Beenish Ahmed

The Dearborn primary ballot is unusually crowded this year, with seven candidates vying to be the city’s next mayor. 

Mayors in Dearborn have historically been long-tenured; the city has had just seven since 1929. The current Mayor, John O'Reilly Jr, announced that he would not seek re-election earlier this year. 

Updated at 1:00 p.m. on July 29, 2021

The City of Dearborn will offer sample ballots in Arabic at all polling sites for the primary election next week, following appeals from local and national advocacy organizations.

“We pushed hard,” said Nada Al-Hanooti of Emgage Michigan, a Muslim-American advocacy organization who said she met with Dearborn City Clerk last week to discuss the need for Arabic-language election materials in the city where nearly half of residents are of Arab origin.

Public schools in Detroit will re-open for in-person learning in the fall, following an agreement with the city’s teachers’ union.   

Detroit Public Schools Community District announced on Monday that it had established terms with the Detroit Federation of Teachers which “recognizes the need to return” to the classroom for all school staff, including teachers. 

“This agreement signals that we are all on the same page to restart our reform efforts that had great momentum before the pandemic,” Superintendent Nikolai Vitti said in a statement. 

The Detroit Historical Museum is set to host an exhibit called “Exiled to Motown” that showcases the Japanese-American Experience in Detroit from World War II to the present day. 

The title refers to the factors that led Japanese-Americans to settle in Detroit and other Midwestern cities. Following the attack on Pearl Harbor, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt issued an executive order in 1942 that authorized the military to forcibly relocate people for the “protection against espionage and against sabotage to national-defense material.”

The Belle Isle Aquarium will reopen on Friday, relieving the ennui that has set in among fish, eels, and frogs since the building closed to visitors last March as a response to the onset of the pandemic. 

"The fish actually react to people so there's a lot of enrichment with people coming by and seeing them and then when no one was around, they just kind of become lethargic,” said Dr. Paul Shuert, a curator at the Aquarium. “There's no excitement for them."

The water from heavy rainfall that filled the workshop where Nikki’s Ginger Tea brews and bottles its signature drinks has receded, but not without causing long term damage to the bottled beverage company. 

“The water was waist high,” said Adrena Sasser, CEO of the beverage company that operates out of the basement of Church of the Messiah in Detroit’s Islandview neighborhood. “We lost everything. All of our equipment, our stoves, refrigerators, freezer boxes, everything.” 

The flood waters that filled basements and streets in Detroit on Saturday are being characterized as a 500-year event in preliminary findings by the city, meaning there’s only a half percent chance it will occur in any given year.

A journalist from metro-Detroit who has been detained at a prison in Myanmar for more than a month remains unharmed, according to a call with staff of the U.S. Embassy in Yangon who spoke to 37-year-old Danny Fenster by phone at the Insein Prison.

This news was relayed to his family by the Embassy. Fenster, a Huntington Woods native, has been held at the high security prison since he was detained at the airport on May 24, while waiting to board a flight that was to bring him back to Detroit after more than three years in Southeast Asia. 

A series of parades, concerts, and other celebrations will take place this weekend to honor Juneteenth, a holiday commemorating freedom for enslaved people following the Civil War. 

The local commemorations coincide with national recognition of the holiday, which marks the day Union troops freed people who were kept in bondage in Texas two years after the end of the Civil War. President Biden signed a bill making Juneteenth the most recent federal holiday on Thursday. 

The head of Detroit Public Schools said that the district will circumvent a law requiring third graders who fail the reading portion of the end-of-year standardized test to repeat the academic year.

Detroit schools Superintendent Nickolai Vitti took issue with the “Read by Grade Three” law in which schools are to recommend that third graders who struggle to show reading proficiency should repeat a grade, saying that retention decisions should be made by parents and teachers.

This story was updated on June 8, at 1:00 p.m.  

The Detroit public school system will begin taking stock of the diverse perspectives included in high school English curricula this fall as part of a broader effort by the district for a community-driven reassessment of the perspectives presented through literature. 

“Representation matters,” said Naomi Khalil, who serves as the Deputy Executive Director of the Equity, Advocacy, and Civil Rights Division of the Detroit Public Schools Community District. 

Democratic lawmakers introduced legislation on Tuesday aimed at addressing the backlog for appointments at Secretary of State offices. 

"We've never been in a situation where the Secretary of State's office has been forced to process a 13 month backlog on top of their normal business,” said State Rep. Julie Brixie of East Lansing, who spoke at a virtual press conference alongside Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson. 

Updated Wednesday, June 2, 2021 at 6:00 p.m. 

The Associated Press | A U.S. State Department official is calling for the immediate release of two American journalists who were arrested by Myanmar's military junta.

Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman called the arrests of Danny Fenster and Nathan Maung and other journalists an "unacceptable attack on the freedom of expression" in Myanmar.

Faith leaders stood alongside Detroit public school officials in calling for more teachers to get vaccinated and return to classrooms. 

“We have a superintendent, we have a board that are working together to make sure that our school system is ready to receive children,” said Bishop Charles Ellis of Greater Grace Temple. “But we must not just have good buildings, sanitized buildings. We need the workforce.” 

Only about 600 teachers have returned to classrooms out of about 3,000, according to Detroit Public Schools Community District Superintendent Nikolai Vitti. An agreement with the district’s teachers union made teaching in-person voluntary.

Members of the Dearborn City Council declined to address concerns about policing from a local Black Lives Matter organization at a meeting that coincided with the one-year anniversary of the killing of George Floyd on Tuesday.

City Council members did raise their concern for another timely issue, however. After going through the slate of resolutions, President Susan Dabaja, a candidate for mayor of Dearborn who has been endorsed by the city's police union, voiced her concern over the Israeli military action in Gaza. 

A Dearborn man accused of joining and supporting ISIS was denied bond by a federal court judge on Monday. 

Ibraheem Musaibli is charged with supporting the Islamic State and taking part in its military training. The 30-year-old could face up to 50 years in prison if convicted. 

Musaibli has denied membership in the terrorist organization despite his name appearing on one of its rosters. Musaibli told the FBI that he was forced to feign the role of an ISIS supporter because the terrorist organization was monitoring communications of those within its territory.

An event for local police chiefs featuring a controversial law enforcement trainer scheduled to take place in Novi next month has been canceled, following a series of complaints to the church where it was to be held, as well as the organization that planned it. 

Marion King said her hesitancy about the vaccine turned into urgency only after she lost both her mother and aunt to COVID-19 last month. 

“When I found out my mom was positive, I know my aunt had to be because whatever air my mother breathed, you breathed it too,” King said, noting that the sisters had what she described as an “inseparable bond.” 

Nurses in the Henry Ford Health System say they're feeling the strain of the latest COVID-19 surge.

When Lauren Varley saw her first COVID-19 case in the ICU last year, she told her parents she couldn't see them for a month. That month stretched into six as she worried about exposing her parents to the virus that claimed the lives of so many of the patients she risked her own life to treat.

"It made me feel extremely hopeless and very helpless as a nurse because I knew that any patient that I saw with COVID, I knew there was a very high possibility that they just were not going to survive," Varley said.

The federal government won't be sending additional vaccines to Michigan. That's despite Governor Gretchen Whitmer’s efforts to secure more shots as cases and hospitalizations continue to increase.

Many area Muslims are preparing for their second Ramadan of the pandemic, with hope that the month of dawn-to-dusk fasting will be filled with the communal prayers and family gatherings they went without last year, as COVID-19 began to sweep the state.

The Henry Ford Health System will contribute to an ongoing national studying the efficacy of the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine in children, in a study similar to the one it conducted with adults last year. 

Dr. Adnan Munkarah, Chief Clinical Officer, said that the hospital system will begin looking for parents to volunteer children between the ages of 6 months and 12 years old to take part in the study in the coming weeks.

Many Detroit public school students would go back to their classrooms in-person, if their teachers would do the same. 

A survey conducted earlier this month by the Detroit Public Schools Community District found that 40% of students would prefer in-person instruction to virtual learning.

When schools re-opened on March 8, about 9,000 students in the district returned to classrooms or “learning labs” where they are supervised by educators during virtual lessons, according to the district.