In August 2006, 24-year-old William Charles Morva made national headlines when he sent the Montgomery County Police on a manhunt unlike any the town of Blacksburg had seen before.

While awaiting trial for an attempted armed robbery, Morva was taken to Montgomery Regional Hospital for minor injuries. After using the bathroom, he knocked out the deputy escorting him with a metal toilet paper dispenser, stole his gun, and fatally shot unarmed security guard Derrick McFarland before escaping the building.

As police searched the Blacksburg area for Morva, a disheveled man wearing only a blanket and boxers was spotted on the Huckleberry Trail near the Virginia Tech campus. Montgomery County Sheriffs Corporal Eric Sutphin went to check out the trail and encountered Morva, who fatally shot him.

After a 37-hour manhunt, Morva was finally captured on the trail, and was charged with two counts of capital murder. In March 2008, he was sentenced to death.

On July 6, 2017, Morva was executed by lethal injection at Greensville Correctional Center, becoming the 113th person executed in Virginia since the Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976.

Virginia plays a unique role in the history of the death penaltyits believed the first execution in America occurred in Jamestown in 1608. Since then, over 1,300 people have been executed here, more than any other state.

But times might be changing. Last January, the Virginia State Senate passed a bill banning the death penalty for defendants with severe mental illness, a bill that could have made a difference in Morvas case. It was not until after Morva was sentenced to death that a psychiatrist diagnosed him with delusional disorder, which made him falsely believe, among other things, that a former presidential administration conspired with police to imprison him, and that he was going to die in jail if he didnt escape. According to family and friends, Morvas mental health had been in a downward spiral since his father died from cancer in April 2004, leading him to drop out of high school, live in the woods, and, ultimately, engage in criminal behavior.

After Morvas appeals were denied on the state and federal level, many individuals and agencies, including the United Nations and Sutphins daughter, Rachel, petitioned then-governor Terry McAuliffe to change Morvas sentence to life in prison due to his severe mental illness. But McAuliffe declined to grant Morva clemency.

A year and a half after Morvas death, the bill banning the death penalty for the severely mentally ill passed in the state Senate with bipartisan support, 23-17. Although the House version died in committee, the Senate bill was a major victory for advocatesthe first time either chamber of the General Assembly had ever voted to limit the death penalty.

On January 30, a similar bill was reintroduced in the Virginia Senate and approved by an overwhelming margin (32-7). And with bipartisan patrons Delegate Patrick Hope (D-Arlington) and Delegate Jay Leftwich (R-Chesapeake), the House version may have a better chance of passing the Courts of Justice Committee this time.

But groups like Virginians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty dont want the momentum to stop there. In November, 13 family members of murder victimsin alliance with VADPsent a letter to the General Assembly asking lawmakers to join the 21 states (plus Washington, D.C.) that have outlawed capital punishment. This session, a bill to abolish the death penalty entirely was introduced in both chambers of the General Assembly, although it did not make it out of committee (the Senate Judiciary Committee voted to delay consideration of the bill until next year, while the House did not schedule hearings).

If Virginia abolished the death penalty, it would be one of the first Southern states to do so, and could lead the rest of the region to do the sameand bring about other crucial criminal justice reforms, advocates say.

Governor Ralph Northam has voiced his personal opposition to capital punishment, and a spokeswoman told the Richmond Times-Dispatch that if the General Assembly passed legislation to replace the death penalty with life without parole, the governor would absolutely sign it.

Could Virginia get rid of the death penalty for good?

Back in 1989, a Virginia Commonwealth University survey found that, while a majority of Virginians supported the death penalty, support decreased when given the alternative of life in prison with no possibility of parole, along with restitution to victims families.

The results spurred a group of 13 people, adamantly opposed to the death penalty, to form an advocacy group, Virginians Against State Killing, in the hope of swaying public opinion. In 1994, they changed their name to Virginians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty.

Since then, VADP has held numerous protests against the death penalty across the commonwealth, aiming to bring as much attention as possible to the many problems within the system. It has also sponsored educational programs, held vigils for those whove been executed, and lobbied the General Assemblynot just to reform the states death penalty laws, but to abolish it all together.

Though VADP has had limited influence for much of its history, it has gained more traction in the past decade, garnering greater public support and assistance from legislators, and helping to prevent the expansion of Virginias capital murder statute.

Today, the group has grown to 2,872 members, who have a range of political affiliations. Conservative membership has increased since Michael Stone, a 25-year veteran of the Catholic diocese of Richmond, became executive director in 2015.

One of the key things that Ive been focused on in my five years with [VADP] is diversifying the organization politically, he says. When I came on board, the membership was overwhelmingly moderate [and] liberal Democrats. Because of my long history with the Catholic diocese, I have really strong relationships, not only with the Catholic leadership in the state, but with a lot of evangelical and interfaith leadersas well as conservatives and Republicans.

If were going to win abolition in Virginia, it really needs to not be a partisan issue, he says.

At the diocese, Stone often worked with Bishop Walter Sullivan, who championed criminal justice reform. One day in 1984, Sullivan encouraged Stone to attend a vigil being held outside of Virginia State Penitentiary, where a man was to be executed. After much thought, Stone decided to go.

The penitentiary was on this busy, divided four-lane north-south road. And on the side where the prison was, there were about 40 of us lined up in a silent vigil holding candles, Stone says. On the other side was a group of over a hundred drunken revelers who were celebrating the execution of the man. They were holding up signs with racist messages and chanting racist things, because the man being executed that night was an African American gentleman.

It was just a very ugly scene. It struck me in that moment that there had to be something profoundly wrong with the death penalty, if that is what it could do to us as a society, he says. I came away strongly convinced that we had to end the death penalty.

Like previous directors, Stone was VADPs sole paid employee. But in 2017, after much fundraising, the group was able to hire Dale Brumfield as its field director, who has led scores of public education programs and single-handedly increased VADP membership by at least 500across the political spectrum, says Stone.

Others, like former VADP board president and capital defense attorney Matthew Engle, work directly in the courtroom. In 2015, Engle opened a private practice in Charlottesville with his partner, Bernadette Donovan. The pair represent capital murder defendants (and other serious felony cases) at the trial level across the commonwealth, and have helped reverse multiple death sentences.

Engles fight against the death penalty began many years earlier, while he was an undergraduate at Cleveland State University, where he worked at a residential treatment unit that helped former inmates reintegrate into society. He saw first-hand how ex-offenders could be rehabilitated and learned that people who have been convicted of crimes, even very serious violent crimes, are often not that different than the rest of us, he says.

[That] really got me thinking about the death penalty and realizing that a lot of the people I was getting to know and really enjoyed working with, but for a few lucky breaks, could have been sentenced to death, Engle says. It made me really feel it was not something I could support.

After graduating from Washington & Lee School of Law in 2001, Engle went on to work for the Virginia Capital Representation Resource Center in Charlottesville and for the Capital Defender Office of Northern Virginia, providing representation to those facing the death penalty. In 2010, he became legal director of the UVA law schools Innocence Project, both teaching at UVA and representing many wrongfully convicted inmates.

In addition to the several organizations, like Engles, that have been advocating against the death penalty in Virginia for years, VADP is joined in its fight by the ACLU of Virginia. Since the national ACLU became active in Virginia in the 1960s, its Virginia affiliate has voiced its opposition to the death penalty through public education, litigation, and advocacy.

It has challenged (unsuccessfully) Virginias policy of keeping all death row inmates in solitary confinement, and fought to reverse the death sentence of William Morva.

That is a person who undoubtedly in my mind was put to death suffering from very severe mental illness, says Bill Farrar, director of strategic communications for the ACLU of Virginia. It makes me tremendously sad, personally, to think about a person who was strapped down to a table and had poison injected into his veins, and no idea what was happening to him or why.

Those in favor of the death penalty often say they want justice for the families of murder victims. And some victims families do push for capital punishment. Unlike her granddaughter, Eric Sutphins mother, Jeaneen Sutphin, wanted Morva to be executed, though she felt empathy for his family.

I have no hatred for this creature who shot him execution-style, she told the Richmond Times-Dispatch about Morva, shortly before his execution date. I just want justice for my son.

But not all families of murder victims feel that the penalty brings them justice.

In 2001, Lucy and Terry Smith were brutally tortured and murdered in their home in Ephrata, Pennsylvania, by their 17-year-old adopted son, Michael Bourgeois, and his 19-year-old friend, Landon May.

Linell Patterson, Terrys daughter (and Lucys stepdaughter), was only 19 at the time. She had just moved to Virginia to attend Eastern Mennonite University when the murders occurred.

Her parents deaths rocked Patterson, and her then-21-year-old sister Megan Smith, to their core. Patterson felt both clashes of anger and deepest sadness, she says, and that no one could understand what they were going through.

Bourgeois pleaded guilty to two counts of first-degree murder, and was sentenced to life in prison without parole (later changed to 80-years-to-life due to changes in juvenile sentencing laws). However, because May did not plead guilty to all of his charges, he was put on trial by jury, which Patterson and her family attended.

[When] we had a meeting with the prosecuting attorney [Craig Stedman], he sat us down and told us what to expect. It was very clear he knew what he was doing. He was very confident [and] calming, she says. He felt like he was our person.

But then he asked us how we felt about the death penalty, [and] my sister and I [said] we dont want to be a part of that, she says. His tone changed very, very quicklyand he made it absolutely clear that regardless of how we felt, he was going to pursue the death penaltyOur opinions didnt actually matter.

Throughout Mays trial, Patterson says, Stedman continuously talked about how he was seeking justice for the Smiths family, and it felt to her like he was lying and using them. She felt even more adamantly opposed to the penalty after meeting Mays family, who were just as devastated, connecting with them through their shared grief.

I just will not forgot that noise that came out of that line of women when it was announced that Landon was to have the death penalty, Patterson says. I had also made that noise. I had also cried in that same way.

After Mays trial (and through the years of legal appeals that come with a death penalty conviction), Patterson experienced a whole range of emotions, and felt that she had nowhere to put them. She began reaching out to and meeting with other family members of murder victims, who she found to be incredibly nurturing.

They were living very similar experiences, but also they were much further along in their process and had a sense of healing that was inspiring. I was able to visually see what it looked like to have this kind of trauma occur, and then continue to live a life that is based on joy, and calmness, and social justice, Patterson says. Thats something that I wanted.

She also began researching the numerous injustices within the death penalty system, leading her to connect with anti-death penalty groupsincluding VADP, where she later served on the board.

Since then, Patterson has shared her story with a host of schools, legislators, and organizations, and written many op-eds against the death penalty. Shes also gotten married, and moved to Harrisonburg. Her work as a nurse practitioner keeps her quite busy, but she still makes time to be involved with VADP.

Though her advocacy against the death penalty has brought her healing, Mays impending executionin the name of justice for her and her familystill haunts Patterson to this day. It wont bring her parents back or bring them justice, she says, only making a whole other family grieve in the same way.

I understand when people want the death penalty. Its not that I havent struggled with those feelings, she says. But all that means is that some people want it, and some people dont. You have to strip that away and explore the actual system, and then you find out that the system stinks. Its not functional, and it makes a ton of mistakes.

Like Patterson, Rachel Sutphin, who was 9 when Morva gunned down her father, has continued to advocate against the death penalty. Now a student at Columbia Theological Seminary, she has signed a joint letter with a dozen other surviving family members of murder victims asking the new General Assembly to end the death penalty.

Instead of supporting my family and me when we needed it the most, the Commonwealth devoted its resources to the trial and appeals that lasted more than 10 years. Year after year, I was retraumatized by the uncertainty and was repeatedly forced to relive the worst day of my life, she wrote in an op-ed for The Washington Post. Morvas execution brought no solace to me, but it strengthened my resolve that the death penalty needs to be abolishedto value and protect human life.

For the first time since the Gallup poll began asking Americans for their stance on the death penalty, in 1985, a majority of Americans today are opposed to itwhen life without parole is also on the table.

In 2019, 60 percent of Americans surveyed, across a wide range of demographics and party lines, chose life without possibility of parole as the better penalty for murder over the death penalty. Thirty-six percent opted for capital punishment.

Thats a big shift even since the last Gallup poll, in 2014, when 50 percent of Americans said the death penalty was the better penalty for murder, and 45 percent favored life in prison.

While some states, like Wisconsin and Minnesota, abolished the death penalty many decades ago, this change in public opinion can be reflected in other states more recent actions. Washington and New Hampshire abolished the death penalty in 2018 and 2019, respectively. Also in 2019, California governor Gavin Newsom ordered a moratorium on executions in the state, which currently has 737 inmates on death row, for as long as he is governor. (The death penalty can only be abolished by California voters, a move they narrowly rejected in 2016.)

And in Virginia, no juries have handed down the death penalty in more than eight years.

Stone attributes this overall decline in public support and use of capital punishment to the rise in awareness of its numerous issues, especially when the system gets it wrong.

Since 1973, 167 death-row inmates, 87 of them black, have been exonerated of all charges. According to a 2014 study by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 1 in every 25 people sentenced to death is innocentan error rate of 4.1 percent.

As the Death Penalty Information Center notes, its impossible to know how many of the 1,513 people executed in the United Sates since 1976 (when the death penalty was reinstated) were innocent. However, it lists over a dozen executed inmates who were possibly innocent, as well as several who were pardoned after their executions.

People have also become more aware that people of color are more likely to be given the death sentence than white people, Carissa Phillips, VADPs secretary, says, pointing to recent television shows and movies like Just Mercy that expose the racism within the death penalty system.

According to The Intercept, from 2009 to 2018, 60 percent of defendants given the death penalty were people of color. And today, while black people make up only 13.4 percent of the total population, they make up roughly 41 percent of those on death row, per the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Funds 2019 report.

A person is also much more likely to receive the death penalty if the murder victim is white. Ever since executions have been carried out exclusively for murder, 75 percent of death penalty convictions have involved the murder of white victimseven though black and white people are equally as likely to be victims of murder.

And, as Engle notes, the death penalty disproportionately affects the poor.

What I have learned from the cases that Ive worked on, the single biggest factor that determines whether or not somebody gets sentenced to death isnt how bad they are [or] how heinous or awful the crime is[but] how effective the defense lawyers are, he says, putting thoseespecially black peoplewho cannot afford to hire a good lawyer at a grave disadvantage.

Largely because of the lengthy legal process involved, the death penalty is also far more expensive than life without parole. Like many other advocates, Stone believes the millions of dollars going towards death penalty cases should instead go towards services for victims families, from funeral costs to counseling, and programs that effectively prevent acts of violence.

There really is no evidence that the death penalty prevents violent crime in any way, he says. In fact, the murder rates in abolition states tend to be significantly lower than the murder rates in death penalty states.

In addition, the years of mandatory appeals and uncertainty continue to traumatize murder victims family members, as well as the other people involved in the criminal justice system, Stone says.

Stone points, in particular, to the executioner, who has to administer the lethal injection and actually end the life of someone who is helpless, strapped to a gurney. He says that performing executions can traumatize them over time. Former VADP board member Jerry Givens was an executioner in Virginia for 17 years, and still wonders if he ever killed an innocent person.

People dont realize that [for] the people that have to carry these things out, thats a burden on them, Givens says. Its no machine; its a human being that has to take another human beings life.

Before working in the system, Givens used to think that people that take other peoples lives deserve to have their life taken as well. However, he realized that the death penalty was not right after seeing that innocent people were being sentenced to deathlike Anthony Ray Hinton, a black man who was wrongly convicted of murder and held on Alabamas death row for 28 years.

Think about the people thats incarcerated now. Were they given a fair trial? Is there such a thing as a fair trial in the American criminal justice system? he says. The system is broken.

To Givens, the death penalty only shows the world that killing is okay, and it must be ended.

As much as public opinion has shifted, there are still significant numbers of prosecutors and politicians, as well as average Americans, who believe those convicted of capital offenses deserve to die, and that their deaths bring true justice to victims and their families.

Republican Delegate Matt Fariss, who represents the 59th District (including parts of Albemarle), says he wishes we didnt need the death penalty, but supports it in some egregious cases, such as violent gang and drug related [cases] and sexual abuse cases that end in murder.

There just needs to be stiff enough penalties that people realize when theyre heading down these paths, that theyre heading down the wrong path, he says.

Fariss also believes not having the death penalty for egregious cases does an injustice to victims families.

There needs to be some accountability and responsibility to the victims, he says. I just dont know how I could ever look a victims family in the eye and tell them that their loved ones life was less important than the person who took it.

But with the Democratic takeover of Virginias legislature, in addition to growing bipartisan support, advocates see reform as only a matter of time.

The death penalty is in its last days here in Virginia, says Stone. We are cautiously optimistic that there will be a serious floor debate on death penalty abolition in at least one chamber of the General Assembly in the next session.

If an abolition bill is not passed this legislative session, Phillips believes it could happen within the next year or two, while Engle sees it happening most likely within the next decade.

Others like Farrar say that its difficult to determine the political will to abolish the death penalty in Richmond, on the part of both Democrats and Republicans. And, as shown by other states, it can take years of political battles to get abolition passed.

For some, theres a real urgency to make real changes as quickly as we can, and for some, theres a desire to do that in a more incremental way, says Farrar. There is momentum on a national level away from the death penalty but, historically Virginia, especially in its criminal justice system, hasnt really looked to other states as something to follow.

In the meantime, advocates like Patterson are committed to keeping up the fight.

The movement has given her a sense of purpose when there has been very little purpose, she says. To succeed in abolishing the death penalty would feel a sense of accomplishment in that I have been a part of something that mattersIt would feel like we are stepping towards social justice.

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Fighting for life (without parole): Death penalty abolitionists see change on the horizon - C-VILLE Weekly

PUBLISHED: 10:00 07 February 2020 | UPDATED: 12:49 07 February 2020

Vicky Angear

Year3 pupils from St Francis Primary School with models they have made for a local history museum in their classroom. Picture: MARK ATHERTON

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Young historians from St Francis Primary School have been studying various buildings and key figures in the town.

The pupils researched significant times in the history of Nailsea including the important work of Hannah More - a champion of social reform, female education and the abolition of slavery - and the use of the tithe barn.

Pupils made a range of items, from posters and models to baked goods, and invited them to the History of Nailsea museum to see their work.

A school spokesman said: "Over the weeks the children worked on projects to showcase their knowledge, this ranged from posters to models, and even baking.

"The children's museum was a hit and they loved showing off what they know. Some of them have even entered their work into the Nailsea Young Historian competition."

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Pupils from St Francis Primary School in Nailsea set up museum to showcase work on history of town | Latest educational news in Somerset - North...

The British Secretary of State for the north recently signed legislation to establish a payments scheme for people injured during the Troubles. However, the caveat added that this only applies to those affected through no fault of their own is a direct contradiction of the definition of a victim in the 2006 Victims and Survivors Order and a clear attempt by the British and unionism to control the narrative, manipulate the entire process and in effect establish a hierarchy of victims to suit their own agenda. This is simply unacceptable and doesnt take a degree in astrophysics to see how it will work.

Throughout the conflict Britain ran nefarious, shadowy undercover cells in the north like the Military Reaction Force, Special Reconnaissance Unit, 14th Intelligence Company and Force Research Unit. In 2013 Panorama aired a documentary about the MRF and drew on interviews from former members who admitted that they shot unarmed civilians without warning and at random. The existence of these secretive groups has never been admitted nor have their activities been investigated. However, under the legislation proposed by the Tory government there will be nothing to stop former members of these state paramilitary militias and other intelligence operatives who controlled and armed loyalist murder gangs from applying and getting a legacy payment for physical and/or mental health issues brought on by their service in the north. It will be ensured, more than likely through new legislative clauses that their conditions will come under no fault of their own.

In comparison 17 men, women and children were killed during the Troubles by rubber and plastic bullets. Hundreds more were injured and maimed through the use of these weapons. Many of those affected were hit by the British army and RUC firing recklessly in built-up, urban areas and often in a totally random manner. A lot of victims were also deliberately targeted and many of them were totally innocent people who have been left with life changing injuries as well as severe psychological issues. Under the British proposals victims of rubber/plastic bullets will more than likely fall foul of the no fault of their own clause as they will in all probability be blamed for their own predicament by the terms of the scheme and seen to be responsible for their conditions by those responsible for overseeing the process.

So we could have the surreal situation where British operatives who killed innocent people could get a legacy pension while civilians who were maimed by the same state forces will get nothing. This is Britain and unionism officially creating a hierarchy of victims, telling many people they simply dont matter and that their suffering means nothing.

S BURNSBelfast BT15

Revision of code of conduct for Spads may prove an exercise in futility

The return of Stormont has seen a few fresh faces introduced to the chambers along with these novices return the main protagonists of the previous administration. Although for some of the former ministers albeit in a somewhat reduced capacity. There was also a proposed revision of the code of conduct pertaining to unelected special advisers which one can only assume is to prevent individuals from going on solo runs. The suggested revision may prove an exercise in futility. Also extremely worrying and wholly incongruous with the spirit of the New Decade, New Approach is the return of former Spads to highly paid positions. An example of this is Peter Robinsons former adviser who left the job collecting a generous pay-out along with a handsome pension, before going on to pursue a career as an MP, a venture which failed miserably. And in line with the culture of preferentialism this temporary civil servant has returned as special adviser to the First Minister with a further eye-watering salary of 85,000 pa. With an anticipated 40,000 compensation package for being unelected this surely is strengthening the union democracy at work eh.

KEVIN McCANNBelfast BT1

Sinn Fin as normal as Fianna Fil

Fianna Fil leader Michel Martin considers Sinn Fin not a normal democratic party. Fine Gael taoiseach Leo Varadkar agrees. Do they think it is, as Fianna Fil taoiseach Sean Lemass said of his party in 1926, a slightly constitutional party?

Fine Gaels predecessor Cumann na nGaedheal, prior to and during its proto-fascist 1930s Blueshirt period, said worse about Fianna Fil than is alleged about Sinn Fin today. They advertised in 1932, The gunmen and communists are voting for Fianna Fil today. It is acknowledged that Fianna Fil came to power with substantial IRA support, when the IRA was a mass organisation with thousands of members.

Fianna Fils policies resulted in a huge increase in public house-building and a significant, sustained, increase in the industrial workforce. The policies were characterised as disastrous pie-in-the-sky fantasies that would bankrupt the state. Cumann na nGaedheal was as opposed to Fianna Fils abolition of the oath of allegiance in the Dil to the British sovereign, as are both FF and FG today to Sinn Fins proposal for a border poll.

A knowledge of history and a sense of perspective would not go amiss.

NIALL MEEHANDublin 7

Young voters in charge

The youthful Eire voters are having their day in the sun.

What with a couple of referendums under their belts and now the intoxicating whiff of cordite emanating from Sinn Feins recent past, that section of voters could well believe they are in charge of everything, or perhaps nothing?

ROBERT SULLIVANBantry, Co Cork

Out of touch with electorate

Nothing better illustrates the extent to which Fine Gael and Fianna Fil are out of touch with the people of the country than, on the one hand, their desire that Sinn Fin be part of an administration in Northern Ireland, but on the other hand, their refusal to have them as a coalition partner in government in the Republic.

J ANTHONY GAUGHANBlackrock, Co Dublin

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Britain and unionism now officially creating a hierarchy of victims - The Irish News

Ali was just seven years old when he and his mother left his home country of Ivory Coast in West Africa.

First they travelled up through Burkina Faso, then Mali, Algeria and Morocco before making the dangerous boat trip across the Mediterranean to Spain.

At every point in the journey Ali says his mother had to take work to earn enough money to support them on the next leg of their trip. It took years.

Ali was twelve when they arrived in Morocco and fourteen when they made the crossing to Spain.

Ali says he always knew he was gay and, although he never discussed it with his mother, hes sure she knew too.

He said: "I had friends who were boys in Algeria and sometimes I hugged them but my mother told me I had to stop because she was worried I would get into trouble.

"I understood that I had to hide it.

Ali arrived in the UK when he was 16 and has been here ever since.

Hes 21 now and says that even when he arrived in the UK he wasnt able to come out.

I had hidden it for a long time and I was scared of how people would react. I didnt tell anyone.

But eventually, Ali said a friend asked him if he was gay and told him that he should come out.

He also importantly pointed out that he should tell his solicitor, who was helping him apply for refugee status.

Aldi said it was a relief.

He told his solicitor and that formed the basis of his asylum application.

Last year he was granted refugee status and he says it lifted a huge burden from his shoulders.

For a long time he had faced being forcibly returned to the Ivory Coast a country he had not lived in for many years and where he would have faced persecution.

He said: If you are gay in Ivory Coast they will never let you live in peace.

"You cant work and they will beat you. Maybe you will die."

LGBT History Month is an annual month-long observance of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender history, and the history of the gay rights and related civil rights movements.

It's aim is to raise awareness of, and combat prejudice against the LGBT community while celebrating its achievement and diversity and making it more visible.

The event was launched in the UK in the wake of the abolition of Section 28 - a clause in the Local Governance Act that banned authorities from " intentionally promote homosexuality or publish material with the intention of promoting homosexuality".

It has widespread support and includes the Met Police, Amnesty International and the CPS among its sponsors.

But living in Folkestone, Ali said life is different now.

He said: "For the first time in my life I am free. I dont have to pretend. I can be myself and I am happy.

Ali is now able to work and has a full time job working in recycling.

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He is also involved in the local gay community and really enjoys events like the annual Folkestone Pride.

He added: When I am at Pride I really feel proud. I am proud of myself and I am proud to live in Folkestone. This is my home now.

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Gay refugee fears he would be killed if he went home - Kent Live

Tim Hailes was partway through his interview for Lord Mayor of the City of London when the grandees on the panel started to ask questions about his personal life.

The prestigious ambassadorial role involves flying around the world to meet business leaders and politicians, entertaining visiting dignitaries over dinner and being the public face of the 950-year-old City of London Corporation that runs and represents Londons financial district.

How would he, as the first openly gay man to potentially hold the role, prevent the post from being "hijacked" by lobby groups representing those communities, panellists wanted to know? And who would be his official "consort at events?

Hailes succeeded in the interview and chose to defer his candidacy to take up another role yet the questions from the interview in 2018 sparked concernamong equalitiescampaigners when they emerged in the Financial Timeslast month.

The reports have triggered a review into the mayoral selection process and shine a light on tensions at the heart of the Corporation, the governing body of the Square Mile,as it tries to modernise.

Attitudes towards minorities arenot the only challenge that lies ahead, with the Corporations role, structure and transparency subject to growing debate as the world gets less deferential to tradition and more critical of authorities.

In a sign of how seriously concerns are being taken, Lord Lisvane, the former clerk of the House of Commons, has also beenasked to conduct a sweeping governance review.

"There's only so long an anachronism can last," said Graham Harrower, who was elected to the Corporation in 2015 and is one of the more radical of growing band of reformist councillors challenging their more traditional peers.

"Increasingly the winds of change are blowing around Guildhall. It's just that some of those inside haven't heard it. I think meaningful reform will have to come from the outside, he says.

The Corporation stretches back to the rights, independence and privileges granted by William the Conqueror to the burgeoning trading centre in London in the 11th century.

Successive monarchs relied on the wealthy centre for loans and strengthened its rights, helping what became the Corporation survive threats of reform or abolition under the Stuarts, the Victorians and, more recently, Labour's shadow chancellor John McDonnell.

It has emerged with exceptional powers, wealth and arcane traditionsthat help it be effective but also fuel criticisms of an "old boys network"that hastoo much power as well as conspiracy theories."You don't have to scratch very deep on the internet to find people who think the corporation is one step away from Bildeburg and run by lizards," says one former councillor.

Unlike other local authorities, the Corporation oversees the City's own police force, Lord Mayor a ceremonial yet powerful figure outranked only by the Queen and an office in parliament to represent the City's views to MPs.

Funded by taxpayers as well as its own property and investments, the Corporation is run by 100 councillors and 25 alderman. Unlike in other local authorities, they are unpaid, typically stand as independents rather than for a political party, and are voted for by workers as well as by residents. They are supported by more than 100 historic, wealthy livery companies representing trades from haberdashers to fishmongers.

Its activities range from the routine work of local authorities sprucing up parks and sponsoring schools to vast charitable giving and representing the powerhouse of the UK's economy on the world stage.

Those roles don't always sit easily together. The Corporation was accused of bowingto China when Taiwan, which is at odds with China over independence, was prevented from taking part in the annual parade to mark the election of a new Lord Mayor in 2019.

How well residents and ordinary workers are represented; the vast number of councillors; whether councillors should be paid; the lengthy and expensive Lord Mayoral selection process are all simmering sources of disagreement and areas ripe for reform, according to councillors.

"In the absence of party politics all politics is personal, it all gets a bit more tribal, a bit more catty, says one former councillor.

"The vast number of councillors meant that in reality the discussions took place not in the committee but between informal groups of members," says another.

The furore around the questioning of Hailes is not the only sign of tension within the council on the issue of diversity.A voluntary charter asking members to actively promote diversity had been been signed by about 70 members of the 100-strong court of common council, as of January. Among the signatories isleading councillor Edward Lord (who asks in work correspondence to be referred to by the pronouns "they/them" rather than "he/him).

"It's not because we are riven with bigots but because they [the charter] have gone too far," says one councillor. "The City actually bends over backwards to be inclusive and diverse," insistsanother former councillor.

The Corporation led by Catherine McGuinnessas chair of the powerful policy and resources committeeaims to get women into 45pc of senior positions by 2023, a target many feel is not ambitious enough. It also wants at least 30pc of candidates standing for the 2021 election to be women and 15pc to be black and ethnic minority, stressing that it aims to "reflect the communities we serve".

As it stares down the next decade, the City is also facing financial challenges, with plans to raise debt for the first time to fund new infrastructure projects. A moratorium on recruitment wasin place as recently as January.

The review being run by Lord Lisvane, a member of one of the trade guilds connected to the Corporation, and will report its initial findings in May. The City says it aims to ensure governance arrangements are "efficient, fair, transparent and accountable".Some critics want a root and branch overhaul.

Harrower says: "The fundamental problem with the City Corporation is that it combines the disparate and conflicting functions of a local authority, a representative of the financial city, a regulator of the livery companies, a major charity, a subsidised private club for its elected members and a freemasons meeting place. The solution is the disaggregation/abolition of those functions."

In whatever form, reform is likely to be slow and painful. The City is "incredibly resistant" to change, says one councillor, with changes such as relaxing dress codes for private functions long in the making.

Sir Mark Boleat, who chaired the policy and resources committee between 2012 to 2017, says he steered clear of the big structural or constitutional changes as they would have consumed his time in office, instead focusing on boosting the City's presence around the world and other more pressing matters.

"I think the Corporation works very effectively but if I had a clean sheet of paper, you would not have 125 members and 25 alderman. But did it get in the way of what I wanted to do? No," he says.

"You would not invent the City of London, absolutely not, but then you would not invent a lot of things.To people who say it should not exist, I would always say, what is the practical problem you are trying to solve?"

A Corporation spokesman said Hailes had voluntarily deferred his candidacy for Lord Mayor, stressing that the body fully supports the LGBT community, taking part in Pride celebrations and flying the rainbow flag. It has also signed up to several initiatives to promote diversity, and has amended recruitment and staffing procedures, such as better maternity pay and diversity training.

The spokesman adds:The City of London Corporation is determined to improve the diversity of its elected membership and is committed to becoming more inclusive and representative of the communities that it serves in the Square Mile and beyond.

We recognise that there is much more to do and will be taking further steps to encourage a diverse range of candidates for City elections. This is a major focus for the City Corporation and will build on initiatives in recent years to engage more people in the Citys democratic processes.

We are determined to ensure there are no barriers to any member of our community standing for elected office to the City of London Corporation.

More:

City of London Corporation forced to confront winds of change - Telegraph.co.uk

IF there is one episode in the history of Scotland which is more ignored and misunderstood than the Radical War of 1820, then I cannot think of it.

Also known as the Scottish Insurrection, it was a very short period in Scottish history that could have seen this country torn out of the unequal Union with England and put on a progression to true democracy 100 years before that was achieved with votes for women. Workers rights could have been won decades before the trade union movement arose, and Scotland could have been a beacon to the world in enlightened proper government of a nation.

Instead, the British state mercilessly suppressed the workers movement and executed three of its leaders James Wilson, John Baird and Andrew Hardie. There were other judicial murders and deportations, and innocent civilians were gunned down in the streets, especially in Greenock.

I consider these events of 1820 and their preceding reasons and bitter, but ultimately triumphant, aftermath to be among the most under-reported matters in Scottish history. Many histories and I have a collection of them either ignore it completely or play it down as an aberration at a time when Scotland was really starting to play a part in the British imperial project.

The 200th anniversary of the Radical War will take place in April, and next week the new Paisley Book Festival will launch with an evening dedicated to the work of Maggie Craig, a real expert on Scottish radicalism which will be the theme of the festival. The organisers state: Drawing on the Paisley Radicals of 1820 as inspiration, the Paisley Book Festival will explore how we can honour their challenging ideas and vibrant energy 200 years later.

I wish them every good fortune, and to tie in with the festival, today and over the next fortnight I am going to deal at length with an insurrection that might just might have succeeded in changing Scotland and this nation.

I first wrote about the Radical War in 2018, concentrating in the bloody slaughter in Greenock after the insurrection had ended, and I was amazed at the response from people who confessed they knew nothing about these events. Over the last two years, I have returned again and again to a study of a period that is actually well documented and from which modern proponents of independence and societal reform could learn much.

I will argue that far from being an aberration, the Radical War really did change Scotland because it politicised people in a way not surpassed to the days of Red Clydeside indeed, I will argue that the Radical War paved the way for the upheavals of 1919.

I will also try to show the lessons from history that the Yes movement can learn. Some of my conclusions will not be popular.

Next week I will deal with the actual war itself a one-sided State slaughter in fact and in week three I will show how the aftermath changed Scotland.

Today, however, I want to deal with the events which led up to the 1820 Scottish Insurrection and yes, that is exactly what it was, a violent uprising against the government.

The seeds of the Radical War were sown abroad. After the Jacobite Rising of 1745-46, the monarchy and the UK Government concentrated on suppressing Highland society and culture, aware that much of lowland Scotland had not been involved in Jacobitism indeed, many areas opposed Charles Edward Stuart and there were plenty Scots in the forces of the Duke of Cumberland.

The emigration of Scots to the USA continued apace and while many of them remained true to the Crown, there were many who fought for the Congress forces under George Washington his friends General Hugh Mercer and General Adam Stephen, Brigadier General Arthur St Clair and his personal physician Dr James Craik were all Scots.

The American Revolution and the American War of Independence were known to all Scots, not least because a quarter of all the British forces in the war were Scottish.

That so many subjects of the King were prepared to take up arms to forge a new nation made a big impression on many Scots, and when the French Revolution came along in 1789, it was watched with great interest by many Scots who were agitating for political reform in the UK.

Among them, though operating in secret, was Robert Burns, the exciseman who was in regular contact with many radicals.

He even wrote an ode for George Washingtons birthday which made clear where his sympathies lay.

See gathering thousands, while I sing,

A broken chain exulting bring,

And dash it in a tyrants face,

And dare him to his very beard,

And tell him he no more is feared-

No more the despot of Columbias race!

A tyrants proudest insults bravd,

They shout-a People freed!

WITH the French Revolution ongoing, the British establishment was terrified of the reformers who fought with words, pamphlets and even cartoons some of the depictions of King George III bordered on the treasonable.

The most influential document of the time was the Rights of Man, published by Thomas Paine in 1791 as a direct reply to Edmund Burke whose Reflections on the Revolution in France contained these words: Those who attempt to level, never equalise. No wonder Burns called him a poisonous reptile. Paine hit back hard, and in contrast to Burkes sales of 30,000, mainly to the land-owning class, Rights of Man is said to have sold half a million copies worldwide. It contained revolutionary ideas such as the abolition of hereditary rights he did not, however, advocate the overthrow of the monarch and a written constitution for the UK.

One passage has always seemed correct to me: Individuals, themselves, each, in his own personal and sovereign right, entered into a contract with each other to produce a government: and this is the only mode in which governments have a right to arise, and the only principle on which they have a right to exist.

In other words, sovereignty resides with the people. No wonder Paines work had such an impact in Scotland, nor that the establishment sentenced him to death for seditious libel against the Crown, a sentence never carried out because he fled to France his prosecutor, by the way, was a Scot, Sir Archibald Macdonald.

Paines Rights of Man heavily influenced the reformers in Scotland in the 1790s, of whom the most famous is Thomas Muir of Huntershill, the radical lawyer who was an ardent campaigner for democracy he is known as the Father of Scottish Democracy.

Muir came to prominence in the Society of the Friends of the Scottish People, a reforming organisation which held conventions in 1792 and 1793. He thought it simply wrong that Scotland should have just 3000 people electing all its MPs, or that so many seats were uncontested because the electorate knew the result in advance. This was a time when local authorities were often self-selected, and lords and lairds dictated how people voted.

Muir was charged with sedition, particularly for speaking against the Union, and after a show trial was sentenced to be deported to Australia for 14 years.

Lord Braxfield, Scotlands hanging judge, said in his summing up: A government in every country should be just like a corporation; and, in this country, it is made up of the landed interest, which alone has a right to be represented. As for the rabble, who has nothing but personal property, what hold has the nation on them?

Muirs own speech has gone into history: What then has been my crime? Not the lending to a relation a copy of Mr Paines works; not the giving away to another a few numbers of an innocent and constitutional publication; but for having dared to be, according to the measure of my feeble abilities, a strenuous and active advocate for an equal representation of the people, in the house of the people; for having dared to attempt to accomplish a measure, by legal means, which was to diminish the weight of their taxes, and to put an end to the effusion of their blood.

From my infancy to this moment, I have devoted myself to the cause of the people. It is a good cause. It will ultimately prevail. It will finally triumph.

Muir was not the only one to suffer such a fate simply for arguing for political reform. The government crackdown on reformers saw several more people deported, and Muir was accompanied on his ship to Australia by fellow radicals William Skirving, Maurice Margarot and Thomas Palmer.

After war with France broke out and the conflict escalated, the cause of reform dwindled away as the government made a plea to patriotism in the face of the enemy. They made a serious mistake, however, with the Militia Act of 1797, which was resented across Scotland but which was imposed without armed revolution against the authorities. Resentment was building up, albeit quietly.

Radicalism and reform went underground in the final years of the 18th century and the first years of the 19th century. An organisation of radicals called the United Scotsmen briefly flirted with the idea of joining the United Irishmen in a rising against the government, but there simply was not the support for it and it collapsed in 1798 with the trial and deportation of its Dundonian leading figure, George Mealmaker.

If truth be told, though there had been local committees across Scotland, there was no mass uprising for the cause of reform, and that remained the case until well into the second decade of the 19th century, especially as Britain was soon fighting not just France but also the USA from 1812.

In the first decade of the 19th century, Scotland saw economic decline despite the advance of the industrial revolution, largely because weavers, then a large part of the working class, saw their earnings halved on average. Organising themselves into local unions, in 1812 they petitioned the courts for an increase in wages. This was granted but employers would not pay, and so the first major strike in Scottish industry in the 19th century took place, lasting nine weeks and ending only when the authorities arrested the leaders in Glasgow and put them in jail for months at a time.

The growth of the Luddite movement is often credited to that Scottish strike. It embraced weavers, factory workers and miners, and was soon a real threat to the authority of the capitalist class. Yet wherever potential revolution broke out, the various arms of the government, including the military, reacted with ferocity and reform was kept at bay.

In 1815, Waterloo ended the Napoleonic Wars and in a few short months, economic hardship across the UK proved disastrous for working people. Discharged soldiers came back into the community but there were precious few jobs for them. In 1816, a huge meeting on Glasgow Green which apparently involved 40,000 people heard calls for governmental reform and an end to the hated Corn Laws which blocked the importation of cheap grain from abroad.

Scotland was ripe for radical reform. It started in England.

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Back in the Day: The events that led to the Radical War of 1820 - The National

For a century, the United States has turned its focus to particular groups within our population, honoring them for a day, a week, and up to a month. Veterans Day is perhaps the first example, dating back to late 1919 when it began as a celebration of Armistice Day at the end of World War I. This was a first effort to shine the spotlight on war heroes in recognition of their service.

By the 1920s, the practice of designating a date to pay tribute to a specific demographic was a way of paying tribute to the contributions of minority populations that continued to be marginalized in society. The work of inclusion, recognition, and even reparation was attempted by these weeks, widening the dominant paradigm and narrative to allow for those formerly erased.

For example, historian Carter G. Woodson inaugurated what he called Negro History Week in 1926, in an attempt to incorporate the African-American experience into the master narrative of American history. A week in February was chosen, coinciding with the birthdays of Abraham Lincoln, the president who outlawed slavery, and Frederick Douglass, who escaped the cruel and unusual institution to spend the rest of his life fighting for freedom.

Emerging 50 years after Emancipation and 50 before the abolition of Jim Crow laws, by the 1970s, the week would become a month Black History Month dedicated, to paraphrase President Ford, to rectify the gross omission of the vast contributions of African Americans to the nation. Just as the purpose of Februarys designation is to recognize Black Americans, other marginalized demographics have also found a place on the calendar to call their own: National Hispanic Heritage Month (September), Asian Pacific American Heritage Month (May), Womens History Month (March).

By the same logic, the fact that on February 11th we observe the International Day of Women and Girls in Science is proof that the role we play in STEM was in dire need of some attention across the world. Historically, the presence of women in science-related fields has been one of those absurd taboos in cultures around the world, as traditional gender roles have played into keeping women tied to domesticity and absent from spaces of inquiry, like laboratories.

One would think that the smattering of prominent female scientists, those who managed to upturn these ossified conventions of the 20th century (chemists like Marie Curie, engineers like Amelia Earhart, astrophysicists like Katherine Johnson), would have sufficiently proven the exception to the rule theory, but no. Instead, it took a resolution passed by the United Nations in 2016 to highlight that the 21st century will require more of us as a species. It will be so much, in fact, that we will no longer have the luxury to squander the talents of more than half our global population by keeping women out of STEM.

This day of celebration and recognition is a step in promoting gender equality and the advancement of science and infrastructure, in the hopes of increasing egalitarianism by 2030. At the moment, while women make up right around 51% of the worlds population, only 30% of researchers across the world are women. The statistics around the number of women who pursue STEM careers and work in manufacturing, construction, engineering, and related fields are even more disproportionately low. Clearly, we still need at least one day a year to shine a light onto all of our smart-at-STEM women and girls.

Here at BELatina, we didnt have to look much further than our backyard to find a remarkable member of the STEM community. Just as we are blessed to be surrounded by Latina artists, educators, and entrepreneurs in our communities, we can also find surgeons, architects, and, in this case, specialized researchers, working daily to use their knowledge and expertise for the public good. Highlighting the contributions of one of these women is our celebration of International Day of Women and Girls in Science, a spotlight on one Latina who has helped lay down a path for others to follow.

Miguelina Matthews was born and raised in Manhattan, surrounded by a large extended family. Latina might be too general a label for this scientist who now works for a pharmaceutical company. More precisely, Dr. Matthews refers to herself as a Jewminican, half Dominican (on moms side), half Ashkenazi Jewish (on dads), fully identifying with both of her families cultures.

Dr. Matthews grew up with her Spanish-speaking tas and grandmother, as well as her fathers English-speaking family, comfortably switching between the two. Her proximity to both languages and the fact that her father didnt learn Spanish (Until recently, she chuckled, noting that all of a sudden, he seems to have a much greater command and comprehension than she remembered) firmly established her bilingualism. Spanish, though spoken domestically only, took sufficient root enough in her that she doubled up on majors, pursuing both a pre-med curriculum and a B.A. in Spanish literature.

During her early years, attending a girls-only elementary school in Manhattan, Dr. Matthews was keenly aware of her languages and cultures at home. She felt then, and does still now, fully of her mothers family and fully of her Bronx-born, Jewish family. The aspects of her hybridity refreshingly coexist without conflict, and I begin to ascribe her ease and self-awareness to New York Citys signature multiculturalism. But Dr. Matthews, who I have been calling by her familiar nickname, Migi, quicker disabuses me of that notion.

None of the people in my elementary school looked like me, she assures me, noting that her cohort was largely Jewish but no one she knew spoke Spanish like her mother and their family. I take a moment to process this as a Jew growing up in Latin America, my Jewish-ness is what set me apart.

I ask Migi how this played out in effect, this homogeneity at her school, thinking about both her and my experience as Bizarro-versions of each other. I vaguely remember feeling that I shouldand I dont know if someone actually said it or if I just felt as if I should butI thought I needed to straighten my hair.

Same! I exclaim, carried away, and quickly try to bring it back to her but she seems as piqued by this mirror as I am. Do you straighten it now? I ask, clarifying that I dont bother, living in a humid climate.

No, not really, she said, and we both leave the rest unsaid, though Im confident we are both long past the point of feeling the pressure to pass.

But as girls in grade school, identity is still raw, more a vulnerability than an asset. Standing out from the crowd can be difficult. Anecdotally, I have never felt more Jewish than when I lived in Colombia, where I was very much in the minority. I imagine Migis Latinidad may have been a tricky wave to surf at a small, culturally uniform, unisex school, but difference is also a strong galvanizing force. She acknowledges the great gift her family gave her by sending her to private school, noting that though she felt different from everyone else, she found ways to navigate. In fact, Dr. Matthews acknowledges, she was happy to move onto a more diverse high school, one which, at the very least, also included boys.

We must be exact contemporaries, Migi and I, I thought when her name jumped off the page of my monthly assignment sheet. As my mental Rolodex whirred through a couple of decades, it settled on my first years in the U.S., when I arrived for college. I couldnt call up a face but felt as if this name Miguelina Matthews its simultaneous here-ness and there-ness, was one I had read on an attendance list or a program.

Indeed, when I ask Migi if she went to Cornell for undergrad, she quickly confirms that we overlapped exactly. Given her diverse interests in both the arts and the sciences, it is quite likely that we sat in the same class at least once. Im definitely a face person, Im sure if I saw you, I would remember you, she notes graciously and I laugh because now I know I must have seen her name written out Im definitely more of a name person.

Being at the same college during the same part of the decade, both of us GenXers, we might have both been sitting in the same Spanish literature class right around the time the word Hispanic was being replaced by Latino. Due to our peculiar background, however, me being Latin American (not Latina) and she being raised in Manhattan, where individualism is prized as a personality trait, we were in some ways spared the politics of this particular issue. Instead, after years of serving as representatives of our minority cultures, we were both released to a school with over 20,000 students, a place where diversity thrives as the inevitable result of the numbers game.

How did you like going to such a big and diverse school, I ask her, thinking of the relief I felt when I left behind my years of moving through each grade with the same batch of 80 people. Nothing about the class size at Cornell was intimidating to Dr. Matthews when she went there, in part, she says, because her father is an alumnus and shed had the opportunity to visit the campus and become familiar with its breadth.

Instead, she remembers those years as being full of intense self-learning. Dr. Matthews went to college convinced that she would become a medical doctor. Unlike many freshmen, she started out with complete conviction, having always had a focused interest in biological sciences. She realized pretty quickly, mainly through following the prescribed pre-med curriculum, that her happy place was the lab, not the library. Losing momentum in her path toward pursuing an M.D., Migi ended up taking her degree in literature and leaving one or two classes in her biology major undone, graduating early but a few credits short of completing that second degree.

Though she was put off from pursuing a medical degree, Dr. Matthews mentorship under Professor Elaine Tolson at the Vet School inspired her to stay in Ithaca for an extra semester. Though she had taken her degree, she wanted to stay and live the last few months of college life with her friends, sure, but the work she was doing up with Professor Tolson inspired her: research on Lyme disease. Her work in the lab even propelled her to finish all of the coursework she had left undone classes in epidemiology and microbiology (also taught by inspiring female professors) and develop a passion for studying infectious disease.

After getting that first degree, Dr. Matthews enrolled at SUNY Stonybrook, one of the leading programs on infectious disease at the time. Her degree program required her to rotate through various labs for a year, searching for the right fit and committing to a single lab that focuses on a particular set of diseases. She did this very thing, only to find herself in a predicament: a year after joining the lab, the professor that ran it moved to Yale University, essentially to inaugurate their infectious disease lab. Migi moved with him, loading up everything from vials and cultures to tanks of liquid nitrogen into the back of the truck and helping to drive the entire operation from Stonybrook to New Haven, she reminisces. (Today, Yale boasts one of the leading labs in the country, a direct result of this move).

At Yale, Migi became Dr. Matthews, not a medical doctor as she once imagined she would be, but a PhD in infectious diseases, with a specialty in pneumonia and similar viruses. That reminds me, I interrupt. This doesnt have to do with women in STEM but what do you think about the Coronavirus? I ask, feeling somewhat embarrassed about my question.

But then Im suddenly so glad I did, as Dr. Matthews is reminded of a story that makes me both cringe and laugh at once, empathizing with the discomfort she must have felt at the time. Evidently, she defended her dissertation in 2003, right around when the SARS outbreak had the whole world worried as we are now. Once she finished her presentation, she realized in horror that her father, invited to bear witness to her defense, had raised his hand to ask a question. Tentatively, Migi calls on him and he asks: What does your research have to do with SARS?, essentially asking her to solve the global conundrum or at least think fast to come up with a good response. She must have done just that because she passed her defense, but the stress of the moment has erased her memory of what exactly that was.

After obtaining her doctorate, Migi was expected to take on one post-doctoral position after the next, a convention of her field. These low-paying, high-output positions were not at all what she had in mind. She realized soon after graduation that she would have to jump through the right hoops in order to eventually land an academic position running her own lab and decided this wasnt a good fit for her. Yale, she reflects, did a poor job preparing us for any job outside academia. And I didnt want to be post-doc forever. And I didnt want to move too far from my family in NYC. From my vantage point in the humanities, I had a similar experience.

So what did you do, I ask her. How did you get out? Migi told me about attending a job fair in New York just after she took her doctoral degree. She was offered a position at a molecular biology company, asked to create a diagnostic. She took the job and never looked back. Were your friends in academia supportive, I ask, and I can practically see her shaking her head no.

They thought I was a sell-out, at first, she says, noting that it was rare at the time not to follow the academic path. Evidently today, these non-academic jobs are less rare. Did they come around? I desperately want to know. Eventually, yes, she says. Some of them did.

One of Dr. Matthews favorite jobs was in vaccine manufacturing. She felt fulfilled by following her viruses full circle from understanding them, to curing them, to preventing them. An expert in pneumonia and similar diseases, that position was practically custom made. She has worked in research and development positions, manufacturing, and now in high-detail global quality control. Traveling around the world to places that produce both injectable and tablet-form medications, Miguelina Matthews makes sure that these various labs are doing their job correctly.

Over the last 17 years, Dr. Matthews has had her fair share of job environments and managers. We talk about the great bosses shes had, noting that many, though not all, have been women. More than their gender, she reflects on the qualities of a good boss: Someone who gives positive reinforcement, support, and credit when its due. She cites listening as the most crucial skill and micromanaging as the most destructive to her work. In previous positions, she, too, had managed people, and though she doesnt mind doing it, she prefers to work on her own.

Has this all been more difficult for you being a woman? I ask. Dr. Matthews doesnt exactly say yes. She agrees that she once had a rude awakening when she realized that a male counterpart grossly out-earned her despite having lesser qualifications. I practically gasped. How did you rectify the situation?

I reported it to my boss, who was a woman, and she advocated for me and got me the same amount, she said. Now, I know how to advocate for myself and I always advise women never to take the first offer. Always negotiate, even if its just the intangibles, things like vacation time.

Not one to over-dramatize, Dr. Matthews cites a single incidence in which she has felt discriminated against at work. As a single woman without dependents, she is asked to travel a lot more than her counterparts who have partners or kids, regardless of gender. She both understands the rationale but is understandably irritated by the discrepancy. I murmur my assent and empathy.

So being a Latina in your field? Is it a positive? A superpower? I ask.

Dr. Matthews laughs a little. I dont know, she says, and I get the feeling that she is consummately empirical, made uncomfortable by assumptions and generalizations. She changes the subject, suddenly remembering that I told her Im Colombian. Im actually supposed to be in Colombia in March, she says. Ill be in Bogot for work, so I extended my trip for a week and will visit Medelln and Cartagena.

You will have such a great time, I assure her. You chose great cities to visit; can I send you a couple of recommendations? I ask.

Please do, she says. Its my first trip to Colombia. And thats when I realized that her Latina identity might not have made Dr. Matthews who she is, but it certainly colors how she sees the world, both inside the lab and out.

See more here:

International Day of Women and Girls in Science: Perspective From Dr. Migi Matthews, a Latina in STEM - BELatina

The undeniable, incontestable, bona fide truth about the New South Africa is that its mother and father are Karabo Moroka and Mandla Sithole. That is the hill I will die on. Generations, the aptly titled soap opera, premiered on SABC1 in 1994, fulfilling the public broadcasters vision to become the leading, credible voice and face of the nation and the continent. Karabo Moroka and Mandla Sithole fashioned the ideal subjectivity of Black South Africans in post-1994 South Africa: A wealthy marriage. One elegant, feminine woman and a powerful, masculine man. The adult ambitions of generations to follow.

It is difficult to study and deconstruct an institution as expansive and pervasive as the Victorian Love-Marriage plot of our lives and it has indeed gone understudied for a long time. However, Elizabeth Brake, in her 2011 book Minimizing Marriage: Marriage, Morality and the Law, gives the phenomenon a word Amatonormativity: [The] disproportionate focus on marital and amorous love relationships as special sites of value, and the assumption that romantic love is a universal goal. The failure to strive for romantic, monogamous love-coupling is often seen as a sign of psychopathy. Our society says, If you dont want this, something is very wrong with you. And yet many people have no desire for this. Not only are many people polyamorous capable and desiring of multiple, nonhierarchical romantic partners and in a way that is not motivated primarily by sex with multiple partners but many people are also aromantic and asexual, having no desire for romantic love-coupling and for sexual intercourse respectively. Polyamorous, asexual and aromantic people are not sexual deviants, are not sociopaths or broken in any way whatsoever. They can lead healthy, fulfilling lives if not for the prejudice and scorn they face in amatonormative society.

Instead of arguing for queers social validity, I want to show that the heterosexual, cisgender love-couple can be a site of violence and that its pursuit can be masochistic in ways we have tried to present as healthy and innately fulfilling.

I will begin by describing the psychosocial dynamics of heterosexual amatonormativity and how it absorbs and weaponises gender identity and performance as its own. Then, I will trace a genealogy of the sanctions on womens self-determination and very humanity, and deconstruct the historic institutions that pursued the domestication of women as objects of marriage in Europe from 500 AD to the 19th century. Following that, I will, relatively briefly, unpack mens monopoly over violence as their primary source of identity formation, using the South African, historically white, elite, all-boys schooling system in the 20th and 21st centuries as my point of departure. I will then contextualise these received notions of marriage and identity within the contemporary ways in which Black South Africans have received, multiplied and navigate their dehumanisation.

By the conclusion, I hope to have shown that, first, the dynamics produced by identity systems in marriage are not self-executing they are because of an unbroken sequence of decisions made by people, notions that have been created and arduously maintained in the church, the school and in the family. I hope to have shown the life and liberty pursued by queers in denouncing the traditional marriage blueprint. Ultimately, I hope that having delivered an account of the violence of traditional marriage identity systems, we may consider heterosexual and traditional marriages as worthy of serious reconsideration at least as the dominant and most widely accepted version of successful adulthood. I hope to have created space at the centre for homosexual and homogender relationships, polyamorous as well as aromantic and asexual people.

Amatonormativity and Gender Labour

The machinery used to engineer the belief that human beings naturally strive for a monogamous, romantic and wealthy heterosexual marriage is expansive, with multiple sources and outlets. It is a belief that is first imparted to us during childhood from Western fairy tales of dragons and damsels in distress who are saved by men wearing metal who possess copious amounts of intergenerational wealth. It is supported by the state which affords extraordinary amounts of social and economic privilege to those that successfully conclude a marriage whether they are citizens, refugees, immigrants or asylum seekers whether people of the same sex could conclude a marriage was enormously contested for a long time in this country, and still is in other countries, although same-sex romantic and sexual relationships are older than prohibitions against them and were not always pathologised in the way they have come to be.

Magazine editions of True Love, Cosmopolitan and Destiny targeting wealthy and heterosexual women are strikingly incomplete without advice on how to fulfil the highest achievement a woman can strive for and no Hollywood script can be considered for production without a romance subplot for the lead character. Marriage is a story that the entire enterprise of organised religion clamours to own and sanctify as an instruction from God to the very hollows of our bones. Whether you are in a romantic, heterosexual relationship or not, the banks, your doctor, your grandmother and your employer all want to know how far you are with that God-given desire.

If we are good boys and good girls, if we are faithful to the gender identity we were assigned at birth, we will be rewarded with the perfect, balanced life as fashioned by Karabo Moroka and Mandla Sithole. And once we win love, we must work to keep love. We must continue to furnish our lovers identities and the institution of our union with our gender performance.

Within the idealised love-coupling of Karabo Moroka and Mandla Sithole is both the fruits and the maintenance of what we might call Gender Labour: The conscientious, concentrated and concerted styling of the body, of mannerisms and of behaviour in the interests of maintaining public gender identity and sexuality. Put differently, if we are men, we must embody the agency of violence with the timbre of our voices, with the broadness of our shoulders, with the performance of dominance, power and the apparent threat of physical violence and share the dividends of patriarchy with our women; if we are women, we must become agents of sex, beauty, morality, and the grace of God on Earth. We must supply our men with the objects of their power through our bodies by painting our faces, wearing shoes that raise and flatter our proportions and adorn our men with our beauty. This is labour.

This is labour we perform, particularly, in public spaces, at family gatherings, in malls, at restaurants, in walks to the park. Faced with the sanction on male beauty, heterosexual men pursue women to perform beauty on their behalf. Similarly, faced with the sanction on female self-determination, heterosexual women seek men to embody the agency of self-determination on their behalf.

Do Women have Souls?

Catherine MacKinnon has invested the past 15 years of her lifes work into asking Are Women Human? It is also the title of her 2006 book which spans her public speeches and scholarly publications in law journals as well as addresses to Human Rights conferences, national legislatures, parliaments and the United Nations. Are Women Human jettisons the theorisations, futurities and utopias of academic feminist work to present brutal (literally) hard, cold facts and insightful analysis of the material conditions of womens local, national and global inequality and a practical legal strategy for remedy By existing legal and social definitions, Human and female are mutually exclusive by definition; one cannot be a woman and a human being at the same time. as Lori Watsons review goes. Womens humanity has been a topic of debate for centuries.

Women do not have souls states the legendary decree of the council of Mcon, supposedly in 585 AD. In reality, such a decree was never made by any Synod or council of European Christianity. What had happened was that a satirical pamphlet published in Germany during the late 16th century, criticising literal interpretations of the bible, took a strange turn. The author was anonymous and based the satire on the Latin term homines which can be interpreted as human beings or as adult males much the same way as James Baldwin and Bantubonke Biko refer to the Black man. However, the public sincerely debated over scripture on the point whether women had souls. It is also widely held by historians that the pamphlet was translated into Italian and published in Lyons in 1647 under the translated title Women Do Not Have a Soul and Do Not Belong to the Human Race by Many Passages of Holy Scripture, un-satirically. The pamphlet was later republished in many other European countries over the next half-century.

Thankfully, when the matter reached the Catholic Church, it was formally condemned by the Pope.

The pamphlet made over 50 claims about the nature of women, including the idea that women have no souls, are not invited to heaven and are comparable to demons and dogs. One claim asserted that while a smith may use a hammer to fashion a sword, the hammer is not a part of him nor the sword. In this way, the writer states, women may be used to perpetuate the human race by a man but do not rank among those considered mankind. But isnt that how we have built the conception of women and the purpose of marriage? Is this not the substantive goal of patrilineality and heterosexual love-coupling? Is this not what society means when they insist that the baby must take the husbands surname because the child is his offspring? Centuries on, The Roots would go on to perpetuate this belief in their 2002 song The Seed:

I push my seed in her bush for lifeIts gonna work because Im pushing it rightIf Mary drops my baby girl tonightI would name her Rock and Roll.

Western Womanhood and Marriage

Over a millennium later in Britain, womens humanity in relation to men was still being debated. The questions were: Should women be educated, and what should that education teach? Thomas Markby is quoted from an article he published in an 1866 edition of Contemporary Review saying that, [t]he true end of the education of women is making good wives and mothers. Thomas was not at all unique in his claim but was joined by proto feminists of the age, unions and other movements who varied in approach but not in principle whether or not ciswomen need education and what that education should teach was debatable, however, the outcome must always be to achieve successful wives and mothers out of children assigned women at birth. What all seemed to agree on was that a womans identity is constituted by being a good wife to her husband and being a good mother to her children. In 1889, a mother of a Girton College student wrote that womans proper sphere is the domestic, and to fill that position she requires to learn all that will make a good wife and mother. The fight to have young ciswomen admitted into formal education was won with the express purpose to have them become successful wives and mothers.

And once the project was won, once ciswomen became married, the doctrine of coverture legally enforced the idea of her marital inferiority. Until the 19th century, only unmarried ciswomen could enter into contracts, sue and be sued, draft wills and sell their property in their own name. The doctrine of coverture was the legal fiction that, upon marriage, a husband and wife become one person: the husband, whose consent the wife needed to perform any and all juristic acts. The Western institution of marriage was an institution that constituted women as perpetual minors, soulless domestic helpers whose existential identity was summed up by wifehood and motherhood. The doctrine of coverture was never officially abolished, only gradually displaced by piecemeal legislation and judicial decisions.

A woman should, according to the current gender ideology, be a companion to her husband, a teacher of her children, and the pervasive moral influence within the home; but only an educated woman could perform these functions adequately; therefore academic education was in fact the best preparation for marriage and maternity Ellen Jordan Making Good Wives and Mothers? The Transformation of Middle-Class Girls Education in Nineteenth-Century Britain 1991 History of Education Quarterly

For this reason a man shall leave his father and his mother, and be joined to his wife; and they shall become one flesh [belonging to him. And the two shall become one mind, his mind] Genesis 2:24, insertions my own, if not implied and merely made express.

The relevance of middle-class girls education in 19th century Britain is presented because it illustrates the precarious humanity and precarious self-determination of women a millennium after Germanys anonymous pamphlet that nominally shook the pope. Even advocates for ciswomens education came just short of repeating the pamphlets hammer analogy: To be a help-mate to man is, I believe, admitted on all sides to be womans happiest position Henrietta Stanley, an early patron of Queens College in a letter she wrote in 1879. Further, this history scaffolds some of the ways amatonormativity is constructed through the identity formation of children in girls schools. This conception of womanhood and social validity was later to be exported to South Africa as a colony through the British formal schooling system. It is this colonial notion of womanhood that informs Karabo Moroka and Mandla Sitholes ambitions in marriage.

Cartoon from The Vote, a newspaper published by the Womens Freedom League (February 1911)

Boys Will Be Made Boys

The stories that historically white, elite boys schools in South Africa tell themselves leave much to be desired. I know this from research for this article but also because I went to one Jeppe High School for Boys in Johannesburg, South Africa. If their websites are anything to go by, their excellence is palpably measured by the successes of their sporting records and less so by the standards of their academic education. All of the elite all-boys schools Michaelhouse, St Andrews, Bishops, King Edward, SACS etc share ideological underpinnings in the vision of colonial, British masculinity, a subjectivity perfected by marriage, but not determined by it.

The all-boys schooling system in South Africa is one of Britains most successful exports, with the first one, South African College Schools, being founded in Cape Town in 1829. These schools inculcate a version of manliness that stresses obligations and duties to the school and wider society, country and Empire, according to John Lambert in Munition Factories Turning Out a Constant Supply of Living Material: White South African Elite Boys Schools and the First World War.

George Edward Lynch Cotton introduced sport into the British schooling system in the 1850s as headmaster of Marlborough College with the express justification that sport teaches boys how to take a licking, follow instruction from authority and curates an appetite for domination. Participating in sport is of paramount importance to the South African elite, all-boys schooling system. Failure to participate in sport attracts the most dehumanising humiliation for students in boys schools. At Jeppe Boys, students who do not participate in sport are referred to as scum ultimately, black students who live in the townships, on the other side of the mine dumps, two taxis and a train away, who cannot realistically afford to leave school after 6pm and again on weekends. The objects of boys education are constituted by self-mastery, physicality as the primary site of existentialism and the desire for dominion.

Contemporary to the sporting obsession was the premium placed on the cadet system/ band pipe/ scouts. The cadets pursued the ethics and idealisation of militarism, with parades on the monarchs birthday, Open Day, rival rugby matches and other auspicious occasions. Unlike sport, the cadet system was never made compulsory except in Natal (today, KwaZulu-Natal) which made it compulsory in 1903.

The connection between the cadet system and militarism was so direct that, in the 1870s, the headmasters of Hilton College and St Andrews publicly stated that their cadets are available to the colonial government in its task of subjugating the natives, and went on to offer their cadets as volunteers against the Chief Langalibalele rebellion of the amaHlubi in 1873. Over the decades, many cadets would go on to serve in colonial regiments against anti-colonial African uprisings, against the scum, and later returned to train cadets emphasising the connections between the schools and the military. During the First World War, South African all-boys schools were overrepresented in the British troops, so much so that the headmaster of St Andrews at the time describe all-boys schools as munition factories [doing their share turning out] a constant supply a living material the insertion being John Lamberts. Speaking on behalf of the boys when the war broke out in 1914, Eric Addison, an old boy of Hilton College, described the atmosphere like this:

[We] were rank flag-wagging imperialistic jingoes, and how we loved it! We certainly did have something to shout about, and the present generation has no idea how we felt We certainly had the courage of our convictions, because when the dogs of war were let slip we were ready to die in thousands to uphold our beliefs.

To this day, there persists the same disturbing veneration of war within South African all-boys schools in the competitive pride they take in their war memorials, listing proudly how many of their former students died protecting the egos and demonstrating the dominion of men. I wonder if Parktown Boys will memorialise Enoch Mpianzi as a life it took in the same order.

Far from institutions that teach inferiority, meekness and servitude, boys schools breed children into agents of violence, soulless in their own way, their innocence a stain on the perfection of their manhood. A wife is not a necessary condition for identity formation, but evidence thereof. Once these boys accrue power and dominance in society, they are led to believe that they are entitled to a wife to perform the kinds of labour they are unwilling and sanctioned from performing in their own name domestic labour, moral labour and the agency of beauty.

The Precarious Black South African Marriage Identity

In an exaggerated parody of double consciousness, black South Africans often get married twice. Although the current Recognition of Customary Marriages Act allows for customary (traditional) marriages to be recognised as Civil Marriages (Western unions), black South Africans will often host wedding ceremonies to socially institute the welding of their four identities. One to wed their black African selves, the other to wed their Western (or Western aspirational) selves. A Traditional wedding in each familys yard wearing Isintu or seShoeshoe and a white wedding, often at the Methodist Church down the road, wearing British suits, bowties, Monk shoes and a white wedding gown with a veil. The tensions created here are extraordinary.

The white wedding institutes a joint identity formation much the same as the one described above, whereas the black wedding institutes a far more explicitly patriarchal set of relations.

Lula, leha a u otla, lula Stay, even when he beats you, stay, said my great grandmother to my mother on the day of her wedding. A mans entitlement to beat his wife is not an uncommon reality in black marriage institutions. It is often explicitly instructed that sometimes, a man must discipline his wife. Inasmuch as Western marriage-identity constitutes a perpetual status of a social and legal minority on the wife, the black South African marriage-identity does not obscure this with veneers of love and intimacy. Acrobatic arguments attempt to romanticize this arrangement with lyrics on duty and communal responsibility that necessitate the concentration of power around men in marriages. Young black South Africans understand this arrangement and internalise it from a very young age by referring to young women as le ngane, lo mntana/ ngoana enoa this child.

Black womanhood in South Africa is not unfamiliar to Western womanhood. In the black marriage identity, a woman is constituted by the embodiment and agency of domestic and reproductive labour: uMakhoti. This must be executed while still serving the Western-ambitious identity of their union as the object of beauty and grace. You must labour to be Imbokodo, navigate an anti-woman and anti-black and anti-black-woman capitalism, bitch in the office servile in the home while being an object of revelry and elegance. And that labour will be enjoyed by the social capital of your husband. And then of course there is the institution of lobolo which I will not argue here save to say Black men use it as justification for their dominion and domestication over and of women.

@NochillinMzansi:Venda women are soo respectful. She will kneel down like this before sex & go on some aee khaba e f[*]cke wee

Before I was born, before Karabo Moroka and Mandla Sithole, my grandmother knew I would be. She was born in the Eastern Cape and spoke isiXhosa and was coloured. She lived with my grandfather in a township called Katlehong (perhaps Where There is Success) being brutalised for being a woman, his woman. My grandfather was a man, and men do terrible things, unspeakable things that must be spoken to their women. He was a black man, a thing at which university departments spend their lives horrified. My grandmother took out a life policy for her children the audacity of it all shocked the story of the black woman killed by her black husband for cooking rice for a change and not pap, for the time other men spent dressing her down, for not bearing him a son from his empty ejaculate, for embarrassing him at the Christmas lunch by correcting him in front of his family, for contesting the space of self-determination he occupies, for nothing at all.

Growing up, I watched Generations with my mother at 8pm in the living room with my grandparents in Katlehong. We watched Karabo Moroka move through space the way a breath moves through mist. We watched Mandla brood over the breadth of his dominion and wondered when our respective turns would come. We had recently stolen ourselves away from a physically and emotionally abusive black man who himself witnessed his mother being brutalised by his father. My mother did not leave in her own name but the name of her mother after the first night my father beat me, realising she was participating in some unremarkable tragedy spinning its taut silk tale. We sat there with our plates on our laps watching freedom play in unremarkable scandals and dreamt of a world when we could shame and be shamed by a glass of wine thrown to the face.

Eventually, she would come to find a husband of her own, a man with money, who drove a German car and looked at her like she was Karabo Moroka. At the wedding, his family sang uzosiwashela siphekele She will do our washing and cook for us. I cried in the outside toilet as my mother, who had once held the temerity to steal us back from the institutionally fractured identities of black men sat and smiled, wrapped in blankets like a gift to marriage. In the worst of times, she would resile her temerity and say things like, I need to let him be the man of the house, I need to let him lead. I watched my mother swallow herself into a child again.

At each point of the genealogy presented here are counternarratives, dissenting streams and contestations in the church, in the school, in the government and in the home. Marriage and identity systems have certainly come a long way from the violence in this account. However, the account of marriage demonstrated above dominates the core construct of marriage and love-coupling in the communal imagination.

A better writer would be able to demonstrate the continuities between marriage identity-making and gendered violence and sexual assault including rape while accounting for the intersectionalities of time, geography, politics, gender ideology, race and class. I hope, in this long, yet small, contribution, I have given that writer some of the necessary premises to present such an argument. A more brazen writer would advocate for the abolition of marriage notwithstanding its candied veneers of unconditional love, mutual support and partnership as though a marriage was ever a necessary precondition to legitimize those characteristics in a relationship. I am not yet either of these writers. Back to the ghetto. MC

Kneo Mokgopa is a graduate of the Wilfred & Jules Kramer Law School at the University of Cape Town. They are currently writing their Masters in Rhetoric Studies at UCT on South African identity systems and are the Communications Manager at the Nelson Mandela Foundation. Kneo has been publishing since 2016 in Daily Maverick, the Cape Times, the Sunday Times, Amandla! Magazine, Hola Africa Magazine and has published a chapter in We are No Longer at Ease: The Struggle for Free Education, the upcoming 2020 CAPS Life Orientation textbook and many other platforms.

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An Account of the Violence of Heterosexual Marriage Identity-Making - Daily Maverick

Stakeholders in Gombe State have faulted a directive by the Executive Chairman, State Universal Basic Education Board (SUBEB), Mr Babaji Babadidi, to public school teachers to enroll their children in public schools.

The executive chairman had said his directive would enhance academic achievement by compelling school managers and teachers to take their work seriously.

But experts said the problem of low-quality performance of public schools was beyond a mere directive to teachers to also send their children to public schools.

A lecturer with the Federal College of Education (Technical) Gombe, Dr Sani Yakubu Gombe, said if the government could provide the infrastructure necessary to provide learners with quality education, teachers and other parents would willingly take their children to public schools.

In my view, there is no way you can direct somebody to enroll his children in a public school when the standard is too low to provide qualitative education.

But once you improve the system, I believe that the teachers will willingly take their children to public schools even to save the cost of taking them to private schools, he said.

He, however, added that if the SUBEB is serious about the directive, then education managers not teachers alone should also send their kids to public schools.

Dr Yakubu Gombe said such directive could not enhance performance but that a teacher could easily be effective whether in private or public school if he/she is provided with all necessary materials, motivation and effective supervision.

If we look at our public schools, there are no instructional materials, the classrooms are dilapidated, there is no proper supervision; the teachers are not going for training, he said.

Yakubu Gombe said the solution was for the government to improve the pupil-teacher ratio and the capacity of teachers in terms of training, motivation and working materials.

On his part, Malam Abubakar Uba, a lecturer with the Federal University Kashere, said the directive would help to a certain extent.

First and foremost teachers welfare should be given priority. For instance, the TETfund is responsible for the infrastructure and training of higher institution lecturers. As such, a similar agency is needed to cater for the lower level. What obtains now at the SUBEB is that they concentrate on the infrastructure rather than the certificates or the training of teachers.

A teacher is key to the education sector, not the classroom. If the teachers are not stable, there is no way they can give their best, he said.

Malam Uba added that there was little effort on the part of government to motivate teachers to be dedicated to their jobs, noting that if the public school system is working, teachers themselves will prefer to enroll their children in the public schools, because it would be cheaper considering the meagre salaries of the teachers.

According to him, posting of teachers should also be looked into with a special provision for rural areas, to encourage teachers to accept posting to such areas.

A retired permanent secretary and public affairs analyst, Alhaji Umaru Gurama, said asking teachers to enroll their children in public schools is not the solution to challenges facing education.

According to him, the entire basic education system became ineffective after the abolition of the Teachers Grade II certificate.

To get it right, the entire sector needs a holistic approach. First, the condition of service of teachers should be reviewed and their salary should be deducted from the federation account. Secondly, if the judiciary and legislature can have an independent salary structure, primary school teachers should also be given autonomy, to take care of their salary.

Also, the SUBEB itself has deviated from its core mandate, which is enrolling and keeping the children in school till completion. What they are now after is awarding contracts for school infrastructure, Gurama said.

According to him, once the quality improves in public schools, teachers and other members of the public would willingly take their children to there.

Gurama said at present, the sector was neglected and turned into a place for people who took the job as the last option after failing to get better jobs elsewhere.

However, the Executive Chairman of SUBEB, Mr Babaji Babadidi, said the board stood by the directive, which, according to him, was meant to reinvigorate the public education sector.

One, if these headteachers, the teachers, the education secretaries and all officers involved in the education sector bring their children to where they are working the standard will improve because you know that your child is part and parcel of that school. Hence the teachers and headteachers would be serious about their responsibilities.

Secondly, the issue of coming late under the pretense of taking their children to private schools will no longer arise, because apart from taking the children to school in the morning, they also close early under the same pretense of picking their children up from school, he said.

Babadidi added that for now, the SUBEB was sensitising teachers on the imperatives of enrolling their children in the public schools before reviewing the relevant laws that would make it compulsory.

He said: Governor Muhammad Inuwa Yahaya has approved the review of SUBEB law in the state and of course we will make sure that the directive aspect is recorded as part of the law.

As such, if you do not bring your child to the school there is a penalty because it is free and compulsory education. So, there will be punishment for parents that refuse to enroll their children in public schools.

The SUBEB chairman said the authorities are working to improve the welfare of teachers through prompt payment of salaries and other entitlements as well as the provision of incentives to make them dedicated to their duties.

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Gombe's directive to teachers faulted on many grounds - Daily Trust

Just due to the fact that the Donald Trump management has actually proclaimed global legislation null and space concerning the Right of Return for Palestinian evacuees, the standing of inhabited East Jerusalem or the outrage of Jewish nests in the busy regions, does not suggest that Israel has actually won and Palestinians have actually shed.

To be extra details, those that have actually undoubtedly shed are those that offered Washington and its allies the power to form the future of Palestine and, as a matter of fact, the whole of the Middle East, in such a way that follows the manipulated United States diplomacy, particularly, the Palestinian Authority () and various other quisling Arab managements.

Those of us that have actually constantly comprehended that Washington and Tel Aviv are 2 sides of the very same coin, are rarely shocked by the supposed Deal of theCentury In reality, Trumps deal is yet an extension of the very same disappointing trajectory of blind United States loyalty toIsrael Whether we call it the Deal of the Century, US-sponsored peace process, or shuttle diplomacy, they are all recycled brand names of the usual item.

But, fingers of blame can not just factor at Trump and Israeli Prime Minister, BenjaminNetanyahu Palestinians should have much of the condemn too.

Twenty- 7 years back, a team of Palestinian political elites escaped from nationwide agreement, authorizing an independent take care of Israel that either yielded or delegated most Palestinian legal rights, consisting of the standing of Jerusalem, and the legal rights of Palestinian evacuees.

READ: Former Israeli PM claims Abbas is the single tranquility companion

They suggested then that Palestinian legal rights might be attained via a step-by-step peace process, via determined settlements andpainful compromises Those that tested the succeeding Oslo accords were avoided and branded as terrorists and radicals; they were sent to prison and, whenever practical, also executed.

Since after that, the destiny, standing and authenticity of the came to be inherently connected to the really Israeli army profession it was indicated to eliminate. The settlements led to the improving of the Israeli profession which is currently under the hazard of being totally linked byIsrael In the meanwhile, some Palestinians expanded richer, and millions of Palestinians came to be a lot more hopeless, separated under an expanding Israeli Apartheid in the West Bank or under a hermetic and fatal siege in Gaza.

Nearly 3 years later on, the Deal of the Century came to totally delegitimize the , itself set-up with American funds and a political required.

Under these brand-new scenarios, there is no rational reason that the need to proceed to exist, at the very least in its existing type, as it played a huge part in putting down the Palestinian individuals, permitting Washington and Tel Aviv to attain their political ends in Palestine without the smallest resistance.

A couple of years back, President, Mahmoud Abbas, referred to armed resistance in Gaza as useless and amistake He supposed to promote a various type of resistance that would absolutely get Palestinian legal rights and give the Palestinian individuals an independent state with Jerusalem as its funding. The Deal of the Century showed that it was Abbas, his Authority and whatever bogus type of resistance they used, that was absolutely and totally pointless.

READ: United States will certainly not request our acknowledgment of Palestine, Netanyahu claims

It is essential that we do not demonstration the Deal of the Century claiming that the is our companion in this procedure. Assigning any type of relevance to the would certainly suggest that we have actually found out absolutely nothing after years of dishonesty and straight-out burglary of hundreds of millions of bucks of funds designated to the Palestinian individuals.

In some strange and awful method, the and the Israeli profession are connected the previous can not exist without the last, and the last calls for the solutions of the previous to lodge itself and broaden its unlawful nests throughout Palestine.

So, any type of message-Deal of the Century Palestinian approach would certainly have to take place in full splitting up from the which, now, just stands for the rate of interests of a course of Palestinians that did well in building up riches and power under the boots of Israeli soldiers.

Despite the s straight-out failings, the Palestinian reason is extra preferred than ever before. The Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) project, which is sustained by the sacrifices and the resistance of the Palestinian individuals, has actually permeated countless layers of cultures throughout the globe, compeling millions of individuals to take an ethical position on the continuous Israeli discrimination and battle criminal activities in Palestine.

More and even more individuals around the globe are likewise realising of the harmful power of Zionism the ideological background that proceeds to overview Israeli national politics to now. Israel is itself in charge of that expanding recognition due to the fact that of its straight treatments in the political events of several nations.

READ: Speaker of Kuwaiti Parliament tosses Deal of the Century in the container

The reality that Israel is meddling in the numerous regulations and constitutions of reputable freedoms around the globe to protect against any type of objection of its transgression in Palestine, is awakening many individuals that might never ever have actually been stired up had the conversation on Palestine and Israel continued its previous type. From the UK to Italy to the United States, the arms of Zionism is trying, and, regretfully, prospering, in imposing its concerns, programs and self-involved interpretations.

The obstacle for Palestinians, now, is recognizing how to browse past the working together and to develop different systems that would certainly enable them to collaborate their activities, to expand the extent of international uniformity, and, ultimately, to harness their success in the type of a central political approach.

This will certainly not be simple, yet is unavoidable. And the response can not be divergent either. While some Palestinian intrigues can happily claim that they have actually denied, also stood up to, the course picked by the , there is not a solitary Palestinian intrigue today that promotes all Palestinians utilizing a unifying language and accepting a global vision. The reality that Palestinian teams proceed to talk of a Two-State solution is a representation of its failure to transcend the boundaries and restrictions of Oslo and the peace process.

As Israel and the United States have actually chosen to take definitive action in the instructions of Apartheid, Palestinians need to take just as definitive action in the instructions of freedom by cutting connections with all stopped working methods and self-seeking people and teams.

Even within Palestines resistance, a significant rethink is called for. While the has actually come a cropper, others have actually stopped working also, and there is no embarassment in confessing that due to the fact that, without taking duty for ones imperfections, genuine adjustment can never ever take place.

This is much from being an ask for the full abolition of the whole Palestinian political frameworks, yet instead for the repair work of an aging system that rejects to restore itself and which is, sometimes, totally unconcerned to altering discussions and political truths.

READ: Israel strategies West Bank annex after deal of century

The reality is that several Palestinian leaders and protestors, also within the resistance, originated from long-gone political periods. While some of them have actually battled a respectable battle, they need to comprehend that enabling an all-natural shift of brand-new managements is the biggest payment they might potentially make at this phase due to the fact that the nature of the battle is likewise altering.

Here is the reality, Palestine can no more rely upon the assistance of Arab nations to construct the required energy that might ultimately subdue Israel and recover the legal rights of the Palestinian individuals.

Our reason is currently a worldwide reason, prolonging from Sweden to Chile and from South Africa to Russia, and it calls for international emissaries that are able to transcend the , the factionalism and ideological tribalism which is damaging the really material of our culture.

Lets turn the Deal of the Century from a dilemma right into a chance, where we rearrange and galvanize the really structure of our political discussion and free ourselves from the countless boundaries that have actually restricted our job and allure in the past.

As Zionism currently makes up one of the biggest hazards, not just to Palestine and the Middle East yet to globes freedoms too, allow the battle for Palestinian liberty come to be a worldwide resist Zionism and all of its benefactors.

The sights shared in this write-up belong to the writer and do not always show the content plan of Middle East Monitor.

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How to Confront Annexation and 'Deal of the Century' Middle East Monitor - The Union Journal

Tribune News Service

Amit Khajuria

Tribune News Service

Jammu, January 14

The Union Territory of Jammu and Kashmir is likely to witness a boost in construction activities, as the abolition of toll on goods at Lakhanpur has cut down the prices of cement and steel.

Abolition of toll from Lakhanpur has reduced the prices of all commodities, which were being imported from the other states to Jammu and Kashmir.

But the cement and steel were the main commodities, which would directly affect the pockets of people, especially construction agencies, who were earlier buying it on higher prices.

The price of steel has been slashed by Rs100 per quintal, whereas the price of cement has been slashed by Rs60-65 per bag of 50 kg.

The abolition of toll from Lakhanpur was due since 2017, when GST was implemented in J&K. This has reduced the price of all commodities by minimum Rs1 per kg. But the visible slash is in the prices of steel and cement as the customer always buys it in quintals, said Neeraj Anand, president, Chamber of Traders Federation (CTF).

This abolition of toll has not only slashed the prices of commodities, but it will also boost infrastructural development in the UT and increase the GST revenue of the administration. There was a mafia, which used to evade toll and the entire GST and toll went to the black market. Now, they wont have to evade toll and GST will also add to the revenue of the UT, he said.

Dealers, who used to bring products from outside J&K and sell it here, are also happy, as the abolition of toll not only reduces the prices of commodities, but also saves time as their products get delayed by 2-10 days at Lakhanpur for checking.

It is the biggest sigh of relief for traders of J&K, as it not only saves money, but also saves our time. Sometimes vehicles carrying our products get stuck at Lakhanpur for almost a week, which sometimes damages the products as well, said Ankush Khajuria, a local trader.

The abolition of toll has also reduced the prices of fruits, pulses, rice, spices, cloth, marble and hardware items among others more, which were being imported from other parts of the country.

The Union Territory of Jammu and Kashmir has abolished the toll on goods at Lakhnpur from January 1, 2020.

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Lakhanpur toll abolition set to boost construction work - The Tribune

Nicky Nodjoumi

Through Jan. 19. Helena Anrather, 28 Elizabeth Street, Manhattan; 212-587-9674, helenaanrather.com.

In 1974, the Iranian-American artist Nicky Nodjoumi took his City College M.F.A. back to Tehran, where his politically charged painting quickly antagonized first the Shahs secret police and then Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeinis Revolutionary Guards. In 1981, he was given a major show at the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art, but it was closed after a single day, and he hurried back to New York, which has been his home ever since.

For a few years in the late 90s, Mr. Nodjoumi made a daily practice of painting or drawing on a shellacked front page of The New York Times. He made portraits of his family; Picasso-like figures with latticework faces; explicit sexual scenes that are both funny and tender; and clearly political but nonspecific images, like a dense black silhouette of a man playing with a bloody-red cats cradle.

One appeal of a serial project like this, over and above the often wonderful drawing, is how it seems to encompass the endless days and scenes of the world at large even as it reduces them to a comprehensible number. I can count 60 spreads in Mr. Nodjoumis current show, New York Times Sketchbooks (1996-1999), at Helena Anrather; note that these include one Metro section cover and one interior spread painted early on, before he committed to front pages, as well as one flower for the day Princess Diana died; and feel as if Ive really gotten to grips with something. Still more appealing, though, is the sense of fleet-footed possibility that the work transmits when hung en masse: If todays nefarious silhouette can turn into tomorrows couple in flagrante or the next days bear on stilts, anything might be around the corner for all of us.

WILL HEINRICH

Through Jan. 25. Nahmad Contemporary, 980 Madison Avenue, Manhattan, 646 449 9118, nahmadcontemporary.com.

The last five months have brought two solo shows of early work by the restless German painter Albert Oehlen that were previously unseen in New York. In September, 12 paintings from the artists 1989-90 Fn (Footnote) series went on view at Skarstedt, full of improvisatory abstract brushwork in off-key colors infiltrated by fragments of images from popular culture. These sardonic mash-ups of Pop Art, Surrealism and Neo-Expressionism exemplify the ugly gorgeousness that is something of an Oehlen signature.

Now Nahmad is showing 13 canvases from Mr. Oehlens Spiegelbilder or Mirror Paintings series, which began in 1982, around the time of the artists solo shows, and extended to 1990. They are dark, dour, loosely painted interiors, consistent with his early interest in representation. Some, with titles like Abolition of a Military Dictatorship, Oven I, and Hell, I or featuring depictions of bunkerlike cinder block structures conjure the Nazi period. But all the scenes whether the grand but decrepit spiral stair in Staircase Old, or the untitled image of a slovenly library devoid of furniture suggest messy aftermaths. Of course Mr. Oehlens impatient brushwork contributes to the desultory mood. Countering it are a few random mirrors affixed to the surface of each canvas. These irreverently disrupt the painted images with blank patches or glimpses of reality, depending upon where you stand, at once punching holes in the mediums spatial integrity and also implicating us in historys devastations. Ugliness has the louder voice in these works, flanked by tragedy on one side and on the other by the engaging intentional lightness of Mr. Oehlens pictorial sensibility.

ROBERTA SMITH

Through Jan. 25. Denny Dimin Gallery, 39 Lispenard Street, Manhattan; 212-226-6537, dennydimingallery.com.

Since the late 1990s, Clarity Haynes has been painting portraits of peoples breasts. They arent descended from the sexy and sexist classical nudes of art history, nor do they have the fleshy weight of the paintings of more contemporary artists like Lucian Freud or Jenny Saville. Instead, in The Breast Portrait Project, Ms. Haynes who works from life over a series of sessions with her sitters that can take years depicts the torsos of women, trans, and gender-nonconforming people in remarkable, caring detail. She relishes the tattoos, wrinkles, scars, veins and folds that our dominant society may deem unsightly.

In her current show, Altar-ed Bodies, which was curated by Benjamin Tischer, co-founder of the recently closed Invisible-Exports gallery, several of Ms. Hayness breast portraits share space with new paintings of her own altars, which the news release calls self-portraits of sorts. The altar pieces lack something of the same magnetic force of their counterparts, but the combination of the series is fruitful. In Genesis (2009), the pioneering body artist Genesis Breyer P-Orridge wears a necklace whose charms echo the hanging pendants and small totems in Rainbow Altar (Spring into Summer), from 2019, while one of her tattoos mirrors the placement of a dangling pink ribbon. Such parallels charge us to treat bodies as sacred, like altars. Rather than sources of worry or shame, they should be sites of empowerment and worship.

JILLIAN STEINHAUER

Through Jan. 25 at Tina Kim Gallery, 525 West 21st Street, Manhattan, 212-716-1100, tinakimgallery.com.

We are playing historical catch-up at the moment, driven partly by the art markets incessant quest for fresh products, but also by a widespread desire to create a more global narrative of art in the 20th century. A good candidate for this is Kim Tschang-Yeul, a Korean-born artist who, along with Park Seo Bo and Lee Ufan, helped introduce Western modernism to Korea and whose terrific paintings from the 1960s and 70s are currently on view in the exhibition New York to Paris at Tina Kim.

Mr. Kim studied art in South Korea and was part of the Korean Informel, a movement that originated in France and favored vigorous, expressive abstraction. Living in Paris and New York, however, Mr. Kim produced work that evolved into what you see here: a radiant, abstract brand of Pop Art, with concentric forms rendered in an unusual mix of acrylic and cellulose lacquer on burlap or canvas. Some of the paintings, like the Composition series from 1969 and 1970, have centers that look almost photo-realistic. This propensity was pushed even further in canvases from the mid-70s and one here, from 1980, which have naturalistic droplets of water painted against a monochromatic ground that look so real they might seep off the canvas.

My favorites are the Compositions, though, which look like psychedelic vortexes rimmed with neon or spectral rainbows. They feel very contemporary, partly because were in a moment of historical remix and revival that benefits lesser-known strains of art history: Mr. Kims work looks as if it were painted today, rather than 40 years ago.

MARTHA SCHWENDENER

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What to See Right Now in New York Art Galleries - The New York Times

THERE is a simple solution to the current controversy regarding the Royal Family, it isn't reform but abolition.This archaic institution shouldhave no place in any modern democratic nation but of course we're talking about the UK, which is anything but modern or democratic.

Fortunatelythe people of Scotland will have a chance to build our own independent nation, one that treats everyone equally and doesn't reserve power and money to an individualfamily.Hopefully the rise of an independent Scotland will coincide with the abolition of the monarchy.

Cllr Kenny MacLarenPaisley

AS I am totally bemused by the medias weeping, wailing and gnashing of teeth over Harry and Meghans decision to leave the royal show and allegedly seek work, I checked the front pages of the London press just to get myself au fait with the whole situation.

I was profoundly shocked to see the hapless couple receive a sound spanking, with one editor of a popular tabloid apparently so incensed that the headline lapsed into a form of pidgin English which lost me.

READ MORE:Meghxit has burst the bubble of royal illusion

The Daily Star, which in my opinion is on a par with VIZ only less funny gave us the nuanced, thought-provoking; Naff Orf Harry!

However, I was deeply troubled by one headline which described the Royal Shows matriarch, known as Liz, as furious. Not good in a nonagenarian.

My reading concluded, I was left in no doubt that this whole business, which in my circle is the sole topic of conversation at the moment, is a CRISIS, possibly the biggest since Prince Charles was made to pay tax on the profits from his nice little earner The Duchy of Cornwall.

And so to bed, although I know I wont sleep a wink due to worry and a foreboding that this latest royal soap opera will run for some time.

Malcolm CordellBroughty Ferry, Dundee

ITsurprised me to find out that Megan was the countess of Dumbarton. Last time I was there it seemed there were more off-licences than open shops and now no doubt more food banks.

It was obviously a place that had served its purpose and been dumped and forgotten about, the people given no opportunities, no hope. It was seriously heartbreaking to see the young kids on the street corners with obvious injecting drug issues, like in so many of our communities: our kids, our country's future, wasted by an environment and ideologyof neglect.

You could see the community had no hope, no future and have been forgotten about.Meghan's title may be dropped. It seems it too has served its purpose and so is to be dumped and forgotten about, just like the town itself.

Crsdean Mac FhearghaisDn ideann

READ MORE:What Harry and Meghans news tells us about modern Britain

I WAS amused at the correspondence regarding the correct use of titles egthe Earl and Countess of Dumbarton. It is about time this silly nonsense was abolished. I would suggest that, in this age of unusual first names, parents could give their child names such as Duke, Countess, Marquis etc but also give the second name "of". Once the child reached adulthood, he/she could change their surname by deed poll to a town or village of their choice. If this procedure was widely adopted, eventually all places in Scotland would be covered, eg Duke of Pumpherston.

Perhaps other readers could suggest more exotic examples. The National may even wish to organise an annual competition to find the best suggestion.

N M ShawEdinburgh

THE Windsor crisis has a new weathervane by which one can figure out what is happening or likely to happen, namely, the dogs! It seems the media has sussedout that the dogs belonging to Harry and Meghan remained in Canada after their Christmas break.

This has caused apoplexy among ceryain paparazzi and no doubt the royalist fan club as it is a sign that Harry and Meghan will with all certainty be going to Canada to stay.

Amid the serious issues facing Europe(and the UK remains part of the European continent after Brexit)and beyond, the minor spat in the Windsor household is becoming a sideshow of increasingly comic proportions. The Windsor-watchers will be scanning the horizon to see if the dogs return, and no doubt a special BBC correspondent will now be appointed as the corporations overall royal canine consultant to pinpoint the whereabouts of the royal canines and interpret any changes in location.

READ MORE:The media obsession with Meghan Markle is yet another distraction

Harry and Meghan have blown apart the mystique behind the duty and duties of the royal family, which neither complains nor explains. This self-imposed duty has become the modern, secular equivalent of the mediaeval "royal touch"which was believed to be a cure for ailments and sickness.

As crisis meetings are being held at Sandringham to try to resolve the situation, it is really too late to save the day. The symbolism of the decision of Harry and Meghan to announce they are stepping back from the "show"is overwhelming. The rotational treadmill of duties to perform and managing press releases to keep sections of the populace informed of your "importance"and to maintain the mystiquemust take its toll on ones sanity. The downside is that the press is constantly littered with supposed comments from friends and insiders and courtiers about internal feuds bordering on character mutual assassination, as we can see who is now made out to be the "baddy"in this present spat.

There are major issues affecting the future of the nations of the UK at present. Let us keep the monarchical crisis in perspective.

It does not affect ones daily life and personal wellbeing if there are fewer royals cut ribbons or have their name on brass plates or even have to wonder about the location of the dogs! Who left the dogs behind in Canada and what does it mean?

John EdgarKilmaurs

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The solution to the royal crisis isn't reform of the monarchy it's abolition - The National

What is the four-hour target?

In 2004 the Labour government required hospitals in England to treat and then discharge, admit or transfer 98% of all patients within four hours of their arrival at an A&E unit. The coalition government cut that to 95% in 2010.

2004 was the first time the NHS had ever come under such a target. Before that patients could, and in some cases did, spend many hours sometimes days waiting for emergency care.

It forced hospitals to prioritise the care provided at their emergency departments and ensure that as few people as possible waited beyond four hours. Publication of each NHS trusts performance figures every month meant none wanted to be named and shamed for missing the target.

As a result, A&Es have got more staff and more resources, reflecting their central importance in hospitals. The four-hour standard is the best-known of the NHSs batch of waiting-time targets. Others cover planned treatment in hospital, cancer care and some forms of mental health treatment.

A&E doctors were initially sceptical or opposed to the target. Some still complain that its existence gives people an incentive to go to A&E because its the one place in the NHS where the lights are always on instead of waiting days or even weeks to see a GP, and this has contributed to emergency departments becoming increasingly overwhelmed in recent years.

A supposed maximum wait of four hours has encouraged some people to use A&E as an anything and everything service, for often minor ailments, rather than just accidents and emergencies, they say. However, A&E specialists accept that it has improved care by ensuring that as far as possible patients with potentially serious illnesses are seen fairly quickly.

NHS England has been looking into replacing the four-hour wait since 2018. It claims that a more clinically appropriate way of measuring A&E performance may well be needed.

As Matt Hancock said on Wednesday: We will be judged by the right targets. Targets have to be clinically appropriate.

But many doctors and NHS experts believe the target may be scrapped simply because of the bad headlines that the increasing inability to deliver it generates every month when the latest performance figures appear.

Last month, for example, some trusts dealt with less than 50% of patients within four hours. Overall, hospital A&Es managed to deal with just 68.6% against the 95% target, which has been missed every month since July 2015.

Because it has succeeded in its original aim, of ensuring that no one has to wait an unreasonably long time which could damage their health. It has played a crucial part in driving improvements in waiting times for patients, said Prof Donal ODonoghue of the Royal College of Physicians.

Also, the public appear to like the fact that they can access urgent and emergency care quickly. If the target disappears there may be a backlash.

Making less sick patients wait longer than four hours while more serious cases get priority which would happen if NHS England did replace the target wait could involve risk, as some of those may also have a more serious condition, such as a heart problem.

NHS Englands review group under Prof Stephen Powis, which is looking at waiting times, is continuing its work. Its recommendations will be influenced by the evidence from the 14 NHS trusts that are trialling an alternative to the four-hour guarantee.

The strong opposition from senior doctors may makes wholesale abolition of the four-hour target harder to do, given that both NHS leaders and Hancock have said that any alternative has to have the support of clinicians.

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Are the Tories about to abolish A&E targets? - The Guardian

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DE PERE, Wisconsin (WFRV) Br. Jay Fostners position at St. Norbert College has been cut, according to a letter sent to staff and faculty by President Brian Bruess.

In the letter, Bruess cites an organizational update as the reason for eliminating p. Jays role as vice president for mission and student affairs. He has held this position for the past nine years.

I would like to recognize the father. Jay for his 21 years of college service, said Bruess in the letter. Under his leadership, the College noted many improvements by integrating the mission into our facilities thanks to art, spaces for reflection and expressions of Norbertine heritage; improvements to the Center for Norbertine Studies, the Norman Miller Center for Peace, Justice and Public Understanding and the Sturzl Center for Community Service and Learning; re-articulations of our mission statement; integration of mission and heritage into the Colleges hiring practices; the growth of many student affairs departments; and dramatic improvements to our residences.

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Bruess explains that an essential part of our planning efforts is the work of aligning our organizational structure with our objectives and strategies, work that has been underway for over a year.

The college will soon begin to look for a vice-president of student affairs / dean of student engagement.

This new position would include monitoring student affairs, student retention, equity and inclusion.

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Fr. Abolition of the post of Jay Fostner from St. Norbert College, organizational changes cited - Techno EA

Labour should continue to support abolishing tuition fees in England, while the free market sector approach of the Conservatives has hammered universities that provide places for local disadvantaged students, according to the partys new shadow higher education minister.

Emma Hardy, MP for Hull West and Hessle, spoke to Times Higher Education after replacing Gordon Marsden, who lost his Blackpool South seat at the general election.

The former Hull primary school teacher and graduate of the universities of Liverpool and Leeds said one of her key priorities would be university funding. The Conservative government is yet to make a formal response to the Augar review, which called for the fee cap to be lowered from 9,250 to 7,500, with the Treasury replacing the lost fee income.

If the cap is lowered, my worry is they [ministers] are going to ask universities themselves to find that additional money, said Ms Hardy, a former member of the Commons Education Committee.

The abolition of tuition fees and the reintroduction of maintenance grants was a signature Labour policy under outgoing leader Jeremy Corbyn.

Should that still be the policy under a new leader? Iwould argue that it needs to be, said Ms Hardy. The current system in which the poorest students borrow the largest sums was unfair and that system doesnt work, while the decline in part-time and mature student numbers under higher fees was a huge concern, she argued.

Ms Hardy put Labours proposed National Education Service and its policy to abolish fees in the context of the need to face up to the fourth industrial revolution and offer lifelong education.

She added: Ithink we do need to look at investing in what should be our greatest resource, which is the skills and the talents of the people in this countryWere not a great manufacturing country any more. Look at the industries that are creating the wealth, [for example] the creative industries. How can we get people developed in those areas, give them the skills they need?

Ms Hardy also highlighted the effect of the abolition of student number controls in 2015, which opened up unconstrained competition.

Institutions such as the University of Hull that recruit large numbers of local students have been hammered, and the policy has really reduced their funding, added Ms Hardy, the daughter of teachers who was brought up on Humberside. We cant lose universities like Hull because of the service they offer to their local area.

In abolishing number controls, the Conservatives wanted the most prestigious, and most selective, universities to expand. But the government didnt think about the fact that children from more deprived backgrounds are less likely to move away to go to university, said Ms Hardy.

They are more likely to attend university on their doorstep. You hammer universities like Hull, you are hitting that demographic of students.

She added: Putting the free market into education is something Idont really agree with.

The partys previously announced proposal to replace the practice of using predicted grades to place university candidates which works against poorer students with a post-qualification application system would be so much fairer, Ms Hardy also said. As someone from what Iwould call an average background, Iwas underpredicted on my results right across the boardYour place should be based on the results that you get.

john.morgan@timeshighereducation.com

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Labour shadow minister backs axeing fees and blasts free market - Times Higher Education (THE)

Illegal espionage of journalists and other public personalities, including magistrates and politicians, seems to have another chapter in Colombia after a scandal over this same issue almost a decade ago ended in the abolition of the country's intelligence department.

The new complaint was published by Semana magazine, which in its investigation found that the departure of the commander of the Colombian Army on Dec. 27, 2019 was related to allegations of illegal espionage.

According to the investigation, some Army intelligence groups used mobile units and state-of-the-art equipment to find out what some journalists, politicians, magistrates, and even colonels, generals and commanders of other forces are doing.

Some of the victims of this espionage allegedly were journalists of Semana magazine itself and their sources apparently in retaliation for their previous investigations that reported alleged irregularities in the armed forces.

According to the investigation, during 2019, the Army illegally monitored Semana with different means such as parking a vehicle near the office with equipment capable of intercepting phone calls and text messages. Agents also allegedly followed some journalists including the magazine's director, Alejandro Santos.

One of Semanas sources told it that the Army offered him more than US $15,000 to introduce malware into teams of journalists of Semana, according to the magazine. Also as part of a campaign of intimidation, a tombstone was sent to a journalist in the newsroom.

According to one of the military members who served as a source to Semana, the 'chuzadas' as these illegal interceptions are known in Colombia were allegedly made from two military garrisons to protect them and avoid a surprise search by the justice or the snooping of the media, according to Semana.

The novelty of using military garrisons allegedly was a lesson learned after the so-called Andromedia Operation, exposed in 2014 and through which the communications of the peace process negotiators with the FARC guerrillas were intercepted, according to the same source. On that occasion the agents used a restaurant as a facade, a headquarters that was later raided by the Prosecutor's Office.

In response to the allegations, the Ministry of Defense issued a statement announcing the immediate commencement, by instruction of the president of the country Ivn Duque, of an internal investigation and called on the other corresponding authorities to also initiate investigations into the case.

This department reiterates the commitment of President Ivn Duque and the National Government of zero tolerance with any action by members of the Public Forces that is contrary to the Constitution, the Law, human rights and International Humanitarian Law, the statement said. If the participation of members of the Public Forces is proven in events that are not in accordance with the Law, those responsible must respond individually to Colombian justice.

Different national and international freedom of expression organizations voiced their rejection of the alleged espionage cases and asked for guarantees to carry out journalistic work in the country.

The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) urged authorities to conduct a transparent and thorough investigation.

As if journalists in Colombia did not already face enough danger from other armed actors, it is clear that the military poses a serious threat to reporters and their sources, CPJ Central and South America Program Coordinator Natalie Southwic, according to a press release. Colombian authorities must thoroughly investigate the armys alleged illegal spying operation and ensure that its architects face justice.

Through his Twitter account, Edison Lanza, Special Rapporteur for Freedom of Expression of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), also asked for an investigation into the complaint.

There are state agents that do not assume that espionage and illegal digital surveillance violate fundamental freedoms. My solidarity with journalists and media of #Colombia that allegedly were spied on by the military sector. It is essential to investigate and punish, Lanza wrote.

Although the authorities have repeatedly denied surveillance actions against journalists, reality has shown, with sufficient evidence, that this form of aggression is constant, Colombias Foundation for Press Freedom (FLIP) wrote in a statement.

These actions, in violation of the Constitution and the criminal law, endanger and affect the rights of journalists and jeopardize the free exercise of journalism, FLIP added.

The organization said that in the last two years "the situation of risk against journalists has increased exponentially." "In this context of escalation of threats it is especially dramatic that the Army would again be the institution that is involved in intimidation, threats and interceptions of journalists," the organization said.

Almost a decade ago, Semana magazine unveiled one of the biggest scandals of illegal espionage in the country in which the country's intelligence agency was involved.

At that time, the magazine reported that the Department of Administrative Security (DAS), as it was known, was spying on journalists, politicians, human rights defenders and magistrates, among others. The DAS was abolished as a result of the scandal and some of its executives and officials are facing justice.

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New reports of illegal espionage of journalists in Colombia reignite fears - Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas

Klim Shipenko/Yellow, Black & White, 2019

Klim Shipenkos movie released for the New Year holidays took 2,317 billion rubles ($38 million) at the Russian box office, outstripping the previous recordholder, James Camerons Avatar. We explain why you need to watch this movie right now.

Grisha, the main character, does not work, spends his fathers money in expensive clubs, and has no respect for people at all. He thinks nothing of insulting a woman or maiming a policeman. After yet another all-night party, he gets into an accident and loses consciousness. When he wakes up, he discovers that his suit, money, and smartphone have mysteriously disappeared, and everyone around insists that its 1860 (one year before the abolition of serfdom in Russia), and that far from being the son of a rich father, Grisha is an ordinary stableboy.

Kholop (Serf)might appear on the surface to be a standard time-travel comedy, but things arent that straightforward. Grisha is in fact an unwilling participant in a psychological experiment, in which he is monitored by numerous cameras. His father hires a team of actors and, together with a crackpot psychologist, turns his hotshot son into an ordinary serf to teach him how to treat people properly, value life, and believe in love. Dont worry, thats not a spoiler, rather the official movie tagline. The truly unexpected plot twists are there to see for yourself.

A haystack instead of a bed, rags instead of a fashionable suit, and leaves instead of toilet paper Grisha has to get used to all this and more.Kholoptells about the hardships of the life of a Russian peasant in all its inglorious glory. Any misdemeanor can result in a whipping, while insolence can lead to a public execution on the main square.

Kholopis a direct commentary on the difficult conditions in which actors work. The film openly states that many ordinary actors (not pampered stars) are forced to work with idiotic scripts with no chance to improvise, and are kept on set for days on end just to deliver a couple of lines. An actor can prepare for a role for months, only to be replaced at the last minute by some upstart with no acting training.

What's more, actors have no privacy at all, and having a fling with a colleague on set is a sackable offense.

If you have an influential father, even if you kill someone youll walk away scot-free. If you want fame, you can just go on a Russian talk show and slander a rich person (less rich than your father, at least) the host wont do anything to silence you. And if human rights are violated, the police wont lift a finger until it turns into a public outcry.

The film is not only about turning a rich kid into a human being, but pokes fun at the environment that made him such a spoiled brat in the first place.

The main character adjusts to his new life as a serf surprisingly quickly. Grisha invokes his right to freedom only at the end of the movie, when his sweetheart is in jeopardy. The rest of the time he suffers humiliation and deceit, and does not even attempt to stand up for his rights.

Ultimately, the films message is that everyone has the right to freedom, whether you are the son of an oligarch or an ordinary worker.

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Former Bersih 2.0 chairman Datuk Ambiga Sreenevasan speaks during a forum in Kuala Lumpur January 18, 2020. Picture by Hari Anggara

KUALA LUMPUR, Jan 18 Lawyer Datuk Ambiga Sreenevasan said the government should do a pilot project by releasing just one recommendation by the Institutional Reform Committee (IRC), of which the report is still not made public until now.

She said that if the government still does not fall after the partial release, and it should have nothing to worry about and therefore can make public the rest of the document that was in storage since July 2018.

I think they can do a pilot [project], release one set of recommendations [by IRC] and see whether the government falls down the next day. If it does, then okay dont release the report, she said, laughing at a forum titled IRC Report. Why the secrecy? organised by the National Human Rights Society (Hakam) today.

In October last year, prime minister Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad said the confidential report by the IRC and its seven recommendations that have been passed to the quasi-official Council of Eminent Persons can only be made public once all Pakatan Harapan (PH) component parties agree to it.

Dr Mahathir said he alone does not have the authority to do so despite being prime minister, in reply to lawyer and former IRC member Ambiga during the regional LawAsia Constitutional and Rule of Law Conference 2019.

Ambiga said she does not know the real reason why PH did not want it to be released but she would charitably assume that it is because of public and voters perception towards the already much-criticised administration.

Perhaps one, they dont want the public expectations to be raised and then if they don't deliver, it's a reflection on them. That's a possibility.

The other one is they don't want any negativity and cold water being poured on any of the suggestions. Perhaps, now that's a very charitable way of looking at their reasons for not releasing [the IRC report], she said.

As part of the team, Ambiga said by withholding the report, the government has denied the public and their own supporters the opportunity to be involved in making the country a better place, something that was promised by PH when they rolled out their election manifesto before 2018 election.

But you know what, if it is just the chapters that affect them, that's fine too, but I don't even know who has received this report and my concern is, if we don't know then that means there is duplication of work, because there is reform measures taking place.

So for me, why did we go through that exercise, and you know something, if only they had seen how engaged the public was. Then they will understand how much goodwill of the people they had. People just came and did the work with no payment, no nothing, she said.

The IRC finalised their report in June 2018, with seven recommendations for revamping the structure of judiciary appointments; limiting the concentration of executive power on a single individual; abolition of oppressive legislation, namely the Anti-Fake News Act 2018 and the Security Offences (Special Measures) Act 2012; reform in enforcement and government agencies; parliamentary reforms; and vetting processes for key public appointments with the aim of achieving a corruption-free society.

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Ambiga: Release one chapter of IRC report and if govt still standing, why not release the rest? - Malay Mail

Priti Patel probably thought she was helping when she tried to defend counter-terrorism police from the condemnation that followed last weeks story in the Guardian revealing the inclusion of Extinction Rebellion (XR) in a guide on supposed extreme or violent ideologies.

The document has apparently now been withdrawn. Nevertheless, the home secretarys insistence that the police always make decisions based on the risk to the public, security risks, security threats does inevitably lead to an obvious, unanswered question. If she is right, how exactly did Counter Terrorism Policing South East (CTPSE), which wrote and published the guide, manage to make what even it admits was a significant error of judgment?

The answer lies in how alleged risks posed by protest groups are assessed. To begin with, it may surprise many that there is no legal definition of what domestic extremism even means, leaving the police with complete discretion in deciding what it covers. Extremism and domestic extremism are used interchangeably by the police to differentiate from terrorism. The current criteria is so broad and ambiguous that David Anderson, a former independent reviewer of terrorism legislation, has described it as manifestly deficient and last summer, the Home Office finally confirmed it had stopped using such terms. The police, as we have seen, have not.

In practice, decisions about who is labelled an extremist are made in secret by police units concerned more about their ideas of security and defending public order than about human rights and by officers who are often deeply antagonistic towards protesters challenging the corporate and political orthodoxies of the day.

The full extent of such hostility was set out in a Policy Exchange report on XR co-authored last year by Richard Walton, the former head of the Metropolitan polices counter-terrorism command. Walton claimed, extraordinarily, that what he saw as the underlying extremism of the campaign had been largely obscured from public view by what many see as the fundamental legitimacy of their stated cause.

It is hardly surprising, therefore, that assessments of alleged risk are never neutral. Invariably, as the CTPSE guide claimed, just having an anti-establishment philosophy, taking part in entirely non-violent direct action and even participation in planned school walkouts is enough for the police to classify individual campaigners as a threat.

In turn, this classification provides police with the justification for intensive surveillance, which can be extremely intrusive and intimidating.

XR is far from the first environmental campaign to receive this kind of police attention. More than a decade ago the anti-aviation group Plane Stupid was targeted and it is nine years since Mark Kennedy was exposed as an undercover police officer who infiltrated annual climate camp gatherings.

However, the most recent targets have been opponents of fracking, with sustained surveillance from regional counter-terrorism units. Netpol, the organisation I run to monitor public order, protest and street policing, has documented the experiences of the anti-fracking movement for five years and these provide an important reminder of why no matter what promises are made now, there are no guarantees the police will stop categorising XR as extremists in the future.

In December 2016, negative media coverage forced the Home Office to declare that support for anti-fracking is not an indicator of vulnerability to extremism. This followed reports about City of York council and a school in North Yorkshire including anti-fracking campaigns in their Prevent counter-terrorism advice. However, months later, leaked counter-terrorism local profiles again the work of the regional police unit in the south-east of England identified protests in Sussex as a priority theme ... where increased tensions or vulnerabilities may exist.

As recently as October 2019, there was evidence of Surrey county council claiming local police had advised it that anti-fracking activities were among their main extremist areas of concern (alongside the far right) and that any protest, no matter how peaceful, was extremist.

It is clear that once the current controversy dies down, it will be only a matter of time before XR and other climate activists are again labelled as an extremist risk. The group has indicated it may bring legal action to have its name removed from any list but perhaps XR would be better served by putting its weight behind the call for the complete abolition of the domestic extremist label for everyone.

To protect freedom to protest, the government also needs to completely separate secretive counter-terrorism units from the policing of non-violent protests. They have no business involving themselves in legitimate political activity.

Until this happens, it seems unlikely anyone will ever be held to account for errors of judgment, no matter how potentially damaging the consequences are for those labelled a safeguarding risk. Officers will simply carry on, as they have for decades, trying to find imagined threats in any new and emerging protest movement and then spying on and disrupting their campaigns. Its time this finally stopped for good.

Kevin Blowe is coordinator of the Network for Police Monitoring

See the rest here:

Non-violent protesters are not terrorists and its time the police accepted that - The Guardian