Free Republic

Benin official offers apology for nation's role in slavery MOBILE, Ala. (AP) -- An official of the Republic of Benin has offered an apology to students at a Mobile school for his country's participation in the slave trade. In 1859, Benin, on Africa's west coast, sold 116 slaves to a Mobile sailor aboard a ship called the Clotilde - the last slave ship to arrive in America. Slavery was still legal in the United States at that time, but importing slaves was not. Simon Pierre Adovelande apologized Tuesday to the students at the Mobile County Training School. Thirty of...

NBC is abusing small children by using them for a "social experiment" and profit on a show airing on Wednesday's at 9 EDT/ 8 CDT beginning June 25 called "The Baby Borrowers" . On the program teenagers pretend to be the parents of babies by substituting for the babies' real parents. Dr. Jan Hunt director of the Natural Child Project says: "As a parent, child psychologist and family counselor, I am deeply concerned about the premise of your new show "The Baby Borrowers," and for the present and future emotional health of the babies and young children whose lives will...

There are 5,000 child prostitutes living in the UK - and over three-quarters of them are girls, according to a new report. The report, by Save The Children, criticises the Government for "not doing enough to respond to the plight of children in this inhumane situation". But Bill Bell, Save the Children's head of protection, says child slavery is still a major problem today. "There are still millions of children in both rich and poor countries who are being forced to lead slave-like lives under horrific conditions of humiliation and abuse," he said. He called on world leaders to "act...

Arab women had more rights at the time of the Romans than they have today. At that time, in fact, their capacity to conduct their own economic affairs was recognised, which is not true in Saudi Arabia today. This is maintained by a female Saudi scholar, Hatoon al-Fassi, in a book entitled "Women In Pre-Islamic Arabia", Barred from teaching at King Saud University in 2001, the scholar has examined the situation of Nabataea, a kingdom that at the beginning of the Christian era included parts of modern-day Jordan, Syria, and Saudi Arabia, and had its capital in Petra. "We now...

Skyra is a runaway Mauritanian slave. Her earliest childhood memories are of fetching water, tending animals and cooking and cleaning. "I was tied up all night and all day. They only untied me so I could do my chores. In the end I could barely move my limbs." She never earnt a single penny. "All those years," she told me, "and I don't even own a goat". Mohamed could not tell me his surname or his age. As a slave he didn't own the right to either. But in a candlelit shack in the sandy outskirts of the capital, Nouakchott,...

The case echoes last year's scandal involving brick kilns Police in China have rescued 33 mentally disabled men who were forced to work as slaves at a building site, Chinese media report. The men were said to have been discovered in a filthy 30sq m (320sq ft) room in Hulan, a city in the north-eastern province of Heilongjiang. At least three people were detained, suspected of keeping the slaves. College students reportedly saw a man jump to his death from a seventh-floor window, and raised the alarm. Last year, one man was sentenced to death and 28 others were...

A few weeks ago, I wrote slightly disobligingly about Jay Lefkowitz, the man who holds the new congressionally mandated post of U.S. special envoy for human rights in North Korea. The North Korean state does not recognize the concept of human rights and considers every one of its citizens to be the property of the ruling family, so Lefkowitz’s job is admittedly an extremely difficult one, but I tried to call attention to the way in which he (in his rather slender annual report to Congress), and the administration in general, had gone somewhat quiet on the subject of North...

(BEIJING) - Chinese police freed four men found to be working as virtual slaves in a brink kiln in a case similar to one which shook the country last year, but lost three of them while trying to send them home, a report said on Friday. The four were free in late December in the northern province of Hebei, which surrounds Beijing, and had been working in appalling conditions at the kiln for up to a year, the China Youth Daily said. Some were suspected of being mentally disabled, and at least one was totally illiterate, knew neither his name...

A rice variety that made many a colonial plantation owner rich was brought to the United States from West Africa, according to preliminary genetic research. The finding suggests that African slaves are responsible for nearly every facet of one of the first rice varieties grown in the U.S., as well as one of the most lucrative crops in early American history. "Not only did they bring the technology, the how-to, they brought the cultivar," said Anna McClung, a genetic researcher with the U.S. Department of Agriculture in Stuttgart, Arkansas. West Africans had been growing varieties of rice for several thousand...

Harry Potter and "the Death of God" - by Michael D. O'Brien Special to LifeSiteNews.com Editor's Note: LifeSiteNews.com, the news service which first put online the letter signed by Cardinal Ratzinger - now Pope Benedict XVI - against the Harry Potter books, is proud to present Michael O'Brien's latest essay on the Potter series.  The author, North America's foremost Potter critic, has written many articles that analyze in detail the Harry Potter novels. Here he reflects on the significance of the series as a whole. Well, July 21st has come and gone and the world is muggling onward. The date,...

This week Mattel recalled nearly two million Chinese-made toys over concerns they contain excessive levels of lead paint and loose parts. Dirt-cheap labour and a massive expansion in capacity means China makes more than three-quarters of the world's toys, with an export value in excess of £7 billion. But increasingly, there is evidence of inadequate safety standards, poor quality control and slave labour. Here, in an extract from his book about the toy industry, Eric Clark reveals the real cost of cheap toys from China. Behind high fences, sprawling factory compounds stretch mile after dusty, depressing mile along the congested...

(Taiyuan, China) - Two months after the scandal first broke that brick factories in China had enslaved people to work, another 359 people have been rescued from slavery in Shanxi province, officials said Monday. Among those freed from working as slaves in illegal brick factories were 15 child workers and 121 mentally handicapped workers. That brings the total of number of people rescued from slavery since early June to 1,340, of those 367 have been mentally handicapped. People, including children as young as 8-years-old, were kidnapped into slavery with promises of well paying factory jobs. However, they were sold instead...

Commentary: The Red State-Slave State Connection is all too Real Commentary: The Red State-Slave State Connection is all too Real Date: Tuesday, November 16, 2004 By: Last week while I was up at Harvard University meeting with black columnists from around the country, including several of my BlackAmericaWeb.com colleagues, Michael Dawson took me to school with his map that shows the overlap between Republican red states and the old Confederacy and slave-friendly territories. Dawson is a professor of government and Afro-American studies who specializes in the ways that race and politics intersect. I was sold. His map spoke to the...

The Fear Factor July 30, 2007 While fear itself is not always the product of irrationality, once experienced it tends to lead away from reason, especially if the experience is extreme in duration or intensity. When people are fearful they tend to be willing to irrationally surrender their rights. Thus, fear is a threat to rational liberty. The psychology of fear is an essential component of those who would have us believe we must increasingly rely on the elite who manage the apparatus of the central government. The statement “Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little...

Nature Has not been kind to Gao Zhou Zhou - though not as cruel as other human beings. Her back is bent and bowed; her legs fold uselessly beneath her. She gets around using a homemade skateboard. Her arms, legs and face are very, very dirty. She doesn't know her age - she looks perhaps 15 - and she cannot remember her real parents. But she knows the pain of life on the streets of Beijing. 'When I first came here they beat me so hard I nearly died. They beat me and they beat me,' she says. It was...

The kiln owner in the case, the son of a Communist Party official, 'got off too easy,' one victim's father says. BEIJING — Family and friends reacted with anger Wednesday after the owner of a kiln operated with slaves who were beaten and forced to work long days was sentenced to nine years in prison even as two aides received far harsher punishment. Kiln owner Wang Bingbing, the son of a local Communist Party official, was convicted Tuesday of unlawful detention for the use of slave laborers at his brick kiln in Shanxi province. The supervisor of his plant, Zhao...

BEIJING: Six men who worked as enforcers in brick kilns said they were ordered to beat "lazy" workers, who were forced to labor up to 18 hours a day, state media reported. The men were the latest to go on trial over China's slave labor scandal, which erupted last month after hundreds of parents complained that their children were being forced to work in brick kilns in Henan, Shanxi and Shaanxi provinces. The six men said Friday that kiln foreman Heng Tinghan had ordered them to supervise the workers and beat "lazy" ones, the official Xinhua News Agency reported. The...

Excerpt - LAS VEGAS -- Three men enslaved more than 20 members of a Chinese acrobatic team, feeding them little, paying them next to nothing to perform and confiscating their passports and visas, US authorities said. A woman who worked as an interpreter for China Star Acrobats escaped late last month and contacted authorities, the FBI said. She told police she and 20 teammates -- including five teens ages 14 to 17 -- were being held against their will. Social workers interviewed 14 of them Friday, according to a criminal complaint. "They literally hugged the investigators when they arrived," said...

"Arise, ye who refuse to be slaves!" go the stirring words that open China's national anthem. But shocking images of men and children padlocked and brutalized in stifling brickworks have shown that even in this officially socialist nation, where workers are supposed to rule, slavery has secured a niche in the galloping market economy. If, nearly six decades after the communist revolution, China can sustain even small-scale slavery, what of other parts of Asia where forced labor has deep roots that have long defied rights campaigns? Observers of workers trapped in forced labor say economic growth does not necessarily spell...

A few hundred dollars doesn't seem to go far these days. Yet the $300 you just forked out for that coveted pair of shoes or handbag could also be the "cost" of the slave that helped make them. For that is the average price of a human life in the booming global slave trade, according to Dr Kevin Bales, president of the Free The Slaves advocacy group. In the 21st century, where trade unions and human rights groups are active around the world, it is easy to shrug off the millennia-old practice of coerced, unpaid labour as a shrinking trade,...

RUZHOU, China — Up from the countryside and desperate for work, 16-year-old Chen Chenggong jumped at the well-paying factory job offered by a man who approached him at the train station. Within hours, he was bundled into a minivan with 12 others and taken to a brick yard where they were fed little, beaten often and forced to haul loads for 20 hours daily without pay. As for the recruiter, he never saw the man again. "I hope they are shot," Chen said Wednesday of his former tormentors, his face, arms, legs and torso mottled with sores where the guards'...

BEIJING - An unfolding national scandal on the large-scale abuse of child laborers in China's brick-kiln industry raises questions on the adequacy of planned labor laws that are supposed to take on sweatshops and protect workers' rights. The first signs of the scandal surfaced early this month when local newspapers carried a staggering photograph of a group of migrant workers freed after more than a year of slave labor in a brick kiln in central China. By the standards of the Chinese state-sanctioned press, which frowns on sensationalism, the photograph was more than shocking - it showed people who were...

Few police are seen at bustling Zhengzhou train station in central China, where people traffickers are believed to have abducted young boys and others for use as slave laborers at brick kilns. There is no shortage of tough-looking men approaching passengers with offers of work and accommodation, offers that frequently turn out to be a ruse to entrap people into forced labor. Uneducated and grindingly poor, China's 200 million migrant workers are among the most vulnerable to exploitation by phony job offers, and they are easily picked out by the animal feed or fertilizer bags they carry as improvised luggage....

Child slaves found in China's brick factories By Richard Spencer in Beijing Last Updated: 2:10am BST 16/06/2007 Hundreds of Chinese children have been kidnapped and forced to work as slaves in brutal conditions. President Hu Jintao and the prime minister, Wen Jiabao, have intervened to call for urgent efforts to trace hundreds more boys and young men who are still feared missing despite raids on brick factories across north and central areas of the country. The reports of children being abducted, locked in factories for years, beaten, left untreated for severe burns and, in some cases, killed spread this week...

Police rescue further 220 slave workers in N China www.chinaview.cn 2007-06-15 16:15:02 HONGTONG, Shanxi, June 15 (Xinhua) -- Police in north China on Friday announced they had rescued a further 220 slave workers from brick kilns and other illegal workplaces, such as small iron and coal mines. The rescues of the workers, all in Shanxi Province, brings the total number of slave workers reported freed in China to 468 in the last month. They include Thursday's widely reported rescue of 31 people who had been freed on May 27 by the police from a brick kiln in Hongtong, a county...

More than 200 people, including 29 children, have been rescued after working as "slaves" in brick kilns in central China, state media reports. Tens of thousands of police moved in on the kilns in Henan province, arresting 120 people, Xinhua news agency said. They acted after media reports claimed that children were being forced to work in kilns in neighbouring Shanxi province, Xinhua said. Photos of distraught parents were also published. Xinhua said that, following the reports of child labour, some 35,000 police were despatched to the 7,500 kilns in Henan. They reportedly rescued 217 people, including 29 children. Xinhua...

A millionaire couple accused of keeping two Indonesian women as slaves in their luxurious Long Island home and abusing them for years have been indicted on federal slavery charges. The women, prosecutors said, were subjected to beatings, had scalding water thrown on them and were forced to repeatedly climb stairs as punishment for perceived misdeeds. In one case, prosecutors said, one of the women was forced to eat 25 hot chili peppers at one time. One of the women also told authorities they were forced to sleep on mats in the kitchen and were fed so little, they had to...

CRUEL L.I. SLAVE MASTERS - MILLIONAIRE DUO BRUTALIZED HELP AT MANSION: FEDS By STEFANIE COHEN, KIERAN CROWLEY and KATE SHEEHY nypost.com May 16, 2007 -- A "monstrous" millionaire couple from Long Island's Gold Coast kept two Indonesian women as slaves for five years in their tony estate-turned-house of horrors - until one victim was found wandering the street half-naked this week muttering, "Master," authorities said yesterday. Varsha Mahender Sabhnani and her husband, Mahender Murliddhar Sabhnani - perfume moguls from the mega-rich community of Muttontown - were hauled into federal court yesterday to face charges including beating, cutting and scalding one...

London's 'white slaves' By Caroline Davies Last Updated: 2:05am BST 05/04/2007 As Britain commemorates the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade, new research traces the stories of the first batch of slaves sent to the colonies in America - not black Africans but white children from London. A new book, White Cargo, tells how children as young as 10 were swept off the city's streets and sent with convicts to work in America several months before the first shipment of African captives arrived in 1619. Authors Don Jordan and Michael Walsh say hundreds of homeless children were...

Who were the slaves? Millions of Africans, who were forcibly transported overseas over a period of about 450 years from the middle of the 15th Century. WHAT IS A QUICK GUIDE? Quick guides are concise explanations of topics or issues in the news. More Quick Guides The enslavement of people from west Africa by British, European and African traders, and their mass transportation to the Americas was known as the transatlantic Slave Trade. A similar slave trade, conducted by Arab and African traders over roughly the same period, saw millions of others transported from the continent's east coast and...

On a plantation just outside the Jamaican capital, Kingston, we watched workers with long machetes slice down towering stalks of sugar cane with industrial precision. Sugar is still harvested by hand, when it is too wet for machines The crop is only harvested by hand on modern plantations when it rains and today there is a steady drizzle. Usually machines do the graft. But for more than 300 years until the early 19th century the machines were African slaves. Men, women and children were overworked and brutalised. Cruelty and torture meant as many as a third of all slaves...

It's 30 years since the TV drama Roots first screened. The show had a profound impact on black people in the US and UK, recalls Kwame Kwei-Armah, right, who spoke to others about their memories of the programme.Thirty years ago I was an 11-year-old growing up in West London. One evening I sat down with my family to watch a new television programme called Roots. It was a moment that changed my life. By the end of the series I had told my mother that I would one day trace my heritage back to Africa and reclaim an ancestral...

Quakers started the British campaign against the slave trade and invented modern campaigning, championing the petition and the consumer boycott, and mastering the use of images and logos. Not that they like to shout about it. It is perhaps the defining image of the battle to end the slave trade. Not a picture of a shackled slave, or some gruesome punishment, but a cross-section of a ship. It is a ship packed so full that the mind boggles at the sheer logistics of inhumanity. The engraving of the Brookes, fully-loaded, slave ship The use of the engraving of the...

Akech Arol Deng has not seen his wife and son since they were seized by Arab militias from their home in south Sudan 19 years ago. His son, Deng, was just three years old at the time but Mr Arol is sure they are still alive, being used as slaves in the north. "I miss them so much. I really hope that one day they come back," Mr Arol told the BBC News website mournfully in his home of Malualbai, just a few hours' on horseback from the Bahr el-Arab river which divides Muslim northern Sudan from the Christian...

The framers of the United States Constitution believed that people of African descent “had no rights which the white man was bound to respect,” and that “the negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit…. [to be] bought and sold and treated as an ordinary article of merchandise and traffic, whenever profit could be made by it.” With reference to the words “all men are created equal” in the Declaration of Independence: “It is too clear for dispute that the enslaved African race was not intended to be included, and formed no part of the people...

Descendancy stems from the 19th Century Dawes Commission lists Members of the Cherokee Nation of native Americans have voted to revoke tribal citizenship for descendants of black slaves the Cherokees once owned.A total of 76.6% voted to amend the tribal constitution to limit citizenship to "blood" tribe members. Supporters said only the Cherokees had the right to determine tribal members. Opponents said the amendment was racist and aimed at preventing those with African-American heritage from gaining tribal revenue and government funding. The Cherokee Nation has 250,000 to 270,000 members, second only to the Navajo. 'Right to vote' The list...

VINITA, Okla. -- J.D. Baldridge, 73, has official government documents showing him to be a descendant of a full-blood Cherokee. He has memories of a youth spent among Cherokee neighbors and kin, at tribal stomp dances and hog fries. He holds on to a fair amount of Cherokee vocabulary. " Salali," Baldridge says, his face creasing into a smile at the word. "Squirrel stew. Oh, that was good." What Baldridge, a retired Oklahoma county sheriff, also has is at least one black ancestor, a former slave of a Cherokee family. That could get Baldridge cast out of the tribe, along...

Today's Baltimore Sun headlines  that "... forebears of (Barack Obama's) white mother owned slaves, according to genealogical research and census records." This fresh evidence of White perfidy should astonish anyone who knows no history. The rest of us might not be surprised, since slavery was a near-universal story around the world before the West put an end to most of it around 1800 or so. What the Sun may not realize is that almost certainly some of Obama's African forebears also owned slaves --- and that his current family members in Kenya may know quite a lot about modern-day slave trafficking....

WASHINGTON -- Many people know that Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama's father was from Kenya and his mother from Kansas. But an intriguing sliver of his family history has received almost no attention until now: it appears that forebears of his white mother owned slaves, according to genealogical research and Census records. The records -- which had never been addressed publicly by the Illinois senator or his relatives -- were first noted in an ancestry report compiled by William Addams Reitwiesner, who works at the Library of Congress and practices genealogy in his spare time. The report, on Reitwiesner's Web...

Virginia's General Assembly has adopted a resolution, expressing "profound regret" for the role the US state played in slavery. The resolution was passed by a 96-0 vote in the House and also unanimously backed in the 40-member Senate. Although non-binding, the resolution sent an important symbolic message, its sponsors said. Lawmakers also expressed regret for "the exploitation of Native Americans" in Virginia. Saturday's resolution was passed as the state was preparing to mark the 400th anniversary of Jamestown, where the first Africans arrived in 1619. It said that government-sanctioned slavery "ranks as the most horrendous of all depredations of...

“Can a man serve God faithfully and posess slaves?” Brother Joseph Mobberly, S.J. asked in his diary in 1818. “Yes,” he answered. “Is it then lawful to keep men in servitude? Yes.” The Jesuits of the Maryland province had always relied on plantations to support their ministries. The estates were extensive, totaling 12,000 acres on four large properties in Southern Prince Georges, Charles and St. Mary’s counties, and two smaller estates on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. In 1634, when the Jesuits arrived in Maryland, Lord Baltimore awarded them quasi-estates in which they were permitted to live off the rent of tenant...

by Michael A. Hoffman II ©Copyright 1999. All Rights Reserved Two years ago, Prime Minister Paul Keating of Australia refused to show "proper respect" to Britain's Queen Elizabeth II during her state visit. In response, Terry Dicks, a Conservative member of the British Parliament said, "It's a country of ex-convicts, so we should not be surprised by the rudeness of their prime minister." A slur such as this would be considered unthinkable if it were uttered against any other class or race of people except the descendants of White slavery. Dicks' remark is not only offensive, it is ignorant and...

Luckily, Colorado Attorney General John Suthers isn't Jewish. Or a woman. Or gay. The clown princes and oligarchs of Saudi Arabia don't take kindly to those kinds of people in their midst. Then again, Christians, Hindis, Buddhists, atheists, etc. ... aren't typically welcomed either. Nope, not even when they're "explaining." Like our attorney general was asked to do when he was shuttled over to Saudi Arabia by the feds to "explain" why a Colorado resident named Homaidan Al-Turki was sentenced to 20 years to life. Surely a brief e-mail could have done the trick and saved taxpayers thousands: "Guys, you...

Did you know that chickens worry about the future? I'm worried about chickens worrying. But what worries me the most is that most people do not worry about chickens at all. A recent sobering sight on the freeway brought the truth home to me. I noticed a smell outside the bus I was on and looked over to see flatbed truck passing on the left. It was stacked high and long with crates of chickens. But these chickens weren’t happily pecking about in their boxes. They were trussed, lying on their sides, with their feet sticking outside the crates. Directly...

The United Nations has described the situation in Darfur as the world's gravest humanitarian crisis. In 2004, then-secretary of state Colin Powell called it genocide. On Tuesday, a US Congressional delegation that had visited Sudan told UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, "The issue of Darfur challenges the conscience of our country." So what is being done about it? Darfur is a province in the southwest of Sudan, an Arab country. The area had a population of about 6 million - about 2 million have fled to neighboring Chad, while about 400,000 were killed by the Sudanese military and the Janjaweed militias...

DAKAR, Senegal (Reuters) -- In a dirty white T-shirt hanging down to his knees, 4-year-old Harouna Balde begs for coins in bare feet among the traffic on the polluted streets of Dakar. Holding a rusty begging tin that is the trademark of the "talibes" -- students at Senegal's Koranic schools -- Balde says he must take back money or face a beating from his religious teacher, or marabout. "I must bring back 500 francs ($0.90) every day to my master or face punishment," says the tiny boy. He travels from his squalid daara, or religious school, in the distant suburb...

Can you imagine the rush of emotion you'd feel if your 8-year-old son, who had been kidnapped six months earlier, suddenly appeared at your door after you'd given up hope of ever seeing him again? In Pakistan just a fews days ago, I was repeatedly blessed to witness parents experience that thrill as we returned their abducted children. As the father in the above photos told us as he clung to his son, "It is a miracle." Indeed it was. Let me tell you how it happened. For those of you who haven't been following the unfolding story over the...

The roots of radio-frequency identification technology stretch at least as far back as World War II, when transponders helped distinguish between Axis and Allied aircraft. Over the years the concept has been greatly miniaturized, landing RFID technology in such settings as animal tags, toll-collection devices, passports, keyless entry systems for cars and wireless credit cards. But perhaps none of these projects will have as much impact for consumers as the adoption of RFID in the supply chains of huge retail stores. Mega-retailers led by Wal-Mart Stores Inc. (WMT) have gotten their biggest suppliers to add RFID chips to pallets and...

Al-Qaida group funded by Christian-slave trade Pakistani, American missionaries film purchase of 20 boys in sting -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Posted: May 21, 2006 1:00 a.m. Eastern © 2006 WorldNetDaily.com Two Christian men – one an American evangelist and the other a Pakistani missionary – have exposed a senior member of an al-Qaida-linked group behind a trade in Christian children by going undercover and secretly filming their purchase of 20 boys, age six to 12. Gul Khan, a wealthy militant and senior member of Jamaat-ud Daawa, an Islamic organization declared by the U.S. State Department to be a front for another banned terrorist...

CONTACT INFORMATION: United States Senate Committee on the Judiciary 224 Dirksen Senate Office Building Washington, DC 20510 Phone: (202) 224-5225 Fax: (202) 224-9102