Colin Bruce Milne/cbmilne33

helvetebrann:

Yesterday, I posted a story about a woman who was receiving conservative support for refusing to do her job. She refused to issue marriage licenses to gay couples because she felt that it violated her religion.

As I thought about the issue more and more, I realized that this…

fyeahafrica:

In the Democratic Republic of Congo town of Kamako, seven kilometres (four miles) from the Angolan border, 10 women sit on sofas arranged in a circle by a local non-governmental organisation which helps distressed migrants.

Therese Tshanga is one of them. This 38-year-old Congolese woman is among hundreds of thousands of migrants expelled from Angola since 2003.

She cradles a toddler in her arms and has a fresh scar on her forehead.

Ms Tshanga says she was looking for a job in Angola when men in uniform arrested her on 28 September and took her into the bush.

“Three soldiers came to rape me. The first two had their way, then I resisted against the third one and he gave me this wound to the face with his teeth,” she says, pointing to the scar.

After being held for three days in the bush and another three days in a prison near the Angolan border town of Dundu, Ms Tshanga says she was finally deported to her native DR Congo with her nephew. She has lost contact with his mother.

Kamako is full of deportees with similar stories.

Jacquie Kasokome says she was raped by five Angolan soldiers. Another woman reported being stripped and searched for money and diamonds by border guards, who inserted their fingers in each of her body cavities, then stole her clothes and shoes before kicking her out of the country.

As for the men, most of them admit to crossing into Angola illegally to work as diamond miners. They report severe beatings if they are caught by Angolan security services.

“I was beaten up a lot. My ear hasn’t been working properly because of a blow I took here,” said Mubikay Mupani, as he pointed to the side of his head.

When I asked Ms Tshanga if her attackers explained why they were raping her, she replied: “They said: ‘We don’t want the Congolese to come to Angola but you don’t want to understand, so we’re raping you so that you don’t come back’.”

But Mr Mupani, a young father, says he has no hope of sustaining his family in DR Congo and he plans to return to Angola, despite the risk of being deported again.

[read more]

jeffmiller:

… [I]t’s all well and good to demonize the people [who] work down on Wall Street until you actually meet one of them, and realize that these are actual people with actual families who might actually do some actual good. Everything about the OWS movement is adversarial, from the…

motherjones:

We don’t know, but we’re going to go back and read his entire feed now. You should, too.

I can understand why people mock him: there are his displays of laughable grandiosity (in Made in America, it’s implied that the canon of notable humans goes as follows: Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jesus, Kanye West); his notorious oversensitivity (in the same track he bangs on about how South Park dared to make fun of him, suggesting he hasn’t quite attained Jesus’s forgiving nature); his tendency to do embarrassing things and then flagellate himself over them long after everyone has moved on (no one but Kanye would pretty much open a song with “Sent this bitch a picture of my dick / I don’t know what it is with females but I’m not too good at that shit”); his utter inability to self-edit, which sometimes is brilliant (“George Bush doesn’t care about black people”) but more often is not (“Imma let you finish”); and his amazing self-belief (debuting his fashion collection at the height of Paris fashion week) undercut with his need for approval (his grief that he wasn’t feted as the new Chanel).