In The News
As Americans gather at their Thanksgiving table this month and join in the annual Black Friday sales, there are thousands of people who will be left out of this holiday cheer. They are far away from their families, serving lengthy sentences for non-violent, and often minor, offenses. Even though they pose no danger to the public, and taxpayers spend as much as $30,000 a year to incarcerate them, they remain in prison because of an antiquated sentencing system, with little hope of release anytime soon. That is, unless the President commutes their sentences.
To say Congressman Steve Cohen is unenthusiastic about the Tennessee Promise is an understatement.
“The people who mostly benefit from (Gov. Bill Haslam’s) plan are people who didn’t make the grades in high school and are higher than the average income,” Cohen says.
“That’s not exactly who you should be looking to benefit in society, the low-achievers and the affluent.
“I think it’s just a total sham.”
Construction began Monday on the more than $17.5 million project to add a bicycle and pedestrian pathway across the Harahan Bridge.
The Harahan Bridge project is part of the $43 million Main Street to Main Street Multi-Modal Connector project. That 10-mile project will link Downtown Memphis with West Memphis, Arkansas with more walkable and bike-able streets, pathways, and trails.
WASHINGTON — U.S. Rep. Steve Cohen has asked Attorney General Eric Holder to take a close look at the practice of “packing” minorities, especially African-Americans, into a single legislative district to reduce their overall influence.
“All Americans hold dear the sacred, constitutionally-protected right to vote, and we too often take for granted the principle of ‘one person, one vote,’” the Memphis Democrat wrote in a letter to the attorney general.
U.S. Rep. Steve Cohen is criticizing Gov. Bill Haslam's campaign on the Tennessee Promise and use of lottery money for free junior college tuition, saying it "siphons" money from the Hope Scholarship and helps only affluent and low-achieving students.
Some 35,000 students already have applied for the funds to attend community colleges across the state free of charge, nearly doubling the state's application goal of 20,000. The deadline to apply is Nov. 1.
Early next year, the first batch of long-term unemployed people could land jobs with Memphis tech companies under Bioworks’ new training program.
Memphis Bioworks Foundation was awarded $8.1 million to steer 960 jobless people into local tech companies that often have hired immigrants with work visas. The program will include aspects such as on-the-job training, with wages partially paid by Bioworks, as well as more traditional training.
MEMPHIS, Tenn. — A multi-million dollar federal grant will be used to help people in Memphis get the training they need to hopefully land some good paying jobs.
The $8,083,138 federal grant will help up to, “960 long-term unemployed citizens in the Memphis metropolitan area find good paying jobs in high-skills industries.”
The University of Memphis on Thursday vaulted into a class of the nation’s top-tier universities seeking to harness the power of “big data” in biomedical research by landing a $10.8 million grant from the National Institutes of Health.
A computer scientist at the Memphis university, Santosh Kumar, will lead one of a dozen new collaborative “centers of excellence” established by an NIH initiative called Big Data to Knowledge, or BD2K.
A U.S. Small Business Administration outreach center will be open Wednesday through Oct. 14 to process disaster loan applications from residents affected by September flooding, U.S. Rep. Steve Cohen, D-Memphis, announced.
The center will operate in Building C, Room 133 of the Shelby County Emergency Operations Center, 1075 Mullins Station.
Greater Memphis received as much as 9 inches of rain on the morning of Sept. 11, with floodwaters hitting areas of Bartlett, Frayser, Millington and elsewhere.
The U.S. Department of Labor will grant $3.27 million in job training funds to William R. Moore College of Technology and the Tennessee College of Applied Technology.
The Memphis schools will use the money to help develop a regional training program for the manufacturing, transportation and logistics industries. The programs are in partnership with Southwest Tennessee Community College in Memphis and Mid-South Community College in West Memphis.
U.S. Rep. Steve Cohen, D-Memphis, announced the grants Tuesday.