Muhammad Ali's son was detained by immigration officials at an American airport who quizzed him about his name and whether he is Muslim, according to a lawyer.
Muhammad Ali Jr, the 44-year-old son of the world-renowned boxer, was kept back at an airport in Florida earlier this month, family friend and lawyer Chris Mancini told the Courier-Journal, a Kentucky newspaper.
According to the newspaper, officials questioned Ali for nearly two hours, repeatedly asking him "Where did you get your name from?" and "Are you Muslim?".
Officials continued to question Ali after acknowledging he was Muslim, Mancini told the newspaper. Ali was born in Philadelphia and holds an American passport.
"To the Ali family, it's crystal clear that this is directly linked to Mr Trump's efforts to ban Muslims from the United States," Mancini told the newspaper, referring to Donald Trump's executive order banning citizens of seven majority-Muslim countries from travelling to America.
Hyderabad, India (CNN)"That night he took me with him. He forced himself on me. I was crying. [He said] I've bought you, I can do whatever I want. I've given your parents money, I can use you for as long as I like. Keep your mouth shut."Muneera Begum, now aged 19, lives in Hyderabad, India. She says she was just 12 years old when her parents sold her into a forced marriage with a man from Oman. He was aged 70.She calls the so-called wedding night "torture." "I wasn't educated and I couldn't understand anything that was going on," she said. I had a childishness in me."
She says that for two months, he kept her locked in a room, using her repeatedly for sex."If he had to go anywhere he would lock me from the inside, come back later and then again that torture would start," she said.
Agents are located in several countries in the Middle East and Africa. They know brokers in Hyderabad (the city with the largest Muslim population by percentage in India) who approach poor families and convince them to sell their underage daughters because they need the money. The agents have clients, usually elderly men, who then travel to Hyderabad. There, the broker shows them the girls and they choose the ones they want.
A religious cleric who is also a part of the criminal network then signs a wedding certificate (which has no legal standing) and a post-dated divorce certificate at the same time. But according to one of the most senior religious authorities in Hyderabad, Islamic law requires a girl's consent before she can be married.After a few weeks or months of using the girl for sex, the client leaves her, never to come back. Some of the girls are gang raped. Many are given drugs by their buyers, making them helpless, unable to stop what is happening.
It's hard to understand how a mother could sell her daughter, but Begum's mother explains her decision. She says her family of five live crammed into one tiny room in one of the poorest parts of Hyderabad. She says her husband was an alcoholic and they had no money, and she believed that selling her daughter would improve Begum's life, as well as the family's."We thought by doing it we could afford a small house and live there," explained her mother. "Our life and our daughter's life would have become good. That's what we thought we should do."
Now Begum has a young daughter, fathered by the man she was forced to marry. When she became pregnant after just two months, he divorced her over the phone. She says she was so distraught, she tried killing herself."I used to cry a lot," she said. "I was in so much pain I thought my life was useless. For the last time I tried to cut my wrist."Then she was taken in by a local NGO called Shaheen, which helps prevent young girls from being sold into forced marriages.
Higher education takes on new meaning in Pueblo County, Colorado.
In February, local officials announced that a first-of-its-kind scholarship program will create $475,000 in funding to help send the county's graduating high school seniors to local colleges. A majority of the fund — about $425,000 — came from taxing legal marijuana.
"A couple years ago, these are dollars that would have been going to the black market, drug cartels," Pueblo County commissioner Sal Pace told KKTV in an interview. "Now money that's used to fund drug cartels is now being used to fund college scholarships."
Marijuana has been legal for recreational use in Colorado since 2012. Pueblo County, located about an hour's drive south of resort town Colorado Springs, began collecting a 2% excise tax on all weed grown there in 2016. The tax will increase 1% annually until 2021.