When Will Shawkan Be Freed?

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

A journalist’s job is to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

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On the good days, the dozen prisoners negotiate their way through the impossibility of the circumstances. The bad days are simply more impossible, because even impossible situations can be made worse.

The prisoners are crowded in a space the size of a child’s bedroom, nine feet by twelve feet, which for obvious reasons does not have cots for all twelve occupants. They take turns sleeping on the cot or on spaces on the floor. A sink and toilet sit open against one wall. The prisoners take turns cooking on a two-plate electric cooker, which during the winter months has served as the unheated prison cell’s heat source.

The sky, the only way to know if it is day or night, is seen through a small gap in the iron bars in the ceiling of the cell. One prisoner wrote in 2014:
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Today in History: Nov. 10

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

Sir Henry Morton Stanley, an explorer and journalist, was given the job of covering the Middle East and Africa for the New York Herald, an assignment which included a possible adventure: a Scottish missionary named David Livingstone had launched a search for the source of the Nile River in 1866 and no one had heard from him since. It was 1870.

On this date in 1871, near Lake Tanganyika, after an eight-month journey, the journalist found his story and his man. In his book about the encounter Sir Henry reports that he hailed the missionary with this sentence: “Dr. Livingstone, I presume?” but he destroyed the pages in his diary about the encounter so it is not known if this most famous greeting ever was uttered in real life. Dr. Livingstone made no mention of it in his memoirs, either.
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‘The K***s Are in a Panic’

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

[Trigger alert: The following article quotes from antisemitic posts that have been published in recent days. I apologize.]

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Today marks the start of an era of bounty and happiness, although I’ll be honest with y’all and remind you that the road will surely be hard and draining at times.
 
But, at least my unborn son will come into a world ruled by a GREAT MAN that only comes around once every century or so.—columnist “Marcus Cicero,” Infostormer web site, “Victory Is Ours!“

Those who spend life’s precious heartbeats as a way to calculate how many people they hate have until recently tended to keep their communications in the shadows. One had to look for their articles. One needed to know that such hatred existed in order to know where to look for their articles and blog posts. Often, those web sites would turn out to be defunct by the time an amateur like me would look for them.

It was as if those who hate full-time knew that there was something impolite about what they felt, so they kept it behind a locked door and only opened it with a secret handshake.

That day is done. With his campaign for U.S. President and his election yesterday, it no longer matters whether or not Donald Trump himself holds these thoughts in his heart or not: some (many? all?) of his supporters do. I do not think it is all.
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