-golf course, and these were all segregated.

Ten years after the course’s opening, in the summer of 1941, a group of black men went to play golf at the whites-only East Potomac Park.

What happened? White people verbally harassed them in protest, but their efforts to keep the course segregated failed. Interior Department Secretary Harold Ickes opened the courses to everyone the following day, a move that National Park Service historian Patti Kuhn Babin called the first step in desegregating all public recreation areas in the city.

BEFORE YOU GO

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He scaled a building to save a 4-year-old child. Now he's been offered French citizenship and a job with the Paris firefighters brigade.

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