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Mumia Abu-Jamal

Mumia Abu-Jamal Granted a Reargue Appeal

By Commentaries/Opinions

By Herb Boyd — “First you say you do/ Then you don’t. Then you say you will/Then you won’t/ You’re undecided now/ So what are you gonna do.” This indecision may work well in a popular song of yore, but it does little to end the 35 years former Black Panther and radio commentator Mumia Abu-Jamal has spent behind bars. On Thursday a Philadelphia Common Pleas judge ruled that Abu-Jamal who…

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Mumia Abu-Jamal

Major Court Victory for Mumia

By News & Current Affairs

By Kevin Zeese, Popular Resistance — There was a major court victory for Mumia Abu-Jamal, on December 27, 2018. In a ruling on an appeals petition for Mumia Common Pleas Court, Judge Leon Tucker found that former Justice Ronald Castille should have recused himself because of statements he made as a prosecutor about police killers that suggested a potential bias. They included campaign speeches and letters advocating the issuance of…

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A Polisario Front official surveys the Moroccan Berm in the Western Sahara. John Bolton and a former German President have helped spur the first negotiations over the disputed desert territory in six years.

Is One of Africa’s Oldest Conflicts Finally Nearing Its End?

By Editors' Choice

By Nicolas Niarchos, The New Yorker — For the past forty years, tens of thousands of Moroccan soldiers have manned a wall of sand that curls for one and a half thousand miles through the howling Sahara. The vast plain around it is empty and flat, interrupted only by occasional horseshoe dunes that traverse it. But the Berm, as the wall is known, is no natural phenomenon. It was built…

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Five nations in the Indian Territory - the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, and Seminole - kept back slaves for decades

How Native Americans adopted slavery from white settlers

By Reparations

And how black people in Indian Territory were denied their rights even after their emancipation. By Alaina E Roberts, Al Jazeera — Last week marked the 153rd anniversary of the ratification of the 13th Amendment to the US Constitution in 1865. Rightly celebrated as a milestone for the black American community, the 13th Amendment led to the eventual liberation of all African Americans enslaved in the United States of the late…

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White supremacists gather under a statue of Robert E. Lee during a rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, August 2017.

America’s Original Sin

By Editors' Choice

Slavery and the Legacy of White Supremacy. By Annette Gordon-Reed, Foreign Affairs — The documents most closely associated with the creation of the United States—the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution—present a problem with which Americans have been contending from the country’s beginning: how to reconcile the values espoused in those texts with the United States’ original sin of slavery, the flaw that marred the country’s creation, warped its prospects, and eventually…

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Ron Daniels, who held the first Kwanzaa celebration in Youngstown 50 years ago, speaks during a Kwanzaa celebration at New Bethel Baptist Church on Wednesday night.

Former Y’town activist surprises crowd at Kwanzaa opening night

By News & Current Affairs

By William K. Alcorn, The Vindicator — Ron Daniels, former Youngstown community activist and television personality, introduced as one of the founders of Youngstown Kwanzaa 50 years ago, paid a surprise visit to the first day of this year’s weeklong event that celebrates African heritage in African-American culture. “When we started Kwanzaa here in the former West Federal Street YMCA, we were among the first in the United States to celebrate…

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Do America’s Socialists Have a Race Problem?

By Editors' Choice

Inside a raging debate that has split the country’s most exciting new political movement. By Miguel Salazar, The New Republic — On an afternoon in July, nearly 200 people packed into the ballroom of a local community center in northern Oakland for a general meeting of the East Bay chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). As they settled into folded chairs on the room’s faded wooden floors, the…

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Slum dwellers are fleeing the country because of the lack of food, medicine and work.

The fallen metropolis: the collapse of Caracas, the jewel of Latin America

By Editors' Choice

Once a thriving, glamorous city, Venezuela’s capital is buckling under hyperinflation, crime and poverty By Tom Phillips, The Guardian — A portrait of Hugo Chávez and a Bolivarian battle cry greet visitors to the Boyacá viewpoint in the mountains north of Caracas. “It is our duty to find one thousand ways and more to give the people the life that they need!” But as Venezuela buckles, Chávez’s pledge sounds increasingly…

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