Published on Feb 20, 2017
Meet the woman who broke barriers as a hidden figure at the US Navy | us navy women

The Oscar-nominated film "Hidden Figures" celebrates the true story of three African-American women who helped propel the U.S. space program to new heights.

While Mary Jackson, Dorothy Vaughan and Katherine Johnson were breaking barriers at NASA, another hidden figure, Raye Montague, was making history at the U.S. Navy. "I faced a lot of the same barriers that those ladies faced," Montague said today on "Good Morning America," recalling a time when a fellow employee asked her for a cup of coffee and she replied that she'd like one too, adding, "Be sure mine has cream and sugar."

Meet the woman who broke barriers as a hidden figure at the US Navy | us navy women


Montague, a native of Little Rock, Arkansas, grew up in the segregated South. She never saw an engineer who looked like her but she would go on to shatter glass ceilings as a female, African-American civilian employee at the then-male-dominated Navy.

"I'm known as the first person to design a ship using the computer," Montague, now 82, said in an interview that aired today on "Good Morning America." "And I was the first female program manager of ships in the history of the Navy, which was the equivalent of being a CEO of a company."

Montague credited her mother with providing the confidence to know she could achieve anything she wanted. She earned a bachelor of science degree in business at a historically black college, the Arkansas Agricultural, Mechanical and Normal School, which now goes by the name the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff. The school she wanted to attend, the engineering school at the University of Arkansas, did not accept minorities at the time.

The hits just keep on coming:

A week before Michael T. Flynn resigned as national security adviser, a sealed proposal was hand-delivered to his office, outlining a way for President Trump to lift sanctions against Russia.

The players involved are a who’s who of Trump-connected pro-Russian figures.

Mr. Flynn is gone, having been caught lying about his own discussion of sanctions with the Russian ambassador. But the proposal, a peace plan for Ukraine and Russia, remains, along with those pushing it: Michael D. Cohen, the president’s personal lawyer, who delivered the document; Felix H. Sater, a business associate who helped Mr. Trump scout deals in Russia; and a Ukrainian lawmaker trying to rise in a political opposition movement shaped in part by Mr. Trump’s former campaign manager Paul D. Manafort.

Cohen is under investigation by the FBI as part of the query into Russian influence in Trump's election; Sater is Mafia-linked. A key part of the plan, led by pro-Russian Ukrainian lawmaker, Andrii Artemenko, would be releasing alleged evidence of corruption by the current not-pro-Russian-enough Ukrainian leader, thus allowing fine men like Andrii Artemenko to take over the government and negotiate a long term Russian "lease" of Crimea, and so forth. (Artemenko even offered up that he had “received encouragement for his plans from top aides to Mr. Putin”, which is apparently something would-be government topplers are willing to brag about these days.)

The end result: If the current Ukrainian government was disposed of and a more Russia-tolerant faction took its place, thus achieving a peace with Russia that may or may not absolve Russia of their military invasion and capture of Crimea, than the way would be clear for the Trump administration to lift the sanctions on Russia that resulted.

Which would, in turn, allow deals like now-Secretary-of-State Rex Tillerson's $500 billion oil deal between ExxonMobil and Russia to go forward.

All it requires is a more complaint Ukrainian government, with the assistance of Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, and Paul Manafort’s pals. This is an actual plan these people were willing to put down on paper.

Travel expenses for Trump and his sons total $11.3 million in one month, almost as much as Obama spent in a year, according to the Independent. Watch:

The bulk of the money has gone to Trump's travel to Mar-a-Lago, his exclusive resort in Palm Beach which he has referred to as the "Winter White House" and most recently the "Southern White House" as in a recent tweet:

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/832950628750127106?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw

The speech he refers to is yet another rally held earlier this evening to give him the ignorant and irresponsible adoration that he craves. Trump is still doing victory laps while boasting about his election win, despite his historically low approval rating.

Not only are millions of dollars going to operate Air Force One and provide security for Trump himself, but his two sons also racked up expenses for which the American tax payer is on the hook. For example, the hotel bill for Secret Service agents guarding Eric Trump on a visit to Uruguay was nearly $90,000. The reason for the trip: to promote a Trump-branded condo tower.

During his eight years in office, Obama's travel expenses averaged $12.1 million a YEAR. At this rate, Trump is on target to rack up $140 million a year, a staggering 1,157% more.

As if this weren't bad enough, Trump's past tweets show his true hypocritical stripes:

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/503973652522885120?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/155014799909064704?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw

Everyone knows about Trump's promise to make Mexico pay for his Wall of Babel. At his rally today, he also vowed to make the Arab oil states to pay for safe zones to keep would-be refugees in their own war-torn countries. Watch:

Someone is going to be in big trouble with the Secret Service, and President Donald Trump will have a perfect opening to cry victim.

The Palm Beach Post is reporting that an object was thrown at the president’s motorcade as he was driving through Palm Beach heading to Mar-A-Lago.

The rock was reported to be the size of a baseball. A subsequent item was also thrown at the motorcade, according to reports. The items were then gathered by officers and removed from the scene in brown bags. Agents and officers are pulling video feeds from businesses in the area to aid the investigation. Fortunately, no one was hurt.

More details to come.

The Donald Trump administration is off to a rocky start, with multiple damaging reports emerging from the White House alleging disorganization, incompetence and infighting—but that hasn’t stopped the new president from making good on his pledges to the country’s police officers. By branding himself the law-and-order candidate who would use his bully pulpit to take down criminals and fight crime, Trump earned himself the support of several police groups, most notably the Fraternal Order of Police, the country’s largest police union, which boasts more than 330,000 members.

Trump has already met with several law enforcement groups to make it clear where his priorities lie. Recently, while speaking to the Major Cities Chiefs Police Association (and after whining about a federal judge ruling that blocked his Muslim ban), Trump launched into a speech about what he believes cops in this country care about: crime in cities populated with black people, Mexican drug cartels, undocumented immigrants, and his desire to build a wall along the Mexican border. During the speech he claimed that undocumented immigrants in gangs cause the problems in Chicago and that building a wall along our southern border would stop drugs from “pouring” into our country.

Two weeks after signing two orders on immigration, President Trump signed three orders on crime and law enforcement, including one that targeted transnational drug cartels. Although immigration and drug enforcement have their own federal agencies, many cops seemed eager to jump into the fray, setting the stage to begin rolling back modest gains made in holding police accountable.

Last week, news broke that the ever-bubbly co-anchor was suddenly leaving NBC and the Today show just days after learning she’d be losing her 9 a.m. time slot because of the incoming former Fox News star Megyn Kelly, joining the show in September.

The fallout from the news left many shocked and disappointed, including top brass at the network. “We are disappointed that she has chosen to leave but we wish her all of the best,” NBC said in a joint statement with Hall, who added she was “excited about the next chapter.”


But in this week’s issue of PEOPLE, sources reveal what really went wrong, and why Hall, 46, an accomplished journalist who for a decade had worked her way up through the ranks at NBC, felt compelled to walk away from her dream job.

Only a couple weeks ago, things seemed to be going extremely well for Hall. On top of anchoring gigs at MSNBC Live and Dateline, she’d recently been enjoying added exposure at Today, filling in early mornings during host Savannah Guthrie’s maternity leave and hosting the 9 a.m. hour alongside Al Roker following Billy Bush’s abrupt departure in October amid the election scandal.

“Just a few days before all of this happened, she received an email [from an exec] congratulating the team for being number one,” a source close to Hall tells PEOPLE, noting that the pair had managed to outpace ABC’s long-running Live with Kelly in the key news demo for several weeks. “Then all of a sudden, it was like it vanished: Megyn Kelly is coming onboard, and who’s going to have to move? Tamron. That’s who.”

Not having it. Fox News’ Shepard Smith slammed President Donald Trump’s erratic press conference during a segment on Thursday, February 16, and the right-leaning veteran news anchor didn’t hold back. Watch the video clip above to see what he said!

“It’s crazy what we’re watching every day. It’s absolutely crazy,” Smith, 53, said with an exasperated expression on his face. “He keeps repeating ridiculous, throwaway lines that are not true at all, and avoiding this question on Russia as though we’re fools for asking this question. Really? Your opposition was hacked and the Russians were responsible for it and your people were on the phone with Russia the same day it was happening and we’re fools for asking the questions? No sir.”

(Reuters) - The U.S. Justice Department has joined a whistleblower lawsuit against UnitedHealth Group Inc that claims the country's largest health insurer and its units and affiliates overcharged Medicare hundreds of millions of dollars, a law firm representing the whistleblower said on Thursday.

"We reject these more than five-year-old claims and will contest them vigorously," UnitedHealth spokesman Matthew Burns said in a statement.

The lawsuit, filed in 2011 and unsealed on Thursday, alleges UnitedHealth Group overcharged Medicare by claiming the federal health insurance program's members nationwide were sicker than they were, according to the law firm Constantine Cannon LLP.

The Justice Department has also joined in allegations against WellMed Medical Management Inc, a Texas-based healthcare company UnitedHealth bought in 2011.

The lawsuit by whistleblower Benjamin Poehling, a former UnitedHealth executive, has been kept under seal in federal court in Los Angeles while the Justice Department investigated the claims for the past five years. Constantine Cannon posted the lawsuit online when it was unsealed on Thursday. (http://bit.ly/2lQTOh8)

No total damages were specified in the lawsuit.