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Germany returns remains from 1904-1908 genocide to Namibia.

Germany Returns Remains Of Namibian Genocide Victims

By News & Current Affairs

A Namibian delegation has received the remains of Indigenous Herero and Nama peoples killed during the Namibia Genocide. By teleSUR — A Namibian Government delegation, in Berlin, has received bones and skulls of Indigenous Namibian peoples killed during the “first genocide in the 20th century,” on Wednesday. The bones were in Germany for “scientific” experiments in order to prove the racial superiority of white Europeans during the German colonial and…

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In December 2016, Bobby Lewis, then 12, was detained and questioned by a Ville Platte detective without a parent or lawyer initially present.

How the Trump Administration Went Easy on Small-Town Police Abuses

By News & Current Affairs

The Obama Justice Department thought Ville Platte, Louisiana — where officers jail witnesses to crimes — could become a model of how to erase policing abuses that plague small towns across the nation. Jeff Sessions decided not to bother. By Ian MacDougall, ProPublica — On a chilly morning in December 2016, 12-year-old Bobby Lewis found himself sitting in a little room at the police station in Ville Platte, a town…

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Inmates in prison

Prisons Are Already Retaliating Against Inmates Protesting ‘Modern Slavery’

By News & Current Affairs

On Tuesday, inmates across the country launched a strike to protest labor conditions in prisons. Only three days into the strike, some inmates have experienced retaliation. By Tarpley Hitt, Daily Beast — Inmates are already experiencing retaliation for alleged participation in the nation-wide prison strike that launched August 21, representatives from the prison labor advocacy group Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee (IWOC) told The Daily Beast. The strike, organized by a…

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Ben Jacques walks among the unmarked graves of slaves at the Old Burying Ground in Stoneham.

A reckoning over the North’s role in slavery

By News & Current Affairs

By Zipporah Osei, Boston Globe — The Old Burying Ground in Stoneham is one of those classic New England cemeteries with markers honoring the memory of Colonial settlers as well as activists in the abolition movement. For much of the year, sections of the nearly 300-year-old cemetery are closed to the public. But every so often, the Stoneham Historical Commission opens up the space for guided tours of the tombstones…

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Haitian-Americans and local residents gathered for the celebration that unveiled Jean-Jacques Dessalines Boulevard, in the Flatbush neighborhood of Brooklyn.

Street Is Renamed in Flatbush, to Joy and Controversy

By News & Current Affairs

By Jeffery C. Mays, The New York Times — Stephania Casimir, a first-generation Haitian-American, remembers her parents talking about Jean-Jacques Dessalines, a former slave who became one of Haiti’s founding fathers, but not all of the details. They came flooding back on Saturday on a street corner in the Flatbush neighborhood of Brooklyn as speakers explained why a stretch of Rogers Avenue was being co-named in honor of Dessalines, who declared…

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Ayanna Pressley

Is This the Next Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez?

By News & Current Affairs

Ayanna Pressley says the Democratic Party needs new blood. She’ll have to take down a popular incumbent to make her case. By Joanna Weiss, Politico Magazine — A few weeks before Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez won her New York congressional primary, Boston City Councilor Ayanna Pressley spoke to a roomful of young Democrats at the Bell-in-Hand, a Boston tavern that dates back to 1795. She was explaining why she should unseat a…

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Peter Cvjetanovic along with neo-Nazis and white supremacists at the University of Virginia campus in Charlottesville, Virginia on \ in Charlottesville, Va. Photograph: Anadolu Agency/Getty Images

A year after Charlottesville, white nationalist views creep into politics

By News & Current Affairs

The far right movement may seem all but dead, but a crop of political candidates are introducing ideas into the mainstream. Vegas Tenold, The Guardian — No one would argue that the last year hasn’t been a rough one for the white nationalist movement in America. In fact, a not insignificant number of column inches has been written about how the movement is all but dead. The leader of the…

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