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Showing posts from 2009

No Good Deed Goes Unpunished In Chicago

In November of 2002 in downtown Chicago, a car raced through a stop sign at high-speed and crashed into the side of a CPD squad car. The crash trapped two police officers in their vehicle and the cars began to burn. Horrified Chicagoans, unlike the stereotypical Southsiders, immediately began pulling the injured to safety before the vehicles could explode. Among the bystanders trying to save the officers lives was 41-year-old nurse Rachelle Jackson. Jackson was credited with saving the life of Officer Kelly Brogan who sustained injuries from the crash. Brogans partner, also injured, was knocked unconscious during the crash. Soon after the rescue it was discovered that Officer Brogan's partner's side arm was missing. Mrs. Jackson, staying on the scene until medical personnel arrived was accused of the robbery and theft. The weapon was not found in Jackson's possession nor has it ever been recovered. Jackson, wanting to clear her name, went to the local police station a

State of Denial: The 21st Century Russian Republic

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Stanislav Markelov was shot to death in January of 2009 while leaving a news conference in Moscow less than half a mile from the Kremlin. He was 34. Neo-nazi and nationalist hate groups in Russia are called a dark secret within the former Soviet Union. Their existence is down-played by the new, leaner Russian government as inconsequential. Some members of the Russian media question whether many of these groups are, in fact, used as state sanctioned secret police to assassinate voices of dissent against the new government. These groups, like most groups bound together with a common hatred, claim to fight for their own specific race's civil rights. But, in modern Russia, unlike most hate groups their only measurable effect is in murdering members of their own communities and doing so under the guise of being a "radical nationalist group". Leaders, including new Russian President Dimitri Medvedev, insist despite mounting evidence to the contrary, that it is only a matte

Tradegy, Meth and New Mexico

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Mile marker 126 looking West at the East bound traffic on I-40 New Mexico. It was a hot late summer day outside Grants, New Mexico a small town roughly 70 miles west of Albuquerque. Two young men had just robbed a Wal-Mart for a key ingredient for meth, escaping store security and getting away with about $600 worth of antihistamine in a stolen pick-up. Maybe they were feeling good at this moment. They'd taken a big step towards making a temporarily escape from the hot dry desert state. They probably didn't realize how deep inside drug addiction that they were. But this crime wasn't the only one they would commit that day. The date was August 1 st 2001. At the end of the day, a 37-year-old man who had served his small community for seven years would be run down like a wretched dog in the streets by a man who could barely count to ten. After the Wal-Mart robbery was reported a police officer stopped two young men in a vehicle matching the one used in the robbery. In

It was like somebody ripped our hearts out.

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Katie Collman was just another poor Indiana girl in the heart of the American Midwest. That was until the ten-year-old's dead body washed up in a shallow creek in February of 2005. Katie had lived in a quiet, small town in southern Indiana of 1500 people 40 miles north of Louisville, Kentucky. Although she would never have a chance to understand it, Katie would be at the center of one of the sickest and most shocking murders in America. In a CBS interview Katie's dad, John Neance recalls, "She was my best friend. I've got best friends my age, but Katie was my very best friend. It was like somebody ripped our hearts out." The ten-year-old's murder in February of 2005 and the circular investigation into three local suspects, each with dark histories of meth and child abuse, would make front page headlines from New York to San Diego. The story would question the reality of the quiet Midwest of American myth. The idea of a friendly place where a family

Her Name Was Uma Singh

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Killed January 14th 2009 in Janakpur, Nepal Uma Singh, 26, was a journalist and vocal critic of government corruption. She publicly questioned indigenous traditions such as caste discrimination in Nepal - a country that lies between India and China. Singh was butchered like an animal by a group of 15 men. These men burst into her apartment and murdered her while her neighbors stood by helplessly. Her neighbors reported hearing the killers say: "This is for writing so much". This killing follows the three-year disappearance of her father and brother who are long suspected to have been kidnapped and killed by Maoist paramilitaries. Her death has triggered a series of public protests against the Maoist Government (The Maoist People's Liberation Army or PLA) which, after a decade-long bloody insurgency, now controls Nepal. The Prime Minister of Nepal, Pushpa Kamal Dahal (aka Prachanda), after taking office warned a large crowd in Kathmandu the nation's capital t

"Keep this safe, it is my whole life."

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In 1943, Charlotte Salomon went to the gas chamber in Auschwitz at the age of 26. She left behind a series of nearly 800 paintings known as "Leben? oder Theater?" (Life? Or Theater?) in the care of a family friend. She reportedly said, "Keep this safe, it is my whole life." Her short life was characterized by the deaths of her mother and her grandmother by suicide and living in the shadow of the Third Reich. Her mother took her own life when Charlotte was nine. As a teenager, Charlotte studied painting at the Berlin Art Academy until Nazi policies ejected her due to "racial grounds" in 1938. Charlotte fled to Nice in the South of France to live with her grandparents. After her grandmother's suicide on 1939, she and her grandfather were sent to Gurs , a political concentration camp in the French Pyrenees. They were released in 1941 due to her grandfather's declining health. Over the next two years, beginning in 1941, Charlotte frantically painted 1,