No image available
/ 8 November 2005
Nobody knows how long Deborah ”Bodie” Fisher (85) had been trapped in her home with the corpse of her younger sister, Delia ”Sis” Holloway (82), upstairs and 60cm of flood water downstairs when help finally floated by on September 2. We’ll return for your sister’s body, the rescuers said. Two months on she was still in the house.
The American trade union movement was poised for its greatest rift in almost 70 years recently, as unions representing a third of the membership announced plans to set up a rival organisation. In a move that could have serious implications for the Democratic party’s electoral machine, four of the country’s largest unions said they would boycott the annual convention of the AFL-CIO.
The conviction of Edgar Ray Killen for the manslaughter of three civil rights workers has a symbolic significance that goes beyond the families of those who died 41 years ago. At stake was not just how Killen would spend his fading years, but whether Mississippi could, and should, address its segregationist past.
This is a tale of one war, two anniversaries, three different demonstrations — and inconsistencies, contradictions and civilian deaths that are too numerous to count. On April 18 2003, tens of thousands of Sunni and Shia protesters took to the streets of Baghdad to call for the Americans to leave Iraq. Two years later, the United States is still there, justifying occupation by embracing the irrelevant and ignoring the inconvenient.
On the neo-Nazi websites where the teenage loner aired his admiration for Adolf Hitler’s notions of ethnic purity, he was known as Todesengel — German for Angel of Death. Late on Monday, in a secluded Indian reservation in northern Minnesota, he played out those dark fantasies. Jeff Weise (16) shot dead his grandfather, five teenagers, a teacher and two other adults before turning the gun on himself.
The flat plains and big skies of Kansas serve as a reassuring backdrop to America’s emotional landscape. In the national mythology, Kansas (the size of Austria; the population of Latvia) is not just any state but a cultural comfort blanket. Like motherhood, apple pie, little league and homecoming, it represents all that is steady, regular, wholesome and decent in America. Look a little deeper, and this facade is shattered by reality.
In mid-January, British Chancellor Gordon Brown went to Africa in a bid to relieve the locals of the burden of their debt and Britain from the burden of its history. ”The days of Britain having to apologise for its colonial history are over,” he argued. But the truth is that the atrocities committed in Camp Breadbasket were as consistent with Britain’s colonial tradition and invasion of Iraq as Brown’s statements are with our post-colonial amnesia.
No image available
/ 10 February 2005
Will Bob Marley find true and lasting peace on the African continent, his spiritual destination? Gary Younge reports from New York.
Gary Younge tracks down Zane, the bestselling author of black erotica in the United States who has hitherto kept her identity a secret. To call her work porn, says Zane, would be inaccurate: ”Porn is just straight sex. My books have a story. If you took the sex out of it, you’d still have the story.”
No image available
/ 8 December 2004
A suburban American school board found itself in court last month after it tried to placate Christian fundamentalist parents by placing a sticker on its science textbooks saying evolution is “a theory, not a fact”. Atlanta’s Cobb County school board, the second-largest board in Georgia, added the sticker two years ago after a 2300-strong petition attacked the presentation of “Darwinism unchallenged”.