OND is a regular community feature on Daily Kos, consisting of news stories from around the world, sometimes coupled with a daily theme, original research or commentary. Editors of OND impart their own presentation styles and content choices, typically publishing each day near 12:00AM Eastern Time.
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Reuters
U.S. President Barack Obama, in a podcast posted online on Monday, used the N word to emphasize his point that the United States has made progress in eliminating racism but there was still more work to do.Obama discussed race and gun control as part of the hour-long podcast interview, in the aftermath of the shooting deaths a week ago of nine black people at a church in South Carolina, allegedly by a 21-year-old white man with racist sentiments.
"I always tell young people in particular: 'Do not say that nothing's changed when it comes to race in America unless you lived through being a black man in the 1950s or '60s or '70s,'" Obama told Mark Maron, host of the "WTF" podcast.
He said the legacies of slavery and discrimination were still "part of our DNA that's passed on."
"We're not cured of it ... and it's not just a matter of it not being polite to say 'nigger' in public. That's not the measure of whether racism still exists or not. It's not just a matter of overt discrimination."
Reuters
South Carolina should remove the Confederate battle flag from the state capitol grounds, religious and local elected leaders urged on Monday, after a white gunman last week allegedly shot dead nine black worshippers at a historic Charleston church.The demand for lawmakers to remove the rallying symbol of the pro-slavery South during the U.S. Civil War follows revelations that 21-year-old Dylann Roof, charged with Wednesday's attack on the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, had posted a racist manifesto on the Internet and posed with the flag.
A group of black and white leaders called for a rally Tuesday at the State House in Columbia to bring their demand directly to lawmakers.
NPR
As a young U.S. Army soldier during World War II, Rollins Edwards knew better than to refuse an assignment.When officers led him and a dozen others into a wooden gas chamber and locked the door, he didn't complain. None of them did. Then, a mixture of mustard gas and a similar agent called lewisite was piped inside.
"It felt like you were on fire," recalls Edwards, now 93 years old. "Guys started screaming and hollering and trying to break out. And then some of the guys fainted. And finally they opened the door and let us out, and the guys were just, they were in bad shape."
Edwards was one of 60,000 enlisted men enrolled in a once-secret government program — formally declassified in 1993 — to test mustard gas and other chemical agents on American troops. But there was a specific reason he was chosen: Edwards is African-American.
"They said we were being tested to see what effect these gases would have on black skins," Edwards says.
The Guardian
South Carolina governor Nikki Haley on Monday called for a Confederate battle flag that has flown on the statehouse grounds for more than 50 years to be removed, in an abrupt about-face as local protesters and national advocates brought intense pressure to bear on the state to make a concrete gesture of healing after the killing of nine African Americans last week inside a Charleston church.“We are here in a moment of unity in our state, without ill will, to say it’s time to remove the flag from the capitol grounds,” Haley said, speaking in front of dozens of current and former South Carolina officials. “One hundred and fifty years after the end of the civil war, the time has come.”
The call was met with applause and cheering by the audience, which had listened in silence as Haley described a vision of the state sharply at odds with images broadcast around the world over the last week of tearful mourners and an empty-eyed suspect in chains.
Al Jazeera America
An online manifesto purportedly written by the white suspect in last week's murder of nine black worshipers at a church in Charleston, South Carolina, said Dylann Roof learned about "brutal black on white murders" from the Council of Conservative Citizens (CofCC), an organization described by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a white supremacist group that "oppose[s] all efforts to mix the races of mankind."On the website lastrhodesian.com, which Al Jazeera determined was registered to Roof on Feb. 9, 2015, Roof apparently wrote that he entered the terms “black on White crime” in a Google search and came upon the CofCC website after trying determine what the "big deal" was behind the media coverage of the Trayvon Martin case.
"The first website I came to was the Council of Conservative Citizens. There were pages upon pages of these brutal black on White murders," Roof wrote. "I was in disbelief. At this moment I realized that something was very wrong. How could the news be blowing up the Trayvon Martin case while hundreds of these black on White murders got ignored?"
NPR
Last week's tragic shooting at Mother Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C., that killed nine black parishioners gathered for a Bible study has renewed the debate over one of the most controversial Southern symbols — the Confederate flag.On Monday, a cascade of both Republicans and Democrats endorsed removing the Confederate flag from the statehouse in Columbia. South Carolina Republican Gov. Nikki Haley held a press conference Monday afternoon, flanked by a bipartisan coalition of lawmakers, to call for the flag to be removed. She was joined by the state's Republican Sens. Lindsey Graham — who is running for president — and Tim Scott — the chamber's only African-American Republican.
Here's quick primer on how we got here:
The Guardian
Walmart Stores, the world’s largest retailer, says it has removed all products bearing the Confederate flag from its stores.In the wake of the Charleston church shootings, South Carolina governor Nikki Haley announced on Monday that she would take steps to remove the Confederate battle flag that has flown on the statehouse grounds for more than 50 years.
Hours afterwards, Walmart said all items connected to the flag had been taken off sale.
“We never want to offend anyone with the products that we offer. We have taken steps to remove all items promoting the confederate flag from our assortment, whether in our stores or on our website,” Walmart spokesman Brian Nick told CNN.
“We have a process in place to help lead us to the right decisions when it comes to the merchandise we sell. Still, at times, items make their way into our assortment improperly – this is one of those instances.”