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More than 3,100 Indigenous students died at boarding schools in the United States between 1828 and 1970 — three times the number of deaths reported earlier this year by the Department of Interior, according to a new investigation by The Washington Post. Many of the students had been forcibly removed from their families and tribes as part of a government policy of cultural eradication and assimilation. The new report was led by Dana Hedgpeth, an enrolled member of the Haliwa-Saponi Tribe of North Carolina, and expanded its reach beyond federal records to achieve a full public accounting of the death toll of what many scholars and survivors have described as “prison camps,” not schools. Hedgpeth shares how some tribes have now been able to recover the remains of children who had been buried at the boarding schools and return them for traditional burials in their ancestral homelands. “The impact of these schools is still being felt in many ways,” she says.

We go to Damascus for an update on the state of affairs in Syria after the surprise collapse of the long-reigning Assad regime, with BBC Middle East correspondent Lina Sinjab. She is reporting in Syria for the first time in over a decade, after she was forced to flee the country in 2013. She relays the “sense of freedom and joy” now present on the streets of Damascus, where ordinary Syrians, for the first time in generations, “feel that they are liberated and they are proud of where they are today.” Current estimates put the number of forced disappearances under the Assad government at 300,000 likely tortured in prisons and buried in mass graves. We discuss Syria’s new transitional government, led by the Islamist group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, and whether it can fulfill its promises of inclusion and accountability for all Syrians. “There’s no way for peace and stability to happen in Syria without a prosecution, without a legal system that will hold those who have blood on their hands accountable, for the sake of reconciliation in the country,” says Sinjab.

As noted on Thursday's rollicking year-end BradCast and occasionally hopeful Green News Report, we will be standing down this week and next over the holidays, after a grueling year and before a likely more grueling one (or four) arrives. Barring any surprises, or itchy trigger fingers, I suspect The BRAD BLOG will be mostly silent [...]

With his tariffs, his privatization of the postal service, & his planned cuts to everything from Social Security & Medicare to the farm bill, Trump's rural supporters are about to get a whole different gift from the one they thought they were getting…https://t.co/8stu702QC7 pic.twitter.com/rXkj3s2KCw — The Daily Felltoon (@DailyFelltoon) December 18, 2024 (Remember: Click to [...]

In his new book Building the Black City: The Transformation of American Life, academic Joe Trotter Jr., explores the role of Black Americans in creating, sustaining, and expanding American cities all over the nation. 

The U.S. House of Representatives in late November 2024 passed a dangerous piece of legislation that many are calling the “nonprofit killer” bill.