The killings of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile last week added fresh pain to the longstanding and unresolved crisis of police killings of black Americans.
President Obama strove to convey a message of solace and unity in the wake of an extraordinary week that rubbed raw issues of police safety and racial bias in policing, saying he believes Americans will come together to find common ground.
“As painful as the week has been, I fully believe that America is not as divided as people have suggested,” he said. People of all races and backgrounds are outraged by the killing of police officers in Dallas — even those protesting the police, he said. And the same people are angered by the deaths of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile.
Dallas clergy, reeling from the shootings of police in their city and the recent shootings of black men by police elsewhere, say they will start responding with prayer and then move to advocating for concrete societal changes in the aftermath of the tragedies.
“Faith leaders now have a responsibility to say we’re going to pray with our feet until real structural change happens in this country,” said the Rev. Frederick Haynes, pastor of Friendship-West Baptist Church in Dallas.
It had been a while since the hashtag of a black man, woman, or child killed by a cop had burned across social media like wildfire. Rather, it seemed the nation had transitioned into a new phase of the struggle — the trial phase.
A French court has found two former Rwandan politicians guilty of crimes against humanity for masterminding the slaughter of 2,000 people taking refuge in a Catholic church during the country’s genocide.
Octavien Ngenzi and Tito Barahira, both former mayors of Kabarondo village, were sentenced to life in jail on July 6.
A new film opening July 8 focuses attention on a long-ignored war crime — the sanctioned and systematic rape of Polish nuns during World War II.
The Innocents (Les Innocentes) tells the story of a young French doctor who is called to a Polish convent to aid a young novice in a breech labor. She discovers that Soviet soldiers, with the approval of their officers, raped dozens of the nuns during the occupation, leaving five of them pregnant.
1. Dallas' Returning Nightmare: A Sniper's Perch, an Unthinkable Crime
A summer photo intern at the Dallas Morning News, Ting Shen, captured his city's terror last night.
A Vatican court on July 7 convicted two people for leaking confidential documents to journalists, concluding a high-profile trial that had underscored the internal dysfunction that Pope Francis has been trying to end.
Eight months after the “Vatileaks II” scandal erupted and exposed secrecy and widespread mismanagement at the Holy See, the Vatican court ruled that a Spanish priest should be jailed for passing information to reporters.
Noah Leavitt and Helen Kiyong Kim’s marriage is one of an increasing number of Jewish-Asian pairings in the U.S., a trend evident in many American synagogues. The two Whitman College professors have just released the first book-length study of Jewish-Asian couples and their offspring.
Though JewAsian is geared toward social scientists, the chapters in which they excerpt and analyze their interviews with 34 Jewish-Asian couples will interest any readers curious about intermarriage in general, and the evolving American-Jewish community in particular.
“We’ve been talking about Black Lives Matter since the AME Church started, not just now,” said the Rev. Gregory Ingram, host bishop for the quadrennial General Conference and leader of the AME Church’s First Episcopal District, in an interview.