Around the Southland: Andrew Wind Symphony hits right note at SuperState, more
The high school's Wind Symphony played at the 2025 University of Illinois SuperState Concert Band Festival, which serves as the state championship for concert bands. About 80 ensembles submitted applications that included a recorded performance, and 24 high school bands were asked to perform at SuperState.
Andrew students also marked a first this year – being chosen as the Class 2A Honor Band, which means they will return in 2026 for a feature performance. They performed 'Galop' by Dmitri Shostakovich, 'Over the Moon' by Frank Ticheli and 'Deep River' by Benjamin Horne.
'I'm just really proud of the kids,' Director Mark Iwinski shared in a news release. 'They play so musically and have a desire to play some of the best repertoire in the best places.'
Reservations are being taken for the free event Hike the Freedom Trail, set for 10 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. June 7 at the boat launch at Beaubien Woods Forest Preserve, 134th and the Little Calumet River.
Seating is limited for the program, which features expats providing a historically accurate story from experts of the Midwest Underground Railroad Network about the hundreds or even thousands of escaped slaves known as 'freedom seekers' who traveled on the Underground Railroad in the Chicago area's south region prior to the Civil War. One site is the farm owned by the Jan Ton family, which is near Beaubien Woods.
The tour, sponsored by the Forest Preserves of Cook County and the Calumet Heritage Partnership, includes a bus ride and a moderate hike. Dress for the weather. Sign up online or call 773-370-3305 or email tonfarmugrr@gmail.com.
Southland College Prep Charter High School in Richton Park recognized all 145 graduating seniors during its 12th All In celebration, noting that once again all of them were accepted to college and earned $50 million in scholarships.
For the first time, four seniors earned scholarships from the newly created Kwarteng Foundation, which honors Alex Kwarteng, of Matteson, who immigrated to the United States from Ghana in the 1980s. His daughters, Lisa, Amy, Sandra and Esther Kwarteng, established the foundation, which awarded $10,000 in scholarships to four 2025 graduates of Southland College Prep: Itohan Salami, Terri Mensah, Dhayra Gomez and Kehinde Sowemino, who was class valedictorian. Amy and Esther Kwarteng are Southland alums.
In addition, 10 Southland seniors were admitted to California Polytechnic State University-San Luis Obispo with full-ride scholarships worth $2 million, and as a result of the growing partnership with the two schools. Two graduating seniors, Rickaiya Bernard and Mofuluwake Arogundade, earned a cumulative total of more than $750,000 in scholarships to top universities from the QuestBridge National College Match Program.
Celebrate local artistry and entrepreneurship during Rhythm & Roots: An Artisan and Entrepreneur Showcase from noon to 4 p.m. at the Up House – Building D, 13811 S. Western Ave., Blue Island.
The event highlights live music from recording artist Gregory Echols and a lineup of wellness experiences, small businesses and tastemakers such as Spa in Your Space, Health Hair Institute, The Chi Concierge, Make Us One Productions and The Entrepreneur Expo.
Participants can connect with Black-owned brands, enjoy wellness experiences and discover handcrafted goods, all while experiencing live music. Tickets cost $25 in advance at eventbrite.com or $30 at the door.
Adults 50 and older can socialize with friends and neighbors at 3:30 p.m. June 6 at the Green Hills Public Library, 10331 S. Interlochen Drive, Palos Hills.
Puzzles, coloring sheets, board games and coffee will be available during the program. Information is at 708-598-8446.
The annual Kickoff to Summer Celebration sets sail from 3 to 8 p.m. June 1 at Briedert Green in downtown Frankfort, featuring a theme of 'All things yacht rock.'
A DJ splints turns starting at 3 p.m. with hulu hoop contests, limbo challenges, classic lawn games and a water balloon toss planned. Bubble Captain Jason Kollum will provide a sea of bubbles from 3 to 5 p.m., and a balloon artist and face painter will entertain kids 3:30 to 5:30 p.m.
From 5 to 6 p.m., the first 500 guests will receive free homemade popsicles from La Michoacana de Frankfort. A mini car show from the Frankfort Car Club will highlight iconic vehicles from the 1970s and '80s. The Yacht Rock-ettes will play soft rock hits from 6 to 8 p.m. Details are at www.frankfortil.org.
Sire Holloway, of Chicago, a senior at Marist High School in Chicago, has earned The Gates Scholarship, one of the country's most competitive scholarships for minority high school seniors who show exemplary leadership.
Holloway plans to major in computer science at Howard University. While at Marist, he was a member of the National Honor Society, president of the Black Student Union and an active leader at the school.
The Gates Scholarship, which fully covers college tuition and room and board, is presented each year to 'exceptional student leaders from low-income, minority backgrounds, helping them realize their maximum potential.
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Time Magazine
4 days ago
- Time Magazine
The True Story Behind 'Amy Bradley Is Missing'
More than twenty-seven years after 23-year-old Amy Bradley went missing on March 23, 1998, while on a Caribbean cruise with her family, authorities still don't know why and how she disappeared. A new Netflix documentary, Amy Bradley Is Missing, spotlights her family's ongoing journey to find her. Through interviews with Amy's family members, FBI officials working on the case, and people who believe they saw Amy alive, the hope is that covering the case on the world's largest streaming platform will reach someone who knows something that can help move it forward. In the film, the cruise director who was working on the ship insists that Amy fell or jumped overboard. A body has not been recovered in the case, which is one big reason why it remains open—and why people have theories that Amy is still alive. People who claim they saw Amy What makes the case hard to solve is that cell phones didn't exist at the time of her disappearance. The cruise ship could determine the last time Amy used her key card to enter her bedroom, but there's no way to tell when or how she left the room. In a conversation with TIME, directors Ari Mark and Phil Lott shared several theories that they have heard that suggest that she could still be alive: Maybe she was murdered, stored in the ship, and taken off when the boat docked at the next stop. Maybe she walked off the ship and started a new life somewhere. Or, maybe she is being held against her will somewhere. Amy Bradley Is Missing features people who say they saw her alive outside of the ship, but didn't report their findings until years later, so authorities couldn't act on them. In the doc, one person who claims to have seen Amy, David Carmichael, says he was walking along a beach in Curaçao when he saw a woman with a tattoo of the Tasmanian devil walking towards him. She looked like she was about to say something, but then kept walking with the two men who were with her. He thinks one of the men was Alastair Douglas, a bass player that Amy was dancing with hours before she disappeared. 'It really isn't until David Carmichael comes forward and says that he saw Amy on a beach that the possibility that she's really alive gains some real momentum,' Mark says. Other people have also come forward with claims of seeing Amy. A Navy vet, Bill Hefner, says in the film that he met a girl at a bar in Curaçao who said her name was Amy Bradley and told him that she had hopped off of a cruise ship to score drugs and now was being held against her will. In 2005, Judy Maurer says she was using a restroom in Barbados when she heard a bunch of people come into the bathroom. A group of men were ambushing a woman and telling her a deal was imminent and that she better be on time. When Maurer left the stall, she saw an emotional woman by the sink. When she asked the woman what her name was, the woman said her name was Amy. A big lead in the case for Amy being alive happened that same year. An anonymous tipster sent the Bradley family a link to a website with sex workers for hire, and an FBI forensic analysis determined that one of the women looked like Amy. A confrontation Shortly after Amy disappeared, one of the first people that the FBI questioned was the bass player on the cruise ship, Alastair Douglas. A videographer on the cruise ship found footage that showed Amy dancing with him in the middle of the night, hours before she went missing. The FBI found no evidence to charge him with Amy's disappearance, and his polygraph test was inconclusive. However, his daughter, Amica Douglas, appears in the doc and says she's not convinced that he had nothing to do with the case. Douglas talks about red flags she saw in her father, saying that when he returned from the cruise ship that Amy was on, her mother found he grew more distant. Amica adds that her dad had a bag full of photos of white women who were not her mother, which she thought was suspicious. It's rare for someone who was a person of interest to be confronted in real-time in a true crime doc but that's exactly what happened when Amica called her father while filming her interview for Amy Bradley Is Missing. He sounds exasperated when his daughter brings up Amy, yelling, 'I didn't do anything wrong. What am I supposed to do?' He explains that all he did was dance with Amy at the club. When asked if he was walking on a beach in Curaçao with Amy, he said no, claiming he stays away from beaches, because he doesn't like them. 'We just wanted to give her a chance to confront her dad, which she really wanted to do,' Mark explains, 'and of course, at the same time, see if we could glean anything, see if his story was consistent, and see if his tone was defensive as she kept telling me it would be. And, of course, it was.' Why Amy's family remains hopeful Amy's family is convinced that she is still out there, and they regularly update a website where they've posted family pictures because they've noticed that an IP address from Curaçao and Barbados visits it around holidays, birthdays, and anniversaries—and dwells on the site for about 45 minutes. They hope it's connected to Amy, but they don't know for sure because the FBI can't get more information on the IP address since it's not from a U.S. carrier. 'In case she happens to be able to look at it, hopefully she would know that we're still trying and still thinking about her,' Amy's brother Brad says in the doc. Amy's mother describes how every day she wakes up thinking 'maybe today,' meaning, maybe today is the day they will find Amy. And at night, her parents have a special goodnight ritual, in which they say, 'maybe tomorrow.' Her father Ron keeps Amy's car in the garage and still handles its maintenance. 'We all have this gut feeling that she's out there,' says Brad. 'The lack of closure or the not knowing allows us to continue to hope. So I actually prefer it that way than the finality of having an answer.' The documentary ends with a plea from her mother Iva, with tears in her eyes: 'If you know something, please give us that one thing that we need, please do that for us and do that for Amy.' The final scene is a clip from a home video of a young Amy kissing Iva on the cheek. Mark says he hopes that documentary will help lead to an answer. "Things happen and change as a result of these shows," he says. "When you put these mysteries out there, something almost always moves forward." Amy Bradley Is Still Missing is the most comprehensive documentary treatment of the case so far (it has also been covered on America's Most Wanted and Dr. Phil) and yet still, viewers will watch it and still have many questions about Amy's whereabouts that cannot be answered. As Lott puts it, 'Nothing adequately answers everything. And in fact, everything seems to just make the mystery that much more tantalizing.'
Cosmopolitan
5 days ago
- Cosmopolitan
What happened to Amy Bradley? A timeline of her disappearance and rumoured sightings
A new Netflix documentary sets out to investigate the disappearance of Amy Bradley, who went missing from a cruise ship in 1998. The three-part Netflix series, which arrives on the streaming platform on 16 July, speaks to those at the centre of the disappearance, examines evidence from the unsolved case, and digs into the many alleged sightings of Bradley since she went missing nearly three decades ago. Ahead of the release of Amy Bradley Is Missing, here's a deep-dive into the case, including a timeline of Amy Bradley's disappearance and rumoured sightings of the missing woman. Amy Bradley is an American woman who went missing in March 1998 at the age of 23. Amy and her family were on the Royal Caribbean International cruise ship, Rhapsody of the Seas, en route to Curaçao at the time of her disappearance. She had recently graduated from Longwood University, and was travelling with her parents, Ron and Iva Bradley, and her younger brother, Brad. The Bradley family boarded the Royal Caribbean International cruise ship on 21 March 1998. Ron Bradley had won the all-expenses-paid trip from his employer and, despite her initial hesitation, Amy agreed to attend as a graduation celebration. She was known to have a fear of heights and expressed concerns over the size of the ship and being out on the ocean. Nevertheless, she joined her family aboard, intending to start a new job at a computer consulting firm upon her return. On the second evening of the cruise, Amy and her brother attended a disco party on the ship's ninth deck. Several witnesses saw the pair drinking alcohol with the ship's band, Blue Orchid, and Amy was also spotted spending time with band member, Alister 'Yellow' Douglas. The pair were also recorded dancing together by videographer, Chris Fenwick. Douglas claims he left the party at around 1am, while Amy's brother recalls leaving a few hours later. The ship's computerised lock system recorded that Brad returned to the family cabin at 3:35am, and Amy returned just five minutes later. Brad recalls sitting on the family's balcony with his sister, and the pair chatted until he went to bed. In the very early hours of 24 March, Ron recalls waking up between 5:15 and 5:30am to check on his children. He says she saw his daughter sleeping on the lounge chair of the cabin's balcony, later telling a local newspaper: "I could see Amy's legs from her hips down. I dozed back off to sleep. The balcony door was closed, because if it hadn't been closed, I would have gotten up and closed it." When Ron woke up again at 6am, he noticed Amy was missing along with her cigarettes and lighter. "I left to try and go up and find her. When I couldn't find her, I didn't really know what to think, because it was very much unlike Amy to leave and not tell us where she was going," he said at the time. Ron spent the next 30 minutes searching for his daughter in the common areas of the ship, he then went back to the family's cabin to inform them that he couldn't find her. The Bradley family immediately reported her disappearance to the ship's crew and pleaded with them to make an announcement to the rest of the passengers. The crew agreed to make the announcement later, but by this point the ship had already docked in Curaçao and many passengers had disembarked to spend the day exploring. After a four-day search, the Dutch Caribbean Coast Guard concluded its search for Amy, which had involved three helicopters, a radar plane, and a separate chartered boat. Upon conclusion of the search, authorities initially suspected that Amy had either fallen overboard or died by suicide. However, investigators said (per People) that there was "no evidence that Amy, a trained lifeguard, fell overboard, was pushed or committed suicide." On the morning of Amy's disappearance, three witnesses claimed to have seen her on the upper deck between 5:30 and 5:45am with band member Douglas – contradicting his statement that he left the party at 1am. The witnesses claim to have seen the pair with a camera, and testified that he handed her a drink. They also allege that the pair arrived at one of the ship's elevators together, and that he was then seen leaving the upper deck alone, shortly after 6am. In light of the witness statements and Amy's brothers claim that a conversation he had with the band member was "suspicious", Douglas was interviewed by the FBI and took a polygraph test, which he passed. Contrary to comments made by the Bradley family, Douglas has repeatedly and strongly denied knowing anything about Amy's disappearance. In April 1998, the Bradley family returned to Curaçao where they were approached by a local taxi driver. The driver claimed to have seen Amy while the ship was docked there on 24 March, describing her as running through a parking lot in search of a phone. He stated her recognised her green eyes, which were described in the reward poster, and alleges to have seen her at several locations across the island. However, none of these claims have been confirmed by authorities investigating the case. A few months after Amy's disappearance, two Canadian divers reported a possible sighting of her at a popular Curaçao diving beach known as Playa Porto Marie. One of the divers, who testified for the Federal Grand Jury, claimed that a woman matching Amy's description was in the presence of two "aggressive men". The diver – who accurately described Amy's tattoos as well as a watch she owned – said she tried to communicate with him, but was ushered away by the men she was with. "I am haunted by that encounter with Amy. I know it was her," the diver is reported to have said at the time. The FBI investigated the reported sighting but, like that of the cab driver's, were unable to corroborate the claims. In January 1999, Naval officer William Hefner claimed to have spoken to a woman who said she was Amy at a Curaçao brothel. According to Hefner, the woman approached him and said that her name was Amy Bradley. He claims she "begged" him for help, while explaining she was being held against her will and unable to leave. At the time, Hefner did not report the incident for fear it would impact his Naval career, but in May 2002 following his retirement, he contacted the Bradley family. Hefner said he "has no doubt" that the woman he met in the brothel was Amy but, as the brothel had burnt down by the time the sighting was reported, the FBI was unable to find evidence to support the claim. Another potential sighting of Amy was reported five years after her disappearance in San Francisco, California. Witnesses reported seeing a woman who matched Amy's description in the company of two men. The trio were alleged to have been watching a street musician at the time, and Amy is said to have given a "pleading" look to the witnesses who had clearly recognised her. According to the witnesses, upon noticing the interaction the men seized her and fled the scene. This prompted the FBI to release sketches of the men believed to be with Amy at the time, although nothing came of the alleged sighting. In March 2005, there were several reported sightings of Amy in Barbados. Numerous witnesses claimed to have seen her in Bridgetown, accompanied by four men who were discussing what sounded like an illegal "deal". Once again, composite sketches were drawn up based on the sighting and those alleged to have been accompanying Amy. Another potential sighting of Amy was reported in January 2007. Witnesses claim she was dining at a restaurant in Aruba with four men – although few details are known about this alleged sighting. In 2010, a jawbone washed ashore in Aruba. It was initially thought to be the jawbone of another missing woman, Natalee Holloway, but this theory was cleared. Even though, at the time, there were nine other vacationers said to be missing in the Caribbean, authorities declined to carry out further DNA testing on the material, although they said that the bone was human and likely from someone of Caucasian origin. Given the numerous alleged sightings of Amy since her disappearance, the most prominent theory is that she was kidnapped and sold into the illegal human trafficking industry in the Caribbean. Another alleged theory is that she was murdered and thrown overboard, however there is no evidence to confirm either theory. The final theory is that Amy fell overboard or committed suicide, as initially suggested by the authorities. "We've pursued every angle, from whether there was foul play, a suicide, or an accident, and we have basically not gotten anywhere," FBI special agent James Weber stated in November 1998. With no body found and no confirmed evidence to support a case, Amy was declared legally dead on 24 March 2010, twelve years after her disappearance. Netflix's three-part series, Amy Bradley Is Missing, is available to stream from 16 July.
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Travel + Leisure
5 days ago
- Travel + Leisure
Kareema Bee
Kareema B. Partin (Kareema Bee) is a senior video producer and writer at Travel + Leisure and has been with DDM since 2021. In her current role, she creates and develops long and short-form content for the brand, one of which earned her a second consecutive Emmy nomination. As a creative, she has also lent her writing, directing, and performing talents to various aspects of the Entertainment industry for over a decade. Kareema received her master's degree in TV, Radio, & Film from Syracuse University's Newhouse School and has a bachelor's degree in English from SUNY Albany, Phi Beta Kappa. She is also a graduate of the AIP Language Institute in Spain, where she studied Spanish and cinema. Whether it's chasing sunshine, discovering hidden gems, or taste-testing her way through a new city, Kareema considers every trip an opportunity to turn curiosity into a story worth telling.
