Mourners say goodbye to one of Clark Atlanta University's best and brightest
'You don't have to pretend to be strong. You don't have to rush past the pain. Because if we're honest, even Jesus wept,' Pastor Kevin Murriel said.
They remembered Dr. Cameisha Clark.
'She was a sweet, beautiful person inside and out,' her cousin Chandra said.
She was also a student who had a love for learning. Earning a bachelor's, master's, and doctorate degree at her beloved Clark Atlanta University.
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'Yes, she's a Triple Panther,' Clark Atlanta's Dr. J. Fidel Turner said.
And a true believer. Those who knew her best say she encouraged her friends to pray and led by example.
'Cameisha, we love you, we honor you, and we miss you,' Turner said.
Clark was killed in what police say was a targeted shooting at Spartan College in Inglewood, California.
She had recently accepted a job there as a college dean.
A former security guard at the school has been arrested and charged in the workplace shooting.
Mourners in Atlanta grieved over a life gone far too soon and celebrated a life well-lived.
'Her love meant something. Her legacy means something. And her impact—hear this—will never die,' Murriel said.
Clark Atlanta University has set up a scholarship fund in Clark's honor.
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Yahoo
2 days ago
- Yahoo
Fact Check: Don't believe video showing cross catching fire during Mass at Dallas church
Claim: A video authentically shows a cross catching on fire during a Mass service at St. Michael's Church in Dallas on June 15, 2025. Rating: A rumor that circulated online in August 2025 claimed a video showed a cross catching on fire during a Mass service at St. Michael's Church in Dallas, Texas. The clip's narrator said the incident occurred weeks earlier, on June 15. For example, on Aug. 11, a manager of the Daily Faith Ministry YouTube channel posted the video (archived) allegedly showing the large cross, affixed to the wall behind the altar, catching on fire during a church service. The clip's title read "A Cross Caught Fire During Mass in Dallas!!" Daily Faith Ministry also shared the video on Facebook (archived), Instagram (archived) and TikTok (archived), collectively receiving around 5.5 million views. A reverse-image search found several other users also shared the clip on the same platforms. The video's narrator told the story as follows: A giant cross suddenly ignited, forming a human silhouette in the middle of mass. It was June 15th, 2025, at 10:37 a.m. in St. Michael's Church, Dallas, Texas. Security cameras captured everything, with over 80 people present. The wooden altar began smoking at its base without explanation. By the 12th second of the video, flames burst from within, climbing rapidly and wrapping the entire cross. We from the Daily Faith Ministry are here to show you something extraordinary. For less than 3 seconds, the flames shaped a human figure with outstretched arms, like the crucified Christ. Then, the fire vanished, leaving no burn marks. Firefighters found the cross intact. Some call it coincidence. But in Luke 21:11, Jesus spoke of great signs from heaven. Could this be one of them? However, the video displayed numerous signs someone created the clip with an artificial-intelligence tool. For example, several shots of the sanctuary displayed differences in the size of the cross, including the statue representing Jesus Christ visible on the cross prior to the fire. Also, as the video continually switches shots, there were differences in chandeliers, columns, items affixed to columns and statues below the cross. Several other factors proved someone fabricated the story, as well. Searches of Bing, DuckDuckGo, Google and Yahoo located no news media outlets — including those based in Dallas — reporting about a cross bursting into flames in Dallas in 2025. Had such an incident occurred, and had someone captured the moment on video, outlets worldwide would have reported the stunning development. Also, the video's narrator — a voice resembling AI-generated voices featured in past fact checks — said "security cameras captured everything." However, the only view of the alleged fire showed the perspective from a parishioner's handheld camera or smartphone, and no footage from security cameras. Further, the narrator said the fire occurred at a church named St. Michael's Church in Dallas. A search for a church in Dallas matching that name found only Saint Michael and All Angels Episcopal Church. As confirmed by a photo (archived) hosted on the church's Facebook page, Saint Michael and All Angels Episcopal Church has a sanctuary that does not match the appearance of the one shown in the AI-generated video. Snopes emailed Saint Michael and All Angels Episcopal Church to ask about the claim and will update this article if we receive further information. Looking for the original post One of the earliest postings of the video, if not the original post, appeared in a clip (archived) on the @retolamysusnoticias TikTok account on July 20. That video, receiving over 11.7 million views, featured a puppet, as well as a Spanish-language narrator telling basically the same fabricated story later appearing in English in the Daily Faith Ministry clip. The Daily Faith Ministry's video displays only the top of the puppet's head, showing @retolamysusnoticias' post served as the basis for whoever edited other elements on top of the puppet. A caption appearing in the clip claimed, without providing evidence, that the Vatican demanded to know how the fire started. The @retolamysusnoticias TikTok account also featured other AI-generated videos showing a man turning into a goat, a lion walking the street in Detroit, scientists finding the city of Atlantis and an exorcism, among others. We reached out to a manager for the account to ask questions, including inquiring about the AI tool they used to create their clips. We will update this story if we receive details. For further reading, another fact-check investigated a story claiming a drifter named Ronald McDonald murdered 12 children in 1892, inspiring the modern-day McDonald's fast-food chain mascot of the same name. "Search with an Image on Google - Computer." Google Search Help, "Saint Michael and All Angels - Dallas, TX." Saint Michael and All Angels, Accessed 15 Aug. 2025.
WIRED
3 days ago
- WIRED
How One Wikipedia Editor Unraveled the ‘Single Largest Self-Promotion Operation' in the Site's History
Photograph:Quick—what are the top entries in the category "Wikipedia articles written in the greatest number of languages"? The answer is countries. Turkey tops the list with Wikipedia entries in 332 different languages, while the US is second with 327 and Japan is third with 324. Other common words make their appearance as one looks down the list. "Dog" (275 languages) tops "cat" (273). Jesus (274) beats "Adolf Hitler" (242). And all of them beat "sex" (122), which is also bested by "fever," "Chiang Kai-Shek," and the number "13." But if you had looked at the list a couple months back, something would have been different. Turkey, the US, and Japan were still in the same order near the top of the leaderboard, but the number one slot was occupied by an unlikely contender: David Woodard, who had Wikipedia entries in 335 different languages. You ... haven't heard of David Woodard? Woodard is a composer who infamously wrote a "prequiem"—that is, a "pre requiem"—in 2001 for Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh, who had murdered 168 people with a truck bomb. The piece was to be performed at a church near McVeigh's execution site in Terre Haute, Indiana, then recorded and played on the radio so that McVeigh would have a chance to hear it. According to the LA Times, which spoke to the composer, "Woodard's hope in performing the 12-minute piece, he said, is to 'cause the soul of Timothy McVeigh to go to heaven.'" According to BBC coverage from the time, Woodard "says McVeigh is '33 and nearly universally despised at the time of his execution'—like Jesus Christ." Hoo boy. Woodard also had a scheme to help save Nueva Germania, an 1880s colony in Paraguay that was designed to let German culture flourish away from the influence of European Jews. Friedrich Nietzsche's sister, Elisabeth, was one of the founding colonists. Elisabeth's husband killed himself as the colony collapsed; she returned to Europe. (Lest you subscribe to the common view that Nietzsche was himself some kind of crude racist, know that he loathed his brother-in-law's racism and cut ties with his sister when she left Europe. Unfortunately, due to his later madness, he eventually ended up under her care for several years, and she edited his works after his death in ways that made him look more like a proto-Nazi.) Some descendants of the colonists still live at Nueva Germania, but the colony is now poor and run-down, and Elisabeth's house is almost gone. "As an artist who is fed up with much of the pretentious nonsense that has come to define Western culture," Woodard told SF Gate, "I am drawn to the idea of an Aryan vacuum in the middle of the jungle." So what was a guy like this doing with articles in 335 different languages? Inquiring minds want to know, which is why people have posted questions to sites like Reddit over the last year asking about the Woodard situation. "Is he super important and this is the first I'm hearing of him?" one asked. "Is it a superfan polyglot who wants everyone to know about his favourite writer/composer? Is it someone using AI to artificially boost this guy's performance metrics?" The Investigation A Wikipedia editor who goes by "Grnrchst" recently decided to find out, diving deep into the articles about Woodard and into any edits that placed his name in other articles. The results of this lengthy and tedious investigation were written up in the August 9 edition of the Signpost, a volunteer-run online newspaper about Wikipedia. Grnrchst's conclusion was direct: "I discovered what I think might have been the single largest self-promotion operation in Wikipedia's history, spanning over a decade and covering as many as 200 accounts and even more proxy IP addresses." A network of accounts with an unusual interest in Woodard was identified, and its activities over the last decade were mapped. Starting in 2015, these accounts inserted Woodard's name "into no fewer than 93 articles (including 'Pliers,' 'Brown pelican,' and 'Bundesautobahn'), often referencing self-published sources by Woodard himself." And that was just in the English version of Wikipedia. From 2017 to 2019, the accounts "created articles about David Woodard in at least 92 different languages, creating a new article every six days on average... They started off with Latin-script European languages, but quickly branched out into other families and scripts from all corners of the globe, even writing articles in constructed languages; they also went from writing full-length article translations, to low-effort stub articles, which would go on to make up the vast majority of all translations (easily 90 percent or more)." Translated languages included Nahuatl, Extremaduran, and Kirundi. Grnrchst concluded that "this amount of translations across so many different languages would either imply this person is one of the most advanced polyglots in human history, or they were spamming machine translations; the latter is more likely." After a reduction in activity, things ramped up again in 2021, as IP addresses from around the world started creating Woodard references and articles once more. For instance, "addresses from Canada, Germany, Indonesia, the UK and other places added some trivia about Woodard to all 15 Wikipedia articles about the calea ternifolia ." Then things got "more sophisticated." From December 2021 through June 2025, 183 articles were created about Woodard, each in a different language's Wikipedia and each by a unique account. These accounts followed a pattern of behavior: They were "created, often with a fairly generic name, and made a user page with a single image on it. They then made dozens of minor edits to unrelated articles, before creating an article about David Woodard, then making a dozen or so more minor edits before disappearing off the platform." Grnrchst believes that all the activity was meant to "create as many articles about Woodard as possible, and to spread photos of and information on Woodard to as many articles as possible, while hiding that activity as much as possible... I came to believe that David Woodard himself, or someone close to him, had been operating this network of accounts and IP addresses for the purposes of cynical self-promotion." After the Grnrchst report, Wikipedia's global stewards removed 235 articles on Woodard from Wikipedia instances with few users or administrators. Larger Wikipedias were free to make their own community decisions, and they removed another 80 articles and banned numerous accounts. "A full decade of dedicated self-promotion by an individual network has been undone in only a few weeks by our community," Grnrchst noted. In the end, just 20 articles about Woodard remain, such as this one in English, which does not mention the controversy. We were unable to get in touch with Woodard, whose personal website is password-protected and only available "by invitation." Could the whole thing be some kind of "art project," with the real payoff being exposure and being written about? Perhaps. But whatever the motive behind the decade-long effort to boost Woodard on Wikipedia, the incident reminds us just how much effort some people are willing to put into polluting open or public-facing projects for their own ends. This story originally appeared on Ars Technica.
Chicago Tribune
4 days ago
- Chicago Tribune
Heidi Stevens: After a child leaves the nest, you get the privilege of parenting the new version of them
My friend Jason is getting ready to drop off his daughter, his firstborn child, at college. And by 'getting ready,' I mean crying himself to sleep at night and asking strangers what to do. Normal. If there's another way to do it, I certainly don't know it. 'I feel like the dad in 'My Big Fat Greek Wedding,'' he texted me the other day. 'WHY YOU WANT TO LEAVE ME?!?!?!?' Even though, of course, he wants her to leave him. Even though, of course, he wants her to want to leave him. 'It's an odd feeling when your heart is simultaneously swelling with pride,' he texted, 'and also being ripped out of your chest.' I call that feeling parenting. You meet your child for the first time and suddenly the world is absolutely beautiful and mind-blowing and magical and your heart is exploding with love and gratitude and awe. And also, at the exact same moment, your heart is breaking in half because one day, lots of days, actually, your child is going to go out and enjoy that absolutely beautiful, mind-blowing, magical world. Without you. What a terrible system. Who thought of this? 'Several people have told us, 'You're not supposed to let her see you cry. Don't cry until after you leave,'' Jason texted. Nonsense, I texted back. Cry your eyes out in front of her if you want to. It's OK to let her see that your world changed forever the day she was born and your world changed forever the day she went to kindergarten and camp and prom and that one party but all those times she came back to you. And this time she won't. At least not for a while. 'I've told her already that no matter how much of an idiot I make of myself,' Jason texted, 'she has to know how proud I am of her and how excited I am for her.' She will. She does. Last year, I wrote a column full of wisdom for launching your kid after high school, collected from readers who had already done so. Chicagoan Allison Clark offered a story about her own experience being dropped off at college: 'My parents unloaded my stuff into my dorm room and then my dad basically hugged me, said goodbye and abruptly left to head back to the car,' Clark wrote. 'My mother stayed a little bit longer and then left as well. 'Months later,' she continued, 'I told my mom that I was a little hurt that my dad left so quickly when they dropped me off. 'Oh, Allison,' my mom said. 'Your dad was about to cry, and he didn't want to cry in front of you. He was very proud about not ever being seen crying.'' Ah. 'I will forever be grateful that she shared that insight with me,' Clark wrote. 'Because it both corrected my memory of what had happened and made me feel so much more understanding of his experience as a parent. It also meant that when I dropped my own child off in that same freshman dorm 34 years later, I made sure to both linger and openly cry before I left.' Two months after I wrote that column, I dropped my daughter at college for the first time. I didn't cry when we pulled up to her dorm. I didn't cry as I unpacked her clothes and folded them into little piles to line her dorm room dresser drawers and had flashbacks of folding her onesies into little piles to line her nursery dresser drawers. I didn't cry when we went to get our nails done together one last time before the old chapter officially ended and the new chapter officially began. I didn't cry when we walked to get iced coffees and I pictured all the times she'd go to that coffee shop and place that coffee order and I wouldn't even know she was there unless she used my PayPal account, which, in the end, happened most of the time. I didn't even cry when I hugged her goodbye. I did cry when I was all alone on the drive home and Luke Combs came on my radio. Mostly because she and I spent part of the drive on the way to college (and the years leading up to that drive to college) singing his songs together at the top of our lungs. But the timing of the tears had nothing to do with hiding what I was feeling from her. The tears came — and come — when they decide to. In a few days I'll drop her at college for the second time. I don't know if it will feel harder or easier. I've heard both. And I don't have a lot of wisdom to share with Jason or any of my other friends who are doing it for the first time, except this one thing. A few weeks ago, my daughter and I stood side by side singing Luke Combs together at the top of our lungs in Grant Park, where he was performing at Lollapalooza. And that was a moment when the world felt absolutely beautiful and mind-blowing and magical and my heart was exploding with love and gratitude and awe. And also, at the exact same moment, my heart started healing in some of the cracked places. Because I realized that after they go out and enjoy that absolutely beautiful, mind-blowing, magical world without us, they come back different. Smarter, probably. Stronger, hopefully. And we get to fall in love with the new them. Over and over again.
