Black American Sign Language (BASL) is a dialect of American Sign Language (ASL), usually encountered among deaf African Americans. The divergence from ASL was influenced largely by segregation in the American South. Like other schools at the time, schools for the deaf were segregated by race, creating two language communities: White deaf signers at White schools and Black deaf signers at Black schools. Today, BASL is still used by signers in the South despite the gradual desegregation of deaf schools after 1954, the year of the US Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education decision declaring racial segregation in schools unconstitutional. Linguistically, BASL differs from other varieties of ASL in its phonology, syntax, and lexicon. In ASL, signs are generally produced near the body, but BASL tends to have a larger signing space. Signers of BASL also tend to prefer two-handed variants of signs while signers of ASL tend to prefer one-handed variants. Some signs are different in BASL as well, with some borrowings from African American English. (Full article...)
... that in breeding pairs of the orange ground thrush, the female consistently weighs more than the male?
... that Christoph Bartneck wrote a nonsense submission for a predatory conference using iOS's autocomplete function and it was accepted within three hours?
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Leonard Cohen
An earthquake with a magnitude of 7.8 strikes near Kaikoura, north of Christchurch, New Zealand, triggering tsunami warnings, causing widespread damage, and killing at least two people.
Canadian singer, songwriter, and poet Leonard Cohen(pictured) dies at the age of 82.
A tram derails on the Tramlink in Croydon, London, killing seven people and injuring more than fifty others.
There are 13 lakes of at least five acres (0.020 km2) within the borders of Minneapolis, Minnesota, known as the "City of Lakes". Lake Calhoun(pictured) is the largest and deepest, covering 421 acres (1.70 km2) with a maximum depth of 89.9 feet (27.4 m) while Lake Hiawatha has the largest watershed at 115,840 acres (468.79 km2). Many of the city's lakes formed during the retreat of the Laurentide Ice Sheet at the end of the last glacial period. The Dakota harvested wild rice from the lakes, which were developed in the 1880s and onward by the city's Board of Park Commissioners. The Commissioners purchased much of Minneapolis's lakefront property, had the lakes dredged, and connected lakes Calhoun, Isles, and Cedar via artificial channels, resulting in an interconnected parks system and the city's "Chain of Lakes". Minneapolis's lakes and lakeshore, much of which is public parkland, host recreation year-round including swimming, sailing, canoeing, biking, jogging, and ice skating. (Full list...)
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