No sleep for Congolese mothers trying to save their girls from rape

The mothers of Kavumu hardly sleep. But on rainy nights, they don’t even try. The rain pounds on their tin roofs so noisily that they worry they won’t hear rapists breaking in to steal their daughters. So they sit up all night, just watching their front doors. Since 2013, 49 young children, one only 18 months old, have been abducted …

Leid Stories – 02.11.16

In Like Flint: Hillary Clinton Sees Victory in Lead Poisoning

Congressional Black Caucus PAC Adds Insult to Injury with Its Endorsement

Abayomi Azikiwe, editor in chief of Pan-African News Wire and a Detroit organizer for the Workers World Party, has been coursing us through the process of Detroit’s forced bankruptcy and its devastating social, economic and political impact, including it ripple effects throughout the state and across the country. He discusses Hillary Clinton’s foray into Flint, Mich., trolling for votes from people whose water system has left untold thousands poisoned by lead.

The Congressional Black Caucus Political Action Committee today endorsed Clinton’s candidacy for president. Leid Stories explains why (a) this is no surprise and (b) black communities must reassess their political leadership and options.

John McMurtry – The Moral Decoding of 9-11: Beyond the U.S. Criminal State, The Grand Plan for a New World Order

I was sceptical of the 9-11 event from the first time I saw it on television. It was on every major network within minutes. All the guilty partieswere declared before any evidence was shown.The first questions of any criminal investigation were erased.  Who had the most compelling motives for the event? Who had the means to turn two central iconic …

PETER ERLINDER – The truth behind the high cost of hepatitis C

Last week’s commentary “Who gets hepatitis C drugs? Who pays?” (Aug. 10) by North Memorial Health Care CEO Kevin Croston and Medica vice president Robert Longendyke responded to a first-in-the-nation class-action lawsuit seeking the new U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) “breakthrough” cure for life-threatening hepatitis C infections. Brought by 1,500 Minnesota Department of Corrections prisoners, the lawsuit was first …

Feds Awarded Colorado Charter Schools $46 Million Because of “Hiring and Firing” Rules By Jonas Persson

Between 2010 and 2015, the U.S. Department of Education (ED) awarded Colorado $46 million under the Charter Schools Program. Part of the reason the state landed the competitive grant was that charters are free to hire unlicensed teachers and then fire them at will, documents reviewed by CMD show. Designed to create and expand “high-quality” charter schools, the quarter-billion-dollar-a-year program …

The Rise and Fall of the Human Terrain System by ROBERTO J. GONZÁLEZ

Pentagon distributed much of the funding to two large defense firms that became the HTS’s principal contractors: BAE Systems and CGI Federal. HTS supporters frequently claimed that the program would increase cultural understanding between US forces and Iraqis and Afghans–and therefore reduce American and civilian casualties. The program’s leaders insisted that embedded social scientists were delivering sociocultural knowledge to commanders, …