A review of Peter d’Errico’s Federal Anti-Indian Law: The Legal Entrapment of Indigenous Peoples, an indictment of a legal system with the unflinching goal of stealing as much land as possible.
Despite its confusion and contradictions, federal Indian law — in d’Errico’s terms, “anti-Indian law” — has long had an unchanging purpose. By destroying Native individuals and communities, it has helped the rich and powerful scoop up vast lands and resources. This landgrab is accomplished in part because what’s typically called federal Indian law is hardly a systematic set of statutes. Instead, according to d’Errico, it’s what mid-20th-century U.S. Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter called “a vast hodge-podge” and covers all areas of Indigenous life and activity with a massive array of U.S. court decisions, laws, executive orders and agency regulations that have piled up over the years in a disorderly and improvised fashion.
Kent McNeil, a professor emeritus at Osgoode Hall Law School at York University in Toronto, calls d’Errico’s Federal Anti-Indian Law “a frontal attack on the whole field of American law pertaining to Indigenous peoples.” He lauds it as a “must-read” for those wanting to understand what motivates any claims that the dispossession of Indigenous people has been legally sound. Similarly, Robert Maxim, a senior research associate at the Brookings Institution and a Mashpee Wampanoag tribal citizen, hails the book as “important and enlightening for all people, Indigenous and non-Indigenous alike.”
Throughout the chaos, the application of U.S. law to Indigenous people has had an unflinching goal: theft.
The Digital Home for Duke University Professor and Left of Black host Mark Anthony Neal
On this day, whenever I walk out of the house, my grandmother reminds me that my ancestors are walking with me.
Toute moun, vin al regle afè Raygine. Ale avèk Raygine/Everyone, go and handle Raygine’s affairs. Go with Raygine.
She always recites these words as I unlock the door to go outside. I imagine my most immediate ancestors forming a protective phalanx around me, accompanied by many ancestors whose names I will never know. They’ve been leaving the house with me for as long as I can remember. I imagine that they walk with me in my journey through graduate school even though I am far from my home in Flatbush, Haiti.
Every time I left the house my grandmother let me know that I was well equipped to overcome any battle that I might encounter outside of our home. She was reminding me that I was her little warrior, the descendant of warriors, and that my ancestors were always around, intervening when necessary. They would help me in all of my battles. She armed me with a sense of connectedness and continuity, locating me within a past that is ever-present. She was making sure that I was familiar with Zansèt yo/The Ancestors, making sure that I would never disremember them.
Haitian culture is a culture of remembering. Haitians celebrate their Independence Day on the first of January and the Day of the Ancestors on the second. After spending a day celebrating its bright and promising future, a newly independent Haiti devoted a day to remembering the sacrifices of foremothers and forefathers. In my family, we continue to do the same. The entire first day of the January is infused with a sense of triumph and victory and the smell of soup Joumou.
The feeling of pride continues into the second day but is tempered by the call to think of those who have come before us, who have sacrificed so that we could have this present moment. For Haitians the idea of revolution, of progress, of change is intricately intertwined with the past and the ancestors. All endeavors that we undertake occur under the gaze and with the aid of our ancestors. The past is always present. This is apparent in the Desalinyèn, Haiti’s national anthem.
Every January 1st, parts of the Haitian national anthem envelop my parents’ home, weaving in and out of boisterous telephone conversations, seasoning our pumpkin soup, and blaring from the kitchen radio that picks up Haitian radio stations.
Pou Ayiti ak pou Zansèt yo
For Haiti and for the Ancestors
Fo nou kapab vanyan gason
We must be able, valiant men
Moun pa fèt pou ret avèk moun
Men are not born to serve other men
Se sa-k fè tout Manman ak tout Papa
That is why all mothers and all fathers
Dwe pou voye Timoun lekòl
Must send their child to school
Pou yo aprann, pou yo konnen
so they learn, so they know
Sa Tousen, Desalin, Kristòf, Petyon
What Toussaint, Dessalines, Christophe, Petion
Te fè pou wet Ayisyen anba bòt blan.
Did to remove Haitians from under white people’s boots.
The anthem repeatedly invokes the ancestors, reminding Haitians to honor and revere them. However, this stanza speaks specifically to the importance of teaching children about the deeds of those who came before them. Specifically, Haitian parents are charged with making sure that their children get an education that will teach them about what their ancestors have done for them. My parents have been relentless about making sure that I know whom I have been, who I am and who I will become.
Through stories, poetry, songs, prayer and artifacts, my family created a syllabus for remembering. As a child my mother fed me stories about the importance of African indigenous knowledge, in the case of Bwa Kayiman, to the Haitian revolution, and poems that placed Haiti’s achievements against the backdrop of Africa’s many firsts. One of the songs that my grandmother taught me had this repeating refrain, which referenced both a hatred of the French and a removal of the color white from the French flag to create the Haitian flag: Desalin pa vle wè blan/ Desalin wants nothing to do with the white man.
However, for my grandmother it wasn’t just about songs, stories and poems. My grandmother lives in a constant state of remembrance. The words that she would recite as I left the house, the prayers that she made to her mother and father to protect our family, and the dreams that she interprets for us at the kitchen table or over the phone are glimpses of the constant state of being which allows her to live simultaneously in the past as well as the present. These practices were lessons in survival and strength. There was an understanding that I needed these lessons to thrive, to fully understand my place in a world that would relegate me to the margins.
I recognize these practices to be a part of a diasporic indigenous ontology, particular to Haitians who have a penchant for speaking about Dessalines and Toussaint as if they just saw the two men on the platform at the 2/5 Church Avenue train station. My sister and I do this too. We talk about “our man Dessalines” and how “that cat was really not trying to hear anything about slavery”. It is a way of being, particular and native to peoples who live and are at home in the diaspora, people for whom the diaspora has become a place of permanent residence.
This way of being, which is apparent in many facets of Haitian culture, is remarkable considering the fact that the victories of the first black republic are something that history likes to forget. This constant remembering is an act of resistance, a way of ensuring the longevity of a people and their strength in world that wishes that they did not exist, a world that refuses to see them, a world bent on diminishing and distorting their history.
Today I remember Edmé Azaël Henriette Jeanty Delpé Jeanty, Lonpré Jeanty, Lucrèsse Azaël, Marcel Azaël, Antonine Azaël, Mona Brifil, Marie-Marthe Azaël, Marco Jeanty, Ulrique Jeanty, Bosier Jeanty, Hypolite Jeanty, Jiocher Jeanty, Richard Jeanty, Loulouse Jeanty, Inez Jeanty, Diaquoi ainé (present at the signing of the Act of Independence), Zabelite Théophile, Paulimuce S. DiAquoi, Felicia Dubois, Feaux Théophile, Jacqueline Théophile, Bathelmy Théophile, Malgrey Théophile, Cill Théophile, Coléstine Théophile.
Toute moun, vin al regle afè Raygine. Ale avèk Raygine/Everyone, go and handle Raygine’s affairs. Go with Raygine.
#ShamelesslyHaitian
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Raygine C. DiAquoi Assistant Professor of Sociomedical Sciences Assistant Dean, Office of Diversity, Culture, and Inclusion at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health.
The U.S. is using the pandemic as a pretext to further shut down asylum, while spreading the virus through deportations.
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COVID-19 Weaponized to Shut Down Borders
The Trump administration began pushing its agenda of shutting down asylum in the U.S. right out of the gate, and COVID-19 has now provided a new justification. Purportedly to protect public health, the government has essentially shut down asylum at the southern border with Mexico while the U.S. spreads the virus through deportations. Asylum deals with Central American nations are currently in limbo, but the administration could begin sending people to a third country, Honduras, at any time.
In 2019, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security signed a series of bilateral agreements with security officials in Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, including an asylum cooperative agreement (ACA) with each country. The agreements permit the U.S. to send asylum seekers of other nationalities to precisely those Central American countries that hundreds of thousands of citizens have been fleeing, and forcing them to seek asylum there instead or return home.
More than 900 Hondurans and Salvadorans were sent to Guatemala under the agreement between November 2019 and mid-March 2020, when implementation was suspended due to factors related to COVID-19, and the president of El Salvador said months prior that his country did not yet have any capacity to receive people under the third country deal. But implementation of the U.S.-Honduras asylum cooperative agreement could potentially begin at any time, following its publication on May 1 in the U.S. Federal Register.
“There are some reasons why the Trump administration might roll out some other ACAs like the Honduran ACA,” said Yael Schacher, senior U.S. advocate at Refugees International, a humanitarian and advocacy group based in Washington, D.C.
Together with Human Rights Watch, Refugees International just released a new report, “Deportation with a Layover,” that examines the U.S.-Guatemala asylum cooperative agreement. The May 19 report details rights violations and lack of protection at every step of the way, from U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) custody to Guatemala. People are effectively compelled to abandon their asylum claims, according to the report, which notes only 20 of the 939 Hondurans and Salvadorans sent to Guatemala under the deal applied for asylum in Guatemala.
Our genetic make-up is the result of history. Historical events that influenced the patterns of migration and mating among our ancestors are reflected in our DNA — in our genetic relationships with each other and in our genetic risks for disease. This means that, to understand how genes affect our biology, geneticists often find it important to tease out how historical drivers of demographic change shaped present-day genetics.
Understanding the connection between history and DNA is especially important for African Americans, because slavery and discrimination caused profound and relatively rapid demographic change. A new study now offers a very broad look at African-American genetic history and shows how the DNA of present-day African Americans reflects their troubled history.
Slavery and its aftermath had a direct impact on two critical demographic factors that are especially important in genetics: migration and sex. The trans-Atlantic slave trade was a forced migration that carried nearly 400,000 Africans over to the colonies and, later, the United States. Once in North America, African slaves and their descendants mixed with whites of European ancestry, usually because enslaved black women were raped and exploited by white men. And, more recently, what’s known as the Great Migration dramatically re-shaped African-American demographics in the 20th century. Between 1915 and 1970, six million blacks left the South and settled in the Northern, Midwestern, and Western states, in hope of finding opportunities for a better life.
How this turbulent history shaped the genes of African Americans has been unclear because, until recently, most genetic studies have focused either on populations from different geographical regions around the world, or on Americans with European ancestry. Fortunately, African Americans are now being included in these studies on a larger scale, and several long-term studies have collected genetic data on thousands of African Americans, representing all areas of the country. In a recently published study, a team of researchers at McGill University in Montreal turned to this data to take a broad look at the genetic history of African Americans.
AFRICAN AMERICANS WITH A HIGHER FRACTION OF EUROPEAN ANCESTRY, WHO OFTEN HAVE LIGHTER SKIN, HAD BETTER SOCIAL OPPORTUNITIES AND WERE THUS IN A BETTER POSITION TO MIGRATE TO NORTHERN AND WESTERN STATES.
The researchers focused on nearly 4,000 African Americans who participated in two important studies, both sponsored by the National Institutes of Health. The Health and Retirement Study consists of older volunteers sampled from urban and rural areas across the U.S., while the Southern Community Cohort Study focuses on African Americans in the South, particularly areas that have a disproportionately high burden of disease. Together, these two studies are among the largest sources of genetic data on African Americans. Importantly, they represent a geographically broad sampling of the African-American population, which is critical for outlining the patterns of genetic history.
The researchers first looked at what fraction of African Americans’ genetic ancestry could be traced back to Africa. Not surprisingly, the data shows that, for most African Americans, the majority of their DNA comes from African ancestors. The results also show that essentially all African Americans have some European ancestry ancestry as well. The genetic mix of African and European DNA, however, follows a striking geographical trend: African Americans living in Southern states have more African DNA (83 percent) than those living in other areas of the country (80 percent). Conversely, African Americans outside the South have a larger fraction of European DNA. Even within the South, this trend holds: Blacks in Florida and South Carolina have more African DNA than those living in Kentucky and Virginia.
One explanation for this geographical bias could be that interracial marriages have been less frequent in Southern states. But this explanation appears to be wrong. The McGill researchers found that most of the European DNA among blacks today probably entered the African-American gene pool long before the Civil War, when the vast majority of blacks in the U.S. were slaves living in the South. The genetic patterns observed by the researchers suggest that, for at least a century before the Civil War, there was ongoing admixture between blacks and whites. After slavery ended, this interracial mixing dropped off steeply.
The implication of these findings won’t be surprising to anyone: Widespread sexual exploitation of slaves before the Civil War strongly influenced the genetic make-up of essentially all African Americans alive today.
But this poses a puzzle: If African Americans can trace most of their European ancestry to an era when America’s black population was overwhelmingly confined to the South, why is it that African Americans now living outside the South have more European DNA?
The researchers propose an interesting answer. They argue that the Great Migration of African Americans out of the South was genetically biased: African Americans with a higher fraction of European ancestry, who often have lighter skin, had better social opportunities and were thus in a better position to migrate to northern and Western states. Though it will take further evidence to show this definitively, the McGill researchers’ results imply that, even after the end of slavery, discrimination that varied with shades of skin color continued to influence the genetic history of African Americans.
Do these genetic findings matter to anyone other than historians and genealogists? The answers is yes — studies of genetic history like this one are important because they help explain why blacks and whites often have different genetic risk factors for the same diseases. African Americans are disproportionately affected by many common diseases, and while much of this is due to poverty and limited access to good health care, genetics plays a role as well. If African Americans are to fully benefit from modern health care, where diagnoses and treatments are increasingly tailored to a patient’s DNA, it is critical that we understand African Americans’ genetic history, and how it contributes to their health today. In other words, we need to understand not just the cultural and economic legacies of slavery and discrimination, but the genetic legacy as well.
Since January 17, 1961, no one has been held accountable for the brutal murder of Congo’s independence leader and first prime minister Patrice Lumumba who was shot dead with two of his ministers, Joseph Okito and Maurice Mpolo.
However, all fingers point to multinational perpetrators who sanctioned the elimination of one of Africa’s bravest politicians and independence heroes who stood his ground against colonizers.
He led the Democratic Republic of Congo to independence on June 30, 1960, after the country was passed on from King Leopold II, who took control of it as his private property in the 1880s, to Belgium in 1908 as a colony.
Lumumba was inspired by the independence movement of Africa after attending the All-African Peoples’ Conference in Ghana in 1958. This spurred him on to organise nationalist rallies in his country resulting in deadly protests that got him arrested and later released to negotiate Congo’s independence.
Independence came with lots of problems including a political divide and an unapologetic Belgium led by King Baudouin who minced no words during the independence declaration while praising his predecessor, the brutish King Leopold II.
“Don’t compromise the future with hasty reforms, and don’t replace the structures that Belgium hands over to you until you are sure you can do better. Don’t be afraid to come to us. We will remain by your side and give you advice,” he said.
An outraged Lumumba rather gave a damning speech highlighting “humiliating slavery, which was imposed upon us by force.” This heightened Belgium’s disinterest in Lumumba whose government was already being opposed by his political rival and president Joseph Kasavubu.
Only three months into the new and independent Congo, soldiers mutinied against Belgian commanders who refused to leave and some regions, including the mineral-rich Katanga and South Kasai, rebelled against the central government and seceded with the backing of Belgian troops who were sent to protect their interests.
The Congolese government called for the United Nation’s help and a resolution was passed by the Security Council calling on Belgium to withdraw its troops. UN peacekeepers were sent into the Congo to restore order and “use force in the last resort” to secure the country’s territories.
However, Belgium did not leave and the UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld failed to provide the Congolese government with military assistance as demanded by Lumumba and sanctioned by the Security Council. He also ignored the prime minister’s appeal to send troops to Katanga but rather chose to negotiate with secession leader Moise Tshombe.
Hammarskjöld died in a plane crash on his way to meet Tshombe in September 1961, winning him a posthumously Nobel peace prize. Meanwhile, the country was in turmoil and Lumumba got no help from the West and the United Nations. He called on Russia and the Soviet Union sent weapons and “technical advisors” which incensed the United States.
The U.S. was a strong ally of Belgium and had a stake in Congo’s uranium. It is suspected to have planned an assassination as disclosed by a source in the book, Death in the Congo, written by Emmanuel Gerard and published in 2015.
U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower was reported to have given the order without any discussion. Lawrence Devlin, CIA station chief in Congo at the time, told the BBC in 2000 that a CIA plan to lace Lumumba’s toothpaste with poison was never carried out.
By September, the Congolese President Kasavubu dismissed Lumumba as Prime Minister after receiving a telegram from Belgian Prime Minister Gaston Eyskens. Lumumba also declared Kasavubu deposed. This ushered in the takeover by army chief Colonel Mobutu Sese Seko who placed Lumumba under house arrest and guarded by his troops and the United Nations troops.
Lumumba escaped in late November with his wife and baby son hidden in the back of a car leaving his residence. They headed towards the east where he had loyal followers in Kisangani (then Stanleyville). He engaged villagers on his way and on the evening of December 2 as they waited for a ferry to cross the Sankuru River, Mobutu’s forces appeared.
Mobutu ordered his detention at a military prison at Thysville, a hundred miles from Léopoldville. For six weeks, Lumumba was kept in cells and that’s where he wrote letters to the United Nations for help and to his wife to calm her nerves.
While Lumumba’s speeches from prison were creating confusion, Belgian Minister of African Affairs Harold d’Aspremont Lynden was putting pressure on the government to move him from Thysville where he could be freed by his supporters.
Lynden later insisted on Lumumba being transferred to Katanga despite a discussion by the Belgian parliament against the decision that will result in his death, cites Belgian sociologist and historian, Ludo De Witte, who made public the gory details of Lumumba’s death in a book published in Dutch in 1999.
Lumumba and his two former ministers were flown to Katanga on January 17 while being beaten so badly that the pilot warned the violence was threatening the flight, says De Witte.
They arrived at the Elizabethville (now Lubumbashi) airport and taken into custody by Katangese police and military under the supervision of Belgian forces. They were driven to a colonial villa owned by a wealthy Belgian, Villa Brouwe, and the beatings continued by both the Congolese and Belgian forces.
LUMUMBA…FILE TO GO WITH STORY SLUGGED BELGIUM CONGO LUMUMBA– Hands tied behind his back, deposed Congo ex-premier Patrice Lumumba (center) leaves a plane at Leopoldville airport, Dec. 2, 1960, under guard of Congolese soldiers loyal to Col. Joseph Mobutu. European Parliament opened an investigation Tuesday May 2, 2000 into possible government involvement in the 1961 killing of Lumumba, whose death shocked the world during the months following Congolese independence from Belgium. (AP-Photo/File)
By that evening, they were semi-conscious and had been visited by Katangese cabinet ministers and President Tshombe himself. Later around 10, a decision was taken on their fate and they were dragged from Villa Brouwe into a nearby bush where a firing squad awaited them.
The execution was commanded by Belgian Captain Julien Gat and Belgian Police Commissioner Frans Verschurre, who had overall command, discloses De Witte in his book based on documents he discovered in the Belgian archives. They were shot separately by a big tree as President Tshombe and two of his cabinet ministers looked on. The bodies were quickly thrown into shallow graves.
To conceal their crimes the next morning of January 18, the Interior Minister Godfried Munongo called a senior Belgian policeman, Gerard Soete, to his office and ordered that the bodies disappeared.
“You destroy them, you make them disappear. How you do it, it doesn’t interest me. All I want is that it happens that they disappear. Once it is done nobody will talk about it. Finished,” Soete recalled Munongo’s orders.
Soete said he and another helper exhumed the corpses and “hacked them in pieces and put them into the acid. As far as our acid because we had two bottles like that of acid, big bottles, but we hadn’t got enough so we burned what we could in those bottles. For the rest I know that my helper made a fire and put them in and we destroyed everything.
“We were there two days. We did things an animal wouldn’t do. And that’s why we were drunk, stone drunk. We couldn’t do things like that. Cut your own, your own – no, no, no. Nobody could say now, today, it’s there, it happened. That’s impossible, you couldn’t,” Soete was quoted in a BBC documentary, Who Killed Lumumba?, which aired in 2000 based on accounts from De Witte’s book published in English in June 2001.
Just as planned, Lumumba’s death was announced a month later on February 13, 1961. Interior Minister Munongo announced that the three prisoners killed their guards and escaped in a getaway car before they were recognized by villagers, who beat them to death.
The truth was hidden despite international protests at Belgian embassies nationwide until 1999 when Ludo De Witte’s book titled, The Assassination of Lumumba, presented new evidence taken from documents long hidden in official archives and interviews of surviving witnesses.
The Belgian Parliament established a commission of enquiry three months after the book was published to determine the circumstances of the assassination of Patrice Lumumba and if the Belgian government was involved.
The report was presented after 18 months of investigation in 2002 and then published as a book in 2004 for the public. It concluded that Belgium had a moral responsibility in the assassination of Lumumba and that it “acted under pressure from the Belgian public, which had heard for days about violence against Belgian citizens in Congo.”
It said there were plans to kill Lumumba and the Belgian government showed little respect for the sovereign status of the Congolese government. The commission confirmed that secret funds (about $8 million today) were used to finance the policy against the Lumumba government by the Ministry of African Affairs, reports the Brussels Times.
It, however, stated that execution was carried out by Kantangese authorities in the presence of the Belgian officials and there was no evidence to prove that Belgium was part of the decision-making to kill Lumumba.
The Belgian government admitted to having had “undeniable responsibility in the events that led to Lumumba’s death” but did not take full responsibility and issued a public pardon of the Belgians involved in the assassination of Lumumba.
The foreign minister at the time, Louis Michel, said “The government feels it should extend to the family of Patrice Lumumba … and to the Congolese people, its profound and sincere regrets and its apologies for the pain inflicted upon them.”
This was accepted by Lumumba’s son, Francois Lumumba, who later filed court cases against Belgium for hiding its role in the assassination of his father.
In January 2016, it was reported that a tooth of Lumumba was confiscated in the former home of police officer Gerard Soete who died in June 2000 during the parliamentary enquiry.
In his 1978 novel, the Belgian who helped dissolve Lumumba’s body in acid described the taking of two teeth, two fingers and bullets from the body, reports Brussels Times. He later declared that he had thrown them into the sea.
Cuban government promotes program against racism and discrimination
According to Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel, there are still “some vestiges, which are not part of policies in our society, but in the culture of a group of persons.”
The Cuban government has created a program against racism and racial discrimination, a problem that continues latent in the country’s society, where it generates complaints, criticisms and insistent calls for its eradication.
This was one of the issues addressed during the most recent meeting of the Council of Ministers―headed by President Miguel Díaz-Canel―which state media reported on this Friday.
Díaz-Canel said that the Cuban Revolution “possibly has been the social and the political process that has contributed the most to eliminating racial discrimination,” but acknowledged that there are still “some vestiges, which are not part of policies in our society, but in the culture of a group of persons.”
As an example, he mentioned the manifestations of racism that are perceived in jokes, in certain attitudes at the social level and in some convocations for positions in private businesses that “specify skin color.”
The new program aims to “combat and eliminate the vestiges of racism, racial prejudice and racial discrimination that remain in Cuba,” explained Deputy Minister of Culture Fernando Rojas.
The deputy minister considered that the dismantling of racial discrimination began since the coming to power of the Cuban revolution in 1959 with advances that he described as “gigantic, solid and unquestionable,” but admitted that “it has been difficult to reverse in just 60 years four centuries of inequality.”
The Cuban program against racism will include “the fight against regionalism and discrimination based on ethnic and national origin,” manifestations that are also associated with that problem.
He said that it is a government program whose follow-up will be integrated into the president’s work agenda, and a Government Commission headed by Díaz-Canel himself will be created to coordinate the tasks.
Rojas highlighted the active role in addressing racial issues by the official Union of Writers and Artists of Cuba (UNEAC) and the José Antonio Aponte commission of that organization that combats racism and racial discrimination from a cultural perspective.
In recent times articles on this subject have been appearing in the official media with some frequency, but it is in social networks where there are the most comments and complaints.
A couple of years ago, the case of a private taxi driver who was arrested after the complaint of a black passenger was published in the state weekly Trabajadores. The passenger accused him of having treated her violently, asking her to get off before what had been agreed.
The young woman―a law student at the University of Havana―said in a letter to the newspaper, which published it, that the driver ordered her to get out of the car and told her that “he didn’t want blacks in his car,” so she photographed the car with her mobile and took note of the license plate.
The publication indicated that after the complaint Havana’s police authorities immediately proceeded to locate the owner of the vehicle, who was arrested for an alleged act of racial discrimination that was investigated by the District Attorney’s Office in order to confirm the “criminal offense.”
Source: IBW21 _ IBW21 (The Institute of the Black World 21st Century) is committed to building the capacity of Black communities in the U.S. to work for the social, political, economic and cultural upliftment, the development of the global Black community and an enhanced quality of life for
The new research was conducted by Check Point in conjunction with Intezer—a specialist in Genetic Malware Analysis. It was led by Itay Cohen and Omri Ben Bassat, and has taken a deep dive to get “a broader perspective” of Russia’s threat ecosystem. “The fog behind these complicated operations made us realize that while we know a lot about single actors,” the team explains, “we are short of seeing a whole ecosystem.”
And the answer, Check Point concluded, was to analyse all the known data on threat actors, attacks and malware to mine for patterns and draw out all the connections. “This research is the first and the most comprehensive of its kind—thousands of samples were gathered, classified and analyzed in order to map connections between different cyber espionage organizations of a superpower country.”
The team expected to find deep seated linkages, connections between groups working into different Russia agencies—FSO, SVR, FSB, GRU. After all, one can reasonably expect all of the various threat groups sponsored by the Russian state to be on the same side, peddling broadly the same agenda.But that isn’t what they found. And the results from the research actually carry far more terrifying implications for Russia’s capacity to attack the U.S. and its allies on a wide range of fronts than the team expected. It transpires that Russia’s secret weapon is an organisational structure which has taken years to build and makes detection and interception as difficult as possible.“
The results of the research was surprising,” Cohen explains as we talk through the research. “We expected to see some knowledge, some libraries of code shared between the different organizations inside the Russian ecosystem. But we did not. We found clusters of groups sharing code with each other, but no evidence of code sharing between different clusters.”
And while such findings could be politics and inter-agency competition, the Check Point team have concluded that it’s more likely to have an operational security motive. “Sharing code is risky—if a security researcher finds one malware family, if it has code shared with different organizations, the security vendor can take down another organisation.”
“Transportation U.S. begins paying out reparations from France to Holocaust survivors and their heirs Add to listBy Katherine Shaver September 15, 2016The State Department has paid or approved 90 claims for a total $11 million in reparations from France to former World War II prisoners who were carried to Nazi death camps in French trains — the first French reparations paid to Holocaust survivors living in the United States, officials said Thursday.
The payments apply to Holocaust survivors who were deported from France to concentration camps on stifling trains operated by the state-owned French railway, SNCF, or, if the survivors have died, to their spouses or heirs. It is the first French compensation to Holocaust survivors who settled in the United States as well as Israel, Canada and other countries that haven’t had a reparations agreement with France.It’s also the first World War II reparations program to include heirs considered to be “standing in the shoes” of people who died before receiving compensation for the atrocities they or their spouses endured, State Department officials said.
“In many ways, this is belated justice for the worst crimes in history,” said Stuart Eizenstat, the State Department’s special adviser for Holocaust issues. “But it also underscores a long relationship with France.”SNCF was paid to transport 76,000 Jews and other prisoners, usually with no food and only a bucket for a toilet, to Nazi camps. All but about 2,000 were killed.[Video: On a French train to Auschwitz, a daring leap for survival]While the French government has paid more than $6 billion in Holocaust reparations since 1948, including to deportees, those payments previously covered only French citizens and those of four countries that had bilateral agreements with France.More than 700 claims have been filed under a 2014 agreement between the United States and France in which the French government pledged a total $60 million for the deportations carried out by SNCF, officials said.
In exchange, the U.S. government agreed to ask courts to dismiss any U.S. lawsuits against SNCF or the French government.U.S. Jewish groups and aging Holocaust survivors have pushed for French reparations since at least 2000, both through class-action lawsuits and state and federal legislation. However, their cause gained political traction in 2010, when survivors began protesting SNCF and a company in which it holds a majority stake, Paris-based Keolis, as they pursued state and federal rail projects.
Survivors said SNCF and Keolis shouldn’t be awarded U.S. contracts supported by their tax dollars until they had been compensated.So far, Eizenstat said, 29 Holocaust deportees have received $204,000 each, while 11 spouses of those who died in Nazi concentration camps or before 1948 are receiving $51,000 each. Spouses of Holocaust victims who died in or after 1948 — the start of France’s own Holocaust reparations fund for French citizens — will receive $750 for each year that the survivor lived after 1948.
“This amazing story tells the events of these men, women and children, who were kidnapped from their native land in West Africa, enslaved in Ouidah, a coastal town in the Kingdom of Dahomey, the current day coastal country of Benin, and brought to America on what is believed to be the last slave ship, the Clotilda. Through their resilience, they not only survived the horrific Middle Passage, but the American Civil War, the reconstruction of Alabama, and the Jim Crow period, but they also fought to preserve their African memories, culture, and community over the generations. “For out of the bowels of slave ships they rose, and their descendants are, in the powerful words of Langston Hughes: Still Here.”After the Emancipation Proclamation, the newly freed Africans tried, but failed to return to their beloved homeland Africa. The story describes the group reuniting from various plantations, alongside American-born, formerly enslaved men, women and children. The Africans bought land and founded their own settlement, which came to be known as Africatown.The Founders appointed tribal leaders and governed Africatown according to customary African laws, spoke their own regional language, kept their own customs, used African irrigation and gardening techniques, and built their own social structures. The people of Africatown formed their own self-sufficient world.Marine archaeologists and researchers from Search, Inc. have confirmed the location of the schooner Clotilda-the last known ship to bring enslaved Africans from Benin, West Africa into the Mobile Bay. The search team discovered the schooner in a remote area of Alabama’s Mobile River.”
Roots of Transformation International (“Roots”), now an international non-governmental organization (NGO)
Roots of Transformation International (“Roots”), founder, Carmen delRosaario, announced earlier today that Roots of Transformation International has been recognized as an international non-governmental organization (NGO).
She writes,
“Dear Friends, I am happy to share with you that Roots of Transformation International (“Roots”) has been recognized as an international NGO, and it up and running! As many of you know, I have spent years reflecting and talking about creating Roots. This idea has been in the making for many years, and this idea is now a reality. Roots is committed to equipping people with the knowledge, wisdom, and tools needed to make decisions that will positively impact their futures- as individuals, for their families and for their nation. Roots is guided by knowledge and experience acquired from over 25 years working in different parts of the world, learning and sharing knowledge in diverse cultures and communities, working with men, women, and young people from all walks of life. The focus of Roots’ work is on how violence, including genocide, female genital mutilation, child soldier, sexual violence, racism and more affects the physical and mental health of so many people around the world. However, we do not stop there. The goal of Roots is to engage and empower individuals, families and communities to interrupt the cycles that perpetuate these forms of violence, starting with the self.
Roots of Transformation working with men for non-violence in the DRC
According to a popular quote from Einstein, “the world as we have created it is a process of our thinking, and it cannot be changed without changing our thinking.” Roots is creating sustainable change in behavior by renewing individual, community and group minds. For example, in my experience working on prevention of female genital mutilation with the people who cut the girls (sometimes as early as 2 months old), some of them are telling me that “well, they also did it to me” or “I want my girl to get married”, reasons based on a mindset that they have not themselves fully understood or agree with . I call this the cycle of knowledge, information, and practices that repeat from generation to generation, and which can be interrupted- not by simply telling or asking people to stop, but through transformational processes that result in people wanting and creating a different outcome for themselves and their children.
OUR COMMON GROUND Voice, Carmen del Rosario, Founder, Roots of Transformation International
About Roots of Transformation International
Roots of Transformation International is a non-governmental organization (NGO) that facilitates organizational stability, change, and transformation by the renewal of individuals’ minds through individual and institutional capacity building. Roots works in collaboration and partnerships with a wide range of government, religious and civic organizations, as well as both national and international NGOs. These partnerships are the means to provide technical assistance and support to local communities by increasing their knowledge of themselves in a holistic manner; a tripartite definition of self as being (1) physical, (2) mental, and (3) spiritual. Roots is committed to equipping people with the knowledge, wisdom, and tools needed to make decisions that will positively impact their futures-as individuals, for their families and for their nation. At this point, Roots needs your help in order to continue this work. This Mother’s Day, please consider supporting Roots in our efforts to support hundreds of women and girls of all ages in their struggle to survive the consequences of female genital mutilation, and in our work to bring an end to this harmful practice.
There is no such thing as too small, even just $10 or $20 can go far in some communities. With much appreciation, Carmen” del Rosario
Donations can be made via PayPal
OCG encourages you to donate. No where else has the need for non-violence work and transforming the meaning of community taking a deep meaning in the lives of each citizen more needed. Roots has been there fighting a culture of non-violence in communities struggling to survive the cultural remnants of war and genocide.
You can listen to Carmen delRosario sharing her passion and hopes for Roots (ROT) here:
OCG 