Featured Stories

 

By Marjorie Valbrun

America’s Wire

 

WASHINGTON—Katrina Browne and her critically acclaimed documentary, “Traces of the Trade: A Story from the Deep North,” are helping Americans talk more openly and honestly about race and race relations. The film is a well-researched account of her New England ancestors’ status as the largest slave-trading family in U.S. history. It is also a moving story about racial healing and redemption, the very issues she wants to help Americans embrace.

In the film, Browne and nine other descendants of the DeWolf family retrace the so-called “Triangle Trade,” the path from Rhode Island to slave forts in Ghana to sugar plantation ruins in Cuba, as “they uncover the vast extent of Northern complicity in slavery” and the key role played by their forebears.

By Robert Pagliarini,
Tribune Media Services

 

 

At last count, Oprah Winfrey was worth a little over $23.234 trillion. Okay, that’s a slight exaggeration, but there’s no doubt she’s done well for herself in doing well for others. Now it could be your turn. Oprah launched the Oprah Winfrey Network (OWN) at noon on January 1, 2011. It’s a massive undertaking that could transform cable TV. And if you’re willing, it could also transform you.

By Mark Miller

Tribune Media Services

 

   Good news is hard to come by in this economy, but seniors can celebrate the final numbers on next year’s Social Security cost-of-living adjustment (COLA) and Medicare premiums.

 

  The Social Security COLA and Medicare Part B premium go hand in hand, since the premium cost is deducted from most seniors’ benefits. And while it was already known that the Social Security COLA for 2012 would be 3.6 percent, it wasn’t clear how big a bite Part B would take from the increase.