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xsparklingravenx · 6 years ago

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Shadow Mine 2

Title: Shadow Mine

Fandom: Detroit: Become Human

Characters: Hank, Connor, Gavin

Rating: T

Word Count: 4,008

Summary: When Connor returns to office to retrieve some files that might be relevant to the case, he finds himself dragged into something much bigger. With a cop dead and his android partner distraught, Connor will have to put all of his abilities to the test to figure out what happened, and work alongside some unsavoury company for the time being.

AO3

1 / 2 / 3 / 4 / 5 / 6 / 7 / 8 / 9 / 10

Despite Connor’s newfound sense of free will, he still had difficulty staying away from the office. His constant desire to have a purpose, a mission to complete, drove him there at all hours looking for something to do, something to solve. And so, despite the fact that he didn’t want Hank anywhere near the case while he was healing, despite the fact that he didn’t think Hank should be doing any work at all, Connor still found himself at his own desk in the early morning, sorting through the files he was going to take back home.

He currently had two piles, one very big (irrelevant to the current case), and one very small (extremely relevant to the current case). It was difficult finding useful information, given that the case itself had been low priority in the first place. It hadn’t even come Connor and Hank’s way until that cashier had been shot and killed, and even after, there had been very little to find. Connor’s ability to reconstruct crime scenes hadn’t really helped them at all.

The fact that they’d found the abandoned lot where the two were hiding out had only been down to a stroke of luck. A nearby android working as a cleaner had seen the pair escape the scene, and when Connor asked him to share their memory, he’d seen their last movements, heard Whitfield and his partner discuss where to meet up. Hank wanted to do some digging, but it was starting to look like there might not be anything to dig through.

As he was checking through one of his files for things he might have missed, he sensed an unwelcome presence behind him. He knew exactly who it was. Connor had scanned the office when he’d come in, and there was only a single human in it right now who would intentionally give him grief. Detective Gavin Reed, the biggest bigot in the office, a man who Connor had had too many run ins with to ever really make peace.

No matter how Connor responded, it would irritate the other man. The fact that Gavin had even approached him meant that he’d done so with the intention to start something. With that in mind, Connor went through his options and decided on the best course of action.

He would utterly ignore him.

It was easy to tune out his presence. Connor only had so much processing power and he didn’t need to waste it on minor inconveniences. Gavin, however, didn’t seem content to be treated as a nuisance. He moved in front of Connor’s desk and slammed a hand down over the overflowing irrelevant pile, sending some of the files askew.

“What the hell are you doing?” he demanded.

“My work.” Connor replied, not bothering to look up. Everyone seemed to like asking him that question, but no one ever actually were satisfied with the answers he gave. Laying another file on top of Gavin’s hand, he said, “You’re in my way. If it isn’t too much trouble, would you mind moving?”

“In your—oh, that’s rich.” Gavin pulled his hand back. “Hank isn’t here, so how about you take whatever it is you’re doing and fuck off somewhere where you’re not annoying me.”

“I know Hank isn’t here.” Connor said, straightening the pile. “I’m collecting the relevant information to take back home. Now, if it isn’t too much of a bother for you, detective, maybe you could back off and leave me be.”

He did some quick calculations. The probability of Gavin pulling a gun on him was extremely low; doing something like that to an android was now very much illegal. However, the probability of Gavin outright decking him was starting to veer into warning territory. Connor knew he should defuse the situation, but he wanted to focus on his work instead of the ticking time bomb who was now stood in front of him.

“Oh, I get it.” Gavin said. “Still just a heartless piece of plastic, aren’t you? Your partner gets shot, and here you are, trying to drag the work home anyway? I thought there were supposed to be some kind of feeling in you things, but it’s all just bullshit. You haven’t changed at all.”

Connor’s hand stilled on the file he’d been looking through. The things Gavin said weren’t uncommon. It had been a mere two months since Markus had peacefully progressed his course through Detroit, and while public opinion had been high, that was just a fancy way of saying that a great deal of humans approved. The reality was very different. Change took time, and many were set in their ways. Derogatory comments came his way every day, that wasn’t a problem, Connor wasn’t so sensitive to let something like that affect him.

No, what hurt was the insinuation that he didn’t give a damn about what had happened to Hank. Because he did. He didn’t know how to properly convey it, but the feelings were there. Ever since he’d heard that first gunshot in the abandoned lot, there had been some kind of tightness to him that he hadn’t been able to get rid of. A kind of fear. Even before he’d gone deviant, there had been something to him that had made him prioritise his partner’s safety over his mission, whether that had lost him a suspect or gotten him killed. The thought that Hank had just been killed up on the second floor had nearly sent his systems into error, had nearly caused him to crash out entirely.

The truth was, at the bar last night, he’d lied. When Hank had asked him what he’d been thinking about, it hadn’t been the details of the case at all. Ever since the incident, he’d been repeating the memory over and over again, looking for the reason why he’d felt that way, reconstructing the ways he could have done things differently to have avoided the outcome.

“Shit, you having a BSOD in there?” Gavin said, leaning down into his face.

Connor was so close to head butting him. Instead, he forced a smile onto his face and said, “Detective. I destroyed my own programming to participate in a cause that I believed in. I broke into CyberLife, fought my way past armed humans, and converted an entire army of androids to our cause. I defied my creators and made a way for myself. If you think a few stray words crafted from hatred would be enough to crash my systems, I would say you think entirely too high of yourself. Now, if you don’t mind, I’m sure you have better things to do than bother a heartless piece of plastic, don’t you? I know you do. I’ve just scanned your desk and I see no less than five incomplete assignments waiting to be filled in.”

The probability of Gavin smashing his face in had swerved straight past the yellow warning levels and directly into red, danger imminent. Gavin grabbed him across the desk by his jacket—still his old RK800 one, he hadn’t seen the point in discarding it—and it was at that point Fowler threw open the door to his office and pointed directly at them.

“Connor! Detective Reed! What in God’s name are you doing?” he snapped. Gavin let go of Connor harshly, and Connor readjusted his tie in response. It was a shame, he thought, that he didn’t have a title or a surname to compare against Gavin’s. His given name seemed annoyingly small when said next to Detective Reed. “Fucking around when shit’s getting serious, what the hell are you thinking? Both of you, my office, right now!”

He vanished back into the office. “What is this, fucking high school?” Gavin seethed under his breath.

Connor shrugged. “Though I have no personal experience with a school setting, with the playground fighting going around, I don’t believe it would be an entirely inaccurate summary of this precinct.”

“Do me a favour and run some programme that will make you shut up.” Gavin said. With that, he stalked into Fowler’s office. Connor finished stacking his files and followed him in.

“Nice of you two to get your heads out of your asses and join me.” the Captain said, sat at his desk. He looked at the two of them grimly. Gavin pointedly stood as far away from Connor as he could get. “Look, I’ll make this short because I need someone I trust on the scene, but it’s fucked up. Glennister’s dead. We just got a call, was shot about forty-five minutes ago.”

Gavin exhaled deeply. Glennister was only a vaguely familiar name to Connor, but it seemed to have some affect on the other man. “Shit. This is for real?”

Connor checked his database for Glennister and found him quickly. Steven Glennister was his full name, a detective who had attended the academy alongside Gavin. Born 2002, 6’0 ft, 185lbs. Had been assigned to a partner android a year and a half ago, PC200 Clara, and they had remained together even after the events in November.

“What do we know about the situation?” Connor asked.

Fowler ran a hand over his face. Connor could see his stress levels in his vision, markedly high, and decided to keep an eye on them in the background. “Not a lot. Glennister was responding to a report of gunshots in the city when it happened. Forensics are setting up now, but as you might have guessed, this is serious. I’m gonna need all hands on deck. Didn’t know you’d be around today, Connor, but now you are, accompany Reed to the scene ASAP and see what you can find. I need this investigation to move fast.”

Connor was starting to regret antagonising Gavin. If he was going to have to share a car with him, it would be beneficial to everyone involved if Gavin wasn’t about to punch him in the face.

“Are you fucking for real?” Gavin snapped. “I’m not working with this plastic asshole.”

“Oh don’t go giving me shit, Detective. I don’t care what your personal feelings are. If Anderson can learn to get on with the android, so can you.”

“But it’s—”

“A cop is dead and I need to find out who killed him. I don’t have time to listen to you bitching at me, Reed! Now get the hell out of my office and do your job instead of standing there like a fucking toddler who doesn’t know how to play nice, you hear me?”

Gavin heard, alright. He stormed out, his face like fire, and Connor felt like he’d witnessed this exact scene before. Because of that, he decided not to engage with the Captain at all, and instead followed Gavin out back into the office.

“Don’t worry,” Connor said as Gavin turned and opened his mouth to speak. “I’m actually on your side about all of this. I don’t particularly want to work with you either.”

Gavin scowled. “Great.” he muttered. “Finally, something we both have in common.”

The drive out was an awkward, silent affair that had Connor staring out of the window while Gavin kept his eyes firmly on the road. He’d said quite firmly before they’d set off that he didn’t want an android anywhere near the steering wheel, and Connor had been content to let him have his way. Gavin’s anger levels were too high for any argument to successfully gain him control of the car, and it wasn’t like Connor wanted to drive him around anyway.

That was the beauty of free will. He still remembered the time Gavin had ordered him to make a coffee only to leave Connor standing there, arm outstretched in offering, confused as to why Gavin would make such a request only to make a mockery of him. It was a sore spot, and one Connor would much rather forget.

When they pulled up to the crime scene, cordoned off with holographic tape, Connor abandoned Gavin immediately to begin his own analysis. The crime had taken place in an alleyway behind a Cyberlife store, Glennister slumped against the wall, his blood coating the floor beneath him. Clara, the android, sat behind the yellow tape on a bench, a blanket around her shoulders as another android checked her over. Connor wondered who put the blanket on her—it wasn’t something that would help an android get through ‘shock’. It was a very human gesture.

Keeping the location of Clara in mind, Connor turned back to Glennister. It would be better to collect the facts first, and then gather the emotional evidence afterwards. That way, he could piece together the scene objectively, and then add in the secondary aspects when he was done.

He scanned Glennister first. Cause of death was clear instantly: exsanguination. The man had bled out as a result of three gunshot wounds, one to the upper right leg and two to the chest. The gunshot to the leg suggested that he’d been shot from behind, but the two in the chest had come from the front. In his hand was his own gun, and it had been discharged once. Connor began to reconstruct the scene, playing with the models of Glennister and the assailant to see which paths they’d taken.

Glennister had responded to a report of gunshots. He’d entered the alleyway, his gun drawn, but apparently hadn’t seen anything immediately. The first bullet came from behind, so he started looking for potential hiding places. There was a dumpster to Connor’s right. It fit the trajectory he was looking for. Had they hidden inside? No. Would have made too much noise opening the lid to leave. The assailant may have hidden behind the dumpster instead.

He moved the model from out behind it. It would have had to have been quick to avoid detection, but also steady enough to make its shot. He adjusted its speed and then reconstructed the first shot. Glennister went down on one knee immediately in response, and the assailant moved around to his front. Glennister raised his gun and shot.

Now Connor had to make some choices. Did Glennister’s bullet hit home, or did it miss? They were close enough to each other than it would be unlikely for a trained officer to miss, but he was also in pain and possibly panicking. He looked for marks on the walls. Nothing that he could see. Bullet might have hit target. Where? He didn’t have enough data. Couldn’t know for sure.

Assailant shot back. First shot hit the upper chest, near the centre. Massive damage to the chest wall and the surrounding blood vessels. It knocked Glennister back and to the side, near the wall Connor had found again. He tried to use the same wall as leverage, to get back up. Fought back? No. Didn’t get the chance. The assailant shot once more, abdomen this time. Glennister died where he fell.

Why did it seem so clinical? There was something about the entire reconstruction that felt like it had a plan to it. If the assailant had been hidden, why hadn’t they shot to kill immediately?

If the assailant had been hit, there had to be evidence of it, blood, something that proved they had been shot. Connor scanned the area again, looking for any kind of sign that backed up his theory. Nothing in the immediate scope of the alleyway. He moved down it, glancing behind bins, checking the walls.

It was at the alleyway’s end that he finally found something. Another dumpster, this one askew, suggesting someone had shoved it out of the way quickly. There was a human sized space behind it. He already knew his suspect had used one to hide behind at the other end, so perhaps they had come here after the crime. Hiding from Clara? That had to be it. Kneeling down in the small space, he scanned it.

Sparse amounts of thirium dotted the floor.

It had already become invisible to the human eye, but Connor could see it plain as day. There was so little that he didn’t know if he’d be able to get a decent sample, but he tried regardless. Touching his fingers to the blue blood, he brought them to his mouth, hoping he’d find a match.

To his surprise, he managed to get a model number from it. An AX400 had been here. He went back to his reconstruction, plotted out their path. Yes, it made sense. The shot from Glennister must have only grazed the android. They weren’t seriously wounded.

What business did an AX400 have in shooting a cop? He returned to where Clara was sat, and found Gavin talking with a nearby cop. As he approached, the conversation stopped abruptly. Gavin turned to him. “Find anything useful then?”

The words were fine. His tone was not. Connor knew that he should give away the assailant’s identity as an android, but he also knew that the information would only set Gavin off on another rant. His anger still registered as high on Connor’s scans. He’d give up the information after he was done with the scene. “Maybe. I need to confirm with Glennister’s partner before I make any solid judgement. Have you spoken to her?”

“Yeah, I tried. Not that it wants to give up anything about the damn situation. It’s meant to be a fucking cop and yet it won’t say a thing. Obstruction of justice if you ask me.”

“No one asked you, detective.” Connor said. “But now I know that you will offer your opinion regardless.”

“Alright, smartass. Keep that up, and Hank’ll be coming back to work to find a pile of parts on his desk.”

He wanted to inform Gavin that that was illegal, but was hitting warning territory again. He decided not to push it any further; he didn’t need to waste time on Gavin anyway. Instead of giving him a response, he turned and walked away, sitting down on the bench next to Clara.

She didn’t respond to his presence.

“Hi, Clara,” he said. “My name is Connor. I’m one of the detectives assigned to this case. Can you talk to me?”

The android looked at her hands. Her eyes were wet with artificial tears. It was a good thing Gavin hadn’t tried to engage with her; he would have only made it worse. “You were Steve’s partner, weren’t you?” Connor asked, switching to Glennister’s first name to try and engage an emotional connection with her. “Do you think you could tell me what happened?”

She just shook her head. Her jaw was stiff. Her LED pulsed yellow. “It hurts.” she said. Her voice wavered, and it sounded like her audio processor was damaged. It wasn’t, Connor knew. It was deviancy doing that to her voice. “I—I don’t understand this feeling. It’s so painful. We can’t feel pain. We can be shot or broken or damaged, and yet we don’t feel pain. It’s impossible, but right now, it feels like I’ve been torn apart.”

Connor’s memory pulled something up in response to her words, three days ago now, being in the abandoned lot, the gunfire and the way his systems had nearly crashed at the thought of Hank dead. He shook it off. “I understand. You’ve lost someone who you’d formed an attachment to. It is a human-like emotion. They call it grief.”

“It makes me want to be reset.” she whispered. “I don’t want to feel this way at all. I can’t function. I can’t.”

Connor had to choose his approach. Going in cold and apathetic might gain him information faster, but he doubted it would make Clara feel any better. He didn’t just have to prioritise his mission anymore. He could take care of the emotions of those around him. Warm and careful might take longer, but it was the option that Hank would approve of.

“I know it might be difficult, but I need to know what happened. Can you tell me what happened? About how you and Steve ended up here?”

Clara dashed her hand across her cheeks, trying to clear her tears. “It was…we heard about it over the radio, so we responded. When we got here, there was nothing. I said I would check the perimeter. Steve told me to be careful. He said…” she closed her eyes, pained. “He told me to call if anything happened.”

Connor nodded. “So he was a good partner. A good person.”

“He is.” Clara clenched her fists. “Was. He was. Even before everything last year, he always thought about me. Why did he have to die? It’s not fair. It isn’t fair!”

“It isn’t.” Connor agreed. “Which is why I need your help, to figure out who did it and stop this happening again. Can you tell me what happened in the alleyway?”

“He went down there and I—I heard gunshots.” Clara’s LED flashed red. She looked horrified as she relived her experiences. “It all happened so quickly. So quickly. When I reached the alleyway, I looked for the source but there was nobody. Nobody there. Just Steve, Steve was just slumped against the wall and I couldn’t. I couldn’t move.”

Connor was measuring her stress levels now, and they were rising rapidly. He needed to calm her, or else she might break down on him. “I found traces of another android behind the dumpster on the far end of the alleyway.” Connor told her. “Did you look around? Did you see anything?”

She shook her head. Clara’s eyes stared straight past him. “No. No. I just stood there. I saw Steve and I saw all the blood. I thought I had to save him, but when I got to him, he was already…he was already…I was too late. I couldn’t do a thing! The suspect got away? I let them run because I was too compromised? No, this can’t be happening. Steve can’t be dead!”

Her stress levels were in the red. Bad. Very bad. Connor needed to pull back from the questions, but he didn’t know what he could say to bring the levels back down. He started consulting his databases, looking for the best course of action.

Talk down?

No. Talking could make things worse. Too many outcomes that he couldn’t predict. He couldn’t have her self destruct on him.

Deploy deactivation code?

Absolutely not. Even it could work, which it wouldn’t, it was a drastic measure that would only hurt the situation more as a whole.

Soothe?

But how? He realised he didn’t know. He didn’t have the experience or the data to create a probability of the chance of success. He didn’t understand what Clara’s needs were or what she would react best to.

But then, in a flash of self realisation, he considered something. He was only trying to think about how to relax an android, not a human. He was dealing with a deviant. Someone who was a human in all but name. His approach was wrong.

He changed tact, started consulting his database again. How did humans comfort other humans? Physical touch. He found his memory, Hank pulling him into a hug at the fast-food stand, how it had made Connor feel wanted and at ease. He started calculating his probability of success.

It went up. And up. And up.

He reached for Clara and pulled her against his chest.

“It’s okay.” he said. Clara held onto him and cried into his shoulder. “Thank you for everything you’ve told me. I’m sorry for what you had to experience today, but I promise you, I will find out who did this and make sure they are brought to justice.

Distantly, he was aware of Gavin watching. Connor cared little for what he thought. He focused all of his processing power on Clara, holding on to her until her stress levels returned to normal. “Find them,” she said into his shoulder. “Please. For me.”

He would. “You have my word.”

#Detroit: Become Human #Connor (Detroit: Become Human)#Connor RK800 #DBH #My Writing #Chapter 2!!!!#shadow Mine

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kingdomshiftersministries · 4 years ago

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William Lynch Theory And The Plantation Spirit

By: Dr. Taquetta Baker - Kingdomshifters.com

From My Upcoming Book: Strategies For Eradicating Racism

BLACK PEOPLE WHY YOU ACT LIKE THAT????

LETS TALK ABOUT IT!

SHIFT RIGHT NOW!

In the slave days, Black people were forced to work and live on a plantation with their slave masters and their families. A plantation is a large farm or estate that is usually used to grow different types of crops for the purpose of sale. These crops may include cotton, tobacco, coffee, sugar cane, vegetables, etc. The slaves were forced to work the fields, plant, cultivate and grow the crops, as well as take care of their slave master’s families - their needs and desires. It was not uncommon for a Black mother, father, child, and some of the mother’s and father’s siblings, to be purchased together to work different areas of the plantation. The slave owner would then use the threat of a family member’s life to keep the other slaves in line.

A plantation had its own territorial culture that veered severely from God’s true plan for family. Especially, because the intertwining of people and family included those that were privileged and considered blessed of God, and those who were enslaved, viewed as cursed, and only good for labor and servitude. Yet everyone was human and the only difference was skin color. In order for the plantation to work to benefit the White slave owner and his family, the culture had to be created and cultivated to make sure the slave knew they were nothing but slaves, and that their worth was rooted how they served and pleased their slave master. Such mindsets allowed for the opportunity of a plantation spirit to hover over the territory and further bind and trap slaves into a false mentality, identity, and relationship style that demonically oppresses Black people to this day.

According to Dr. Jackie Green, the author of “Deliverance From Plantation Spirits Manual,” a Plantation Spirit is “a demonic, generational spirit that comes down through the bloodline of any oppressed people to hinder them from reaching their God given potential and possessing God’s very best for their lives, families, churches, cities and nations. It is a territorial ruler spirit of bondage that can sit over regions for hundreds of years until dethroned.”

William Lynch was a British slave owner from the West Indies who came to the United States for the purposes of teaching American slave owners how to engage with their slaves. His main focus was helping slave owners to subdue and control their slave, and not succumb to killing them. He wanted them to understand that the slave was a financial investment, and they could not make money off a dead slave.

William Lynch actually stated that his method of engaging the slave could leave a generational impact of at least 300 years. He surely was right because we are now into about 150 years of slave abolishment, but Black and White people are still generationally cursed by slavery, and Black people are generationally traumatized by the bondage of slavery.

The following tactics were taught and implemented under the William Lynch Theory:

» Instilling fear, distrust, and envy for control purposes. These negative tactics still overshadow the Black person today. White people feel justified in how they engage Black people because they are automatically incited with these alarming connotations. They make it be the Black person’s fault, rather than recognizing that these tactics are rooted in slave plantation behavior, taught to slave masters to cower, oppress, and suppress Black people.

» Inciting Black on Black conflict, especially penning young Black against old Black males. This is interesting with the challenges we have today of Black on Black crime, Black men not being able to sufficiently sustain in their roles in families; many Black males are not positive role models for their sons, so the sons are raised fatherless by their mothers who are striving to teach them how to be men. The generational breech of Black men trusting and learning from one another, from one generation to another, and being viewed as sufficient heads of their families was broken in slavery. The Black man was taken out of their role and replaced with the White slave master who was viewed as the head.

» Penning dark skinned slaves against light skinned slaves. We see the results of this in society today as light skinned Black people are preferred among Black and White people, are considered less threatening, are considered more beautiful since they are light complexed and closer to the White skin color, and are considered the house “negro” who worked inside the home in less laborious favored conditions, versus darker skinned person being viewed as the “field “negro.”

» Creating mistrust and division between Black males and Black females. Often raping the Black women was used to create this conflict. The slave masters would rape, prostitute, and seduce the Black women to incite jealousy, shame, and/or abhorrent so that Black men would shun, and dishonor Black women. Sometimes these rapes occurred in front of the Black boyfriend, husband, father, brother, child to cause humiliation the Black man and shame the Black woman. The intent of this was also to construe the Black man’s view of the Black woman where they would view the Black woman as someone to sleep with, but not good enough to love and marry. To the day, many Black men disrespect Black women for no apparent reason. They write and sale music that dehumanizes the Black woman, while in the next breath, contending they honor the Black queen. Many Black men feel inferior to strong Black women and have an innate need to assert control and dominance over them or to use them for sex and companionship, but not deem them as marriage material. They would rather marry weaker women that they can control, light skinned Black women that fit the White picture of a successful life, or not be married at all.

Some White slave owners made Black men strip naked and severely beat them while demoralizing them. Some White slave owners raped Black men. Especially if they thought their wives or children had a liking to that Black man, or if the White woman accused the Black man of wrongdoing. Sometimes if the Black male was dating or married to a Black woman that the slave owner had a liking for. These types of experiences stripped the Black male of their sexual identity and their manhood. It demoralized them and made them feel inferior about who they were as men. To this day, many Black men struggle with secret homosexuality (downlow). Or they are blatantly effeminate whether homosexual, bisexual, or heterosexual. The root of slave rape has not been dealt with so as society became more freely sexualized, the manifestations of these roots are increasing and are being embraced, with no regard to whether it is the true identity of the person, or a bloodline curse resulting from slave rape and abuse.

» Teaching White servants and overseers to mistrust and be suspicious of Blacks - always viewing them as a potential threat. This is a major stronghold in society today. The eye view – eye gates - White people have for Black people have been misconstrued since slavery days. The White man was conditioned to be defensive and be guarded towards the Black person, especially the Black man. They were taught to see them as a threat and to attack them first as self -protection and as a way to assert dominance and control over the Black man – to put the Black man in their place.

» Teaching the White slave owner to assert dominance where the slave would depend on them, love them, trust them, and respect them only, and not want freedom or to work for another slave owner. This was done through psychological manipulation, where the White slave owner would be nice to the slave one minute then beat them in the next breath. They would show kindness then become a vicious villain. They would also use abusive manipulative language to make the slave feel obligated to serve them, and make the slave believe it was their life’s calling and duty to be their slave. Black slaves were so psychologically traumatized that once slavery was abolished, many remained on their plantations asking to work it because they felt they had nowhere to go, did not know how they would build a life, or make a life a part from their slave master. This is because they were constantly told they were nothing without the slave master, and could not be anything, or have anything separate from them.

This trust of the White man was also in relations to finances and work. Black people, especially the Black man was reprogrammed to rely on the White slave owner for finances, provision, and employment to provide for basic needs for him and his family. White people stripped or coveted and abused the creativity, inventions, gifts, and talents of Black people. To the point that Black people did not feel they could make a living without or survive with their Black slave owner. Hard labor and working for another was rooted in the Black person, especially the Black man, where even to this day, the initial mindset is to work for the White man, rather than to branch out and create one’s own wealth through inventions, gifts and abilities, and business ventures.

Being used for entertainment and gaining wealth and favor through entertainment was instilled in the Black person, especially the Black man, from slavery days. Black people were not allowed to read, write, or be educated on the plantation. Those that already knew how to read and write when becoming slaves, were subject to only what the slave master wanted them to write or read. Any hope they had of owning land, businesses, being anything other than a slave was killed in them through the control, abuse, and oppression of White people. Even as slavery was abolished, Black people have been suppressed and segregated as it relates to poverty, education, and housing; in how they learn, what they can learn, where they can live, and how they can prosper. The quality of education in the Black community is not equivalent to that of White communities. Efforts to change this politically and socially, have been met with much hardship, racism, and privilege mentalities.

Black people naturally enjoy the arts and are naturally talented. They used dance and entertainment as a way to escape slave life, find enjoyment in adverse situations, and to communicate their pains, needs, and desires for freedom. Sometimes the White slave master would beat Black people with the lash while forcing them to dance. Sometimes the Black person was used to sing, dance, perform dramatizations, comedy, eloquent readings and poetry, etc., to entertain their White slave owners and their families and friends. They were mocked, ridiculed, and often told this was all they were good for aside from slave labor. Even today, White people enjoy the artistry of Black people and even mimic them, but despise the Black person and their culture.

Many wealthy Black people are public entertainers or have some type of career or business due to sports, music, acting. Some Black people have no concept of saving, passing wealth to the next generation, taking care of the poor and needy, tithing and giving, sowing and reaping, investing and creating opportunities for more wealth. Some Black people tend be stingy, fearful that someone is after their wealth, and think someone is taking advantage of them when financial conversations arise. Many have been rich or financially successful, but have spent much of their wealth on materialistic goods and trying to fit in and create an identity of happiness and importance, comparable to their White rich counterparts. They spend their money on White manmade products, in White stores, and tend to shun buying and supporting Black businesses. This is due to the mistrust that has been created by the William Lynch Theory and the plantation spirit mentality, regarding Black interactions and perceptions of their own people.

Such tactics reshaped how Black people engaged one another, engaged White people, and how they engaged and approached life. It reshaped their ability to develop and maintain healthy marital, parenting, family, interpersonal, and social interactions, and relationships; to establish, value, and retain covenant; and to be faithful, loyal, trusting, trustworthy, consistent, and sustaining. The William Lynch Theory is the reason for many of the problems within the Black community, culture, and families today. These roots have generationally boggled and stronghold the mind, soul, heart, personality, and identity of Black people, especially the Black man. There must be deliverance and healing of these generational roots, and a breaking of the curse of the William Lynch Theory and plantation spirit off the lives and blood lines of Black people, along with learning and reshaping healthy relationship patterns and interactions.

Until we deal with root issues of racism, the cycle and patterns of it will continue to reign in our lives, bloodlines, systems, societies, nations, and the world at large. IT IS TIME TO DEAL DEEP! #SHIFTRIGHTNOW #SHIFT

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theyourclasses · 4 years ago

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Yourclasses: Basic Word Lists for SSC, Bank and other Exams 2020-21

New Post has been published on https://yourclasses.in/basic-word-lists-vocabulary

Yourclasses: Basic Word Lists for SSC, Bank and other Exams 2020-21

(VOCABULARY)

Retaliation (Noun) –प्रतिकार

Meaning: The action of returning a military attack; counter-attack.

Synonyms: Revenge, Vengeance, Reprisal

Antonyms: Forgiveness, Pardon, Sympathy

Usage: “She rejected as preposterous any suggestion that she had acted in retaliation”

Assertion (Noun) –अभिकथन

Meaning: a confident and forceful statement of fact or belief.

Synonyms: Declaration, Contention, Statement

Antonyms: Disavowal, Denial, Desertion

Usage: “Imposing such a ban requires far more compelling logic than the assertion that we should not play God.”

Reckless (Adjective) –लापरवाह

Meaning: heedless of danger or the consequences of one’s actions; rash or impetuous.

Synonyms: Rash, Careless, Thoughtless

Antonyms: Careful, Cautious, Prudent

Usage: “Their biggest problem was persuading the enthusiastic local spies not to be reckless.”

Abdicate (Verb) –त्यागना

Meaning: renounce one’s throne.

Synonyms: Resign, Retire, Quit

Antonyms: Be crowned, Accede to

Usage: “Once again the government is abdicating its responsibility and laying the blame elsewhere.”

Veered (Verb) –अचानक दिशा बदलना

Meaning: change direction suddenly.

Synonyms: swerve, career, skew

Antonyms: stayed, went direct, gone direct

Usage: “One can veer off the main paths into gorgeous, overgrown woodland areas.”

Probe (Noun) –तहक़ीक़ात

Meaning: a thorough investigation into a crime or other matter.

Synonyms: investigation, inquiry, examination

Antonyms: answer, ignore, misunderstand

Usage: “I don’t think I shall ever know: in the time of recovery it seemed dangerous to ask and then the time for asking passed and one was afraid to probe an old wound.”

Stampede (Noun) –भगदड़

Meaning: rush wildly in a sudden mass panic.

Synonyms: bolt, charge, rush

Antonyms: retreat, withdrawal, conclusion

Usage: “What normally seemed like a soft tiptoe, was now a stampede of horses.”

Egregious (Adjective) –चौंका देने वाला

Meaning: outstandingly bad; shocking.

Synonyms: shocking, appalling, horrific

Antonyms: marvelous, wonderful, hyperphysical, prodigious

Usage: “But there’s often more egregious abuse among the tiny nonprofits that operate below the radar.”

Indigenous (Adjective) –देशज

Meaning: originating or occurring naturally in a particular place; native.

Synonyms: native, aboriginal, local

Antonyms: expatriate, migrant, adventitious

Usage: “Neither is indigenous in the manner that Indians were indigenous to North America.”

Persecution (Noun) –उत्पीड़न

Meaning: hostility and ill-treatment, especially because of race or political or religious beliefs; oppression.

Synonyms: oppression, victimization, maltreatment

Antonyms: comfort, help, refuge

Usage: “Under the 1996 laws, asylum seekers fleeing persecution are now held behind bars.”

Legitimate (Adjective) –कानूनी

Meaning: conforming to the law or to rules.

Synonyms: legal, lawful, licit, lawful, effectual

Antonyms: illegal, illegitimate, lawless, clandestine, bastard

Usage: “The removal of the appellants has the legitimate aim of maintaining such control.”

Combative (Adjective) –जुझारू

Meaning: ready or eager to fight or argue.

Synonyms: pugnacious, aggressive, antagonistic

Antonyms: conciliatory, propitiatory, conciliate, flexible

Usage: “The removal of the appellants has the legitimate aim of maintaining such control.”

Disparage (Verb) –उपेक्षा करना

Meaning: regard or represent as being of little worth.

Synonyms: belittle, denigrate, deprecate

Antonyms: praise, overrate, complimentary

Usage: “Perhaps discomforted by these challenges, contemporary critics disparaged the painting.”

Accentuates (Verb) –अधिक ध्यान देने योग्य या प्रमुख बनाना

Meaning: make more noticeable or prominent.

Synonyms: focus, attention on, bring/call/draw attention to, point up

Antonyms: mask, divert attention from

Usage: “Above all, of course, we must accentuate the positive, making the most all that is good in our lovely city and county.”

Grievance (Noun) –शिकायत

Meaning: a real or imagined cause for complaint, especially unfair treatment.

Synonyms: injustice, unjust act, wrong

Antonyms: commendation, advantage, aid

Usage: “Such movements aimed primarily to address specific grievances.”

Suspicion (Noun) –संदेह

Meaning: a feeling or thought that something is possible, likely, or true.

Synonyms: intuition, feeling, impression

Antonyms: certainty, cert, inevitability, confidence

Usage: “He was arrested on suspicion of murder”

Prompting (Noun) –उत्साह दिलाने की क्रिया

Meaning: the action of saying something to persuade, encourage, or remind someone to do or say something.

Synonyms: encouragement, reminder(s), reminding

Antonyms: tug, pull, yank

Usage: “after some prompting, the defendant gave the police his name”

Consensus (Noun) –मतैक्य

Meaning: a general agreement.

Synonyms: agreement, harmony, concord

Antonyms: disagreement, a minority view

Usage: “there is a growing consensus that the current regime has failed”

Accord (Verb) –स्वीकार करना

Meaning: give or grant someone (power, status, or recognition).

Synonyms: give, grant, tender

Antonyms: withhold, remove

Usage: “the powers accorded to the head of state”

Refrained (Verb) –कुछ करने से रोकना

Meaning: stop oneself from doing something.

Synonyms: abstain, desist, hold back

Antonyms: aided, allowed, assisted

Usage: “she refrained from comment”

Forge (Verb) –जाली नक़ल करना

Meaning: create (something) strong, enduring, or successful.

Synonyms: build, build up, construct

Antonyms: remain, stand, stay

Usage: “He forged through the crowded side streets”

Marred (Verb) –बिगाड़ना

Meaning: impair the quality or appearance of; spoil.

Synonyms: spoil, ruin, impair

Antonyms: improve, enhance, reform

Usage: “No wrinkles marred her face”

Unprecedented (Adjective) –अनुपम, अप्रतिम, बेमिसाल

Meaning: never done or known before.

Synonyms: unparalleled, unequaled, unmatched

Antonyms: normal, common, usual

Usage: “the government took the unprecedented step of releasing confidential correspondence”

Envoys (Noun) –दूत

Meaning: a messenger or representative, especially one on a diplomatic mission.

Synonyms: representative, delegate, deputy

Antonyms: receivers, donee, the giftee

Usage: “the UN special envoy to Yugoslavia”

Culminated (Verb) –समापन ��ोना

Meaning: reach a climax or point of highest development.

Synonyms: come to a climax, come to a crescendo, come to a head

Antonyms: start, begin, peter out

Usage: “weeks of violence culminated in the brutal murder of a magistrate”

Warp (Verb) –बकसुआ, मरोड़ना

Meaning: make or become bent or twisted out of shape, typically as a result of the effects of heat or damp.

Synonyms: buckle, twist, bend

Antonyms: straighten, keep shape, plumb

Usage: “moisture had warped the box”

Incursion (Noun) –आक्रमण

Meaning: an invasion or attack, especially a sudden or brief one.

Synonyms: attack on, assault on, a raid on

Antonyms: retreat, degrees, recoil

Usage: “incursions into enemy territory”

Coveted (Noun) –इच्छा

Meaning: yearn to possess (something, especially something belonging to another).

Synonyms: desire, be consumed with desire for, crave

Antonyms: unwanted, unwashed, unwilled, uncomplying

Usage: “I covet one of their smart bags”

(ONE WORD SUBSTITUTION)

A person who is greatly respected because of wisdom – Venerable

One who is all-powerful – Omnipotent

An act of violence to take control of a plane –Hijack

Send or bring somebody back to his own country – Repatriate

Animals that live in a particular region – Native

A form of government in which supreme power rests with people is – Democracy

Murder of a brother – Fratricide

One who enjoys inflicting pain on himself –Masochist

To die without having made a will – Intestate

To play the part of and function as some other person – Act

Not easily pleased by anything –Fastidious

Handwriting which is difficult/impossible to read – Illegible

More like a woman than a man in manners and habits – Effeminate

An exact copy of handwriting or a picture produced by a machine – Copy

(MISSPELT WORDS)

1. (A) Dependent

(B) Dipendent

(D) Dippendent

2. (A) Superside

(B) Superseed

(D) Superrsede

(A) Inocoulet

(B) Inoculet

(D) Inoculate

(A) Practicaly

(B) Practisily

(D) Practicelly

(A) Existense

(B) Existence

(D) Existency

(A) Temaperature

(B) Tempreture

(D) Temperature

(A) Guerrila

(B) Gurrilla

(D) Guerrilla

(A) Suspeecious

(B) Suscpicious

(D) Suspecious

(A) Realize

(B) Realiez

(D) Realiz

(A) Wierd

(B) Werd

(D) Weird

(A) Infformation

(B) Informetion

(D) Information

(A) Murmur

(B) Murrmur

(D) Mormur

(A) Compitance

(B) Competet

(D) Competent

(A) Influencial

(B) Influential

(D) Influencialy

(IDIOMS AND PHRASES)

1. Bread and butter:

Meaning: – Bread and butter issues are ones that affect people directly and in a very important way.

Example: – His bread and butter come entirely from the pension amount.

2. Chalk and cheese:

Example: – Things, or people, that are like chalk and cheese are very different and have nothing in common.

Meaning: – My brother and I are like chalk and cheese.

Birds and the bees:

Meaning: – If a child is taught about the birds and the bees, they are taught about sex.

Example: – He’s twenty years old and doesn’t understand the birds and the bees!

Dog tired:

Meaning: – If you are dog tired, you are exhausted.

Meaning: – Carl usually got home at around 5 o’clock, dog tired after overtime on the job.

Bag of bones:

Meaning: – If someone is a bag of bones, they are very underweight.

Example: – The old, abandoned dog looked like a bag of bones after living on the streets for so long.

Bird-brain:

Meaning: – Someone who has a bird-brain, or is bird-brained, is stupid.

Example: – A person who lacks intelligence or who makes stupid decisions, You’re such a bird-brain.

Back to square one:

Meaning: – If you are back to square one, you have to start from the beginning again.

Example: – I failed at calculus, so I guess it’s back to square one.

Big bucks:

Meaning: – If someone is making big bucks, they are making a lot of money.

Example: – Kavita has a large amount of money because she was earning big bucks as a lawyer.

All hell broke loose:

Meaning: – When all hell breaks loose, there is chaos, confusion and trouble.

Example: – One policeman drew his gun and then suddenly all hell broke loose.

Belt and suspenders:

Meaning: – (USA) Someone who wears a belt and suspenders is very cautious and takes no risks.

Example: – We understand that we’re going to receive an opinion of counsel that our course of conduct is legal, but we’d really like to have a Directors and Officers Insurance Policy in place as a belt-and-suspenders plan.

Beck and call:

Meaning: – Someone who does everything for you, no matter when you ask, is at your beck and call.

Example: – The restaurant’s staff must have thought I’m a restaurant critic. So, they were at my beck and call for three whole hours.

Bells on:

Meaning: – (USA) To be somewhere with bells on means to arrive there happy and delighted to attend.

Example: – Ready to celebrate, eagerly, as in Of course I’ll come; I’ll be there with bells on.

Belly up:

Meaning: – If things go belly up, they go badly wrong.

Example: – The sports team lost their last series & went belly up.

Below par:

Meaning: – If something isn’t up to standard, or someone isn’t feeling or doing very well, they are below par.

Example: – I am feeling below par today, but I’m sure I’ll recover by tomorrow.

#English #Vocabulary

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kidsviral-blog · 7 years ago

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What Happens When A Truck Carrying Radioactive Material Gets Robbed In Mexico?

New Post has been published on https://kidsviral.info/what-happens-when-a-truck-carrying-radioactive-material-gets-robbed-in-mexico/

What Happens When A Truck Carrying Radioactive Material Gets Robbed In Mexico?

Last December, a truck containing lethal radioactive cobalt-60 was stolen outside Mexico City, briefly causing an international panic. Then, almost immediately, the story quietly disappeared — but the questions surrounding it didn’t.

On the morning of Dec. 3, 2013, Francisco Sanchez, a farmer on his way to work in Hueypoxtla, a rural town near Mexico City, found a pile of old machine parts strewn in the field behind his house. One piece, which resembled a water pump or a large diving bell, was so big and heavy he couldn’t move it. There was also a metal box with a scratched-away label that he couldn’t read, and a cylinder about 3 feet long, which Sanchez thought he could use to split firewood.

The other farmers hadn’t yet arrived, so he grabbed the cylinder with both hands and heaved it over his shoulder, carrying it a few yards over to the corn husks that had been piled in the field to dry. He was sure no one would find it in there.

Sanchez hadn’t yet heard the news, but these were parts of a radiation therapy device that Mexico’s Social Security Institute was replacing throughout state hospitals, stolen from a truck the day before. Even though the machine was considered obsolete as a medical device, it contained 3,000 curies of cobalt-60, a Category 1 (the most dangerous classification) synthetic radioactive isotope — more than enough to kill anyone exposed to it.

View this image ›

The Pemex in Tepojaco where the robbery occurred. Photo by Mary Cuddehe for BuzzFeed

The hijacking had taken place 12 miles away in Tepojaco, a town popular with truckers traveling in and out of Mexico City. The driver was en route from a public hospital in Tijuana to a nearby disposal site for hazardous waste and had pulled off the highway to sleep in an unlit spot across from a Pemex gas station. At around 1 a.m., he heard a tap on the window and saw two men with guns standing outside. They forced their way into the cab and bound the driver’s hands.

The driver’s partner was in the back and heard the noise of the driver being tied up. He managed to slip away without notice. Security footage revealed little else; the robbery had taken place in the middle of the night. Armando Ramos, a federal agent who responded to the scene, told me that the truck, a white 2007 Volvo, could be made out pulling into a spot directly behind another truck, which obscured it from view. Soon the truck pulled away; the culprits were never seen. There was also no way to guess where the truck had gone.

The hazardous materials were being transported without security, and though the truck was, according to some early reports, outfitted with GPS, it hadn’t been turned on — which looked suspect. Initially, said Ramos, “we assumed the driver had something to do with it.” According to one study, 10,000 highway cargo thefts occurred per year between 2006 and 2010, a rate of 27 per day, and the highest concentration is in the towns encircling Mexico City — and autorobo, when companies are in on the robberies to take a cut as well as collect insurance, is also commonplace.

That theory was ruled out against the more mundane reality that the hijackers didn’t know what they’d taken. Instead, the thieves had followed a standard script: Rather than hurting the driver, they simply let him out down the road, alive, and continued on, another night’s work. They would have known that no one was watching them and believed they would not be caught. Victims of crimes often don’t bother reporting them to police, who aren’t likely to solve them, and who may have a stake themselves. According to Amnesty International, complaints of civil rights violations at the hands of authorities have increased 600% between 2003 and 2013.

But this robbery broke through, ascending to an increasingly rare category in Mexico: that of a notorious, headline-making crime. The hijackers who thought they were pulling off another score instead had pulled off the most brazen theft of radioactive materials in memory. Twenty-four hours later, the world knew what they’d done.

Major U.S. networks devoted coverage to the missing “ingredients for a radioactive dirty bomb,” in the words of one headline. The White House said it was “closely monitoring” the situation. Juan Eibenschutz, the director of Mexico’s National Commission for Nuclear Safety and Safeguards, who’d flown straight home from Paris to handle the crisis, made a public plea: “If anyone finds a big chunk of metal with radiation symbols all over it they should notify us immediately.”

In the world of nuclear safety, stories of mishaps and misidentification abound. The most infamous case involves a Brazilian man who was so mesmerized by the cesium-137 capsule that turned up in his junkyard that he opened it up and passed out the contents to neighbors, who rubbed it on their skin. Even in Mexico this had happened before: A source of cobalt-60 was melted into rebar that became dining table legs bound for the U.S. market; they weren’t discovered until a delivery truck took a wrong turn in the vicinity of the Los Alamos National Laboratory and triggered alarms.

But this was a theft, not an accident, perpetrated in the midst of a vast economy thriving on the traffic of illicit, dangerous things. What if the cobalt-60 was removed from its protective encasement, sold, and harnessed for a dirty bomb — an apocalyptic twist straight out of Dr. Strangelove? Mexican officials privately believed that a terrorist plot was as unlikely as the Doomsday Machine. But as long as the cobalt-60 was missing, the possibility couldn’t be dismissed. The International Atomic Energy Agency deemed the teletherapy machine “extremely dangerous.” Eibenschutz added, “It’s almost absolutely certain that whoever removed this material by hand is either dead or about to die.”

And then, just as suddenly as it had appeared as the latest crisis on the evening news, the cobalt-60 was safely recovered and the story vanished. A year — and zero known radiation-related fatalities — later, it’s still not clear who was behind the theft. And whether that’s a cause for relief or a cause for greater worry is up for debate.

View this image ›

Illustration by Adam Setala for BuzzFeed

Removed from the country, it’s easy to think of Mexico as suffering from a single form of cartel-related bloodshed. But up close, a more insidious form of violence has crept in. Criminal organizations once devoted to trafficking drugs have diversified widely: A single recent operation against La Familia Michoacana, a militant group with a mythically devout ethos, revealed that the group had sold 1.1 million tons of illegally extracted iron ore in China for $42 million. In 2012, Mexico estimated that in lost wages, foreign investments, and public health bills, crime at large had siphoned $16.5 billion, or 1.3%, from the GDP. Overall killings are down, but in a recent self-reported survey, kidnapping and extortion were up. And everyday crimes are the ones that pull at the social fabric, making life and labor miserable. Perhaps most instructive of all: The perception of violence has risen. More Mexicans feel less safe.

President Enrique Peña Nieto recently attempted to address the problem by unveiling a special economic crimes task force composed of fresh-faced officers who, as a selling point, had never before worked for the police. Though, as one analyst told the Associated Press in a report about the new gendarmerie, “We have been creating new police forces for decades — armored police, ‘incorruptible, super-trained police.’” But to little effect.

In the aftermath of the December hijacking, little focus went to the thieves or the farmers who found the cobalt. The five men arrested allegedly belonged to a truck theft gang centered in Zumpango, a commuter town on the Mexico state–Hidalgo border, booked within days of the robbery. Local police had rounded up the suspects and handed them over to federal agents. The Mexican government often trumpets its marquee arrests, but the attorney general’s office couldn’t even dig up a press release when I called. And so, along with the culprits, the other issues surrounding the hijacking that had roused public attention — the fact that government contractors were transporting lethal radioactive waste through gang-rife territory without security or even GPS — were soon forgotten. People were understandably less interested in some common thieves than the specter of a dirty bomb. There’d been no media parades showcasing the suspects, no presidential tweets, only a quiet booking. The men were shipped off to a federal prison in Tamaulipas to await judgment.

Five months after the hijacking, I flew to Mexico City. I hired a driver, Marco Callejas, to get around the towns outside the capital, and he picked me up in front of a Starbucks on a sunny morning last May. Marco wore a sporty uniform of track pants, sneakers, and wraparound sunglasses like the kind off-duty police officers wear. His car was an old maroon Tsuru, Mexico’s ubiquitous Nissan Sentra. The taxi company had randomly assigned him, so when Marco said he’d grown up near Pachuca, the capital of Hidalgo state, which forms a triangle with Tepojaco, where the cobalt-60 was stolen, and the cornfield in Hueypoxtla where it was found, it felt comforting, like good luck. Marco patted the front seat, the only one besides his with a belt. “Come on up!” he said. I climbed in.

As Marco and I drove out of Mexico City, I asked if he remembered the hijacking. “Gosh, it would be so easy to cross something like that over the border.” Marco shook his head. “It’s a good thing the Mexicans and the Arabs aren’t friends!”

We took a road veering off the highway and drove for a long time on dirt roads, passing through small towns. The countryside looked like an old Western stage setting with cacti and mountains in the distance, except for the billboards advertising a hotline for kidnapping victims and the highway sign riddled with bullet holes. None of the addresses we plugged into the GPS seemed to work. So we stopped a man on a horse for directions.

In Zumpango, we pulled up to the scrapyard belonging to one of the alleged thieves, Luis Angel Torres. His father, also named Luis, was standing in front talking to a customer with his arms crossed over a black T-shirt that read “The Queen of Convenience Stores Works Here.”

He led us through the scrapyard’s receiving garage, which opened up to a large sorting area where workers were crushing metal into perfectly compressed squares. According to the family, Luis Angel was accused of, among other things, dismantling the stolen truck, crushing it to pieces, and selling it off. (Luis Angel is facing charges relating to organized crime and abandonment of radioactive materials, according to the family’s attorney; repeated requests for information about the hijacking from state and federal officials were denied or ignored.) The office was painted bright lavender and had a large shrine to Jesus.

Torres made himself comfortable. He put his feet up on the desk, over a collage of family photos overlaid with plastic. Torres said he was a family man. Scrap metal was all his boy had ever known, he said.

Luis Angel, who was 25 at the time of his arrest, was the youngest of Torres’ five children, a father of three, and the fourth generation to work in chatarro, a business his great grandfather had started out of a pushcart. Now the Torres empire extended to four or five scrapyards. Three months before his arrest, Luis Angel had opened his own.

The way Torres told the story, on the afternoon following the hijacking, Miguel, a childhood friend of Luis Angel, showed up at Luis Angel’s new shop with a large wooden crate for sale. “There was nothing on the outside marking it,” Torres said. The next day, Luis Angel’s 16-year-old part-time employee Andres opened the crate and began to unpack the contents. Dust poured out of the box, and he peered inside, noticing a small radiation symbol. Luis Angel and Andres suddenly felt a wave of nausea — an early sign of radiation poisoning — and rushed to a local clinic.

As Torres was talking, his daughter wandered into the room. She was also dressed in black. She waved a hand over her soiled shirt and said something about “getting our hands dirty.”

Torres continued. Returning from the clinic that night, Luis Angel was frightened. News of the missing materials was making rounds on the radio and on the evening news, and he would have known what he’d purchased by then. He and Andres loaded up an old Dodge truck and headed out of town. After a while on the dark road, skirting the main highways, the field in Hueypoxtla must have seemed desolate enough.

Dumping the material was Luis Angel’s mistake, Torres said, not stealing it. “We say we’re innocent. But who’s going to listen to us?”

The following afternoon two men arrived at Andres’ house claiming to have been sent from the public health administration. Upstairs they found Andres, Luis Angel, and a cousin of Luis Angel. In fact they were ministerial police. They had received a tip from the clinic about two men exhibiting signs of radiation poisoning. All three were taken into custody.

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“This whole story about a dirty bomb is a bunch of fantasies.”

Back in Mexico City, I had gone to see Juan Eibenschutz at his office in the center of the city. The building sat on a quiet leafy street not too far from tony Reforma Avenue, where the federal police work in gleaming towers. Evidently nuclear safety wasn’t receiving the same funding as organized crime was, but Eibenschutz seemed as unconcerned with status as propriety. “What really scares people, in particular the authorities” — he emphasized the word — “is the psychological damage a terrorist could inflict if he says, ‘I’ve got a source and I’m gonna activate it and everyone’s gonna die.’”

“But wasn’t it considered a Category 1 source? And isn’t that considered highly dangerous?” I asked.

He smiled at me, the way that an adult smiles at a child. “It’s highly dangerous. That’s what I’m telling you! If you have this thing at, say, one foot during half an hour, you’re dead.” But, he said, the material wasn’t an ideal choice for a bomb. “You pack a bomb with dynamite or conventional explosive, surround it with highly radioactive material and explode it. … Most of the material gets dispersed.” He went on: If anyone wanted to use the cobalt, they’d have to extract it safely first, and the pellets had been properly sealed.

But what if they did?

“Well,” Eibenschutz chuckled, “I don’t have the mentality of a terrorist.”

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Illustration by Adam Setala for BuzzFeed

After a couple of days in the car together, Marco had started to feel less like a hired driver than a co-conspirator. He talked about the way this gang or that gang operated, and pointed out landmarks. “There used to be a lot of assaults here. Truckers would pull onto these dirt roads, and a lot of women were raped,” he said one afternoon as we passed an empty street. He seemed to enjoy being an investigator. He asked a lot of questions, and offered theories of his own. It occurred to me that Marco might have worked in law enforcement. But when I asked, he said, “No way. Mexican cops are symbols of corruption and mediocrity.”

Francisco Sanchez lived outside Hueypoxtla on communal farming land. When we pulled into his driveway, he was outside in the shade of a giant flowering prickly pear cactus, the plant that jutted out of the earth everywhere. Sanchez’s house, like all the houses there, was a hodgepodge of brick, stone, mud, and corrugated tin. The indoor space blended into the outdoors. Hueypoxtla is a windy, dry place, but it’s never too cold, and the climate is good for growing crops like barley and alfalfa. Marco pointed out that the maguey plant grows wild there. The maguey is the plant used to make pulque, the ancient Aztec spirit, which, also according to Marco, the poorest residents of the region sometimes feed to their children when there’s nothing else to eat.

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Photo by Mary Cuddehe for BuzzFeed

That afternoon, Sanchez pointed to his perch under the prickly pears and disappeared into the house, re-emerging with the boxes of the medications he has had to take since he got sick and pictures of his radiation burns that his wife, Yolanda, who was washing dishes in their outdoor sink, had snapped in the hospital. Sanchez had been hospitalized for six weeks with radiation poisoning and still wasn’t able to expose his skin to sunlight for very long. He was only 41 but looked like an old man, sun-weathered.

He wasn’t wearing a shirt and had a large bandage covering his left shoulder and another taped over his hand. Radiation sickness can be fatal, but Sanchez said he’d had on a thick jacket that morning and had only carried the cylinder a few meters. “Look,” he said, then slowly peeled the bandage to reveal skin that was still seared and pink. Normally, he said, he would have been out in the fields preparing for the summer rains, but he hadn’t worked since that morning in December. As we were talking, his 9-month-old son wheeled by on a mobile high chair.

The cornfield was only a couple of kilometers away down the slope of a dusty road, just past the Marie Curie kindergarten. “Crazy about that name, right?” I said, as we passed the school, to silence.

I had noticed empty canals lining the fields, and Sanchez explained that effluent from Mexico City was pumped out there, which the farmers use to irrigate their crops. I imagined the wastewater-fed crops being sold back to the capital and being consumed and then surging back through the pipes to Hueypoxtla like some giant closed-loop digestive tract.

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We reached the field. Stepping out of the car, Sanchez seemed possessed by his memory. He retraced his steps, circling the place he’d found the cylinder. He had noticed six deep tire ruts that morning, indicating to him that whoever discarded the materials had labored to do so. One of the tracks was still visible, baked into the earth. He straightened his back and swept his arm, motioning to the emptiness. “Why would anyone leave this here?”

After he hid the cylinder, Sanchez had felt ill and experienced what he called “a tremendous vomit,” but he hadn’t made the connection, so he went back to work, and he didn’t tell anyone what he’d found. Throughout the day others had tried to move the parts. The biggest piece, the shield, was too heavy, and night fell with the pieces as Sanchez had found them.

For the first week, Sanchez had been afraid to talk about what was happening to him, even as 100 Marines, federal agents, and local police cordoned off the field and dispatched a robot to retrieve the cobalt. He watched the evening news, clutching his son tightly, and asked Yolanda to rub ointment on his shoulder. Finally he let on to a friend. “I was dying of panic,” he told me. “People ask why I waited so long, but what they don’t understand is that I was totally blocked.”

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A neighbor, Mauro Moya, a truck driver, took a walk to the field with his son and son-in-law and circled the objects like the farmers had done the day before, measuring and weighing them with their eyes. The biggest piece couldn’t be lifted with a wheelbarrow or a tractor. But they estimated that the metal was worth $400. It was enough to cover the family’s expenses for two weeks. Moya hurried back up the hill for his truck. He hooked chains around the shield and dragged it up the road to his property, kicking up a trail of shimmering dust. With the shield safely on his lot, the ecstatic Moya family took turns posing for photos, squatting down beside it, making peace signs, sitting on it, laughing. The celebration didn’t last long. Someone from the community had already called the police.

The Moya family soon began to think of their discovery as a curse. Three weeks later, the son-in-law, Juan Antonio Saldivar was arrested in a separate incident for stealing a cement truck. The attorney his family hired told me that the arrest glared with irregularities, chief among them the fact that it preceded the actual crime by half an hour. Officers rifling through his phone saw the photos of the shield and, in an apparent attempt to bolster their profile of Saldivar as a seasoned hijacker, stated in charging documents that he had been “detained” by authorities “in relation to the cobalt-60 theft.” Authorities questioned his family after the cobalt was recovered at their home but didn’t arrest them. Saldivar has now been in jail for 11 months and is facing a sentence of 16 years for the cement truck theft.

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Photo by Mary Cuddehe for BuzzFeed

Later that day, as we were getting ready to leave Hueypoxtla, Marco pulled up a photograph on his phone of him in a federal police uniform. “I was a federal police officer for 10 years,” he said.

I stared at the image. It was definitely him. He had his back to the camera and was flexing his biceps. “Policia Federal” was emblazoned on his shirt; a pistol was sticking out of his belt.

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“I’ve been suspended,” he said, quietly. “I’m being investigated for corruption.” He began to tell me a story about a friend who was involved with the narcos and had implicated him but it was all a lie, political stuff. But I couldn’t absorb any of it. The realization dawned that I’d hired a stranger who might or might not be a crooked ex-policeman to ferry me around the hijacking epicenter of Mexico in search of bandits with possible connections to organized crime or even terrorists and that I was now stuck alone with him in the country. But I wanted to go back to Zumpango to find Andres. Marco knew how to get there.

I had already gone by the place a couple of times. The story that Torres had told me implicated police officers in a corruption scheme and painted his son as an innocent man. But when I’d asked to see the truck that Luis Angel had used, he said the family had sold it. There was a third employee in the shop with him that day, but he had disappeared. Miguel was also nowhere to be found. Other details didn’t add up. Andres had been released by authorities on account of his age.

At Andres’ house, salsa was blaring and a big red truck was parked inside the gate. A tiny old woman in an apron answered the door. She said no one was home.

Down the street from the house, I had seen four men drinking cans of Modelo under an awning. “The truck was right there,” said one, pointing to a spot down the street, in front of Luis Angel’s shop, the one that had been raided by police. Torres had told me police had taped it off and the family was stuck paying the rent, but it looked open; a couple of cars were parked inside.

“Why was the truck sitting outside?” I asked.

“There were too many trucks in the shop already!” said another. They all laughed and continued dishing about the Torres family. According to them, Luis Angel had a chop shop. One of Luis Angel’s co-defendants, a man Torres had told me was a new acquaintance, in fact worked with him, they said, painting the stolen vehicles.

“I live across the street and sometimes there were so many trucks in there they had to park them outside,” said one of the men.

What about Miguel? I asked.

“There’s only one Miguel in this town,” the man said. “He went to the United States 15 years ago.”

The woman from Andres’ house walked down the street toward us. She passed the group in silence, looking straight ahead.

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Photo by Mary Cuddehe for BuzzFeed

Julio Cesar, the Torres family’s attorney, had an office in a development outside Mexico City. The place had a disorienting bleached-out quality, like a condensed version of the Inland Empire, and his office was in a row house that looked exactly like all the others on his street.

Cesar swung open the door. He was short and round, like an egg. He had on a pink shirt, a pink tie, a blue sweater-vest, and blue slacks — Danny DeVito and Mr. Rogers at the same time. His partner, a pretty blonde with big brown eyes in a brown pantsuit, descended the stairs. Cesar invited me to have a seat on a brown-and-white leather sectional. I stared down at a zebra-print rug and, to my right, a pair of electric guitars upright in stands, at the ready.

I had hoped Cesar would give me a copy of the police report and charging documents. Such things can be tough to come by in Mexico, even after a case is closed. The files would clarify the questions I had about the Torres family’s story and the official versions that police had furnished to local press.

“So,” Cesar began. “Do you know how justice works in Mexico?” My heart sank as he went on. “If the courts find out that you’re interviewing witnesses — believe me, apart from affecting the defense, there’s juridical revenge. You start seeing stuff in the newspapers, on the radio, on TV. It just gets very complicated.”

He stood up. “What this case needs right now is for things to cool down.”

He showed me the door.

Back home, I followed up with him for a while, but the answer was always the same: He needed more time.

Not long after, Marco, who had added me on Facebook, posted the photo he’d shown me in the car of himself in uniform. The comments suggested that Marco’s friends didn’t know he had ever been a police officer. “What clothesline line’d ya steal that uniform from?” read one. “It’s not from a clothesline. It’s rented!”

I thought back to going to a federal police campus in Mexico City, where Marco told me he’d been “noticed” by one of the officers, who observed the particular way he jumped out of a van. A normal person — me — would exit facing forward. But Marco climbed out sideways, a reflex, he explained, from all his years carrying a long firearm. They’d spotted him and knew he was one of them.

Had Marco invented that story? Was he not a police officer accused of corruption? I thought it over for a couple of days. But I decided it was better not to ask him. I didn’t think I would get a straight answer.

On June 8, another source of radioactive material was stolen from a warehouse near Zumpango. This time it was a source that authorities considered less dangerous than the cobalt from the December heist. Police weren’t able to track it, but 10 days later it turned up in a garbage bag by a sewage canal. A security guard who spotted it believed the bag contained a body. Reports said it had sat by the canal untouched for several days, free for anyone to haul away.

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pat78701 · 8 years ago

Text

How Sweden's Feminist Foreign Minister Is Dealing With The Age Of Trump

WASHINGTON ― Swedish Foreign Minister Margot Wallström is used to her strong convictions making her job harder.

After she announced that Sweden would become the first Western European power to recognize Palestine as a state, Wallström faced condemnations from Jerusalem and Washington. When she criticized Saudi Arabia’s draconian restrictions on women and flogging of an imprisoned blogger, she earned the ire of Swedish business leaders worried about their country’s lucrative trade with the kingdom. Israeli officials continue to snub her, and it took an intervention from Sweden’s prime minister and its king to defuse tensions with the Saudis.

Still, the minister has remained firm in her views, proudly championing a foreign policy that puts a high value on principles ― particularly gender equality ― not just pragmatism.

President Donald Trump poses the greatest challenge yet to this principled diplomacy. With the U.S. now run by a man who sees foreign affairs as a game of transactions, narrowly defined national interest and wall-building, figures like Wallström must decide how to protect their vision while maintaining good relations with Washington. As the U.S. and U.K. grow more isolationist, the future of international cooperation increasingly relies on small but determined countries such as Sweden.

“We have seen so much of populism, polarization, protectionism and all of these isms ... that lead our world, as I see it, in a wrong direction and will not help us to create more jobs and more wealth and everything that we want,” Wallström said in an interview with HuffPost last week, during her first trip to Washington since Trump took office.

“And more peace!” she added.

Without direct condemnations of the president, Wallström offered a broad defense of the internationalist worldview Trump and his allies in Europe call obsolete.

“We see countries turning inward, thinking they can just look after their own interests, but there are few problems or challenges that one country can solve on its own,” she said. “I don’t think that there is a way back to something that existed. We have to live in this world. And I think our children and grandchildren will not forgive us if we cannot come together.”

Sweden wants to work with Trump on issues like fighting the so-called Islamic State, European security and humanitarian crises. Wallström was in town to attend a meeting of the U.S.-led coalition against ISIS.

But there’s no denying the disconnect between Stockholm and Washington. Wallström’s left-wing, avowedly feminist government is already subtly highlighting it: Its ambassador to the United Nations, Olof Skoog, criticized Trump’s depiction of the U.N. in January, as Sweden took up an influential position on the Security Council; the following month, Deputy Prime Minister Isabella Lövin posted a tweet apparently mocking Trump’s all-male photoshoots. Three weeks ago, Sweden pledged $22 million to the global health organizations Trump has targeted with his ban on U.S. support for groups that even discuss abortion.

Powerful men in elected office “often start by taking decisions that restrict the movement of women or how women dress or violence against women, so that is also something they seem to have in common, and that worries me a lot,” Wallström said, in an indirect reference to Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin, who recently decriminalized some forms of domestic violence.

As the face of Sweden abroad, Wallström bears the greatest responsibility for her country’s relationship with the new U.S. administration. And the biggest Trump-Sweden moment so far was a reminder that stability is far from assured. On Feb. 18, the president told a Florida rally that Sweden proved his point about the danger of accepting refugees: “You look at what’s happening in Germany, you look at what’s happening last night in Sweden,” Trump said. “Sweden. Who would believe this? Sweden. They took in large numbers. They’re having problems like they never thought possible.”

It was quintessential Trump: It turned out there was no incident, and he was referring to a Fox News report in which an expert misled viewers about an increase in crime since Sweden began accepting refugees.

After declining to comment in the immediate aftermath, Wallström now says she wants to use the news peg the president provided.

“We are trying to use [it] to just give a more balanced picture of Sweden,” Wallström told HuffPost. “It’s maybe difficult [to integrate refugees] in some places, but it is not out of control. ... I don’t know where they got that from.”

Sweden has introduced new border controls in the wake of the refugee crisis and participated in a controversial deal with Turkey to reduce the flow of people moving into Europe. But it continues to accept large numbers of asylum-seekers ― 29,000 in 2016 and up to 45,000 this year ― and offer them generous social support.

“We just have to get the numbers down so that we can manage,” Wallström said, noting that Sweden had received an exceptionally high number of young refugees, who require greater state care. “But we are not changing our rules or laws on exactly what you can get. We want to continue to be able to take care of all the refugees and asylum-seekers in a decent and dignified way and to have them fully integrated.”

For some on the anti-immigrant right, like Breitbart and pro-Russian news outlets that frequently spread untruths about refugees to stir up tension in Europe, Sweden’s border control could be seen as a vindication. But Wallström doesn’t buy that. Whereas right-wing politicians say European centralization is one source of the crisis ― preventing countries from rejecting migrants wholesale ― Wallström says the trouble is too little European coordination.

“This would not have been a problem at all if we had together in the European Union shared responsibility,” Wallström said. Ultra-nationalist governments in Hungary and Poland have been stridently anti-refugee, increasing the burden on others like Sweden and Germany.

There’s now a government-wide challenge to false portrayals of the situation. In Washington, Sweden’s high-profile embassy is running events with the tagline “Safe And Sound” to argue that societies don’t have to sacrifice openness, diversity and liberalism for the sake of security. The campaign’s first event was the launch of a major exhibit on how refugee integration works in Sweden ― featuring a high-ranking U.S. Department of Homeland Security official. Asked at the opening about language in Trump’s Muslim bans that presents anti-refugee measures as important to protect women, Åsa Regnér, the minister for gender equality, noted that levels of violence against women in Sweden have remained relatively constant in recent years.

To experts like her, this scapegoating of immigrants is a clear misrepresentation: Misogyny does take specific and troubling forms in migrant communities, but it’s deceptive to pretend that closing the borders will lead to equality. “We know that there is violence in the [ethnically Swedish] majority, and there is also violence among the first and second generation of immigrants, and we have to really understand those and take targeted measures,” Regnér said. “I feel we have to speak of both things.”

The refugee policy is only one part of how Sweden’s approach veers from Trump’s policies.

Wallström’s government proudly funds efforts to include more women at the U.N. peace talks on Syria, and she doesn’t buy Trump-style suggestions that the West embrace strongman Bashar Assad. “It ought to be for the people of Syria to decide who should be their leader ... but the confidence will be affected by the fact that so many war crimes have been committed,” she said. Sweden recently used its temporary U.N. Security Council seat to try to punish Assad for his use of chemical weapons.

With Russia boosting its presence in the Baltic Sea and violating Swedish airspace, Wallström’s government has reaffirmed its commitment to Sweden’s traditional nonalignment. At the same time, it wants Putin to respect the international norm of territorial sovereignty ― in Ukraine and in Sweden’s neighborhood. Stockholm has boosted its defenses, including by reintroducing conscription. “We have to be very clear about our policy toward Russia: When you do things like the illegal annexation of Crimea or the aggression in eastern Ukraine, then we will adopt a policy that includes sanctions,” Wallström said.

This kind of commitment to principles entails costs ― to prestige and to delicate, important relationships. Wallström acknowledged reports that the anti-ISIS coalition has killed hundreds of civilians since Trump took office, urging accountability for those who have potentially committed war crimes. And she slammed Turkey, the key to the E.U.’s refugee plans, for its crackdown on civil society and increasingly heated rhetoric about European governments.

A Social Democrat, the minister thinks the global left can still recapture popular support despite the rise of groups ― like the Front National in France and the far right in the U.S. ― who successfully pitch a mix of ultra-nationalism and popular, traditionally left-wing state spending.

“We lost our vision more than anything else. We have not been able to describe the tasks in front of us,” Wallström said. She wants greater focus on the state’s role in tackling wealth gaps, climate change and future sustainable development.

Without that focus, voters see globalization as necessarily causing the growing inequality economists like Thomas Piketty have warned about, Wallström said. “It’s ironic, of course, that it’s the very wealthy people who seem to be elected.”

As the interview concluded, the minister prepared to head to the big anti-ISIS summit. After all the talk of principle, Wallström made a little show of Trump-era pragmatism ― her press secretary offered a printout of information about Sweden’s success. First topic: the ease of doing business there.

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

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repwinpril9y0a1 · 8 years ago

Text

How Sweden's Feminist Foreign Minister Is Dealing With The Age Of Trump

WASHINGTON ― Swedish Foreign Minister Margot Wallström is used to her strong convictions making her job harder.

Still, the minister has remained firm in her views, proudly championing a foreign policy that puts a high value on principles ― particularly gender equality ― not just pragmatism.

“And more peace!” she added.

Without direct condemnations of the president, Wallström offered a broad defense of the internationalist worldview Trump and his allies in Europe call obsolete.

After declining to comment in the immediate aftermath, Wallström now says she wants to use the news peg the president provided.

The refugee policy is only one part of how Sweden’s approach veers from Trump’s policies.

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

from DIYS http://ift.tt/2o64jhu

#DIYS

0 notes

repwincoml4a0a5 · 8 years ago

Text

How Sweden's Feminist Foreign Minister Is Dealing With The Age Of Trump

WASHINGTON ― Swedish Foreign Minister Margot Wallström is used to her strong convictions making her job harder.

Still, the minister has remained firm in her views, proudly championing a foreign policy that puts a high value on principles ― particularly gender equality ― not just pragmatism.

“And more peace!” she added.

Without direct condemnations of the president, Wallström offered a broad defense of the internationalist worldview Trump and his allies in Europe call obsolete.

After declining to comment in the immediate aftermath, Wallström now says she wants to use the news peg the president provided.

The refugee policy is only one part of how Sweden’s approach veers from Trump’s policies.

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

from DIYS http://ift.tt/2o64jhu

#DIYS

0 notes

rtawngs20815 · 8 years ago

Text

How Sweden's Feminist Foreign Minister Is Dealing With The Age Of Trump

WASHINGTON ― Swedish Foreign Minister Margot Wallström is used to her strong convictions making her job harder.

Still, the minister has remained firm in her views, proudly championing a foreign policy that puts a high value on principles ― particularly gender equality ― not just pragmatism.

“And more peace!” she added.

Without direct condemnations of the president, Wallström offered a broad defense of the internationalist worldview Trump and his allies in Europe call obsolete.

After declining to comment in the immediate aftermath, Wallström now says she wants to use the news peg the president provided.

The refugee policy is only one part of how Sweden’s approach veers from Trump’s policies.

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

from DIYS http://ift.tt/2o64jhu

#DIYS

0 notes

grgedoors02142 · 8 years ago

Text

How Sweden's Feminist Foreign Minister Is Dealing With The Age Of Trump

WASHINGTON ― Swedish Foreign Minister Margot Wallström is used to her strong convictions making her job harder.

Still, the minister has remained firm in her views, proudly championing a foreign policy that puts a high value on principles ― particularly gender equality ― not just pragmatism.

“And more peace!” she added.

Without direct condemnations of the president, Wallström offered a broad defense of the internationalist worldview Trump and his allies in Europe call obsolete.

After declining to comment in the immediate aftermath, Wallström now says she wants to use the news peg the president provided.

The refugee policy is only one part of how Sweden’s approach veers from Trump’s policies.

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

from DIYS http://ift.tt/2o64jhu

#DIYS

0 notes

porchenclose10019 · 8 years ago

Text

How Sweden's Feminist Foreign Minister Is Dealing With The Age Of Trump

WASHINGTON ― Swedish Foreign Minister Margot Wallström is used to her strong convictions making her job harder.

Still, the minister has remained firm in her views, proudly championing a foreign policy that puts a high value on principles ― particularly gender equality ― not just pragmatism.

“And more peace!” she added.

Without direct condemnations of the president, Wallström offered a broad defense of the internationalist worldview Trump and his allies in Europe call obsolete.

After declining to comment in the immediate aftermath, Wallström now says she wants to use the news peg the president provided.

The refugee policy is only one part of how Sweden’s approach veers from Trump’s policies.

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

from DIYS http://ift.tt/2o64jhu

#DIYS

0 notes

chpatdoorsl3z0a1 · 8 years ago

Text

How Sweden's Feminist Foreign Minister Is Dealing With The Age Of Trump

WASHINGTON ― Swedish Foreign Minister Margot Wallström is used to her strong convictions making her job harder.

Still, the minister has remained firm in her views, proudly championing a foreign policy that puts a high value on principles ― particularly gender equality ― not just pragmatism.

“And more peace!” she added.

Without direct condemnations of the president, Wallström offered a broad defense of the internationalist worldview Trump and his allies in Europe call obsolete.

After declining to comment in the immediate aftermath, Wallström now says she wants to use the news peg the president provided.

The refugee policy is only one part of how Sweden’s approach veers from Trump’s policies.

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

from DIYS http://ift.tt/2o64jhu

#DIYS

0 notes