China is lifting the ban on rhino horn and tiger bone: the government wants to permit their use in traditional Chinese medicine, even though they have no therapeutic value whatsoever. With a legal market, China is creating a huge opening for poached animal parts. This move could be a death sentence for the last rhinos.
Patricia Fox: nun attacks Duterte’s ‘reign of terror’ in Philippines upon return to Australia

Catholic nun calls on Australia to stand up to Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte
An Australian nun who angered the Philippine president by joining anti-government protests has criticised his “reign of terror” after being kicked out of the country.
Sister Patricia Fox, who arrived back in Australia on Sunday morning, said of Rodrigo Duterte’s violent crackdown on the drug trade: “The human rights abuses are just increasing and it’s a reign of terror. Of tyranny.”
In Miami, Cuban Americans have the power to push the state to the left

Cuban immigrants were drawn to the Republican party in the 80s, but their children and grandchildren are shifting the vote
Miami runs on Cuban cafecitos, Cuban sandwiches and “Cuban time” – a favorite excuse for being 45 minutes late. As the largest group of Latinxs in Florida and Miami, Cubans are credited with giving the city its cultural core.
A bit of Cuba can be heard in the Miami accent, tweaking a local’s tongue to round vowels and cut syllables. And Cubans are also heard through their politics, or so the cliche states: they will always push Miami, and Florida, to the right.
Peace on Earth

‘We share that pain’: Muslims form rings of peace at GTA synagogues in wake of U.S. shooting

In the wake of a deadly attack on a U.S. synagogue last week, people of faith from across the Greater Toronto Area gathered at Jewish places of worship throughout the city Saturday in an act of defiant solidarity.
Voting Rights | Martyrs For The Right To Vote
From about 1900 to 1965, most African Americans were not allowed to vote in the South. This was especially true in the Deep South: Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina.
White people in power used many methods to keep African Americans from voting. Some of these methods also prevented poor white people from voting.
Ways People Were Kept From Voting
1) Violence: Blacks who tried to vote were threatened, beaten, and killed. Their families were also harmed. Sometimes their homes were burned down. Often, they lost their jobs or were thrown off their farms.
Whites used violence to intimidate blacks and prevent them from even thinking about voting. Still, some blacks passed the requirements to vote and took the risk. Some whites used violence to punish those “uppity” people and show other blacks what would happen to them if they voted.
2) Literacy tests: Today almost all adults can read. One hundred years ago, however, many people – black and white – were illiterate. Most illiterate people were not allowed to vote. A few were allowed if they could understand what was read to them. White officials usually claimed that whites could understand what was read. They said blacks could not understand it, even if they could.
3) Property tests: In the South one hundred years ago, many states allowed only property owners to vote. Many blacks and whites had no property and could not vote.
4) Grandfather clause: People who could not read and owned no property were allowed to vote if their fathers or grandfathers had voted before 1867. Of course, practically no blacks could vote before 1867, so the grandfather clause worked only for whites.
5) All-white primary elections
6) Purges: From time to time, white officials purged the voting rolls. That means they took people’s names off the official lists of voters.
7) Former prisoners: People who had gone to prison were often not allowed to vote. Blacks were very often arrested on trumped-up charges or for minor offenses.
8) Poll taxes: In Southern states, people had to pay a tax to vote. The taxes were about $25 to $50 dollars in today’s money. Many people had extremely low incomes and could not afford this tax. This poll tax applied to all people who wanted to vote – black and white. There were ways for whites to get around other laws, but not around the poll tax. Many poor whites could not vote because of the poll tax.
Blasphemy agreement: Is Pakistan ruled by Islamists?
losers rule the state

Experts say that an agreement between the government and Islamists to bar a Christian woman recently acquitted in a blasphemy case from leaving the country shows that radical groups are more powerful than the state.
About | Right of the Right – This site – neo-nazies who make up false hate news daily
Welcome to Right of the Right. While the so-called “Alt-Right” is busy raising more questions, our goal is to help provide the answers you need. In today’s world of 24/7 fear-based media, most people are feeling overwhelmed, confused, and frustrated with all the “noise” masquerading as “news”. Our message is not the gloom and doom …
Source: About | Right of the Right
U.S. Law Enforcement Failed to See the Threat of White Nationalism. Now They Don’t Know How to Stop It. – The New York Times
In March 2018, a 20-year-old white evangelical Christian named Mark Anthony Conditt laid a series of homemade I.E.D.s around Austin, Tex., in largely minority communities. The bombs killed two African-Americans and injured at least four others over the course of several weeks, terrorizing the city, yet the local authorities preferred to describe Conditt, who committed suicide, as a “very challenged young man.” Also last spring, another white man, 28-year-old Benjamin Morrow, blew himself up in his apartment in Beaver Dam, Wis., while apparently constructing a bomb. Federal investigators said Morrow’s apartment doubled as a “homemade explosives laboratory.” There was a trove of white-supremacist literature in Morrow’s home, according to the F.B.I. But local cops, citing Morrow’s clean-cut demeanor and standout record as a quality-control manager at a local food-processing plant, made sure to note that just because he had this material didn’t mean he was a white supremacist. “He could have been an individual that was doing research,” the local police chief said.
On The Eve of Dona Nobis Pacem in the Blogosphere
On Sunday November 4th, bloggers and webmasters and status-keepers everywhere will lay their pens down on white paper and social pages to write peace. Bloggers will use keyboards, singers will sing songs, artists will draw and paint, some will dance and some will preach. All will tell a story. It’s what peace bloggers do.
Let’s brew a hot cup of tea and have a chat. Peace weekend has begun!
As tradition holds, here’s the story of The Doll Box as told on this blog many years ago. As was his usual custom, Papa visited one bright sunny morning and reminded me of the dusty old box. I expect him to direct me straightway into another tale come tomorrow morning. We’ll have to wait and see what transpires between my world and his.
This is the story of The Doll Box.
And for some reason on this chilly November night as I wait for another launch of peace globes, I can almost hear him speak and hover about, waiting right along with the rest of us. The dolls must be shared once again.
So Papa….I miss you. I love you. Speak.
The Doll Box
I planted the last Black-Eyed Susan in the clay pot on the deck, richly purple, and staring at me with an eye in the center of royalty’s colored fall beauty. I dug and rearranged and poured in fertilizer. Watered. Played in the dirt.
“Plant one more in the pot, Mimi. She’d like it that way.”
“They remind me of her,” I said out loud. “The dark ones she loved best. The Black-Eyed ones I don’t care for, but I plant them anyway because she loved them so. I think they look disheveled and untidy – if a flower can be that way – and as she could be in the morning times. Her hair a mess and a cigarette over coffee, frying bacon at 5am so that you’d have a great start to your day, wrinkled robe and a smelly kitchen. One bright spot of colorful charm – like my Black Eyed Susan – was you, Papa.”
I stopped planting and looked up.
I laughed.
He laughed.
I fixed my eyes upon the face of the man who held the key to my heart ever since the day I took my first breath. I put the trowel down, the dirt fell from my fingers and I found myself sitting in the fall sunlight, listening to leaves drop playfully from the trees that surrounded me. I watched them fall almost on command at his overgrown feet that were firmly planted in front of me.
Pansies could wait.
He roared a belly laugh I thought I’d never hear again this side of Heaven. It nearly rocked me off balance, causing me to drop the flat of pansies on the deck…..


Will you stay?”
I sat down again, wondering if I’d done something wrong. He sounds serious. Does he want to talk about the marbles? Yes, that must be it. The marbles. He wants to tell me how he made them. He’ll tell me and I’ll tell my readers and they’ll tell people and he’ll explain it all.
I waited.
And now they were both gone.
I just wanted to see him smile again.
“But why, Mimi…..why do you need so many?”
I sighed. Doesn’t he understand?
I stopped digging.
He sighed.
Had I disappointed him?
If there’s one thing about my Papa that was always the best thing, it was his deliberate ability to cut through my facade and get to the truth – usually without a word and never with a scold. Any serious conversation he made with me always came on the palpable presence of one who loved me unconditionally. I never doubted his intent for my good or his wish for my clear understanding. Laden with well-worn common sense wisdom, I soaked it up often, playing carefully at his painfully laced shoes which criss-crossed in front of me on the living room floor at the bottom of the green leather recliner he loved. And today, I felt much like that seven-year-old.
Papa had one more story to tell.
” Oh yes, Papa. I still have them. I keep them in the box for safekeeping. They are in perfect condition though the box is yellowed now and torn on the edge. I still see your address, your name, the paid postage stamp and the tape.”
He suddenly got a serious look.
“I remember the day you asked me for them. We were thumbing through a catalog and you squealed with delight. ‘One hundred dolls!! How could 100 dolls come in one box?’ you asked.”

I went inside to get the box. I’m writing this story at my usual perch at the table trying to recapture on paper what other-worldly thing has just happened in my pansy world. In my mind’s eye I am still there, on the porch with my Papa and we are planting pansies and the sun is hot and the leaves are falling. My pen is flowing and I don’t want to leave. We are having such a lovely day. All is right and he has chosen to visit me now. I don’t want to break the spell. I don’t want to open the box…but it is there in front of me on the table.
I picked it up, put my reading glasses on trying to make out the fine print. I reach for a magnifying glass to help but for some reason, I put it down. I couldn’t. I couldn’t look. I just couldn’t. If I do as he asked then my time with him will be over and I can’t stand the thought of that.
I picked it up again.
285 Market Street
Newark, N.J
What’s so special about this old box of dolls? They’re plastic and probably a few are missing. Pink. Flimsy. Tiny little things.
“NOW I know how they got so many dolls in one box. They don’t look like the picture in the magazine at all. They are very small and I think I might even break them.”
Back in the box. Back in the box. Always back in the box.”
This was not going to be easy. What does he want me to see? There won’t be an obvious blue world-globe-like-marble sitting there this time. We’re talking about prissy dolls for a prissy girl who turned into a prissy woman who has no idea why she’s crying at her keyboard in the middle of this unfinished story.
Until……
I decided to open the box.

Tricky Dogs. They were magnets. One white dog. One black dog. When you start to play with them they always gravitate toward each other. After forty years the magnet is still strong. I turned them over in my hands and read the back of the box.
Directions: Place one Tricky Dog on a surface (polished wood or glass) Push the other Tricky Dog up to it from behind, or sweep the second Tricky Dog in a half circle around the first one. Watch them twirl!
My tabletop is made of glass. I took the black one and put him up front, made a sneak attack by the white one and voila! the black dog began to spin in a circle – in an energetic frenzy – and aligned itself with the other one smashing into him, wagging their magnetic tails and gravitating together: smooching, the way only magnets can. When I was little, most often I played with the dolls, but Papa……he would gently nudge me to lay aside the Barbie doll brain and chase my dream in another direction. He was like that. Always dropping life lessons in my lap, at inopportune times like today, when I am planting pansies.
Without fail.
Is that right?”
Now my grownup mind understands such things. I know there really is no trick. I know they’re just heavily plastered metal toys with magnet skates on the bottom – but I’m not a grownup today. I’m a seven-year-old on the floor with my Papa and we are playing from the box he mail ordered for me in the 1960s. And I am laughing. The dogs – and the dolls – and Papa….still make me laugh.
I sighed. This observation is just too obvious. Magnets. Globes. Spinning earth balls. Earth Science. I get it! I turned to him with a knowing look and said,
Hmmm…It’s been forty years and I still haven’t played with all those dolls.
No time like the present.
I remembered how his hands were so large and gnarled, fumbling with the small creatures as they fell in his lap. I would laugh and we would start the dance again. The Buddha man would twirl with the Peruvian woman while the little boy with the ball – perhaps it was a jack-in-the-box – sat quietly in the middle of it all. They all got along in my peaceful box universe.
The dolls in my box lived in one world, dancing and spinning around.
I looked up from the land of pink twirling peace and saw a tear roll down his cheek to land on his steel-toed shoes. I could tell he longed for our pink doll world of friendly global dancers and I so wanted to never see him sad again.
“My life went sailing by,” he said, “like a thin silk pansy leaf falling on the wisp of a breeze. I blinked and it was gone. Not much older than you are today. So much left to do. So much left to say. Many more flowers to plant. Stars to catch. More dances to dance. My work was not done…But you knew that, didn’t you, Mimi?”
I did?“All I know, Papa, is that I wasn’t there that day. I canceled our outing and you left without me. You and grandmother went to the doctor and after that day I never saw you again. Not ever again. I was angry because you did not say goodbye. I was angry that I did not say goodbye. And I longed to tell you all my tales and all my stories through the years. I’ve waited for you to tell me what to do.”
I put the dolls down and looked at his wisdom worn face, anxious for the answers I needed. But he had a way of making me figure it out for myself. This day was no different.
“You do not need me to tell you what to do. I am proud of you and you are doing just fine. Just remember one thing: It takes all the dolls in the box to make the world a beautiful place, Mimi. They can’t hear what the other has to say unless you introduce them to one another and set their feet to dancing.
Take them out of the box.


*********
The Doll Box was written for BlogBlast For Peace in November 2007. It is now time for Dona Nobis Pacem in the Blogosphere 2018. I never know what I’m going to write until the last minute. Some strange sort of sensation hits me about the stroke of midnight on the eve of each launch.That’s when Papa shows up, nudges my memory and honors me with a story.
Maybe I’d better get some sleep.
It could be a long – very long – night.
Reason #4 to Blog4Peace: The magic of dolls. And love. And dolls. And love.
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