Month: August 2026

By Francis Page Jr.

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    August 31, 2026 (Houston Style Magazine) — HOUSTON — In Houston, hustle is practically a second language. And few Houstonians have spoken it longer, louder—or more successfully—than Jim “Mattress Mack” McIngvale.

Now, Houston City College (HCC) is once again turning that unmistakable Mattress Mack energy into practical education with the Fall 2026 HCC Mattress Mack School of Selling, an intensive six-session onsite program designed for entrepreneurs, aspiring business owners, sales professionals, college students, career changers and anyone ready to become better at selling an idea, a product—or themselves.

There is one especially attractive price tag: $0.

Applications are free, participation is free for accepted applicants who complete the program, and graduates receive an HCC Mattress Mack School of Selling Certificate of Completion. Classroom space, however, is limited, and the application deadline is Tuesday, September 1, 2026, at 2:00 p.m. CST.

Apply for the Fall 2026 HCC Mattress Mack School of Selling hcc.idloom.events/MMSSOnsiteFall26

photo Wells-Fargo-Small Business Success Series by HCC – Registration QR-CODE

From $5,000 and a Dream to a Houston Classroom The program draws its personality from one of Houston’s most recognizable entrepreneurs. McIngvale and his wife, Linda, arrived in Houston in 1981 with roughly $5,000 and a dream, launching what became Gallery Furniture from an abandoned model-home property along the North Freeway. His relentless advertising, inventory discipline, hands-on leadership and famous promise to deliver furniture the same day helped transform the company into a Houston institution.

But behind the television commercials and “save you money!” enthusiasm is a business philosophy rooted in something decidedly old-fashioned: listen to customers, work hard, keep your promises and take care of people.

That philosophy is now part of a growing educational legacy.

HCC reports that the Mattress Mack School of Selling has operated for approximately 5½ years, completed 12 virtual and onsite cohorts and produced 510 graduate alumni. HCC expects its Fall 2026 programs to move the initiative into Cohorts 13 and 14.

That is no small footnote. It is evidence that Houston’s entrepreneurial spirit can be taught, sharpened and passed forward. Six Tuesdays, 18 Hours, One Serious Commitment Classes will be held at HCC Alief Hayes Campus, 2811 Hayes Road, on Tuesdays from 5:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m., beginning September 8 and concluding October 13.

The curriculum reads almost like a blueprint for surviving business: September 8 — The Art of Listening, led by Landi Spearman; September 15 — Persistence, led by Austin Tenette; September 22 — The Ability to Say No, with Spearman; September 29 — Caring Customer Service, led by Jennifer Dale; October 6 — Building a Book of Business, with Tenette; and October 13 — What You Learn After You Know It All, again led by Tenette.

That last title may be the most Mattress Mack lesson of them all: the minute an entrepreneur believes there is nothing left to learn, the competition is probably already learning it.

The program is offered through HCC Northwest’s Glenda and David Regenbaum Center for Entrepreneurship, whose mission has long centered on helping entrepreneurs launch and grow businesses through education, mentoring, resources and community connections. The Regenbaums helped strengthen that mission with a $100,000 contribution supporting entrepreneurial initiatives.

Accepted applicants must commit to all six sessions; partial participation is not permitted. HCC notes that some graduates could also be considered for sales opportunities at Gallery Furniture or other employers, although employment is not guaranteed.

For entrepreneurs wanting to continue learning after graduation, HCC is also offering its Fall 2026 Small Business Success Series, a no-cost virtual program covering venture validation, entrepreneurial mindset, financials, risk management, sales and marketing.

Explore HCC’s Fall 2026 Small Business Success Series: hcc.idloom.events/SBSSFall2026 Houston Style Magazine has long celebrated programs that connect education with economic opportunity. The Mattress Mack School of Selling does exactly that—taking lessons forged on Houston showroom floors and placing them into the hands of the next generation of entrepreneurs.

Because in this city, somebody is always dreaming up the next great Houston business.

The first sale may simply be believing they can do it.

Explore HCC’s Fall 2026 Small Business Success Series: hcc.idloom.events/SBSSFall2026

Please note: This story was provided to CNN Wire by an affiliate and does not contain original CNN reporting. This content carries a strict local market embargo. If you share the same market as the contributor of this article, you may not use it on any platform.

Kierra Lee
KIELEESTYLE@GMAIL.COM
3465287733

By SAMUEL B. PARKER Richmond Times-Dispatch

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    RICHMOND, Virginia (Richmond Times-Dispatch) — Earlier this year, a Richmond Police Department sergeant broke the law.

In an April 30 news release, police spokesperson James Mercante said the sergeant had been caught sharing images taken from one of the department’s 99 Flock cameras with the Federal Bureau of Investigation to assist in a murder investigation.

That’s despite the fact that state law forbids Virginia law enforcement from sharing automatic license plate reader (ALPR) data with out-of-state agencies.

Under that law, the prohibited disclosure of ALPR images or data is a Class 1 misdemeanor — punishable by up to a year behind bars and a fine of up to $2,500. But Richmond prosecutors, led by Commonwealth’s Attorney Colette McEachin, declined to charge the sergeant in connection with the incident.

Why?

In a statement to The Times-Dispatch, McEachin, who has been Richmond’s top prosecutor since 2019, said the decision not to file criminal charges was due to “a lack of criminal intent.”

“(That’s) the foundation for a criminal charge against an individual,” McEachin said. “Factors that would lead to a different decision would include evidence of criminal intent, or evidence that the dissemination was done for personal or pecuniary interest.”

Criminal intent is a legal doctrine that describes the mental state behind an act that renders the act criminal. In order to show criminal intent under Virginia’s ALPR law, prosecutors would have to show that the data disclosure was done “wilfully and intentionally,” and was not simply an accident or oversight.

Police, on the other hand, characterized the issue as more intentional.

Mercante, in the April news release, explained that the sergeant had been “asked by a special agent with the … FBI for an image of a vehicle believed to be connected to a homicide investigation in Washington D.C.,” and had complied with that request. Police Chief Rick Edwards, meanwhile, noted that he “appreciated the sergeant’s willingness to assist in a homicide investigation,” but stressed the importance of following the law.

Asked to clarify, McEachin explained that “an act can be purposeful without having criminal intent.”

For example, a person might “throw a ball” without meaning to “hit (or) hurt any specific person,” she said.

Criminal intent is distinct from ignorance of the law, which does not eliminate criminal liability. In order to show criminal intent, prosecutors must demonstrate only that the act itself was purposeful, regardless of whether the alleged perpetrator knew it was unlawful.

Across the country, prosecutors have taken different approaches to handling violations of state ALPR laws.

Officers in California, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Kansas, Kentucky, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Texas and Wisconsin have been charged or indicted for unlawful use of ALPR technology, including in some cases to track or stalk family members, friends or past partners. In other cases, officers have been fired or resigned for misuse.

The Richmond police sergeant still works for the department.

“An internal investigation was conducted by RPD’s Office of Professional Standards,” Edwards said at the time. “The sergeant’s authorization to access ALPR data has been deactivated.”

Please note: This story was provided to CNN Wire by an affiliate and does not contain original CNN reporting. This content carries a strict local market embargo. If you share the same market as the contributor of this article, you may not use it on any platform.

By Dan Higgins, The Buffalo News, N.Y.

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    NEW YORK (The Buffalo News) — Lake Ontario has carried several names over nearly four centuries. French kings and colonial governors had names attached to it, while Jesuit missionaries preserved versions of its Indigenous-derived name. Eventually, Ontario outlasted the alternatives.

BEFORE EUROPEAN SETTLEMENT: The name Ontario comes from an Indigenous language, although sources differ on its precise derivation. Canadian place-name scholar Alan Rayburn traced it to the Mohawk kanyatariiya, meaning “handsome lake.” Natural Resources Canada gives the Iroquois kanadario, meaning “sparkling” water.

1632: French explorer Samuel de Champlain labels the lake Lac St. Louis, honoring the French king.

1635: Jesuit missionary Jean de Brébeuf refers to it as the Lake of the Iroquois.

1639: Dutch geographer Johannes de Laet uses Ontario.

1641: Jesuit Jérôme Lalemant uses Ontario but also gives St. Louis as an alternative.

1647-48: Jesuit missionary Paul Ragueneau describes it as “a lake named Ontario which we call Saint Louys.”

1654: Jesuit missionary Simon Le Moyne refers simply to “a great lake called Ontario.”

1688: Italian cartographer Vincenzo Coronelli captures the unsettled naming on a single map, labeling the lake “Lac Frontenac ou Ontario et Skaniadorio ou St. Louis.” Frontenac honored Louis de Buade, Count of Frontenac and governor general of New France.

1688: Jesuit cartographer Pierre Raffeix produces a manuscript map titled “Le lac Ontario avec les lieux circonvoisins et particulièrement les cinq nations iroquoises” – “Lake Ontario with the surrounding places and particularly the Five Iroquois Nations.”

LATE 1600s: The Indigenous-derived Ontario increasingly displaces the competing European names. Great Lakes scholar Ivan H. Walton later wrote that it “superseded all others.”

1867: The newly created Canadian province of Ontario takes its name from the lake, rather than the other way around.

AUG. 27, 2026: President Trump signs an executive order directing the U.S. federal government to rename Lake Ontario “Lake America.” The order requires the Interior Department to begin changing federal maps, databases, documents and communications within 30 days. The order only applies to the U.S. federal government.

Please note: This story was provided to CNN Wire by an affiliate and does not contain original CNN reporting. This content carries a strict local market embargo. If you share the same market as the contributor of this article, you may not use it on any platform.

By Francis Page Jr.

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    August 31, 2026 (Houston Style Magazine) — HOUSTON, TEXAS — August 31, 2026 — Apple is heading into September with something it knows how to manufacture almost as well as technology: anticipation.

The company has officially confirmed its next Apple Event for Wednesday, September 9, 2026, teasing the occasion with two irresistible words: “Surprise and shine.”

Apple has not officially announced the iPhone 18, iPhone 18 Pro or iPhone 18 Pro Max. No official specifications, prices or release dates have been published. But nearly two decades after Steve Jobs introduced the original iPhone, September and Apple have developed a rhythm of their own.

And this September arrives with Apple firing on considerably more than one cylinder.

photo Apple-AirPods Pro 4 launching next month with cameras

From the Original iPhone to an AI Supercomputer in Your Pocket When Jobs unveiled the original iPhone in 2007, he described three revolutionary products—a widescreen iPod, mobile phone and internet communicator—before revealing they were all one device.

Today, that little revolution has become our camera, newsroom, wallet, television, navigation system, editing suite and mobile office.

Now comes the next transformation: artificial intelligence.

Apple spent WWDC26 positioning Apple Intelligence and the next generation of Siri as increasingly central to the experiences spanning iPhone, iPad, Mac and Apple Vision Pro. The question surrounding September 9 therefore isn’t simply, What will the next iPhone look like?

It is increasingly: What will Apple’s next iPhone be capable of doing? M6 Has Already Entered the Building Apple supplied an enormous clue August 25 by unveiling its M6 chip and a more powerful Mac mini.

The company says M6 delivers a major leap in AI compute, with Neural Accelerators incorporated into its GPU architecture. Apple simultaneously introduced a new Mac Studio powered by M5 Max and M5 Ultra, making late August unusually hardware-heavy before its traditional September spotlight.

Translation: Apple isn’t strolling into fall.

Cupertino is coming in hot.

And Houston has suddenly become part of that technology story. Houston Is Helping Build Apple’s AI Future On August 13, Apple opened its new 20,000-square-foot Advanced Manufacturing Center in Houston, offering free advanced-manufacturing training for small- and medium-sized businesses.

But the bigger headline is literally under the same roof.

The Houston facility already builds and ships Apple’s advanced AI servers, and Apple says Mac mini manufacturing will begin here later this year.

CEO Tim Cook said Apple invested hundreds of millions of dollars in the Houston facility in less than nine months, established the factory, started production and shipped its first advanced AI servers.

For Houston, that’s more than another ribbon cutting.

The Bayou City now has fingerprints on Apple’s AI future.

Apple Isn’t Waiting Until September 9 to Have Fun Apple’s late-summer push isn’t limited to silicon and factories.

In an official August 27 update, Apple announced a new Sneaky Sasquatch and Subway Surfers+ crossover on Apple Arcade, available through October 7. Players can unlock four character skins and two hoverboards while racing through a reimagined environment inspired by Sasquatch Valley.

Then on September 17, Sneaky Sasquatch gets an unexpectedly charming new obsession: birdwatching.

More than 30 bird species will populate the game, allowing players to photograph, catalog and earn rewards for their sightings. Apple also released 11 new Sneaky Sasquatch Messages stickers.

photo Sneaky Sasquatch fans can jump into an exciting crossover with Subway Surfers+ today and check out the new birdwatching update arriving September 17

It sounds whimsical—and it is—but there’s a larger point.

Apple increasingly sells an ecosystem rather than an individual device. Arcade Originals span iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple TV and Apple Vision Pro. Apple Intelligence stretches across Apple’s major computing platforms. Services, silicon, hardware and entertainment increasingly reinforce one another.

That makes whatever happens September 9 about considerably more than another smartphone.

So, Is iPhone 18 Coming? Maybe.

But Apple has not officially said so.

As of August 31, anyone presenting iPhone 18 specifications, camera configurations, prices or release dates as confirmed Apple information is getting ahead of Cupertino.

What we do know is compelling enough.

M6 is here. Apple’s AI ambitions are accelerating. Houston is producing Apple AI servers. Mac mini manufacturing is coming to Texas. Apple Arcade is expanding. And Apple has summoned the technology world for September 9 with the words “Surprise and shine.”

Houston Style Magazine will be watching.

Because if Apple’s history teaches us anything, the most interesting part of a September invitation is often what Apple deliberately doesn’t tell us.

Charge your iPhone. Clear your calendar. Houston—don’t blink.

OFFICIAL APPLE LINK September Apple Event: Apple Events

Please note: This story was provided to CNN Wire by an affiliate and does not contain original CNN reporting. This content carries a strict local market embargo. If you share the same market as the contributor of this article, you may not use it on any platform.

Kierra Lee
KIELEESTYLE@GMAIL.COM
3465287733

By Ben Jealous

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    August 31, 2026 (Houston Style Magazine) — When I was a boy two brothers lived on our block and we ran together every weekend. Ball in the street, made-up games, War!

Then one day they were gone. My buddy said their father had lost his job at the tire factory and taken his own life in the basement, with a gun the family already owned.

That was a gun death in America. Quiet street, good schools. In all my years arguing guns, a death like that almost never came up.

Our children are back in school, and September is Suicide Prevention Month.

Guns, children, and despair are one subject. We rarely treat them so.

My friend Lenny McAllister has never made me pick. He is a Black Republican, a voice on Rust Belt radio from WVON in Chicago to KDKA in Pittsburgh. I was the Democratic nominee for governor of Maryland. We have gone at each other’s parties twenty years and stayed friends.

What people miss is that we are both civil rights men, and civil rights work is Bill of Rights work.

The First Amendment is why we could march. The Fourth is why an officer needs a reason to search you. The Second sits in that same document, and we believe in all of it.

Lenny’s father was shot on a Rust Belt street and spent nearly a year in the hospital. In 2001 a man broke into Lenny’s home and tied him up. He tells it in his new book, “A Venn Diagram of One”, an honest book about refusing to be one thing in a country that insists you choose.

My cousin was shot and killed at a gas station in Columbia, Maryland, at noon. A cousin I called uncle agreed to testify against a Prince George’s County drug dealer, who shot him at his door. He lived. At the hospital they would not let us up to his room, for fear the shooter’s friends would come finish the job.

When Lenny writes that we can respect the Second Amendment and still use common sense about who buys a gun, I hear no man splitting a difference. I hear a man who has waited on word about his father, and lain on his own floor with a gun at his head.

Then he writes this. “There is a right greater than the right to bear arms; it is the right to a liberty-filled life.”

Now let me tell you what I got wrong.

Thirty years ago at Oxford I needed a thesis topic. A headline in the International Herald Tribune stopped me on the sidewalk. Black teen suicides were surging. I was sure I knew why. Handguns were flooding the inner cities.

I was wrong. The children dying were not in the cities. They were in the suburbs.

Black families moved out there in the late sixties and seventies. Twenty years later their children began killing themselves. Children like me, with the big backyard and the shiny bike.

Our mothers gave us what they had been denied in the projects and tenements and row houses they came up in. Without meaning to, they cost us the one thing those places had, a house full of family who would listen no matter what.

One of the strongest predictors of a suicide attempt is isolation. Ask a woman how many people she talks to after her worst day and she names two or three. Ask a man and he names one, or nobody. Her circle grows all her life. His shrinks toward zero.

That headline should have said the Black teen suicide rate was catching up to the White one. Among young Black men it has passed it.

About nine in ten suicide attempts with a gun end in death. With most other methods people live, and most who live never die by suicide.

In 2024 there were 27,593 gun suicides, well over half of all gun deaths.

Money is no shield. A gun in a cul-de-sac is as final as a gun on a corner.

The Bill of Rights is not a menu. You do not get to order the Second and send the rest back to the kitchen. None of it means much to a child who does not live to grow into the promise of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

So set partisanship aside. Lock your own guns in a safe at home. Keep them away from people in crisis. And build friendships across party lines that bind this nation back together for all our children.

Ben Jealous is a professor of practice at the University of Pennsylvania and former president and CEO of the NAACP.

photo

Please note: This story was provided to CNN Wire by an affiliate and does not contain original CNN reporting. This content carries a strict local market embargo. If you share the same market as the contributor of this article, you may not use it on any platform.

Kierra Lee
KIELEESTYLE@GMAIL.COM
3465287733