Tag Archives: WorldNews

Independence Day will expose Brexit as a ruse to free an imaginary nation | Fintan O’Toole

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Next Friday, Britain officially leaves the EU but it’s difficult to see who or what is being liberated. Perhaps an England without London?

We know what the week running up to the glorious day of Brexit is supposed to be like. A few nights before the original chosen date of 29 March 2019, Boris Johnson was “in conversation” with his old boss at the Telegraph, Charles Moore, at Methodist Central Hall in Westminster. Johnson was out of office then, and free to indulge himself without constraint.

He told the audience that this “was meant to be the week when church bells were rung, coins struck, stamps issued and bonfires lit to send beacons of freedom from hilltop to hilltop. This was the Friday when Charles Moore’s retainers were meant to be weaving through the moonlit lanes of Sussex, half blind with scrumpy, singing Brexit shanties at the tops of their voices and beating the hedgerows with staves.” Moore replied that Johnson was right, “but in fact I had already stood these good people down, since I could see what was coming”.

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Seven months detained: seven-year-old is longest-held child migrant in US

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Maddie Hernandez and her father, Emerson, fled crime in Guatemala. After months, her parents says she has changed

Emerson Hernandez and his daughter Maddie have withstood hunger and thirst.

They’ve been dumped in a threatening border city in Mexico, a foreign country with nowhere to shelter. And, for seven months, they’ve been locked up at what critics call a “baby jail”.

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‘Whitewashed’: how gentrification continues to erase LA’s bold murals

Occupiers the same globally. Tries to wipe indigenous people from history and culture. Ultimately, it will not work but will cause years of tension and reactions harmful to both communities.

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The artwork in the Highland Park area told the story of its history and culture – until newcomers decided to wipe it out

Kathy Gallegos remembers the first time she saw John “Zender” Estrada’s striking mural of an Aztec warrior flanked by two eagles. She was parking behind a music venue in Highland Park, a heavily Latino working-class neighborhood northeast of downtown Los Angeles, and couldn’t help noticing the bold imagery of a piece that Zender had painted in the wake of the 1992 riots to urge ordinary Angelenos to “resist violence with peace”.

“I remember thinking, that’s a really nice mural,” Gallegos recalled. “Next thing I knew, the place was bought and it was gone.”

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When judges don’t know the meaning of rape, there is little hope of justice | Sonia Sodha

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As we watch the Harvey Weinstein trial unfold, other horror stories emerge in our own courts

Harvey Weinstein is at last facing justice in a New York courtroom. As I hear in graphic detail the accounts of the women he allegedly raped and sexually assaulted, it’s hard to stop myself imagining what I would do if a 21-stone man suddenly reappeared naked and lunged at me after manipulating me to accompany him to his hotel room on false pretences. Scream? Fight back? Try to escape?

It’s impossible to tell unless you find yourself there. Our body’s response to acute danger is not rational: it releases a flood of hormones that trigger an automatic response over which the thinking part of our brain has little control. For decades, that response was understood as fight or flight. But that was a highly gendered understanding developed as a result of tests primarily done on men. (Women were considered too complicated as test subjects because of the hormone fluctuations associated with our menstrual cycles.)

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