Articles from %2 January, 2011

 Tracing lives of three ‘white’ families and their black forebears

By Dan Cryer, Globe Correspondent / February 20, 2011

"Randall Lee Gibson, an urbane, Yale-educated Confederate general, mocked black people as “the most degraded of all races of men.’’ Later, as a US senator from Louisiana, he helped broker the end of Reconstruction, freeing the South to harass and lynch blacks virtually at will.

In the 20th century, his orphaned son, Preston, was raised by an aunt and her husband, who had been a justice on the US Supreme Court that legitimated racial segregation in the infamous case of Plessy v. Ferguson.

At the beginning of the 21st century, a rent-a-car employee and genealogy buff dubbed himself Sir Thomas Murphy after tracing his mother’s lineage...

 Hezbollah, Israel And Egypt: What Happens Next?

Fresh Air from WHYY, February 2, 2011

"All of our assumptions about the Arab world has been turned on their head in the last month, says veteran Middle East correspondent Thanassis Cambanis.

"Everything that the experts say and everything that the activists and politicians have taken for granted for a generation, at least, is really off the table," he tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross. "What's been happening, first in Lebanon and then in Tunisia and now in Egypt and who knows further afield, suggests that new forces have been unleashed and we have no idea where they might lead and what new dynamics they might create."

On today's Fresh Air, Cambasis puts what's been going on in Egypt in a historical context — and explains the rising...

 Children's: Middle Grade: REAL MERMAIDS DON’T WEAR TOE RINGS author Hélène Boudreau’s next two books in the Real Mermaids series, about a plus-sized, aquaphobic teenager with mermaid tendencies, again to Rebecca Frazer at Jabberwocky,  by Lauren MacLeod at The Strothman Agency (World English).

Hezbollah’s Latest Suicide Mission

By THANASSIS CAMBANIS,  OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR, The New York Times

"THE collapse of Lebanon’s government on Tuesday signaled the final stage in Hezbollah’s rise from resistance group to ruling power. While Hezbollah technically remains the head of the political opposition in Beirut, make no mistake: the Party of God has fully consolidated its control in Lebanon, and will stop at nothing — including civil war — to protect its position. 

The crisis was precipitated by Hezbollah’s opposition to a United Nations-backed tribunal investigating the 2005 assassination of a former prime minister, Rafik Hariri. Some analysts speculate that the current Lebanese government — led by Prime Minister Saad Hariri, the assassinated man’s son — could stabilize the political situation by rejecting the legitimacy of the tribunal.

Mr...