[When Dessalines declared Haiti’s independence from France in 1804 after a 13-year slave uprising and civil war, he became the Americas’ first Black head of state.
For more than two centuries, Dessalines was memorialized as a ruthless brute.
Now, say residents of Brooklyn’s “Little Haiti” – the blocks around Rogers Avenue, home to some 50,000 Haitian-Americans – it’s time to correct the record. They hope the newly renamed Dessalines Boulevard will burnish the reputation of this Haitian hero.]
[In 2007, a team of researchers watched a 1-year-old boy take justice into his own hands. The boy had just seen a puppet show in which one puppet played with a ball while interacting with two other puppets. The center puppet would slide the ball to the puppet on the right, who would pass it back. And the center puppet would slide the ball to the puppet on the left . . . who would run away with it. Then the two puppets on the ends were brought down from the stage and set before the toddler. Each was placed next to a pile of treats. At this point, the toddler was asked to take a treat away from one puppet. Like most children in this situation, the boy took it from the pile of the “naughty” one. But this punishment wasn’t enough — he then leaned over and smacked the puppet in the head……..
A growing body of evidence suggests that humans do have a rudimentary moral sense from the very start of life. With the help of well-designed experiments, you can see glimmers of moral thought, moral judgment and moral feeling even in the first year of life. Some sense of good and evil seems to be bred in the bone.]
When a wrongfully convicted person gets released from prison, it is a major news event: Local television crews capture the first steps of freedom and the speeches on the steps of the state capital, audiences empathize as they grapple with gratitude and rage, and the exonerees take their first steps into an uncertain future.
But when the limelight fades, the wrongfully convicted face the reality of navigating the world they were yanked from, often with limited financial and social support.
According to the Innocence Project, it takes exonerees three years on average to receive any compensation after their release. More than a quarter get nothing. Among those who are paid, 81 percent get less than $50,000 for each year of wrongful imprisonment. Read the full article | PBS NewsHour
Sunday evening, some of the most prominent organizations that work against LGBT equality joined together in Houston, Texas to rally in defense of “religious freedom.” The event, called “I Stand Sunday,” was hosted by Grace Community Church, whose pastor, Steve Riggle, was one of the five pastors originally subpoenaed for his role in challenging the LGBT-inclusive Houston Equal Rights Ordinance (HERO).
The subpoenas, which Mayor Annise Parker (D) withdrew last week, were the catalyst for the rally, which largely functioned as a star-studded Christian worship service. Guests like Mike Huckabee, Todd Starnes from FOX News, and Phil Robertson from Duck Dynasty preached that religious liberty is under attack from LGBT equality.
It is hard to overstate the importance of Afghan employees, particularly translators, to the US war effort. Translators accompany military and special forces in everything they do, from night raids and helicopter insertions to route clearance, and they are often unarmed. They’re also critical to the work done by the State Department, the US Agency for International Development and US government-supported NGOs.
All that mean they are also targets. Taliban checkpoints are often set up expressly for the purpose of catching such men. Translators casually swap stories of Afghan employees of the US military who have had limbs or heads cut off by insurgents.
Now, with the US scheduled to largely withdraw from Afghanistan later this year, Afghans still waiting on visa applications fear their time is running out. Critics describe the process of applying for a visa as opaque, prohibitively complicated and painfully slow, putting the applicant’s lives at risk with each passing month that their visas aren’t approved.
“It has been a disastrous program,” said one former USAID official.” It’s embarrassing.”
But the State Department says they’ve implemented a set of changes to revitalize the process.
Jacques Derrida writes in Of Grammatology:
Spacing as writing is the becoming-absent and the becoming-unconscious of the subject. By the movement of its drift/derivation [dérive] the emancipation of the sign constitutes in return the desire of presence. That becoming-or that drift/derivation-does not befall the subject which would choose it or would passively let itself be drawn along by it. As the subject’s relationship with its own death, this becoming is the constitution of subjectivity. On all levels of life’s organisation, that is to say, of theeconomy of death. All graphemes are of a testamentary essence. And the original absence of the subject of writing is also the absence of the thing or the referent. [The Outside is the Inside]
Thus, the years of waiting to receive a US visa while the Taliban threaten the local linguists, kidnap their relatives, while, occasionally, they cut a head or two. “Absence”, translator as the referent, as the subject’s relationship with its/his own death. An excellent intellectual exercise on diffe’rance, for the rest of us.
“I attend Clemson University, which was founded on on lands donated by Thomas Green Clemson to the state of South Carolina. The land was previously the Fort Hill Plantation, and the main residence is open seven days a week, honoring Clemson’s willed wish that it “shall always be open for the inspection of visitors.”
Of course, I did not know there would be a plantation house operating as a museum at the university when I’d accepted the offer to attend, but more troubling, I thought, was the way history is told through communications published by and created for the university, and the strange relationship between those versions of history and the dedication to the athletics programs, particularly football, and the university’s “Solid Orange” campaign.
It seemed only logical to help create a better representation of those stories untold, from a historical perspective, and of the students who don’t feel that “Solid Orange” properly represents the diversity that exists presently at Clemson with a program to help Clemson, the surrounding communities and the world “See The Stripes.”
Contrast that to what happened following the use of assault rifles pointed at the heads of local, state and federal officials by so-called “patriotic” “Tea Party” protesters during the Bundy Ranch standoff earlier this year. Yes, in that case, law enforcement officials also, ultimately, “backed down.” But they backed down to avoid what was a hair-trigger’s pull away from unspeakable violence.
Where the Ferguson demonstrations made the police look silly and dangerous, the armed-up protesters in Nevada made themselves look silly. More importantly, they actually provided, ironically, a twisted form of support to the notion that law enforcement needs to arm itself up, if only in self-defense.
In any event, little changed after the dangerous armed stand-off in the Nevada desert. Real change may come about, eventually, thanks to the peaceful — and very brave — resistance of the unarmed protesters in Ferguson.
Grand Chief Edward John is a Hereditary Chief of the Tl’azt’en Nation — located in northern British Columbia. He also serves as the Vice-Chairman of the United Nation’s Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues.
“Can and should this court order that documents that contain information about what happened at the Indian Residential Schools be destroyed?” Perell wrote in his decision. “My answer to this question is: yes, destruction, but only after a 15-year retention period during which the survivors of the Indian Residential Schools may choose to spare some of their documents from destruction.”
In speaking out, Modi challenged citizens and government alike to change the way that rape is thought about. “Today as we hear about the incidents of rapes, our head hangs in shame,” he said in his wide-ranging address. “I want to ask parents when your daughter turns 10 or 12 years old, you ask, ‘Where are you going? When will you return?’ Do the parents dare to ask their sons, ‘Where are you going? Why are you going? Who are your friends?’ After all, the rapist is also someone’s son. If only parents decide to put as many restrictions on their sons as they do on their own daughters.”
ΡΟ Π ΤΡ Ο Ν 