Americans may believe the United States is set up for the middle class, and Europe is set up for the bourgeois. Or let’s put it this way: America is a great place to buy kitty litter at Wal-Mart and relatively cheap gas. But it is not designed for me, a professional without a lot of money. That’s who Europe is for: people like me.
Diallo Ibrahima traveled to France from his homeland of Mali with dreams of a decent life. Nine years later, he’s still waiting. “I came here to find a better life,” he said at Place de Bastille, in central Paris, where he and hundreds others had camped out for nearly a month. “And I still haven’t found it.”
For most Britons July 7, 2005 will be remembered as the day that al Qaeda terrorists attacked London. But five years on, no link has been established between the 7/7 bombers and al Qaeda. While it’s possible that two of the bombers, Shehzad Tanweer and Mohammad Sidique Khan, may have visited training camps in Pakistan and met with al Qaeda operatives there is no evidence of this.
I scurried up to a higher vantage point to get a better view of the site the activists had just sneaked into and occupied. Most were now sitting in a circle amongst the undergrowth having a planning discussion, while others guarded the locked gate. ‘This is it,’ I thought as the police eventually arrived and started banging aggressively on the nine-foot high wooden gate: ‘It's all gonna kick off!’
This year's Roma Day on April 8th marked the twenty-year anniversary since the Gypsies of East Europe freely acknowledged their ethnicity. The day has been celebrated throughout the region in gypsy style with music and dance, skewered pork or lamb and plenty of drink as means of celebrating life. The day memorializes the roughly one million Roma exterminated by the Nazis in what has been commonly dubbed the forgotten holocaust, though which Roma scholars have termed Porrajmos, the devouring.Roma at Pata Rat, Romania Garbage Dump
You hear them in Los Angeles, New York, Paris and Berlin: Punk bands, "world musicians" and cabarets filch Roma, or Gypsy, Jewish and Balkan melodies, and casually weave them into other musical traditions. In these metropolises, Eastern European folk music roosts on the margins, threading together broader Balkan, Jewish and Roma themes to survive. Yet on the edge of this musical map beats Budapest, a folk boomtown with thriving Magyar, Roma and the seedlings of the neo-klezmer scene. In a town where established folk communities are the norm, do they ever cross-pollinate?Photo by Daniel Spitzberg
Copyright Toward Freedom 2019