Royal Van der Leun has entered in a collaboration agreement with Royal IHC to build a diesel-electric hopper dredger for the U.S Royal Van der Leun will deliver the machinery with a hopper capacity of 6,000 cubic yards (4,587 cubic meters) will be built at Eastern Shipbuilding Group in Panama City the dredger will feature a diesel-electric propulsion system that meets the highest environmental and efficiency standards (EPA Tier 4 and IMO Tier 3) this innovative dredging vessel can operate up to 15% more efficiently reducing both fuel consumption and environmental impact The integration of Plumigator® technology further minimizes air release during dredging contributing to a lower environmental footprint,” said Royal Van der Leun The Sliedrecht based giant added that they will also provide on-site supervision during installation and support the final commissioning Daily news and in-depth stories in your inbox announced it will supply equipment for a new hopper dredge being built by Eastern Shipbuilding Group in Panama City for the United States Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) with a hopper capacity of 6,000 cubic yards will join the USACE’s Ready Reserve Fleet replacing the USACE Philadelphia District's high-powered deep draft hopper dredge McFarland Eastern worked with longtime partner Royal IHC The hullform—based on Royal IHC’s Beagle trailing suction hopper dredge (TSHD) series—provides "the best balance of proven carrying capacity seakeeping and open water transit operations as well as highly predictable operating characteristics" Royal Van der Leun said it will deliver the machinery It will also provide on-site supervision during installation and support the final commissioning The vessel will feature highly automated systems like integrated forward-looking sonar and tracking for enhanced dredging efficiency. Equipped with the ECO Package the new dredging vessel will be able to operate up to 15% more efficiently reducing both fuel consumption and environmental impact.It will feature a diesel-electric propulsion system that meets EPA Tier 4 environmental standards The integration of Plumigator technology further minimizes air release during dredging contributing to a lower environmental footprint Homeported at the USACE Fort Mifflin dock facility on the Delaware River in Philadelphia the new dredge will be kept dockside on shore power in a standby mode as a "Ready Reserve" dredge to perform urgent or emergency dredging when needed It will also complete 70 days of dredging in the Delaware River on an annual basis Crane specialist Huisman has secured another contract for the delivery of Knuckle Boom Cranes South Korean shipbuilder Hanwha Ocean aims to boost its revenue from overseas military vessels to around 4 trillion won ($2.91… a power electronics provider for the marine industry has won a contract to deliver the single drives for shaft… Jan De Nul has kicked off the installation campaign of the monopile foundations for RWE’s Thor offshore wind farm we excel in creating stunning illuminated yacht names and logos and cutting-edge LED and fiber optic solutions Maritime Reporter E-News is the maritime industry's largest circulation and most authoritative ENews Service delivered to your Email five times per week The Executive Board is delighted to announce that Joanne van der Leun took up the position of the university’s Academic Lead International Affairs starting 1 January 2025 Hester Bijl is pleased that Joanne will bring her managerial experience and network as former dean to this position: ‘International networks are in good hands with Joanne and we look forward to continuing these collaborations.’  Joanne will become a member of the Una Europa Board of Directors a position that was recently held by Koen Caminada she will take over the tasks performed by Wim van den Doel at the League of European Research Universities (LERU) a network of research-intensive European universities Joanne will represent LERU at central level and contribute to the network in consultation with the deans and the Executive Board she will remain the chair of the temporary Committee for Assessing Ethical Aspects of Collaborations the Committee will issue recommendations on working methods and assessments She will continue lecturing at Leiden Law School as Professor of Criminology and will also coordinate the national cross-cutting theme of the Social Sciences and Humanities sector plan for the SSH Council.  Criminal Justice: Societally Effective Criminal Justice 2023-2029 Leiden University has set up two committees to consider issues that are the focus of much attention within our community and society at large They are the Knowledge Security Committee and the Fossil Fuel Industry Collaboration Committee Former dean Joanne van der Leun will chair both There has been some commotion in recent years about our ties with the fossil fuel industry and partnerships with international research and teaching organisations This has led to various demonstrations and protests The two new committees have arisen from the wish to give more careful consideration to new partnerships before entering into them The Knowledge Security Committee and the Fossil Fuel Industry Collaboration Committee officially started on 1 March this year. Appointing Van der Leun, Professor of Criminology and former dean of Leiden Law School, to chair both committees is a deliberate choice.  She was already chair of the temporary 'Committee for Assessing Ethical Aspects of Partnerships' which recently shared its advice with the Executive Board the committee advises on how we can conduct this assessment in the future it advises on how we can evaluate our current institutional partnerships in major conflict zones The university is aiming for a clear and cohesive approach and in which Van der Leun will play a role The Executive Board will discuss the committee’s advice with the University Council in April From 1 March 2025, each potential new international collaboration must first undergo a knowledge security check. The university and the LUMC have a new knowledge security policy detailing the basic principles to ensure that sensitive information and technology are not inadvertently shared in international collaboration the potential risks need to be weighed against the opportunities and the matter can be submitted to the committee To allow the central committee to transition into its new role it has been agreed that the Faculty of Science will submit its cases to this committee as of 1 June and that the Faculty of Science’s committee will remain active until that date From 1 March 2025, new initiatives for collaboration with the fossil fuel industry must be submitted to the Fossil Fuel Collaboration Advice Desk for assessment If the potential partner is a company that is not compliant with the Paris Agreement the Fossil Fuel Industry Collaboration Committee will assess ethical aspects of the collaboration Joanne van der Leun will chair the Donations Assessment Committee for the Leiden University Fund from 1 March Before the university can accept donations of € 10,000 and above an assessment will be made of the nature of the donation and whether this donation and any associated conditions contravene the university’s ethical principles For sums above € 100,000 the Donations Assessment Committee will carry out this assessment ‘It’s a great honour to have been asked to chair these committees’ ‘It has become clear in recent years that both our community and society at large have become more critical of the partners we work with so it is good that we will be exploring how we wish to position ourselves in relation to our current and potential future partners This is not just about committees but is also about researchers being aware of their responsibilities and seeking help and advice.’ Rector Magnificus Hester Bijl is grateful that Van der Leun is willing to take on these roles ‘I’m tremendously pleased that Joanne was prepared to chair these committees Each of these topics is crucial to our future The expectations and perspectives of our community and society are changing and we want to give shape and meaning to this The Executive Board advocates a learning approach and is confident that Joanne and her fellow committee members will help us chart our course in this year and the years to come.’ 36% of all banned titles featured characters or people of color and a quarter (25%) included LGBTQ+ people or characters This week-long intensive provides an in-person workshop for early-career writers from communities underrepresented in the publishing world Learn how the creation and display of art is entwined with the U.S.’s most fraught cultural and political debates The next four years could reshape the United States for decades to come Join us in fighting every day to protect the freedom to write and the freedom to read This Q&A is part of Local Heroes: Journalists Covering COVID-19 PEN America’s series spotlighting local journalists across the country in celebration of World Press Freedom Day 2020 Name: Justine van der Leun Outlet: Independent journalist City: Brooklyn What do you want your readers to know about what goes into the coverage they’re relying on I’m currently writing almost exclusively about prisons and there’s been a lot coming out about how the virus is blasting through these facilities We only know the details of what’s happening inside because incarcerated people put themselves at enormous risk of retaliation and punishment to communicate with the media Any prison reporting that centers the voices of those inside is the result of someone having the courage to come forward in the face of losing what little they have left it’s often because they are advocating not for themselves but for elderly or vulnerable people locked up with them “Any prison reporting that centers the voices of those inside is the result of someone having the courage to come forward in the face of losing what little they have left but for elderly or vulnerable people locked up with them.” How have the advent of the COVID-19 outbreak and social distancing requirements changed your reporting and the way your newsroom operates more broadly The communication channels that we all depend on while isolated are many of the same that people in prison use as a matter of course: letters So while I’m no longer able to do in-person visits I don’t have to change my daily reporting methods much I do have a clearer perspective of how precious those avenues are when you have no other way to interact One thing I’ve noticed is that as the Postal Service suffers As more incarcerated populations are locked down using the mail has become increasingly necessary are now giving people 45 minutes a day total to shower It’s hard to send anything lengthy or meaningful within those strictures But they can still write freely from their dorms or cells so many postal workers have gotten sick or have been exposed to the virus The local station is operating at partial capacity while trying to deliver even more packages My mail has slowed down and been staggered have been out there every single day through this entire pandemic When I think of the administration’s opposition to saving our postal service I think about these workers risking their lives to get mail to us and I think of how much people in prison depend on that service to simply reach their families and receive books and educational materials The USPS is a critical tool of a free American press and of our justice system and it’s not a coincidence that during this pandemic it’s been the target of politically-motivated attacks “One thing I’ve noticed is that as the Postal Service suffers or other creative media have you been turning to for comfort or inspiration I’ve been reading through Against Forgetting: Twentieth Century Poetry of Witness It contextualizes this pandemic as a historic time that we’re living through—not the first but a struggle that we need to keep a record of old and funny episodes of This American Life (“Fiasco” is my all-time favorite) and the new season of Better Call Saul Justine van der Leun is an independent journalist and the author of several books, the most recent of which is We Are Not Such Things: The Murder of a Young American, a South African Township, and the Search for Truth and Reconciliation. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, VQR, The Guardian, and Harper’s, among others. She is a reporter with Type Investigations and a 2019–2020 PEN America Writing For Justice Fellow and learn by donating to PEN America today Copyright © 2025 PEN America. All rights reserved | Privacy Policy Metrics details The T cell infiltrates that are formed in human cancers are a modifier of natural disease progression and also determine the probability of clinical response to cancer immunotherapies Recent technological advances that allow the single-cell analysis of phenotypic and transcriptional states have revealed a vast heterogeneity of intratumoural T cell states and the observation of this heterogeneity makes it critical to understand the relationship between individual T cell states and therapy response This Review covers our current knowledge of the T cell states that are present in human tumours and the role that different T cell populations have been hypothesized to play within the tumour microenvironment Prices may be subject to local taxes which are calculated during checkout Prognostic value of tumor infiltrating lymphocytes in the vertical growth phase of primary cutaneous melanoma and location of immune cells within human colorectal tumors predict clinical outcome The immune contexture in human tumours: impact on clinical outcome Adoptive cell transfer as personalized immunotherapy for human cancer The blockade of immune checkpoints in cancer immunotherapy Improved survival with ipilimumab in patients with metastatic melanoma and immune correlates of anti-PD-1 antibody in cancer Anti-CTLA-4 therapy broadens the melanoma-reactive CD8+ T cell response CTLA4 blockade broadens the peripheral T-cell receptor repertoire Improved survival with T cell clonotype stability after anti-CTLA-4 treatment in cancer patients Distinct immunological mechanisms of CTLA-4 and PD-1 blockade revealed by analyzing TCR usage in blood lymphocytes HYPE or HOPE: the prognostic value of infiltrating immune cells in cancer PD-1 blockade induces responses by inhibiting adaptive immune resistance Durable complete responses in heavily pretreated patients with metastatic melanoma using T-cell transfer immunotherapy Tumor-reactive CD4+ T cells develop cytotoxic activity and eradicate large established melanoma after transfer into lymphopenic hosts Cancer immunotherapy based on mutation-specific CD4+ T cells in a patient with epithelial cancer MHC-II neoantigens shape tumour immunity and response to immunotherapy Dissecting the multicellular ecosystem of metastatic melanoma by single-cell RNA-seq The first single-cell transcriptome and TCR analysis of the TME in human melanoma dissecting the major T cell states and tumour-specific programmes Dysfunctional CD8 T cells form a proliferative dynamically regulated compartment within human melanoma Single-cell transcriptome and TCR analysis in human melanoma describing a dysfunctional axis made up of cells that are transcriptionally related and show TCR sharing as well as a separate cytotoxic population The dysfunctional T cells identified contain a highly proliferative subset and are indicative of the presence of a tumour-reactive T cell repertoire A human memory T cell subset with stem cell-like properties Exhaustion of tumor-specific CD8+ T cells in metastases from melanoma patients A transcriptionally and functionally distinct PD-1+ CD8+ T cell pool with predictive potential in non-small-cell lung cancer treated with PD-1 blockade This study defines a T cell subset in human NSCLC with high expression of PD1 that is enriched for tumour reactivity that expresses markers of T cell activation and that appears predictive of clinical response to anti-PD1 therapy Selective expansion of a subset of exhausted CD8 T cells by PD-L1 blockade Viral persistence alters CD8 T-cell immunodominance and tissue distribution and results in distinct stages of functional impairment Landscape of infiltrating T cells in liver cancer revealed by single-cell sequencing Single-cell transcriptome and TCR analysis of T cells in HCC showing the distribution and connectivity between T cell states in tumour tissue and that also provides evidence for the presence of cell state diversity within T cell clones Global characterization of T cells in non-small-cell lung cancer by single-cell sequencing Single-cell transcriptome analysis of T cells in NSCLC adjacent normal tissue and blood showing the distribution of T cell states in these tissues and their relatedness based on TCR sharing between cell states inside and outside the tumour this study provides evidence for dysfunctionality as a gradual state Lineage tracking reveals dynamic relationships of T cells in colorectal cancer Single-cell transcriptome and TCR analysis of T cells in microsatellite-stable and microsatellite-instable colorectal tumours addressing the clonotypic relationships between intratumoural dysfunctional cells and T cells with other cell states that reside in the tumour Single-cell map of diverse immune phenotypes in the breast tumor microenvironment Single-cell transcriptome analysis of immune cells in human breast cancer demonstrating that intratumoural T cells reside along a continuum that is driven by activation and terminal differentiation cell state diversity is shown both between and within T cell clones Checkpoint blockade immunotherapy reshapes the high-dimensional phenotypic heterogeneity of murine intratumoural neoantigen-specific CD8+ T cells An immune atlas of clear cell renal cell carcinoma Tumor-infiltrating and peripheral blood T-cell immunophenotypes predict early relapse in localized clear cell renal cell carcinoma A single-cell atlas of the tumor and immune ecosystem of human breast cancer T-cells require post-transcriptional regulation for accurate immune responses Critical role of post-transcriptional regulation for IFN-γ in tumor-infiltrating T cells drivers of the anti-tumor responses in human cancers Tertiary lymphoid structures in the era of cancer immunotherapy Immune cell dynamics unfolded by single-cell technologies Subsets of exhausted CD8+ T cells differentially mediate tumor control and respond to checkpoint blockade A mouse melanoma study showing the importance of a low dysfunctional (‘progenitor exhausted’) T cell population marked by TCF1 expression and required for response to anti-PD1 therapy Mechanisms regulating T-cell infiltration and activity in solid tumors Low and variable tumor reactivity of the intratumoral TCR repertoire in human cancers Unbiased analysis of the tumour reactivity of TCRs in human cancer lesions providing formal evidence that human colorectal and ovarian tumours contain high proportions of bystander T cells Bystander CD8+ T cells are abundant and phenotypically distinct in human tumour infiltrates This study demonstrates the presence of virus-specific bystander T cells in human lung and colorectal tumours Intratumoural bystander T cells were characterized by a lack of CD39 expression suggesting that CD39 can be used to help distinguish tumour-reactive T cells from bystander cells Virus-specific CD8+ T cells infiltrate melanoma lesions and retain function independently of PD-1 expression TIL therapy broadens the tumor-reactive CD8+ T cell compartment in melanoma patients Virus-specific memory T cells populate tumors and can be repurposed for tumor immunotherapy Tumor- and neoantigen-reactive T-cell receptors can be identified based on their frequency in fresh tumor Tumor-specific T cell dysfunction is a dynamic antigen-driven differentiation program initiated early during tumorigenesis Tumor antigen-specific CD8 T cells infiltrating the tumor express high levels of PD-1 and are functionally impaired PD-1 identifies the patient-specific CD8+ tumor-reactive repertoire infiltrating human tumors Selection of CD8+PD-1+ lymphocytes in fresh human melanomas enriches for tumor-reactive T cells Co-expression of CD39 and CD103 identifies tumor-reactive CD8 T cells in human solid tumors This study identifies CD103 and CD39 as markers of tumour-reactive T cells across multiple human cancer types Checkpoint blockade cancer immunotherapy targets tumour-specific mutant antigens A distinct gene module for dysfunction uncoupled from activation in tumor-infiltrating T cells High-dimensional analysis delineates myeloid and lymphoid compartment remodeling during successful immune-checkpoint cancer therapy PD-1 blockade unleashes effector potential of both high- and low-affinity tumor-infiltrating T cells CD4+ T cell help in cancer immunology and immunotherapy Checkpoint blockade immunotherapy induces dynamic changes in PD-1−CD8+ tumor-infiltrating T cells A mouse study that describes a PD1-low subset of T cells that responds to ICB and identifies Tcf7 expression to be required for response to anti-PD1 and anti-TIM3 combination therapy T cell factor 1-expressing memory-like CD8+ T cells sustain the immune response to chronic viral infections Defining CD8+ T cells that provide the proliferative burst after PD-1 therapy The TCF1-Bcl6 axis counteracts type I interferon to repress exhaustion and maintain T cell stemness Systemic immunity is required for effective cancer immunotherapy High-dimensional single cell analysis identifies stem-like cytotoxic CD8+ T cells infiltrating human tumors PTPN2 regulates the generation of exhausted CD8+ T cell subpopulations and restrains tumor immunity Negative co-stimulation constrains T cell differentiation by imposing boundaries on possible cell states Tumor immune profiling predicts response to anti-PD-1 therapy in human melanoma Distinct immune cell populations define response to anti-PD-1 monotherapy and anti-PD-1/anti-CTLA-4 combined therapy Differences in tumor microenvironment dictate T helper lineage polarization and response to immune checkpoint therapy CD4 T-cell subsets and tumor immunity: the helpful and the not-so-helpful The opposing roles of CD4+ T cells in anti-tumour immunity T-helper-1-cell cytokines drive cancer into senescence Insights into the molecular mechanisms of T follicular helper-mediated immunity and pathology T follicular helper cell biology: a decade of discovery and diseases Innate immune landscape in early lung adenocarcinoma by paired single-cell analyses Molecular profiling of CD 8 T cells in autochthonous melanoma identifies Maf as driver of exhaustion High levels of Eomes promote exhaustion of anti-tumor CD8+ T cells Induction and transcriptional regulation of the co-inhibitory gene module in T cells TOX is a critical regulator of tumour-specific T cell differentiation Progenitor and terminal subsets of CD8+ T cells cooperate to contain chronic viral infection TOX reinforces the phenotype and longevity of exhausted T cells in chronic viral infection TOX transcriptionally and epigenetically programs CD8+ T cell exhaustion Comprehensive integration of single-cell data Single-cell multi-omic integration compares and contrasts features of brain cell identity Simultaneous epitope and transcriptome measurement in single cells Molecular dissection of CD8+ T-cell dysfunction Heterogeneity and fate choice: T cell exhaustion in cancer and chronic infections Download references Logtenberg for input and insightful discussions This work was supported by ERC AdG SENSIT to T.N.S and the Dutch Cancer Society Bas Mulder Award to D.S.T Division of Molecular Oncology and Immunology jointly discussed data and co-wrote the article The authors declare no competing interests reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations The capacity of a T cell to recognize tumour cells regardless of its ability to perform effector function Gene expression profiling method that allows unbiased transcriptome analysis of individual cells The unique T cell receptor (TCR) sequence formed by both the TCR α-chain and the TCR β-chain T cell count or expression level of a marker gene) to make a risk estimate of the response of a patient to therapy Download citation DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41568-019-0235-4 Anyone you share the following link with will be able to read this content: a shareable link is not currently available for this article European Journal of Medical Research (2025) Sign up for the Nature Briefing: Cancer newsletter — what matters in cancer research was killed by a group of young men in a South African township in 1993 This book on the famous case turns it upside down On 25 August 1993, eight months before South Africa held its first fully democratic elections a 26-year-old white American Fulbright scholar at the University of the Western Cape called Amy Biehl (right) was murdered by a group of young black men in the township of Gugulethu outside Cape Town who was about to return to the US after nearly a year in South Africa was giving two black fellow students a lift home An ANC supporter and activist committed to bringing about social change she had been researching the rights of non-white women in an emerging democracy and had been to the townships several times Although the entire country seemed poised for civil war in the tense and violent months before the election Biehl did not think twice about driving into Gugulethu As her battered Mazda (bearing a bumper sticker reading “Our Land Needs Peace”) pulled into the township it intersected with a restless group of local men and boys who were attempting to overturn and loot a truck According to accounts they would later repeat to various journalists and commissions the young men had just left a political rally for the militant Pan Africanist Congress of Azania and were pumped up by the organisation’s militant exhortations the mob – watched by a crowd of township residents – attacked the vehicle with bricks shattering the windshield and cracking Biehl’s skull As Justine van der Leun remarks in this compelling account of the killing and its aftermath quite apart from the dramatically brutal nature of the attack Far from being a member of the white South African ruling class Biehl was a foreigner with impeccable liberal credentials a member of the ANC-aligned National Women’s Coalition the killing of Biehl was a spectacular own goal For all the spectators standing by that afternoon in Gugulethu – Van der Leun estimates that the number topped 200 – no witnesses came forward to testify Four men were arrested on the basis of a tip-off from a single source They were duly tried and convicted of Biehl’s murder and were sentenced to 18 years in prison they applied for amnesty at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission dryly characterised by Van der Leun as “South Africa’s experiment in restorative justice” the commission “offered release and a clean slate to those who could prove that their misdeeds were politically motivated” Amy’s mother Photograph: Allen J Schaben/LA Times via Getty ImagesEnter Peter and Linda Biehl a well-heeled Californian couple who had been welcomed to South Africa by the ANC following her death and introduced to the party’s dignitaries Deciding that their daughter would have wanted them to respect the processes of this new democracy they did not (unlike many families of victims) oppose amnesty for her killers In the wake of Amy’s murder the Biehls had set up a charitable foundation in her memory to help develop Cape Town’s townships The killers were released from prison in 1998 after serving between three and five years a young man with learning difficulties who found it impossible to hold down a job disappeared from the map until unearthed by Van der Leun was later convicted for the rape of a neighbour who had a mental health condition approached the Biehls to ask for their forgiveness and were not only employed by the Amy Biehl Foundation but became personal friends of Linda and Peter appearing arm-in-arm with them at press conferences and referring to them by the honorific titles of “grandmother” and “grandfather” Van der Leun received a legal warning on behalf of Linda Biehl and Ntobeko Peni warning her to cease and desist on the grounds that “her continued attempts to exploit Mr Peni’s participation in the story have caused him much harm” the emotional and political stakes in the Biehl story are high it remains an unchallenged narrative of reconciliation: “black South Africans loving by nature but distorted into rampage by apartheid who had been reformed and redeemed through the grace of an inspirational if puzzling pair of good-looking white Americans” and indeed the very identities of Biehl’s murderers Van der Leun’s is the first book to appear on the Biehl case [see footnote] She is herself an American who has lived in South Africa for some time and has a resident’s wry familiarity with the jangling contradictions of a country in which shopping malls sit side by side with shantytowns while retaining an outsider’s unsentimental perspective on its ongoing racial tensions and a bracing scepticism about the rhetoric of liberation pace the TRC’s remit to pardon political killings Van der Leun is aware that “the distinction between pure-hearted freedom fighter and local street gangster was not always so delineated in South Africa” Having spent four years interviewing the participants in this gruesome tale in which tropes of casual racial hatred still surface at shocking moments – the mortally wounded Biehl looked “like a Barbie covered in ketchup” – and after following in the Biehls’ footsteps by befriending Nofemela Van der Leun arrives at the startling conclusion that three of the men convicted for Biehl’s death were very probably not directly responsible Was the murder a legitimately politically motivated act or an arbitrary crime inspired by iqungu (isiXhosa for “bloodlust”) Was she an international liberation hero or the chance victim of a bored and angry crowd Van der Leun’s hard-nosed reconstruction of an alternative narrative for the events of that afternoon raises troubling questions about the deals that sometimes have to be struck by former enemies when faced with the exigencies of nation-building To order We Are Not Such Things for £12.29 (RRP £14.99) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846 This footnote was appended on 5 August 2016: We Are Not Such Things may be the first non-fiction account of the case published as a book but Sindiwe Magona’s novel Mother to Mother which was published in 1998 and takes the form of a letter to Biehl’s mother Please enable JS and disable any ad blocker Kwaneta Yatrice Harris writes letters documenting the torturous conditions In a solitary cell in a central Texas prison Kwaneta Yatrice Harris was eating cold bologna sandwiches on the better days also known as discipline cake: a rectangle of meat The food was slid through the door of a room the size of a walk-in closet where Harris has been held since 2016 she will be returned to a general population unit to serve the rest of her sentence has been subject to questionable disciplinary cases brought by guards the offense of “aiding” me to telephone her under a fraudulent name Punishments vary: nutraloaf is one of them; more time in solitary is another She has noted that she and those in her unit “sleep and groom in camera-free spaces” overseen by male officers “Black women’s bodies were playthings for slave masters and now are playthings for white prison guards,” she wrote “Violence against us is not only tolerated slammed so hard it appears they ‘bounce’ off the concrete.” how I wish the [correctional officers] wore body cams,” Harris wrote “If [the public] only knew the horrors inflicted The over 230,000 women and girls incarcerated in the United States have singular stories but share common backgrounds Studies suggest that 60 percent of women incarcerated in federal prisons have a history of sexual or physical abuse as many as 94 percent of the female population has been physically or sexually abused before entering the criminal justice system A 2015 Human Rights Project for Girls report showed that the vast majority of girls in the juvenile justice system have been sexually or physically abused before their incarceration These trauma histories—largely unacknowledged or dismissed by attorneys and juries—often play a role in gender-based criminalization Harris was convicted of shooting and killing a boyfriend In interviews for a salacious TV docudrama series in which Harris refused to take part the white male judge said that Harris’s “levels of depravity are top five of any I’ve ever known,” and her own white male defense attorney seemed puzzled: “I don’t know why she went down this path that she did,” he said “She had a very good mother and she was raised to be a good person.” Harris had attended private school and her mother was an upstanding citizen and physically abused by her first and second husbands “The lawyers—my lawyer—did not want to hear about my history of sexual assault and specifically what my victim did and has done to me,” she wrote to me Over their on-off relationship of many years her boyfriend had been abusive and manipulative which he used to threaten her; hacked her computer with spyware; and sent emails calling her a “slut,” a “whore,” and a thief to her colleagues at the hospital where she worked as a registered nurse Harris wrote that her legal team did not wish to disparage a veteran she had dropped charges against her rapists and kidnappers which the attorneys worried might make her seem “lying or promiscuous.” Harris did not push the attorneys “The stigma and shame of allowing myself to continually accept abusive behavior is stronger than the shame of being a convicted murderer.” she had met many others like her: a woman who had arrived in prison “marked with all types of scars”; another who woke the dorm by screaming in the night reliving torture at the hands of her husband; one who had been trafficked as a child White women who speak about rape and abuse have historically been dismissed as manipulators; Black women like Harris face even more skepticism and scorn even though they experience higher rates of intimate partner and sexual violence Harris was accused of forging a judge’s signature on paperwork to lessen her sentence She maintains that evidence shows another woman in the facility—likely a member of an Aryan gang—committed the act Harris has now spent twenty-two to twenty-four hours a day in isolation This is where she remained as the coronavirus spread through Texas’s 103 facilities over 7,821 incarcerated people had tested positive in the state and at least seventy-nine had died A riderless horse walked across a field to honor the fallen officers the Supreme Court struck down a bid by two elderly incarcerated men for better virus protections in Texas prisons the Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ) uploaded a video of barefaced incarcerated individuals sewing masks by hand One woman said that she and the others were “excited” to make masks instead of the American flags they regularly sewed The TDCJ denies that it uses slave labor or chain gangs and any jobs that take place outside of the prison perimeters are overseen by an armed officer on horseback Harris did not work because she was in “restrictive housing,” or “administrative segregation,” which is what Texas calls its solitary confinement the state announced that it would do away with solitary confinement as a form of punishment according to a 2019 report by the Texas Civil Rights Project Solitary has been classified as torture by the United Nations and causes mental health to deteriorate in as few as ten days Millions of people stayed at home for months Those who were alone began to physically throb for human connection But true solitary is nothing like shelter-in-place: no quilts or sunlight no quick bike rides or walks around the block or brown-bag cocktails on the sidewalk at a six-foot distance I’ve been told by several individuals who have lived in solitary for months and years that the experience magnifies the senses: You can smell the guard’s perfume hear the click of shoes echoing from far away You will clean every corner of your cell on your knees A woman in California kept a pet cricket and tore off one of its legs so it couldn’t leave her A man in Minnesota nurtured a baby mouse and taught it to sleep by his head in a Folger’s jar Texas currently keeps over 4,000 people in segregated cells That’s more people in solitary than the rest of the country’s prisons combined The TDCJ declined to comment on the official reason for Harris’s confinement My initial contact with Harris was a form letter that I have sent to many as part of a long-term project on women in prison asking me to focus on the issue of parenting while incarcerated: “Bars and razorwire doesn’t erase motherhood.” Eighty percent of women in detention facilities are mothers She also wanted to correct what she felt were common stereotypes “Every prosecutor describes women convicted of murder as cunning “I’ve yet to encounter these ‘monsters,’ although I’ve met plenty of women with mental illness Our correspondence was a lens into the lives of women held in jails and prisons in the United States where Black women are incarcerated at twice the rate of white women—attributed Lane Murray prison—nicknamed “Miserable Murray”—was one of “forever punishment.” She relayed the emotional toll of family separation and the unabating physical discomfort where temperatures soared above 100 degrees in sealed-in spaces—“torture,” she wrote especially for a premenopausal woman experiencing hot flashes Seventy-five percent of Texas facilities are un-air-conditioned and the state claims it would be too expensive to install cooling features a for-profit company that provides goods and services resulting from the unpaid labor of people incarcerated in the state there have been over two dozen deaths and untold illnesses from high temperatures Harris informed me that a nineteen-year-old—the same age as Harris’s eldest daughter—had been transferred into the prison from a juvenile facility as a minor and kept in solitary for trauma-related behavioral issues She tried to fake suicide to “go to the air-conditioned psych center.” There had been four attempts by different women that month Incarcerated people often report that deaths attributed to suicide or natural causes are that law enforcement claims about how deaths happen and who is responsible are often false there has been a focus on two deaths in New York: Layleen Xtravaganza Cubilette-Polanco an Afro-Latina transgender woman in psychiatric crisis who died of an epileptic seizure while unattended in a solitary unit a Black man who died of a heart attack after officers pepper-sprayed him inside his cell a Black man who was feeling unwell and was not exhibiting violent behavior was tackled by six officers and pepper-sprayed as he said “I can’t breathe” multiple times Sabbie was given a disciplinary ticket for “creating a disturbance” by “feining [sic] illness and difficulty breathing.” Sabbie was left alone in his cell and found dead the next morning But most events in detention facilities are concealed from view and the incarcerated people who speak of abuses are society’s most marginalized—often discredited because of their backgrounds and unable to offer proof because of the opacity of their institutions Harris was housed in a state where the number of times that officers have used force against incarcerated people jumped by 66 percent between 2009 and 2019 even while the immense prison population has decreased A more subtly insidious form of oppression is exhibited in excessive disciplinary write-ups A 2018 national study found that women are often disciplined at higher rates for smaller such as “disrespect” or “disobedience,” or more absurd breaches like “reckless eyeballing.” Low-level tickets can result in the revocation of “good credits,” which can shorten a person’s sentence women incarcerated in California had the equivalent of 1,483 years added to their sentences through such revocations While the TDCJ denies the use of write-up quotas reporting in the Houston Chronicle has shown that quotas have been used in some Texas prisons Harris had been threatened with a disciplinary for an “extreme hairstyle” when she tried to wear her hair in a naturally curly style and has received tickets for telling a pen pal she was taller and thinner than the guard believed her to be and for giving an indigent woman with stomach flu a 7 Up The disciplinaries Harris has received since she was accused in 2015 have been minor but a fraud offense is considered a major charge and would bolster the state’s upcoming forgery case against her Usually journalists aren’t able to witness the production of an invented disciplinary ticket I know that the charge of fraud is fabricated because I essentially observed its fabrication It is an aperture into how detention facilities operate without accountability or oversight using a messaging system run by Securus Technologies a private corporation with an annual revenue of $700 million which is known for charging exorbitant fees to incarcerated people and their family members My email was printed out and delivered to Harris’s cell I sent her my phone number and asked her to call; we had never before discussed the possibility of phone contact Harris used regular mail; she had no direct email access as my post office grew overwhelmed and its workers fell ill I wanted to open a quicker line of communication I learned that I had to be on Harris’s official phone list for her to call out The online system required a bill and an ID that matched the submitted number so I uploaded his information with his permission telling her my husband’s name: “the number is technically his I guess.” In mid-April I received a letter from Harris informing me of the prison’s policies for those in segregation who are limited to a single five-minute call every ninety days here in restrictive housing we have been asking people to call the prison we have not had hot water in our sinks in our cells since March 11.” and she did not have materials to disinfect her cell and escorted to one of three showers shared by forty-two women she observed that the officers stationed nearby had no hand-washing station She decided to stay in her cell twenty-four hours a day and clean herself in her sink a task complicated by the fact that the water had been running ice-cold for nearly a week Harris spoke up for the group—an interaction confirmed by another woman on Harris’s unit “[The warden] calmly and nicely explained to me ‘It’s no rule that you have to have ‘hot’ water,’” Harris wrote That was the only direct communication I had from Harris for months with whom I had never before been in contact “I just returned from inmate court regarding this major case on Justine did violate a posted TDCJ rule requiring no misrepresentation of personal information in that offender Harris aided Justine vanderleun [sic] to register her phone number under a fraudulent name attempting to communicate with unauthorized person using the offender telephone system I called the office of Warden Stroleny and told her secretary that I had added my own number to the phone list on my own volition and under my husband’s name Families of those in prison often complain that they are ignored or treated rudely by staff when they try to advocate for their loved ones’ well-being “They’re feeding her nutraloaf,” she said when we spoke lowering her voice so Harris’s daughters wouldn’t hear why the people in charge of the prison “hate her when they don’t even know her I laid out what had happened and wrote that any blame was mine alone: “She had no role in any of my actions when attempting to speak with her.” Within thirty minutes “If a journalist attempts to use the offender telephone system they have forfeited their status as a journalist and are banned from our facilities,” he wrote Desel did not acknowledge the charges against Harris She informed me that she had gathered evidence in the case that the disciplinary was “justified,” and that Harris had used a “third party” to contact a “reporter.” The original complaint against Harris listed nothing about speaking with a reporter or a third party Harris and I regularly wrote about how women are criminalized for defending themselves against sexual or physical violence “All traumatic events in my life were preceded by sexual assault from conception to incarceration,” Harris wrote in one letter Many women in prison had been required to choose “between a coffin and a prison cell.” In December 2019 I wrote to Harris about one of the first such recorded cases which involved an enslaved Missouri woman named Celia who was raped repeatedly by her white master a man who purchased her when she was fourteen after futile attempts to convince the man’s daughters to stop him a pregnant Celia attacked him as he entered her cabin one night She was convicted of murder in an all-white and was hanged—an inelegant parallel to the first woman to die of COVID-19 in federal custody: Andrea Circle Bear a member of the Cheyenne River Sioux tribe who died after giving birth by C-section while on a ventilator in a Texas prison for a minor drug charge I told Harris of a slogan that I’d read about when studying liberation movements some years before: “La lucha continua,” or “the struggle continues.” Harris replied that she had read stories similar to Celia’s Her great-grandparents were sharecroppers in Tennessee and her great-grandfather was often told to “go off in the fields Harris’s great-grandmother gave birth to eighteen children they had to get rid of it.” The existence of such a child meant “death for all.” Harris’s grandmother was “lucky,” Harris wrote Rumor had it that a midwife looked at the baby’s face and decided to keep her came with its own horrors: she was sent to do errands in a faraway town to get the cheaper better quality products reserved for white people a different group of white boys saw her talking to her eight-year-old friend Bobby Assuming that Bobby was speaking with a white girl Harris’s grandmother never forgave herself “My mother said when the Alzheimer’s took over she would relive the rapes and little Bobby dying I followed up with Desel with a list of clarifying questions “about the Kwaneta Harris incident.” The disciplinary offense caused Harris and her family enormous stress “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” he said in a voicemail Kwaneta Harris incident of last week even is so you’ll have to enlighten me.” which was a “worst case scenario,” though it was unlikely that I would ever be able to interview Harris “because of the issue.” On that day the listed online communications policy for “offender interviews” only referred to in-person interviews and did not mention that journalists could not speak with incarcerated people by telephone (though an obscurely placed lengthy directive did note that “telephonic media interviews” were prohibited) It now specifies that telephone contact between media and the incarcerated population is prohibited incarcerated individuals in Texas can only reach the media through letters which are monitored and can be censored by prison staff I have heard from Harris again several times She wrote that she suspected her disciplinary was related to her writing letters about the prison “chronicling the daily battles.” She wrote that some sympathetic officials recognized that the disciplinary was meritless but did nothing “The blue line stretches to [correctional officers] and the entire criminal justice system If Harris wasn’t happy with a disciplinary “she can grieve it.” Stroleny was referring to the Offender Grievance System among the only formal processes available for incarcerated people to resolve issues with prison administration called “rigged” in a 2017 Prison Justice League report Both a 2008 State Audit survey and a 2015 Prison Justice League survey found that the majority of incarcerated people who made grievance reports experienced staff retaliation and that only a slim minority received satisfactory resolutions at which she presented our communications and my emails laying out my own actions the board found “no valid reason to warrant overturning this case.” Still though she presumably risked retribution: more time in solitary She did so because she observed that the public seemed increasingly interested in criminal justice reform in the issues of racism and state violence But the focus was so often on the millions of men affected push [my] pen until the ink runs dry.” She hoped through communicating to the outside too.” She hoped that “our daughters will not be punished for making a bad choice when the option didn’t exist for a good one.” I looked back at how she signed her letter in December the letter about Celia and her grandmother Justine van der Leun is an independent journalist she have a big problem,” Easy Mzikhona Nofemela told me one day on the phone During the more than two years I spent in Gugulethu a black township on the outskirts of Cape Town I once gave a lift to a man who deduced that I was American inspected my ten-year-old Renault hatchback “But where is your Ferrari?” Easy had never asked me for a penny though he was essentially broke — his modest salary tied up in high-interest cash loans and membership in a service that provided a lawyer in an emergency — and he had never asked for a favor I met Easy while researching the murder of a white American Fulbright Scholar named Amy Biehl in Gugulethu in 1993 Easy and three other young men had been tried and convicted of Biehl’s murder and sentenced to eighteen years in prison Easy and his co-accused appeared before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission South Africa’s experiment in restorative justice it offered release and amnesty to those who could prove that their apartheid-era crimes had been politically motivated then a skinny twenty-six-year-old with Coke-bottle prison-issue glasses and enormous white high-tops sat before the commission and read from a statement carefully crafted by his attorneys arguing that he had been incited by leaders of the student wing of his party — the Pan-Africanist Congress had been marching down the street when Amy Biehl Easy and his co-accused were granted amnesty in 1998 and freed in 1999 he had apologized to and built a relationship with Biehl’s parents and he now works as a driver at an NGO they established in her name that provides after-school programs for kids throughout Cape Town’s townships I left the beige stucco cottage I was renting in Sea Point a wealthy suburb ten minutes from the city center on a sliver of land by the Atlantic Ocean Though Sea Point has always been de facto a white area in 1953 it was officially designated as such by the apartheid government The neighborhood’s streets are narrow and swept clean by a tired army of brown-skinned contract workers in neon vests stamped with the phrase jesus saves Most homes are hidden from view by walls lined with electric fencing when I opened the iron security gate to get a nice view I could watch paragliders jumping from the peak of Lion’s Head behind me and floating down to a lush rugby field near the promenade at the water’s edge a fifteen-minute straight shot out of town a once multicultural neighborhood that was designated a whites-only area in 1966 by the apartheid government; removals of non-whites began in 1968 and proceeded in waves well into the 1970s and many of the old homes and buildings were razed I drove past the defunct power plant and its persistent stink the tangled trees and marsh reeds lining the highway where workhorses grazed on patches of dirty grass at the border of Bonteheuwel a gang-ridden and poor neighborhood of coloreds as the generally Afrikaans-speaking mixed-race population is called a windowless brick building where public toilets are padlocked to the walls and guards armed with machine guns alternately stand watch and help old ladies work the bread slicer Then I took the highway overpass that separates Gugs made possible by the passage in 1950 of the Group Areas Act which aimed to forcibly separate each of the four official South African racial classifications into its own living area (Apartheid means “apartness” in Afrikaans.) In Cape Town and the ocean views; colored people were placed in square government “matchbox houses” in bleak zones like Bonteheuwel Tens of thousands more were moved to so-called green fields on Cape Town’s periphery where they survived by fashioning shacks of corrugated tin rows of drab single-room homes had been constructed to house “bachelor” men whose purpose was to provide labor to whites Gugulethu was established in 1962 to absorb the population overflowing from the older townships of Langa and Nyanga It was originally called Gugulethu Emergency Camp The architects of apartheid dreamed of complete racial segregation “The Native should only be allowed to enter urban areas which are essentially the white man’s creation when he is willing to enter and minister to the needs of the white man and should depart therefrom when he ceases so to minister,” declared the prescient Stallard Commission in 1921 Although colonial powers had for centuries been dividing South Africa along racial lines a policy of discrimination was officially sanctioned by D who was voted into office by an almost entirely white electorate in 1948 The infamous Natives Land Act of 1913 had limited black ownership of land to 7 percent of South Africa’s territory (a figure increased two decades later to around 13 percent) but after 1948 a series of discriminatory laws and practices were instituted to further dispossess black people relocating more than 2 million of them to ten bantustans or “homelands” — underdeveloped rural reserves led by black puppet chiefs and the National Party hoped that they could provide all required labor thereby rendering black workers unnecessary But the colored population did not satisfy the growing needs of industry And few black families could survive in their derelict new homelands building shanties and trolling the streets for work there were 72,711 black people in Cape Town; in 1975 there were a reported 100,530 — in addition to squatters nearly two decades after the end of apartheid nearly 1.5 million black people live in Cape Town Gugulethu’s population of 98,468 remains almost entirely black but township inhabitants have also revamped old a young man must spend several weeks in the bush in an elaborate rite of passage involving circumcision though “the bush” in Gugulethu is an overgrown roadside plot next to a pork wholesaler and a cash-and-carry Gugulethu also houses a small number of somewhat unwelcome refugees and asylum seekers from the Democratic Republic of the Congo When I collected Easy to go to the dentist an elegant woman with close-cropped gray hair fiddling with his rusted Nissan pickup in the open garage He used to get so full of rage that his family sometimes slept outside to escape his temper after thirty years of working in the gardens of a multinational insurance company during which he never made more than $550 a month Wowo received a onetime pension payment of $9,500 which he used to build the sagging overhang and buy a white Ford Sapphire sedan so everyone walked or took public transportation I passed through the entryway into the main room stuffed with ornamental furniture that Easy’s mother had inherited from her employers when she was a domestic worker: three spiffy love seats protected by white cotton covers and decorated with handmade doilies a heavy oak dining-room table pushed into a corner an unwieldy plastic shelving unit displayed an untouched stuffed toy dog a photograph of the three white children Kiki had helped raise and two huge speakers that were connected to a TV in another room and played booming where Easy sat wearing a pressed gray button-down and gray trousers boyish forty-two-year-old with a hearty laugh a collection of gang and prison tattoos on his arms and a scorned ex-girlfriend with long nails and a vendetta Easy and I got in the car and followed NY 111 passing the one house with the pretty front garden and the old company hostels now taken over by squatters companies housed black migrant laborers from the homelands in single-sex dormitory-like structures carting them to and from manual jobs each day and allowing them one month a year to visit their families as apartheid edged toward its demise and the townships became increasingly ungovernable the companies abandoned these buildings and the workers and their families took over deteriorating quarters under faded signs bearing the names of the original owners: wjm construction corp a police tow truck pulls out from a hostel’s courtyard recently renamed Steve Biko Drive — after the founder of the black-consciousness movement who was tortured to death by apartheid forces in 1977 — but still widely referred to by its old name the stands selling barbecued sheep’s heads the herbalist who could help with “weak erection ETC.” We passed a man who stood on his front lawn dressed as a sensei and that gives you the power,” he pronounced in the direction of a dirt patch “He is training his students in karate,” Easy told me “The teacher is out sick today,” the principal explained brightly “The teacher get a new job and leave and they don’t have a replacement.” Easy asked a kid loitering in the courtyard to find his daughter and moments later nine-year-old Aphiwe appeared in the parking area in her navy-and-yellow uniform and heavily scuffed black Mary Janes for whom Aphiwe is the center of the universe has mastered neither the art of braiding nor that of routine Aphiwe’s mother had her at nineteen but left Easy’s house when Aphiwe was two years old and took her child away to the privacy and freedom of her sister’s shack Easy found Aphiwe alone with only an eight-year-old cousin He picked her up and brought her back to his house Xhosa children are discouraged from questioning their elders so Aphiwe didn’t ask about this expedition She sat in the back of the car and played with my ponytail We arrived at the health clinic in the next township where hundreds of black people sat on rows of wooden benches Many middle-class and wealthy South Africans consider free care at a government hospital to range from useless (a routine checkup) to a potential death sentence (surgery) “You get there at nine and you leave at five,” a pregnant woman explained to me Easy’s uncle was friends with the dentist and could speed the process along, so we were ushered to a back room, where a group of women sat chattering loudly. Aphiwe perched gamely on a plastic chair and ate a hot-dog-and-mustard sandwich that Kiki had packed for her. The dentist squirted novocaine into the air once and then swiftly propping Aphiwe’s mouth open with his hand began to insert the huge needle into her gum Her tiny body tightened immediately and she let out a desperate then closed her mouth as tears began to stream down her cheeks Easy lowered his face close to his daughter the dentist jammed the needle in and pulled it out Easy lifted his daughter up and hauled her away past the ladies chatting in the waiting room A little boy looked suspiciously at his grandmother Easy deposited Aphiwe on a square of concrete outside and watched as she heaved on her hands and knees she opened her mouth as the dentist requested he reached in with a pair of heavy steel pliers and ripped her molar from her gum For a split second the room froze and the dentist stood still Then Aphiwe let out a full-throated wail and bolted from the room She flew into the waiting room and flung herself onto a chair and then to the floor brokenhearted moans and spat out a stream of blood wrapped her school sweater across her chest to stop the blood from further staining her yellow shirt We covered the back seat of my car with newspapers and put Aphiwe there people like to joke that your résumé can be blank but for one qualification and you will still become a minister or a tycoon: you need only have served time at Robben Island — Cape Town’s offshore prison where Nelson Mandela and other political prisoners suffered for decades — and your future will be bright and certain In 1994, after three centuries of colonial oppression and forty-six years of apartheid, Mandela became South Africa’s first black president in its first all-inclusive democratic elections. Today, Mandela’s party, the African National Congress, or ANC, still wins two thirds of votes cast. fucking up the country,” said an intoxicated retired teacher wearing an oversize peacoat We were standing in a two-room concrete house in an informal settlement near where Easy lives set among illegal shacks built on a municipal plot a factory worker who had lost her husband to a heart attack and her favorite son to alcoholism and now invited everyone to get drunk at her place so she would have company The teacher was referring to the current South African president $20 million of public funds was spent upgrading Zuma’s private estate in a poor rural village A leaked draft of the public protector’s report found that Zuma had derived “substantial” private benefits from the upgrades to his residence A report by Zuma’s ministers claimed that the improvements were merely security measures: what appeared to be a new swimming pool was in fact a “fire pool,” since there were no fire stations in the area and the structure that the press had misunderstood to be an amphitheater was simply “a structure with steps.” Zuma was cleared of all charges “I vote for ANC because only one movement liberate us,” the teacher said “But Zuma can go to hell in a nutshell.” (This sentiment was reflected at the Johannesburg memorial service for Nelson Mandela this past December at which Zuma’s speech was roundly booed.) many people believe that the most efficient path to riches is to get deep into the ANC; that way a pretty house subsidized by the government and possibly a nice car as some sort of bribe or kickback One of Zuma’s cabinet members spent about $36,000 of taxpayer money to visit a lover jailed in Switzerland on drug charges Former police commissioner and Interpol president Jackie Selebi was found guilty of corruption and of taking bribes from a drug dealer; his successor was dismissed amid allegations that he mishandled a $160 million building lease it is twenty years too late to make such connections and they cannot revise their role during the Struggle Easy and his neighbors watched the endless coverage of the former president’s death with little interest and even less emotion; Mandela was not their man NY 111 and its surrounding streets were once a PAC stronghold But after splintering off from the ANC in 1959 soon after the party declared itself multiracial the PAC began to operate under the charismatic leadership of its founder under what came to be called the “Sobukwe clause,” to indefinite detention on Robben Island separated from his PAC loyalists and from Mandela before he was allowed to return home under house arrest and died of lung cancer that went untreated for weeks while he applied for permission to go to a Johannesburg hospital NY 111 and the neighboring areas are today shared among average working-class people though few admit to having at some point belonged to a gang claimed political ignorance and then told me some people who were politically ignorant in the old days today claim “struggle cred.” Former PAC militants suspect that they chose the wrong party back then and believe that if they had been arrested for attending ANC instead of PAC rallies though of course plenty of ANC members live in poverty in shantytowns across the country you’ll land in the yard of an ex-militant named Mzwabantu “Mzi” Noji who was an APLA soldier in the 1980s and 1990s Easy and Mzi aren’t exactly friends but something perhaps more intimate: They are of these blocks They know the unspoken rules of the neighborhood and the township that Mzi was recruited by APLA as a teenager and spent his twenty-third year in prison on weapons charges after an all-night shoot-out between APLA cadres and apartheid government forces in 1993 When Mandela was elected the following year Mzi was sleeping in a cell that guards flooded at night as a form of torture he was integrated into the newly created South African National Defense Force in which white apartheid-era soldiers served next to the men of color they had formerly oppressed the result of a long-ago mob attack by ANC members He keeps two photographs in his room: in one he is a nineteen-year-old freedom fighter dressed in camouflage sitting on a mound of red earth surrounded by dry brush pointing an assault rifle into the distance The other picture is a poster-size photo of a tank set against the black night emblazoned with the words 3 sa infantry battalion In the upper right corner is an image of a twenty-seven-year-old Mzi in state-issued military fatigues a black beret superimposed on the dark background this time serving five years of a seven-year sentence for a robbery he says was pinned on him After getting into a fight with another prisoner he found a book called Buddhism Without Beliefs: A Contemporary Guide to Awakening He had always been a loner interested in world religions He became a Buddhist and a vegetarian and spent the last two years of his incarceration meditating and gardening meticulous manila folder filled with papers commemorating his various prison accomplishments: a high-school diploma two “Mindfulness Awareness in Action” courses a prize as the best medium-security inmate in the fight against HIV/AIDS and an award of merit for outstanding performance in an 800-meter track event he suspected a kid named Kenya of stealing his nylon car cover We were sitting at a Wimpy Burger and he was drinking orange juice “But what about renouncing violence?” I asked Violence is nearly impossible to escape in Gugulethu Men battle other men to protect the very women and children they then pummel with their own fists Fights between couples sometimes take place in public In a shebeen — the township term for a tavern — a friendly argument can devolve into a knife fight and a small slight directed toward the wrong guy can get you killed he was wiping blood from the previous night’s stabbing off the floor of the Spirit Horse as he has christened his immaculate old turquoise Toyota hurled himself over Mzi’s high iron fence and landed on the brick stoop his chest and stomach punctured nine times He was a twenty-three-year-old who spent his days smoking tik inhaled from a miniature lightbulb connected to a straw as evidenced by the bands of young addicts strutting through the area followed by old addicts limping alone down the streets succumbed to another side effect of tik use Nishno had been at the pale-yellow single-level house he shared with his extended family which he plucked off the line and sold for three dollars at the squatter camp a few roads away Those pants belonged to the boyfriend of Nishno’s twenty-one-year-old niece The boyfriend waited for Nishno to emerge from a nearby shack Nishno broke free and ran down the street to Mzi’s small family compound Mzi and his brother each live in single-room lean-tos in the back yard and one of the adult sisters live in the main two-bedroom house who abided by a personal policy of non-interference peered out briefly at the commotion unfolding on his lawn and then retired to his room But Mzi was concerned about a new mob-justice movement gaining popularity in the townships where terrified or incompetent police have long been unwilling or unable to prevent black-on-black violence police forces were feared as tools of a racist state They raided the townships and routinely tortured prisoners or mad; some people disappeared entirely after a run-in with the cops at a platinum mine near the town of Marikana police forces killed thirty-four striking miners cops tied a Mozambican taxi driver to a police van and dragged him to his death as a stunned crowd tried to intervene But crime committed among locals remains endemic: between 2003 and 2011 an average of 143 murders a year were reported in Gugulethu a rate more than thirty times New York City’s and 454 home burglaries — and these are only the official numbers in a country where many crimes go unreported Vigilante-administered punishment is usually disproportionate and vicious and it is sometimes mistakenly directed at innocent people but it satisfies a communal need to see wrongdoers face consequences Mzi had recently embarked on a campaign to keep NY 111 and NY 119 clear of the all-black neighborhood watch groups — according to Mzi and cops” — that now roam the dirt paths of settlements at night bearing sjamboks — long whips made famous by apartheid police — which they use to punish anyone out after an 8:30 p.m bearing a laminated newspaper article describing a mob murder in Khayelitsha during which a watch group had severely beaten an alleged young robber and then locked him in a portable toilet which the group doused with gasoline and set alight included photos of the dead man’s dismantled shack below a photo of his ash-encrusted corpse Mzi wanted to avoid such a gruesome scene on his streets Mzi got out of bed and approached the gate Nishno’s assailants were surrounded by women and children from the shacks and hostels down the road demanding that Nishno be ejected onto the street and boys like him were always grabbing their phones Let him walk home and face the consequences of stealing bhuti,” Mzi said to a man with a switchblade “But I cannot allow you to kill this boy.” you don’t know the whole story!” they yelled They were angry because I ended the movie before the end.” Mzi had driven Nishno — wrapped in three garbage bags and two blankets to protect the car’s houndstooth interior — to the emergency room and Nishno’s mother had asked that Mzi now check in on him We walked into a chilly waiting area lined with cracked plastic benches We passed a security booth and entered a large windowless space filled with sick and wounded people on beds a tube pulling fluid from the slash near his left nipple He wore an oxygen mask and was asking the doctor if he could have some food a chubby bespectacled white man in his early thirties was bent over a table piled high with bloody gauze fresh out of med school and on a monthlong volunteer stint in the Cape Town townships before beginning his job at a hospital in Delaware smiling pleasantly but looking as if he was about to burst into tears “This isn’t the first time I’ve seen multiple stab wounds like this.” apparently on a tour of the “real South Africa,” were driven through Gugulethu at night a British national of Indian origin named Shrien Dewani a Swedish-born twenty-eight-year-old named Anni Dewani was found dead in the abandoned taxi the next morning in Khayelitsha The tabloids widely described Anni as “beautiful” and Gugulethu as “dangerous,” “notorious,” and “notoriously dangerous.” Investigating authorities soon came to suspect that Shrien had put a hit out on Anni British courts ordered his extradition to South Africa are currently asking for the decision to be blocked until he is fit to stand trial hire a hit man,” a detective directly involved in the case and who wished to remain anonymous told me Despite the political transformations in South Africa and the process of national reconciliation My first months in South Africa were spent primarily with a wealthy group of white people who lived in heavily secured houses by the sea and many were scared to even drive near the places I was warned not to come down with “Amy Biehl syndrome,” in which white do-gooders who work in the townships forget how vulnerable they are Although these privileged folks claimed never to have actively supported the apartheid regime they remained nostalgic for the order and efficiency of that tightly run state in which nobody was stealing the sinks out of the public hospitals and what was out of sight was out of mind White citizens packed stadiums around the country to celebrate Mandela as their great president and to mourn his passing But their everyday lives usually reveal neither an attempt at integration nor an understanding of the lasting effects of apartheid brown-skinned maids and gardeners appear from the ether and disappear as effortlessly and a successful black person is often viewed as either an exception to the laws of nature or a well-connected beneficiary of affirmative action The searing inequality of the city — its organized bands of vagrants picking through the garbage of the rich on trash-collection mornings its sidewalk vendors and glue-sniffing kids milling in the streets next to luxury-car dealerships — is a fact of quotidian life “I don’t know why they won’t come here,” Mzi said Mzi hoped that whites would come into Gugulethu and bring money He had applied without success to be a paramedic Now he spent his days volunteering for the waning PAC attempting to gain benefits and jobs for APLA veterans who had fought for a free South Africa and who now had nothing to show for it But he was also a certified “excursion facilitator,” or tour guide who dreamed of charging fifty dollars a person to tell his history of South Africa as he was ordered to do by his NGO employer; the organization hosted a steady stream of moneyed visitors “How does he do it?” he muttered when he saw the one white socialist who lived in Gugulethu leading a line of Europeans in khaki shorts and highs socks down the street “Because he is white,” he concluded without malice which happened rarely and usually through word of mouth he led them through what he called “the journey of remembrance,” which ran from District Six to Gugulethu stopping at the memorial to seven anti-apartheid fighters killed by armed forces in an ambush in 1986 and at a high marble cross dedicated to Amy Biehl against which an old man and his collection of mutts snoozed Mzi had named his tour company the Social Nexus Consultancy and he didn’t feel confident marketing his business in the hotels and tourist centers downtown upwardly mobile black South African professionals are called can confidently walk into luxury stores and chic restaurants But for people who are somehow marked as township dwellers those parts of the city are an exclusive club at which they are not welcome Mzi and I once had quiche and cappuccinos at a spacious coffee shop near Parliament and when I went to pay the bill at the counter “Are you looking for something?” the waiter asked “My boss wants me to ask you to move away.” Inside the restaurant a colored woman in an apron averted her eyes absently staring at their iPhones or smoking “You are an African from outside of South Africa and I am an African from South Africa.” “You remember apartheid but you won’t know apartheid,” Mzi continued beginning the long-form African handshake: the Western grip followed by a clasping of each other’s thumbs Then he held on loosely as the waiter’s eyes widened “Tell your boss I fought for this land and I have the right to be wherever I want and I ask that you also adopt this attitude.” The waiter mumbled several thank-yous and walked slowly inside an inventor of the future,” Mzi said as we walked away He was speaking of the former prime minister Hendrik Verwoerd who was assassinated by a mentally ill mixed-race parliamentary messenger in 1966 The waiter must be happy I am a Buddhist.” Mzi was considering renaming his company Shanti Tours shanti being a Sanskrit word for “peace.” He was trying to come up with ways he might improve traffic who gave tours to a constant flow of visitors township residents by now understood the quirks of white tourists which Easy summarized as “they take pictures tourists loved kids — and the kids of Gugulethu were generally gregarious with visitors hamming it up gleefully as soon as a camera appeared Easy led tourists to an after-school program where the hastily assembled children would dance or sing traditional songs as smiling white people recorded their every move they stopped their lesson and gathered for photo opportunities “Maybe if you add kids to the mix?” I suggested to Mzi “Maybe tourists like the touch of hope that kids radiate.” He had recently been campaigning to get a group of perpetually unemployed ex-combatants some of whom hadn’t had a full night’s sleep in decades he had helped the same group undergo counseling at a nonprofit center but the program fell apart when the young female therapist appointed to the group told her boss that she was terrified of the dark war-torn men with scarred faces and gruesome stories an American woman cried quietly on three separate occasions All tours of Gugulethu have one thing in common: they end at Mzoli Ngcawuzele’s self-named restaurant on NY 115 including a car wash (two men with a bucket and dish soap) and a souvenir stand (a table displaying ashtrays made from beer-bottle caps) Dozens of strung-out men in dusty neon-yellow vests stand in the streets hoping to usher drivers into parking spaces for a few rand The line for food runs through a room empty except for three deli cases: two full of raw meat in plastic tubs and one full of steaming pap — a maize porridge used to sop up sauce — and a spicy they carry it to a sweltering back room where a collection of soot-covered cooks rub it with spices and roast it over an open fire in a pitch-black oven Easy and I were sitting at a table as pouring rain hit the clear tarps surrounding the dining area surrounded by bottles of top-shelf liquor and a platter of sausages government employees or drug dealers or office managers to afford that kind of alcohol Maybe some of them even lived in the suburbs — people with enough money could always move out of the townships and into more contained neighborhoods two young mothers holding babies on their laps were tucking into a platter of chicken and sharing a can of ginger soda They were in Cape Town on business — though the nature of that business was not revealed “Didn’t that English lady get killed here?” stopped by after her long day as a debt collector and planted a generous kiss on his cheek before heading home A group of colored professionals had left work early and driven into Gugulethu with coolers full of beer A half dozen local women in high heels carted in fruit-flavored wine coolers and ordered four platters of chicken and lamb An elderly white American woman with her family requested a bottle of chilled white wine; her guide returned from the bar next door with twist-top chardonnay balanced on a pile of ice in a cardboard box lined with a trash bag When three large women in sparkling red dresses sidled onto the restaurant’s makeshift stage Easy and I left and drove back to his house A cockroach taxi — the rusty jalopies that roam the blocks — cost $1.50 round-trip within Gugulethu’s borders and occasionally they’re stolen by tsotsis (township gangsters) and we drove across the township to Gugulethu Square and pharmacies that Mzoli and his partners developed in 2009 a line of people extended from a bedraggled pickup truck manned by a fisherman Easy hopped out and sprinted across two lanes of traffic Easy was across the street in a crisp white T-shirt wearing a new brown cap he’d bought for two dollars because a street vendor told him he looked winning in it We watched him chatting exuberantly with the people in line “What is your favorite thing about your dad?” I asked Easy came back with a dripping package of fish Aphiwe helped him wrap it in a plastic bag where a group of teenage boys were pushing his car out of the driveway his brainy eight-year-old niece sitting in the back a child so round and beatific he had been nicknamed Buddha addressing Mzi as “African.” Easy was no longer involved in politics but in the right context he used the old honorific for comrades We continued past the squatter camp whose residents had called for Nishno’s punishment and past the old ironworkers’ hostel Raw sewage streamed out of the building and collected in puddles in the street a well-coiffed woman was hanging her washing to dry We pulled up to Easy’s house and said our goodbyes I maneuvered around a broken-down car and back over the bridge the ocean came into view on my right and bright-green Lion’s Head peak rose before me the gardens on the street medians were carefully manicured I miss it,” I once said to Mzi as we sat in a square of sun on his lawn and the challenges faced by the townships and their residents in this twenty-year-old new South Africa Timeless stories from our 175-year archive handpicked to speak to the news of the day “An unexpectedly excellent magazine that stands out amid a homogenized media landscape.” —the New York Times has opened a new operations base in Atlanta to bring its knowledge and expertise closer to the US market By developing and installing complete electrical systems Van der Leun has been in the electrical engineering business for more than a century and has also developed into a serious player in the maritime industry The company has fitted systems in more than 500 dredging vessels: boosters hopper dredgers and water-injection dredgers The great advantage of these systems is that Van der Leun designs and installs them itself which means that the entire electrical system on board is finely attuned ‘We engineer an efficient and user-friendly system that incorporates state-of-the-art components and automation,’ explains Ronald Visser service department manager with responsibility for the US ‘The program installed on the computer allows the crew to operate the system They can also check whether the system is functioning properly the program will help the crew to resolve them We can also log in remotely and make adjustments since we know all the ins and outs of the system Our customers in the Netherlands wouldn’t expect anything less of us.’ Last year Van der Leun supplied the Great Lakes Dredge & Dock Company in Chicago with its first fully electrical system ordered by Mobile Pulley Works something which is already customary in European dredging vessels ‘We were able to contribute to the specifications from an early stage Using the cable routing program that we’ve developed in-house we determine at the start of a project where the cableways should go Dock companies appreciate the opportunity to brainstorm with us We discuss ideas with them and work together to achieve an optimum product for the customer.’ The Sliedrecht company has worked with various dock companies in the United States and Canada Last year it provided the electrical systems for four Damen tugboats for Hawaii at a dock in Morgan City Van der Leun provided the full electrical systems for dredging company Boskalis and for two fully electric suction-cutter dredgers for Exxon mobile ‘Our Atlanta operations base will also offer services to our Dutch customers active in the US and Canada We’ve got an international network of companies and service hubs and we work in partnership with installers at docks.’ Van der Leun also develops smart systems for hybrid propulsion and for reducing fuel consumption and emissions as well as mobile and other solutions for energy storage This means that it can offer green concepts to assist with the energy transition The company now wants to use all the knowledge and experience it has gained in the Dutch dredging business to help overseas dredging companies Atlanta was chosen as the new operations base due to its large airport and the flexibility of 24/7 availability for customers While working on the project in Morgan City one member of the Van der Leun team met the love of his life ‘He’s now engaged to be married and has already settled in Atlanta,’ laughs Visser We’ve been active this market for many years which has traditionally been home to dredging companies and where many dredging vessels have been built brother or uncle who works in the dredging industry The industry also has its own mindset: down to earth And we’re proud of the systems that we produce for the dredging industry and viewpoints expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Dredging Today recently won a contract to supply equipment for new Water Injection Dredger (WID) includes construction and commissioning of the electrical switchboards for this new WID The switchboards will be built in the Netherlands and shipped to America currently built at St Johns Shipbuilding in Palatka (FL) has an impressive flow of 20,000 GPM (4,542m3/h) a width jet beam of 27ft (8.2m) and a total installed power of 770 HP (566kW) the North Carolina State Ports Authority (NCSPA)’s largest port the dredger will perform maintenance in the main seaports of Wilmington and Morehead City in order to safeguard the depth of the ports The delivery of the vessel is set for the beginning of 2021 Tanisha Williams met Kevin Amos on December 29 but sometimes visited his girlfriend and their infant daughter at the red-shingled apartment complex in Saginaw and a thin layer of snow coated the ground She poured two glasses of Crown Royal on ice three of Patrick’s children were watching TV She heard Patrick’s voice rise and stepped back into the living room where she saw Kevin bleeding from the mouth and Patrick’s hand raw “the meat missing off [his] knuckle,” she would later testify The metal braces Kevin wore had torn Patrick’s skin but Patrick ordered Tanisha to block his path and kicked him repeatedly in the head and genitals At some point—no one involved in the incident could remember the exact sequence of events—Patrick’s cousin Patrick would confess to a girlfriend that he attacked Kevin because Kevin was “mean mugging” him—or looking at him the wrong way Patrick became concerned that Kevin would defecate but she was barefoot and in a remote building with two male cousins “I began screaming and yelling,” she told me twisting the fabric of her shirt and pressing his fist into her neck she began to wrap tape around Kevin’s head a prosecutor at the Michigan attorney general’s office “Because I ain’t have no choice but to do it.” once the center of a thriving automobile gear industry A manufacturing decline in the late twentieth century led to urban decay Tanisha and her four siblings lived in a Spartan 900-square-foot home She remembers sitting in the house with only popcorn to eat one of her mother’s boyfriends dipped her feet in a tub of scalding water Her mother grabbed her before the man could fully submerge her ‘One of us is going to die today,’” wrote a woman who had been brutalized for decades She married her boyfriend at the time so that he could act as guardian for her children while she underwent prolonged treatment Tanisha did odd jobs in the neighborhood and collected bottles to buy chips and hot dogs for her little brothers walking alone in the dark to get food for them all her stepfather entered her room and offered her ice cream— especially appealing because she was often “super hungry”—in exchange for sex acts Tanisha’s mother later found out about the abuse “You done slept with my husband,” Tanisha recalls her mother saying “I don’t want to look at you.” Tanisha was around 10 years old She had an abortion and was sent back to Saginaw to live with her father Sharon Sanders was married to Tanisha’s father then; Tanisha and Sanders still consider themselves related Tanisha’s father was incarcerated for the sexual abuse of multiple young female relatives; he and Sanders later divorced.) Tanisha was “a hurt she was “not able to be a mom.” She left the baby with Sanders staying with adults who lived “the faster life.” Until then her only job had been at a fast-food restaurant; she remembers making less than $5 an hour She found she could make $200 for oral sex: Her clientele and an exuberant personality; she wore tight sparkly dresses and organized parties where she provided sexual services “I was already introduced to being utilized by men.” and stopped doing sex work—but her boyfriend abused and cheated on her and sold small quantities of drugs to make money She summarized that period in one word: “Survival.” a step-cousin introduced her to Patrick Martin a father of five who had recently separated from his wife Patrick and Tanisha quickly decided to live together They would split bills and maintain independent enterprises “This is a perfect setup,” Tanisha recalled thinking once slapping her so hard that she saw “a flash of light.” He beat and choked her “wasn’t nobody else … gonna have a pistol but him.” but my pride was too high,” Tanisha told me “I could deal with this while I stack some money somehow Kevin Amos stopped by for the glass of Crown Royal I first heard from Tanisha in February of this year when an envelope arrived in my P.O box containing a response to a questionnaire that I had sent “I’m at the beginning of my project,” I had written in an accompanying letter to Tanisha and 548 others detained at Women’s Huron Valley Correctional Facility in Michigan “My goal is to write an article about why and how women end up in prison on murder charges.… I have attached 16 questions.… Tell me everything you think I should know about your story.” Tanisha later told me that she had lugged a communal typewriter to her bunk and fed the paper in “I applied duct tape to the victim’s head,” she typed “Only while a gun hung over me forcing me to assist... and I’m sending out batches to more states and run statistics on 608 surveys: These are the responses from a total of 5,098 surveys sent to people serving time on murder and manslaughter charges in 45 state facilities for women in 22 states I started the project in late 2018, after I began investigating the story of Nicole Addimando a young mother in upstate New York who had killed her abusive partner in what she said was an act of self-defense I came upon dozens of cases across the country in which a woman insisted that she had been trying to protect herself or a loved one while the state countered that she was a cold-blooded killer and sought a harsh prison sentence Race and socioeconomic circumstances often played a prominent role which is fitting given the history of gender-based criminalization in the United States One of the first recorded cases occurred in 1855 when an enslaved Missouri 19-year-old named Celia killed her master I found limited studies, conducted in single prisons or states, consistently showing that up to 94 percent of people in some women’s detention facilities experienced physical and sexual violence prior to incarceration I couldn’t find systemic data to support what experts told me and what I witnessed while reporting: Women’s prisons are populated not only by abuse and assault survivors but by people who are incarcerated for their acts of survival About 230,000 women and girls are incarcerated, an increase of more than 700 percent since 1980 The female prison population is dwarfed by the larger population of more than two million men on whom conversations about mass incarceration center the criminal legal system has stripped away context and circumstance Women must also navigate gendered binaries in a system designed by and for men: Offenders are violent Female victims should fit a paradigm of innocence: a petite heterosexual white woman with a clean record though she has been unyieldingly victimized But even women who do square with the paradigm struggle because they survived “Lawyers say the only correct battered woman when talking about self-defense is a dead one,” Sue Osthoff co-founder of the National Clearinghouse for the Defense of Battered Women Her survival itself becomes reason to condemn her a post-conviction attorney for incarcerated survivors of domestic violence in Illinois for data on women in prison for defending themselves you could just ask the women directly,” she said That comment was the seed from which this work has grown then an assistant professor of political science at Yale University I designed 16 questions to assess the abuse and trauma backgrounds and unique pathways of women into U.S (Sanchez now works in the ACLU’s data and analytics department.) My two-page survey asked for demographic information—age and sentence length—and posed qualitative questions Those who speak of abuse are subject to doubt and skepticism; in a courtroom or a prison they are often accused of trying to avoid consequences by making “the abuse excuse.” To reduce any appearance of dishonesty I did not ask “priming” questions about domestic abuse my queries concerned the respondent’s relationship to the person they were convicted of killing; the days leading up to the event; factors they believed contributed to their conviction I contacted the media liaison or public information officer at the departments of corrections in the majority of states and requested a list of all women incarcerated on murder and manslaughter charges but many sent names: more than 1,000 in Florida Mental illness, which affects nearly half of those in prison was another hurdle: “Every prosecutor describes women convicted of murder as cunning and evil,” Kwaneta Harris wrote from Texas “I’ve yet to encounter these ‘monsters.’ Although I’ve met plenty of women with mental illness untreated and undiagnosed … the ones who you really need to talk to are too mentally damaged to talk to you.” They said that they wanted their stories told: sometimes anonymously Many wanted to make known their own experiences and those of others who had transferred between state and federal facilities for 17 years repeated a common sentiment: “I have lived amongst thousands of different women prisoners from different countries I have probably come across six of these women whom I would even think were murderers Nearly 30 percent were serving life sentences including life without the possibility of parole including life sentences (weighted at 100 years) was 55 years Seventy-two percent of respondents had been represented by state-appointed defenders, meaning they most likely qualified as indigent. A 2015 Prison Policy Initiative analysis found that the median annual income for a woman prior to her incarceration was $13,890 58 percent of the income of a woman who was not incarcerated and 34 percent of the income of a man who was not incarcerated unfamiliar with the legal system,” one respondent summarized Another woman wrote that her case was her lawyer’s first-ever murder trial One wrote that the judge fell asleep and her attorneys “said it was okay.” Sixty percent of respondents reported experiencing abuse—physical or some combination of the three—before entering prison (Thirty-one percent did not give enough information for a determination.) The fact that a majority of respondents had been abused suggests a nexus between abuse and incarceration for women “I have yet to meet a person who hasn’t been sexually or physically abused,” wrote Kwaneta from Texas Kwaneta told me that she had been kidnapped and gang-raped as a child (Her mother confirmed this.) Kwaneta is incarcerated for killing a boyfriend who didn’t want her to “disparage” the dead at trial Having a female body had opened the respondents up to harm long before they were considered to have harmed others raped while being driven home from babysitting “Ruined before I had a chance,” wrote another but I was molested by a sheriff from age 7 to about 9 years old “It was supposed to be me,” one woman wrote “I never thought I would be the survivor and he ‘the victim.’” of enduring physical violence: forced to kneel “on uncooked grits until my knees were bloody,” kicked “with steel-toed boots,” hit in the head with “a tire wrench.” They wrote of crushing poverty and upheaval: One woman had used “the bathroom outside for years shower[ing] in the water hose.” Another said that when she was 19 she lived with her drug-addicted mother in a “condemned house” in the days leading up to the killing she committed when she fought off an attempted rape A confluence of life factors usually converged—many beyond a person’s control I received a letter in purple crayon from a 32-year-old Black woman who wrote that “the judge … gave me to [sic] much time and I was 11 when I did the murder.” I looked up her story and diagnosed as mentally ill and developmentally disabled she stabbed a stranger in the heart with a kitchen knife she lived in an isolated cell in an adult jail before being sent to a facility for children with mental illnesses Childhood abuse and neglect rippled out into adulthood More than 40 years of research and multiple studies show that abuse begets abuse and that sexual victimization in childhood raises the risk of sexual victimization in adulthood Children who have been objectified and betrayed can have issues with trust and find it difficult to navigate adult relationships My survey found that people abused as children were more than twice as likely to report abuse as adults: Nearly 75 percent reported revictimization versus 33 percent among those who didn’t report abuse as children—meaning that those with abuse histories are more than twice as likely to be victimized in their later years Respondents found it hard to prove that they had been abused because domestic violence and rape are private violations they faced another problem: There was a dead body “It was supposed to be me,” Jema wrote to me were in prison for trying to protect themselves or loved ones from physical or sexual violence If my findings are representative of the population incarcerated for murder and manslaughter in all U.S more than 4,400 women and girls are serving lengthy sentences for acts of survival and that there are most likely others in similar circumstances serving time on lesser charges While many claimed straightforward self-defense against a romantic partner others wrote of trying to survive in ways that exist outside the typical ideas of gender-based violence the women are not blameless,” Carol Jacobsen director of the Michigan Women’s Justice & Clemency Project they didn’t have a whole lot of choices.”A woman was often convicted for a man’s actions or for her involvement with a man who had committed a crime Thirty-three percent of respondents said that they had been convicted of committing their crime with a male partner and 13 percent said that they had been convicted of committing their crime with their abuser—often but not 50 years,” wrote a woman who had driven a car for her abusive boyfriend after he’d killed a man during a burglary “Fifty years for driving a car under duress … with the threat always there to kill me and take away my kids for talking or leaving him.” Motherhood figured prominently in a woman’s decisions; 64 percent of my respondents said they were parents and 14 percent did not answer the question “One topic … affects the majority of female prisoners: Our children,” wrote Kwaneta in Texas Bars and razor-wire don’t erase motherhood.” Some women said they were in prison for trying to protect a child A white woman was serving 40 years in the South for shooting the man she said had beaten her daughter and raped her toddler grandson and a Black woman was serving life in a mid-Atlantic state for shooting a man she witnessed molesting her five-year-old son Other women were convicted because they had not protected a child. In Michigan in 2010, Corrine Baker, a 25-year-old survivor of childhood sexual abuse, threw her body in front of her four-year-old son in an attempt to bear the brunt of her boyfriend’s attack Corrine and her son were hospitalized after the beating and Corrine gave an interview to a local TV station; in the video she has two black eyes and wounds dotting her face She is serving 13 to 30 years for her failure to save her child “I just lived through it,” Mary wrote to me but about half of respondents pleaded guilty—often because they were marginalized or did not trust their lawyer I received a response from an indigenous woman in the Northwest despite acting in self-defense against a man who was “abusive physically and threatened to keep her child if she left He told me the woman had a weak case and added that in court “Women get a lot of fuckin’ benefit of the doubt,” he said the Illinois attorney for incarcerated domestic violence survivors “People who have lived their whole lives not being believed— if they are women maybe a drug user—think they won’t be believed by a jury those who went to trial received a sentence nearly two times higher than those who did not and were approximately five times more likely to receive a life sentence received a sentence length that was roughly 10 percent higher than all others pleaded guilty in 2010 to second-degree murder while held in Saginaw County Jail a situation she found herself in largely because she had tried to make amends for Kevin’s death “I was ignorant to the system and its workings and it worked against me on every facet,” she told me “The rules weren’t articulated for a person with zero understanding to understand.” Patrick wrapped Kevin in a blanket and put him in a closet he removed the body and dropped it down an embankment on the outskirts of town Tanisha and Patrick moved to a more isolated apartment and kept a gutting knife tucked in her waistband “Something was gonna happen bad for someone,” she told me “Most likely me.” Within two months of Kevin’s death Tanisha gathered some $200 and four outfits and fled to a roadside motel without a home or anyone she trusted enough to talk to She had been involved in a murder with a known drug dealer who threatened to kill her and knew where her family lived Tanisha decided her only chance was to stay moving “I pushed what happen to me to the deepest depths of consciousness,” she recalled Tanisha was pregnant and determined to get clean and make a change she began to see a man around town who bore an unnerving resemblance to Kevin She feared intensely for her daughter’s safety Each time Tanisha entered her home at night as she swept the place with her gun cocked Only once it was clear would she carry Hon’Esty inside two people testified at trial that Patrick said he was thinking about killing Tanisha; he worried that she would talk to police and had unsuccessfully attempted to convince her to meet up with him several times Tanisha made a New Year’s resolution for 2009: She would tell the truth she called an attorney she’d heard of named Steven Snyder Tanisha told Snyder that she wanted to talk to police but needed immunity a Michigan State Police detective who had been handed the cold case in 2006 and a Saginaw County prosecutor signed a proffer a written agreement that allows a person to speak of a crime with the assurance that their words won’t be used against them in criminal proceedings a client typically provides a piece of evidence that allows authorities to determine their value; then a better deal is negotiated But Tanisha signed a single agreement that offered her no protection from charges the first time she had ever spoken of the crime I showed the proffer letter to David Moran co-founder of the Michigan Innocence Clinic He characterized it as “lousy.” I asked Moran if it was unusual for an attorney to allow a client to give a full statement to police without discussing the content beforehand “The lawyer would want to hear the client’s story before having her tell it in a proffer,” he said and she led Speary through the crime scene She told Speary that Patrick “had this rage … he frightened me .. he was more dangerous than the average guy that I have been involved in .. he was dangerous without maybe knowin’ it.” And she told Speary that following the killing she had “spiraled like super down.” Tanisha explained that she was coming forward to give closure to Kevin’s family—and to get closure for herself “I just wanna apologize to the family … for even takin’ this long to get the strength to tell ’em what happened.” Though Tanisha remained terrified of Patrick “I started having joy in my life,” she told me She thought Snyder and Speary would protect her and that a prosecutor would recognize her courage and commitment to justice “Because this is America.… I thought if I was just honest the truth was going to set me free based off American values.” Speary interviewed witnesses widely and collected evidence. Then, on June 22, 2009 Patrick called 911 to report that his girlfriend Tanisha told me that Speary had called her days before Kukla’s death; on the call Speary asked for Tanisha’s permission to tell Patrick that she had been speaking with police She theorized that police had nonetheless confronted Patrick and that “he thought [Kukla] was the one who talked.” Tanisha turned 27 the day Kukla died She recalled that Speary called her that morning “in a panic,” saying “he did it again,” and advising her to find a safe place because police didn’t know where Patrick was no one working for the state offered to provide her with security.) “I feel if I had never entered the agreement “Every year at my birthday I think about her didn’t respond to requests for an interview Tanisha also believed that her incarceration was related to the fact that Kukla was white ‘We have to get him off the streets by any means,’” she told me She was charged with first-degree murder and booked into Saginaw County Jail “She just was always looking for me [after that],” Tanisha told me “She would sit at her desk at school writing me letters.” According to a letter that White later wrote to the judge he was constrained by a “$1,000 cap” on his legal work for Tanisha he was paid $27.40 per hour—a rate that diminished the more he worked “is the legal equivalent of performing brain surgery It’s complex and requires a great deal of skill to be able to do it right.” A 2008 National Legal Aid & Defender Association report on Michigan’s indigent defense systems studied sample counties and found that none of their public defender services were constitutionally adequate which also exists across the United States created “a conflict of interests between a lawyer’s ethical duty to competently defend each and every client and her financial self-interests that require her to invest the least amount of time possible in each case to maximize profit,” according to the report Since 2011, legislative efforts have led to indigent defense reform in Michigan, and in 2019 Saginaw opened its first public defender’s office a former prosecutor who heads the new office told me that $1,000 to work a homicide was “insane,” and that the previous system meant that attorneys “basically lost money” on major cases But Fenner didn’t understand why Tanisha needed an attorney at all then the attorney general’s office turns on her Sanders told me that she had arrived for what she believed was a hearing and was surprised to be taken aside by White who asked that she convince Tanisha to testify at Patrick and Terrance’s trial and it need to come to an end … release all of us from all of this .. you need to give it to them.” Sanders had no experience with the legal system and was caring for one of Tanisha’s daughters She told me that she believed she was helping Tanisha and knew nothing about a plea deal “I thought they was gonna let her come home … because she had gave them what they wanted.” after two hours of Sanders’s exhortations and nine months in jail agreed to testify in exchange for a second-degree murder plea that she originally believed was 20 years flat “I took the plea ’cause I was sick of being in there White did not respond to a request for comment Tanisha needed to inhabit contradictory roles: moral and credible enough for a jury to trust but blameworthy and sufficiently deplorable to exist as an extension of the man who killed Kevin and to therefore merit her own conviction characterized Tanisha and the others as “jackals.” Baker questioned Tanisha as a key witness over two days using her testimony as a basis for a larger narrative Baker alternately diminished and commended Tanisha He told the jury that when Tanisha met Patrick she was living “a wasted life … she is prostituting herself She has children that she’s not living with.” Tanisha was “not a very reflective or thoughtful person.” But she “had some conscience” and had come forward but “that’s not a defense to homicide.… The law says You’ve got to—you’ve got to take your chances.” “[Tanisha’s] choice was she should die,” Jacobsen of the Michigan Women’s Justice & Clemency Project It doesn’t matter that he’s going to kill you... “They got me in here and really don’t know what that man did to me that night,” Tanisha said “Black women can be disposed as an object of punishment in order to demonstrate that the system works,” Alisa Bierria an assistant professor of African American studies at the University of California and a co-founder of Survived & Punished an organization that supports incarcerated survivors of gender-based violence that’s what it is: It has to perform justice in order to have good copy but it performs that on the backs of Black women all the time because nobody is interested in the full dimensionality of their story as a human being.” I can’t even believe this is my life for real,” Tanisha told me What is all of this about?’ I love taking care of the earth I got so much suffering and I never did nothing.” The authorities “didn’t and don’t care what happened to me No one don’t even know how I lived.… They got me in here and really don’t know what that man did to me that night.” Patrick Martin called me from Kinross Correctional Facility in northern Michigan where he is serving life for armed robbery and two murders (He pleaded no contest to killing Debra Kukla after a jury convicted him of killing Kevin Amos.) Patrick said that he had bipolar disorder with psychotic features was “a full-blown alcoholic,” and had been institutionalized in 2007 and 2008 He described years of “madness,” and told me that his 2009 arrest was “almost a relief.” Patrick could not express why his mental illness and alcoholism manifested in lethal violence but he could speak clearly to why Tanisha and his cousin Terrance had participated in Kevin Amos’s murder “I always had them guns and stuff.… My own mom would be scared now chief of criminal enforcement and quality of life for the city of Detroit We spoke at length about his reasons for charging and sentencing Tanisha to decades in prison considering the role she played in the actual crime and in helping authorities Baker explained that when a witness has accepted a lengthy sentence it can benefit the prosecutor who puts her on the stand “Part of what goes into making a witness like [Tanisha] credible is that she’s paying for what she did,” Baker said If a jury takes somebody that gets … probation or whatever that’s argued to the hilt by the other side that they would say and do anything to get this sentence.” This suggests that a prosecutor who has nearly total discretion in charging decisions may be incentivized to seek the most serious charges that ultimately carry extensive sentences Baker also argued that Tanisha’s sentence was a form of justice for Kevin and his family was “the one that actually in that sense literally took the life She made sure that he wasn’t going to get those last breaths.” the medical examiner testified that Kevin died of asphyxiation because there was duct tape on his mouth and liquid in his lungs He also testified that two quarters were found in Kevin’s stomach and a bag of powder was found in his mouth and that a dead person cannot swallow—so Kevin was alive when the quarters were put into his mouth Since her first interview with Speary in 2009 Tanisha has denied any knowledge of the bag or coins testified that he briefly stopped by the apartment on the night of the attack and saw Kevin bound on the floor looking to cut a deal to get out two months early and in order to prove that he was reliable offered a detail that “nobody else would know except for somebody that had firsthand information,” he testified The detail was that Patrick “said that he put 50 cents in [Kevin’s] mouth to make it look like a drug transaction.” it seemed possible that Patrick may have removed and replaced the tape over Kevin’s mouth serving a life sentence in a southern Michigan prison Baker told the jury: “It’s 20 to 40 years out of her life “I think that she would be a good subject for being paroled.” Baker provided her with a letter on attorney general’s office letterhead He wrote that she had participated in the homicide “after being threatened.” candid testimony and remorse for her role in the crime,” Baker wrote was of invaluable assistance in bringing the other Defendants to justice.… We believe that Ms Williams can be rehabilitated and someday live a law-abiding life.” I asked him what Tanisha’s lengthy sentence was supposed to accomplish as well as a rehabilitative value,” he said He lived in a facility for people with mental health issues In 2019, Patrick Jr., then 27, shot MoeNeisha Simmons-Ross, Tanisha’s 26-year-old niece and a mother of three who was also pregnant with Patrick Jr.’s child. MoeNeisha and the baby died. Her brother told local media that MoeNeisha’s other children “were in the apartment and they saw what happened.” “The system is a freaking violence-producing factory,” Bierria A theme emerged in my research: As in Tanisha’s case before their involvement in the legal system were regularly disregarded or damaged by state systems from Child Protective Services to schools to police Families and individuals in desperate situations did not have access to quality services or to sustained services—and were often scared of seeking outside help “In the Black community you don’t go to the cops,” Tanisha told me labeled “aggressive” and “dangerous.” At home After she explained why she had welts on her legs to a trusted teacher she says she “paid terribly for it.” Sandra was later a victim of domestic violence and rape she was arrested for killing a woman in what she says was an act of self-defense “The tragedies we suffered as little girls and young women in a sense ‘groomed and doomed’ us to this current state of modernized slavery,” Sandra wrote me “I have been the recipient of acts of violence since I was a child and the law was virtually nowhere to be found But the one time I fight back because I am afraid for my life Bierria observed that stories of gender-based criminalization were the result of the legal system’s design and function “Those things animate the system we have.… What you see are formalized acts of profound people have long been engaging in concentrated community-based anti-violence and transformative justice work “There’s no magic answer that will get us where we need to go All we have is us.… I think people are on it The respondents to my survey offered various solutions effective protection for sexual and domestic violence victims changing incentives for police and prosecutors engaging offenders and victims in restorative justice processes One woman suggested that people be permitted to tour prisons and jails: “Allow the public to see who is in their prisons.” wanted to be seen—as a way to advocate for herself and others I asked her why she responded to my letter in the first place “I know everything I’ve been through,” she said “This matters for women.… I felt that every little bit helps.” Tanisha understood that at each turn she had been failed: as an abused child and perhaps most significantly by a state apparatus that reduced and exploited her story and good-faith efforts to bring closure to Kevin and his family She never complained about the abysmal conditions at Huron Valley and works disinfecting the facility at night I asked Tanisha how she remained so persistently optimistic “Something in my spirit that sustains me.” She thought of her efforts to shine a light on injustice in biblical terms: as a mustard seed This story was produced in partnership with The Appeal, and was supported by the Pulitzer Center. and a PEN America Writing for Justice fellow Emily Crisman became a staff writer for the Chattanooga Times Free Press in 2009 Emily graduated with a degree in humanities from the University of Colorado at Boulder in 2006 This document may not be reprinted without the express written permission of Chattanooga Times Free Press Material from the Associated Press is Copyright © 2025 audio and/or video material shall not be published rewritten for broadcast or publication or redistributed directly or indirectly in any medium Neither these AP materials nor any portion thereof may be stored in a computer except for personal and noncommercial use The AP will not be held liable for any delays errors or omissions therefrom or in the transmission or delivery of all or any part thereof or for any damages arising from any of the foregoing Look out for your first newsletter in your inbox soon We help you navigate a myriad of possibilities Sign up for our newsletter for the best of the city By entering your email address you agree to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy and consent to receive emails from Time Out about news Sign up for our email to enjoy your city without spending a thing (as well as some options when you’re feeling flush) Our newsletter hand-delivers the best bits to your inbox Sign up to unlock our digital magazines and also receive the latest news By entering your email address you agree to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy and consent to receive emails from Time Out about news, events, offers and partner promotions. Kuala Lumpur It was a dream come true for Sitka’s head chef Chen Kim Leun when he took part in the semi-finals of the San Pellegrino Young Chef 2018 competition which aims to identify the next big thing in the culinary world which took place at Singapore’s Asia Culinary Institute on October 23 saw him compete against ten of the best young chefs in Southeast Asia one of whom would go on to compete in the grand finale in Milan from May 11 to 13 2018 Sadly, the 26-year-old didn’t win – the top spot went to Jake Kellie from Singapore’s Burnt Ends – but nevertheless he still impressed the judges with his entry dish: aged duck with daikon fondant We spoke to Kim about the inspiration behind the dish Where did the idea for the dish come from?The aged duck was one of the first few dishes we put on Sitka’s menu when we first opened the restaurant The concept of Sitka revolves around local produce but we aren’t particularly Malaysian or European – we’re just about modern gastronomy – and Sitka Studio [Sitka’s test kitchen upstairs] is where we present to diners a new way of experiencing the ingredients that they’re familiar with The competition required us to cook a signature dish that represented our restaurants which has a story behind This whole dish also highlights Malaysian elements – the bao was made with a char siew-like duck jam using a duck leg jerky and the daikon reminds me of the lou ngap (Cantonese-style braised duck) I used to have; it’s been sous-vide for two hours with a master stock made with shiitake mushroom so it absorbs all the flavours of the sauce while maintaining a firm texture What does the ageing process do to the duck?The aged duck that I used in the competition was a 90-day aged duck but also a different texture of skin because the fat has broken down So what you’ll get instead is not a super crispy duck but a piece that melts in your mouth – you’re not chewing on the fat as you would on an unaged duck What was it like to compete at such a high level It was very intense when I arrived in Singapore; it felt like everyone had their game face on everyone was friendly and helped each other out – there was an understanding that we’re all professionals and it was as if we were working in one kitchen; if any one of us needed something I think that element of friendship is missing in the Malaysian restaurant scene – here it’s too competitive; it’s rare to see a chef finish work but the intensity came from knowing that we’re competing at a high level of skill How did you feel when you didn’t win the contest?I felt sad It was more of a missed opportunity to expand the network of the restaurant to present the Malaysian dining scene on a bigger stage – imagine we would’ve gone to Milan to present Malaysian cooking to a panel of judges from around the world This dish will make an appearance as part of a seven-course dinner in Sitka Studio on November 24 Thanks for subscribing! Look out for your first newsletter in your inbox soon! twitteryoutubepinterestinstagramAbout us Contact us Van der Leun China has just reported the successful completion of tests and the commissioning of the 7000m³ trailing suction hopper dredger Hai Gong 101 is back from a successful sea trials and dredging test which started on April 8th and lasted until the April 15 Van der Leun delivered the main switchboard and power management system for the Hai Gong 101 some years ago The company commissioned the main switchboard and power management system and made sure everything meets the latest rules and regulations of CCS after it experienced 4-years of delay “Also the simulation was set up with methodology via Python – OPC DA which helped save around 7 days of test time and decreased the cost for ship owner to successfully deliver the project,” Van der Leun said Van der Leun congratulated the complete team of the Hai Gong 101 for the successful sea trials The newbuild will soon be put to use for a maintenance dredging project in the Yangtze River Port Essential digital access to quality FT journalism on any device Complete digital access to quality FT journalism with expert analysis from industry leaders Complete digital access to quality analysis and expert insights complemented with our award-winning Weekend Print edition Terms & Conditions apply Discover all the plans currently available in your country See why over a million readers pay to read the Financial Times all of whom were convicted of the 1993 murder of American Fullbright student Amy Biehl attend the Truth and Reconciliation Commission's amnesty hearing in Cape Town WE ARE NOT SUCH THINGS: The Murder of a Young American and the Search for Truth and Reconciliation Amy Biehl drove several friends to a township on the outskirts of Cape Town It was probably a bad idea for Amy — a 26-year old white American Fulbright scholar working to improve the lives of black women and children in South Africa — to venture into the township in those “final fiery days of apartheid.” Her car was set upon by a mob chanting “one settler one bullet.” The brick that smashed her windshield caved in her skull — or maybe it was a different brick — but did not kill her A group of men and boys then surrounded Amy who was kicked and stabbed and died soon after at a police station Amy’s wealthy parents later publicly forgave her killers and employed two of them in the humanitarian organization they founded in their late daughter’s name told and retold by Katie Couric and Diane Sawyer with “over 100,000 search results on Google,” writes Justine van der Leun “We Are Not Such Things.” The title is a quote from Easy Nofemela in response to a government lawyer who asserted that he and the others convicted of murdering Amy did so “with wanton brutality like a pack of sharks smelling blood.” The men were nevertheless granted amnesty by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission South Africa’s solution to the crimes of apartheid “lest they ‘live with us like a festering sore,’ according to [Nelson] Mandela.” The story intrigued van der Leun when she relocated to Cape Town in 2011 for her South African fiance’s work With time on her hands — she had previously published “a light travel memoir to nobody’s notice” — van der Leun Was the mob that attacked Amy loyal to Mandela’s African National Congress or the more militant Pan Africanist Congress Did those who confessed to and were imprisoned for the murder commit it Why didn’t police take Amy to the hospital What did the ANC gain from Amy’s martyrdom What did the killers get from their perhaps false confessions “find the Big Truth about the Amy Biehl story.” According to Easy Nofemela — charming sometimes drunk and and van der Leun’s steady companion through most the book — “the truth is not anymore existing for years and years.” if you commit to listening to people’s stories now disillusioned and bearing “a passing resemblance to a hard-living Santa Claus.” She parses the institutional amnesia and deliberate obfuscation that is South African record keeping She travels to the townships so often that Easy gives her the Xhosa name “Nomzamo,” meaning “she who strives” (“or And she locates a white South African truck driver she gives the pseudonym Daniel de Villiers was deemed politically inconvenient and thus buried That she is able to extend equal empathy to Ilmar Pikker is evidence of a writer who understands that the feel-good story can conceal the festering sore her book calls to mind Joan Didion’s 1991 essay “Sentimental Journeys.” Where Didion focused on one Hispanic and four black boys wrongly accused of a rape in Central Park van der Leun must consider the sweep of colonialism and the institutions and people using Amy’s murder for ill and good and crafts a narrative both fuller and more intimate than the one the world was told But she impresses upon the reader that no one life or death is worth more than another and for writing a masterpiece of reported non fiction The Newsday app makes it easier to access content without having to log in Unlimited Digital AccessOnly 25¢for 6 months Copyright ©2025 Newsday. All rights reserved. While the crowd wasn't quite as large as the one at last year's Mountain Education Foundation fundraiser featuring Herschel Walker, MEF Executive Director Katie Hanners said this year's event with speaker John Quinones, ABC News correspondent and host of "What Would... Emily Crisman became a staff writer for the Chattanooga Times Free Press in 2009. She also writes for Chatter Magazine. Emily graduated with a degree in humanities from the University of Colorado at Boulder in 2006. Copyright © 2025, Chattanooga Times Free Press, Inc. This document may not be reprinted without the express written permission of Chattanooga Times Free Press, Inc. That day violence was brewing, and Biehl, among the only white people in the township, quickly became a target: She was attacked by an angry mob, beaten, and stabbed to death. A high-profile trial followed, during which four black men were convicted of Biehl’s murder and sentenced to long prison stays. The ANC was voted into power in 1994, marking the official end of the country’s long struggle against apartheid. Soon thereafter, Mandela and Archbishop Desmond Tutu introduced the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, hearings designed to offer perpetrators and victims an opportunity to come face-to-face, to acknowledge crimes, and to seek and grant absolution. In 2011, nearly 20 years later, the young American journalist Justine van der Leun, on sabbatical with her fiancé in his native South Africa, encountered Biehl’s story and, surprised to see that it had never been the subject of a book, set out to write one. With the family’s initial cooperation (she’d later lose it), she endeavored to retell Biehl’s ordeal and that of her parents’ remarkable act of forgiveness. She spent four years researching (plus another writing), and now Van der Leun has just published We Are Not Such Things: The Murder of a Young American, a South African Township, and the Search for Truth and Reconciliation. The book is a fascinating case study, a feat of investigative journalism that offers entrée into the impossibly murky potage of present-day South African national dynamics. It’s also, I was pleased to discover, a total page-turner, a gripping Serial-like true-crime story. Van der Leun, who now lives in Brooklyn, discussed her book with me by phone. You wrote that after a few months of research you were convinced you’d stumbled upon a story that desperately needed telling, or at least one that you desperately needed to tell. Explain. Well, I landed in South Africa with very little knowledge of the country. My husband (then fiancé) is SouthAfrican; I moved there so he could take a sabbatical from his job. I moved into a well-off white suburb immediately. When you go into Cape Town, when you land at the airport, you drive past townships to get to the city center and the suburbs by the ocean. You could see the townships behind these walls, see people trying to cross the highway to get from one township to the other, these corrugated tin roofs. I would ask people: Can I go? What’s going on there? And again and again people said, you can’t go. It’s too dangerous. When I kept pushing, they said, don’t get Amy Biehl syndrome—basically when a well-meaning, probably white person from Europe or America wanders blindly into the townships and is taken down. When I heard that, I looked into who Amy Biehl was. I was fascinated. Finally, Sam, my husband, said why don’t you look into it. You’re clearly obsessed. I thought how could this happen to this person, how ironic, how strange and amazing that her parents have forgiven the men that killed her, and not only that, that these men call them Grandmother and Grandfather. Did you see yourself in Amy? In the sense that we were two privileged, white, young American women, yes, there were similarities. But I wish I were as principled and ambitious and remarkable as she was. She was an activist who really lived what she believed. She was there trying to change the world. I went because I didn’t really have anything else to do. So many people were willing to rehash their memories with you again and again. Were you surprised? Why do you think they were willing to talk to you?I also have wondered this. But I think people want their story told. That’s my conclusion. When you want to hear their story, especially when people haven’t wanted to hear it in-depth, I think they want to tell it to you. I remember talking to Mzi, one of the characters in the book. An African proverb goes that the story of Africa is the story of the lions told by the hunters. He said, “You’re at least coming to talk to the lions.” I mean, I talked to the hunters, too. I found that people, at the beginning, would quite easily tell me the same story. They knew what people wanted to hear. But since I just kept going back again and again, I think then they became interested. Okay, maybe this person actually really wants something more than just this rote thing that we tell people. She was this American, but what happened to her, both before she died and at her death and after, really followed along the ebbs and flows and arcs of the country’s history, into today where it’s this complicated and hazy place. That’s where the story ends up. It’s not clear-cut. The story is unknowable. In a way you sense it without knowing all the facts, but it’s ultimately totally unknowable. I think I became at peace with that, and that itself held some truth. I think in that way it was successful to have people face-to-face, talking about what happened. But afterward, there wasn’t money for the people who had suffered. There wasn’t follow-up. Still today people live in squalor; education is totally unequal. I talked to so many people in these townships who say, okay, but we’re still here, we’re still living in single-room dwellings, we still don’t have jobs with futures, we still can’t afford college, we still go to subpar schools. I remember saying something to an older South African intellectual who was very political, who was involved in the struggle. She just said, “Why do Americans always come here crying about our situation when they have the same issues in their own country, the same historical ills, segregation, police brutality, all that?” I thought, fair enough. I think it’s more apparent there, because it was a majority oppressed by a minority. America, it’s not exactly the same, but there are definitely echoes. We’re not in some post-racial world that people hoped an Obama presidency would usher in. There are still these huge divides along racial lines. I think in both countries we have these legacies of racism that are still alive today. People still live that. I see more clearly here how the past has created our present, after looking at it so deeply there. Maybe that’s a failing of mine, that I didn’t see it as clearly before. This interview has been condensed and edited. Madeleine Fullard leads a team of investigators searching South Africa for the remains of murdered activists Eugene de Kock led the police squad that killed dozens of them Could the two of them work together to solve the mystery of apartheid’s disappeared on a vast game farm on the South Africa-Botswana border a yellow excavator annihilated an overgrown plot set by a river A pale blonde woman – slathered in sunscreen shrouded in a floppy hat and wearing a backward lab coat to protect her arms – oversaw the digging The rest of her team was less delicate: four male investigators and three female forensic anthropologists The other had trimmed brown hair and pale skin; he wore thick glasses that had once earned him the nickname Spectacles The team searched as the two men pointed out different spots one of the investigators knelt down and pointed at the corner of an ancient green blanket The skeleton had been beautifully preserved by the light clay soil These were the remains of Phemelo Moses NtehelangThey took turns lowering themselves into the hole which had cracked along its natural sutures The skeleton had been beautifully preserved by the light clay soil and the synthetic blanket a single trouser pocket bearing the brand name “Cash McCall” These were the remains of Phemelo Moses Ntehelang after they had killed Ntehelang at a farm 160 miles away They had purposefully beaten and suffocated him De Kock and his accomplices dug a hole in this isolated spot and covered Ntehelang’s corpse before daylight and it proved to be right,” he told me in April recalling how he had reassured De Kock that night “Twenty-five years later and I have to go point [for] him.” is the head of South Africa’s Missing Persons Task Team a small group of investigators and forensic anthropologists who sweep the country looking for the bones of apartheid’s disappeared is an unlikely crusader: permanently frazzled and quick to cry when confronted with a sad story committed to finding the dead and the forgotten and when she comes across the name of somebody killed during apartheid as she manoeuvres her hatchback towards Soweto she’d like to start a museum commemorating the missing She recalls travelling to the impoverished black townships where she experienced a “sense of horror”: death swept the communities with such grim consistency that the bereaved themselves had become desensitised death is a tragedy of epic proportions,” she says “But this was a world where death – from sickness where mothers had not a single child left.” Fullard was joined by Claudia Bisso, part of the team who helped identify Che Guevara's bones in Bolivia in 1997When Nelson Mandela was swept to power in 1994, Fullard became a researcher for the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) The process was meant to stand in stark contrast to the Nuremberg trials: where Nuremberg was an exercise in retributive justice the TRC was an exercise in restorative justice in which offenders were urged to take responsibility for their crimes and victims were urged to speak about their trauma The TRC offered a deal to perpetrators: if they were willing to tell the truth and could prove that their actions were politically motivated they could gain amnesty from future prosecution As the hearings were broadcast on TV the extent of the country’s perverse past was brought to light – up to a point from white police officers to black radicals One sweating ex-policeman admitted to sodomising activists with electric cattle prods while two others confessed to 60 murders – and then offered nine more that had slipped their minds Nearly all these men swore that they had acted under the orders of their leaders – even if the last apartheid president “My hands are clean and my conscience is clear.” it was recommended that the government continue to search for those who had disappeared between 1960 and 1994 Fullard formed the Missing Persons Task Team she was its lone employee; to lend the organisation legitimacy and convinced a forensic anthropologist called Claudia Bisso to join her on a part-time basis Bisso is a member of the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team a trailblazing group that has used advanced techniques to uncover human rights abuses; famously they helped identify Che Guevara’s bones in the Bolivian jungle in 1997 A 53-year-old with a short mop of curls and purple metallic cat-eye glasses Bisso is Fullard’s opposite: pragmatic and stoic where her boss is cerebral and excitable “I’d be nothing without her,” Fullard says of Bisso Madeleine Fullard (centre) and her Missing Persons Task Team at the Avalon cemetery in Soweto where they have recently exhumed the bodies of missing activists Photograph: Marc Shoul/The Guardian“Madeleine is too emotional,” Bisso says an onlooker asked worriedly if a medical doctor should be present two young female forensic anthropologists work under Bisso A nearby municipality lent two of its police officers both former guerrillas who fought in exile for the ANC in the 1980s one a former guerrilla and the other an activist the men were shot by police and dumped in paupers’ graves; tracking them can take years After conducting interviews and combing through transcripts They examine skeletons and take bone samples They check these against the DNA of the missing person’s closest living relative the team conducts a public exhumation attended by the families the media and representatives of the deceased’s political party – usually military veterans The bones are cleaned and analysed at the team’s small lab before being returned to the family for a proper burial “It’s not just the recovery of bones – these are stories of the most intense personal sacrifice,” says Fullard and I’m sad to say goodbye to them when they finally go home.” Bisso and an investigator named Ambrose Ndhlovu drove to Kgosi Mampuru II prison to meet Eugene de Kock Fullard was anxious; Bisso was ready for a brawl “You don’t know how a conversation with such a person will go,” she recalls over sugary black tea and a pack of Camel Classics He can say the wrong thing and I can tell him to go fuck his mother.” when Fullard and Bisso went to meet De Kock in prison Fullard was anxious; Bisso was ready for a brawlThey hoped De Kock might have information for them Bisso and Ndhlovu held back in a small waiting area while Fullard sat before a thick glass pane with brown hair and flat blue eyes behind his thick glasses when he was a police colonel responsible for some of the most heinous acts of the old regime had earned him his other nickname: Prime Evil Fullard asked De Kock for help finding missing bodies Fullard and her investigators – some of whom had been on the apartheid regime’s most-wanted list – met him in a prison break room listened as Fullard and the men explained that they were looking for those who had disappeared without a trace “I have an open-door policy as far as we are concerned,” De Kock finally said; he would work with the team whenever they needed him leading his men in hundreds of bloody battles “He became dehumanised as a result,” his lawyer a clandestine counter-insurgency police force headquartered at an eponymous farm outside Pretoria The unit’s mission was to fight opposition guerrillas Vlakplaas employed a core team of around 15 white police officers as well as dozens of black police officers and askaris – opposition fighters who had been captured and who she reflected for a moment and then answered simply: “Drinking.” They drank a lean-to on the farm with a pool table and a dartboard ministers – to down a brew called lion teeth peppermint liquor and raw garlic cloves poured into a wine glass The vast majority vomited it up; if they refused a Vlakplaas man would cut their tie in half “I get shivers hearing the drink’s name,” Leon Flores an ex-Vlakplaas sergeant now working in security in Iraq Loyalty to cause and unit were the key qualities required of a Vlakplaas member most of whom joined the military or police fresh from high school and were expected to adhere to what one member called “The Eleventh Commandment: Thou Shalt Not be Found Out” The government denied the existence of a group devoted to exterminating insurgents but Vlakplaas’ purpose was to do just this and blew up the car of their own black police colleaguesOver the years and a group of eight in Lesotho (including a husband and his unarmed wife whose one-year-old daughter was left alive and alone next to her dead mother) They blew up the car of their own black police colleagues whom they suspected of double-crossing them They ambushed and slaughtered three student activists and sent a young lawyer a bomb hidden in a cassette player which took off his head while he sat at home with his wife They kidnapped an apolitical security guard tortured him for information on his guerrilla brother bashed in his head with a shovel and hid the body a small group branched out and began to deal in weapons supplying conservative black groups fighting the leftwing ANC with guns and grenades Though Vlakplaas itself is the subject of urban myth much of the death and destruction was rained down elsewhere (“You don’t mess up on your own front porch,” Dave Baker The farm was an administrative headquarters and askari dormitory High-ranking military and ministers visited the bucolic setting for barbecues The daughter of a general remembered one such gathering where De Kock impressed her with his kindness “Gene took me to see a dog with little puppies and he picked them up and you could see he adores animals,” she recalled as she served me heart-shaped butter cookies at her Eastern Cape home The Vlakplaas officers were decorated for their dedication and fine work De Kock was awarded the prestigious Silver Cross for bravery He lived a comfortable life with his young wife and their two sons – polite boys who called black Vlakplaas policemen “Oom” De Kock has always claimed he was never a racist merely an anti-communist patriot and soldier – a claim made by many former police officers a social worker wrote of De Kock’s “multicultural” childhood with his black nanny and young black acquaintances De Kock worked closely with black Namibians and nurtured a friendship with a Namibian fighter named Lucas Kalino Together they survived hundreds of shoot-outs Vlakplaas’ downfall began in 1989, when South African journalist Jacques Pauw convinced De Kock’s predecessor – a bungling rogue named Dirk Coetzee who had left the police service – to tell his story It was published in the anti-apartheid Afrikaans weekly Vrye Weekblad under the headline Bloody Trail of the South African Police The apartheid government denied the existence of the squad The nation was stunned: pictures emerged of the Vlakplaas men on team getaways – broad frolicking half-naked in the surf with topless women a fully-dressed De Kock standing coolly to one side they became caricatures of apartheid’s excesses Those who had directed their activities claimed total ignorance nearly deaf in both ears from a bomb blast “De Kock and them didn’t sit around a campfire and pull numbers and names out of a hat,” Julian Knight tells me “Vlakplaas never did the target evaluation a sociopath,' says the director of a victims' family support groupAlmost overnight De Kock turned from a secret hero into a public villain abandoned by the leaders he had so zealously served De Kock decided to talk – and once he began The nation watched as he sat before the TRC and spilled all in his flat “I do not deny that I am guilty of the crimes That dubious honour belongs to those who assembled us into the murderous forces that we became and which we were intended to be all along have got off scot-free… And so it would seem that justice has been sufficiently served by turning me into a lone demon to explain all the evil of the old regime.” and was driven from the courtroom in a yellow armoured jeep The man who had committed such brutal acts without blinking begged forgiveness His wife divorced him and moved with his sons to Europe where they changed their names and cut off contact De Kock met with mothers and explained the circumstances of their children’s deaths He helped one widow trace the body of her husband Could a man so dedicated to segregation that he had been willing to kill for it really change “He fought for a system that he believed in and the system failed him,” is the way his biographer ‘I no longer viewed him as the perpetrator and me as the victim,’ says the daughter of one man De Kock murdered ‘He was just another soul.’ Photograph: Leon Botha/Foto24/Gallo Images/Getty ImagesCandice Mama recalls a 2014 meeting with the former police officer and I don’t believe he was faking,” she says She had grown up nursing “a silent resentment I no longer viewed him as a perpetrator and me as the victim He was just another soul.” At the end of the meeting Your father would be so proud.” “It changed my life,” she says Khoza’s mother had been tricked into thinking she was going for military training when Vlakplaas forces ambushed and shot her multiple times with a semi-automatic after which De Kock checked her pulse by placing his pinky finger on her eyelid listening to what he was saying and it sounded like somebody telling me a story,” Khoza says has written letters supporting De Kock’s parole But others are not convinced by De Kock’s remorse He had been talking about the best way to get out of prison since the late 1990s he had applied for a presidential pardon or parole every few years taking notesAt a restaurant in Port Elizabeth who worked with De Kock at Koevoet and later in joint operations with Vlakplaas tells me the former colonel is helping families purely as a means of gaining parole the director of a victims’ family support group The new parole requirements call for the offender to ask for forgiveness and then it’s recorded I think he was told that’s what he had to do.” For his first collaboration with the Missing Persons Task Team in 2013 De Kock was escorted to the team’s office in the gleaming Pretoria headquarters of the National Prosecuting Authority The team figured it wasn’t the best way to get the guy to open up: shackled and sitting in the state’s legal headquarters The prosecutor who’d won De Kock’s conviction 16 years earlier even popped in to say hello the team arranged for the meetings to be held at a private home Old cops wouldn’t talk if De Kock called from prison where calls were recorded; but they would join him for lamb and sausages in a suburban back yard And this was De Kock’s great value to the task team: his connections prison guards milled around while De Kock met up with his friends and the men welcomed a chance to relive the old days alternately reminiscing and discussing the details of cold cases trying to figure out where a body had been dumped Sometimes the ex-guerrillas joined the ex-police and shared a drink – the men connected easily with the strange intimacy shared by enemy soldiers after a war “I have even enjoyed working with him,” says Brian Ndhlovu But Fullard has been troubled by their partnership. During her first six months working with De Kock, Fullard said her world “kind of shrunk to him”. She fought with a friend, who accused her of humanising him, of suffering from Stockholm syndrome and she felt the pressure to give them closure The graves at Avalon cemetery are opened to check that their occupants are properly recorded on the cemetery register Photograph: Marc Shoul/The GuardianBy July 2013 the team had found the remains of a woman’s son – just a bit of skull – and were preparing an exhumation ceremony and couldn’t wait to show them to his elderly mother Fullard enrolled in a university class in non-fiction writing “I work with government lawyers and dead people and there’s not much difference between them So it’s nice to go to a class and meet new people,” she says Her classmates urged her to add some levity to her work-in-progress: each chapter Fullard and the team decided to focus on Phemelo Moses Ntehelang Ntehelang was an askari: a guerrilla captured in battle and turned into a double agent Ntehelang’s brother-in-law and the town’s former mayor and helped cook and farm as the family eked out a meagre existence: no electricity or running water Ntehelang dropped out and turned to politics He and his friends distributed illegal leaflets They took risks because they had heard about a man called Nelson Mandela who was willing to die for their liberation as we share breakfast at a chain restaurant where they waited for months in an ANC safe house before boarding a plane for Zambia Neither had imagined that they would ever experience the stomach-churning sensation of flight They trained at a malaria-ridden bush camp in Angola before they separated. In December 1984, Ntehelang is thought to have trained in East Germany with other young recruits; by the end of 1985 or early 1986, he and Martins crossed paths in Angola, where, Martins and another comrade tell me, Ntehelang was guarding Chris Hani the charismatic then-commander of the ANC’s armed wing Ntehelang went from ANC guerrilla to askari “We said we would rather die than be captured but you don’t know what you will do in that situation Maybe you will use your last bullet and never surrender Ntehelang returned home and confessed to his sister that he was working for the enemy either his old comrades or his new bosses would kill him he told his sister: “I am certain about my death.” De Kock and his team were away on a three-day mission When De Kock and his men finished their operation they pub-crawled their way back to Vlakplaas They were playing pool at the canteen when Ntehelang appeared drunk and bearing bad news: he had lost his gun that it wouldn’t have happened if I took his weapon,” says Flores it had been Flores’s duty to relieve Ntehelang of his gun before he went on holiday Flores claims not to remember the incident clearly; but when I attempt to run through the events of the day “This Ntehelang episode was unnecessary and will always sit in my mind and bother me.” The next morning he sends me a Facebook message: “Thx for the sleepless night… have a cool day.” De Kock smacked Ntehelang over the head with a pool cue until the cue broke in half “It appeared to me that I was going to have a heart attack out of pure rage because you would try everything in your power to help these persons and that was the tragedy of it,” De Kock said during his TRC hearing about the incident the men said they suspected that Ntehelang had sold his weapon to an ANC cadre and were concerned that their location had been compromised Ntehelang took the blows; the cops took turns Tubing is essentially water-boarding: pouring water over the victim’s face and then placing an inner tube over their nose and mouth to create the sensation of drowning I was fighting communism and terrorism,' says Leon Flores an ex-Vlakplaas sergeantWhen Flores saw blood dripping from Ntehelang’s nose he shouted at the men to stop; they had gone too far Everyone stepped back and stared at the dead askari on the canteen floor “It’s the quickest anti-booze thing that perks you up and if I could bottle and sell whatever juices get going While some of the men were wrapping Ntehelang in a blanket and cinching each side with string He was furious: the idiots had needlessly killed an asset – and worse De Kock asked an officer called Marthinus Ras who had not been involved in Ntehelang’s assault then a hulking young blond with dead blue eyes De Kock figured he might know a good place to dispose of a body Ras ended up addicted to alcohol and struggling to make a living He has sought compensation for post-traumatic stress disorder but the new government has denied him for years He brings a copy to our meeting in a cafe and hands it to me: a few hundred bound pages detailing his most heinous acts sipping on a rock shandy on his third day of self-imposed sobriety He orders a chicken and mayonnaise sandwich he says; they are all ground down from stress As victims are exhumed Photograph: Marc Shoul/The GuardianRas doesn’t know how many people he’s killed though he remembers he shot his first enemy aged 19 as a Koevoet member under De Kock; he had engaged in 49 firefights on the border before he reached Vlakplaas he forced a captured guerrilla to write a letter to his mother “It’s particularly sad to imagine being forced to write your mother a letter when you know you’re going to die “That’s why I’m down at the moment,” Ras says I have to make sure I get an alibi and and then I’m clean.” “How can you have done all that stuff and be 100% normal?” Flores left South Africa in 1996 to work abroad How could I let the work that I did blind me?” has no teeth: they are ground down from stress He opens his mouth: only gumsBut they weren’t sorry “I was fighting against communism and terrorism.” His prison social worker detailed this in her report: he wakes at night with sweat all over his body smelling blood – experiencing the brutality of war When De Kock asked him to come up with a burial spot I shot and buried a guy in the same place,” Ras recalls He has never found out the name of that victim; he had been directed to kill him and he had obliged offering the man a cigarette and a prayer before shooting him in the back of the head Ras and two others – loaded Ntehelang’s body into the boot of a car and drove north Ras led them to a game farm owned by an elderly friend seeing a car full of police at his gate late at night on their knees after a day of drinking and murder They prised Ntehelang’s stiff body from the car and tried to torch him in the hopes of protecting the corpse from wild animals weaving through the streets during morning rush hour while white workers headed to their offices De Kock arranged for Baker to keep issuing Ntehelang’s salary to cover up the crime “It’s very horrible to see the way he was buried,” Ntehelang’s brother-in-law “They put him in a blanket and threw him into the hole so they have to make sure they put everything on top of him They were fearing him even when he was dead.” Baker and six other men received amnesty for Ntehelang’s murder Ras hadn’t heard from De Kock since their days before the TRC when they were co-applicants in a number of cases He was bitter that De Kock had implicated him in so many crimes he now considers the whole process “brilliant – if I didn’t go to the TRC De Kock and his prison guards in the back of a burger chain in Pretoria younger than his years; you don’t get sun in prison Ras was tasked with asking the new farm owner if they could dig on his property they haven’t got hassles about the past,” Ras tells me ‘Eugene de Kock and I have to go dig up the body,’ and he says The unusual group headed upcountry: Prime Evil and his two prison guards; a quartet of ANC guys; Claudia Bisso; her two proteges one of them Indian-South African and the other Zimbabwean; and Madeleine Fullard meticulously extending their search until they found Ntehelang “Fifteen years in this country and I still don’t understand.” the Missing Persons Task Team formally exhumed Ntehelang before his family members The local ANC military veterans’ association presided over the service “It is the belief of most comrades that if a man died in the hands of the enemy you can’t say that he was selling out,” Martins explains Six weeks later, to the shock of many South Africans, De Kock was released from prison offenders sentenced prior to 1 October 2004 who have served a required minimum sentence (13 years and four months) are eligible for parole at the justice minister’s discretion Justice minister Michael Masutha had dodged a decision several times as De Kock’s lawyer repeatedly applied for parole who said he had asked President Jacob Zuma’s advice announced in a press conference: “In the interests of nation-building and reconciliation I’ve decided to place De Kock on parole.” He credited De Kock’s work with the Missing Persons Task Team and his consultations with the victims’ families as key to this decision "It’s spook nation," says De Kock's lawyer "This is the weirdest case I’ve ever worked on."But according to Julian Knight the state was simply litigated out of options; De Kock had more than served the minimum sentence and the minister’s repeated refusals had begun to seem like discrimination De Kock was in prison precisely because he had been denied amnesty on the grounds that certain crimes were not politically motivated; he should be treated like a criminal And we had the minister by the balls,” Knight says De Kock had long held out hope that the new government would release him he told a friend: “My own people put me in jail De Kock was refused parole on several occasions Photograph: Juda Ngwenya/PRDe Kock was released in January this year he was extracted from prison a week before his release was announced on 30 January telling journalists that De Kock had “gone missing” Knight received a message through an intermediary telling him that De Kock was being held against his will Days later he sent another message saying he was “fine” the government asserted that De Kock was being kept in protective custody due to threats on his life he was produced before the Pretoria high court where he told a judge he was “satisfied” by his parole conditions before being whisked away by unnamed officials Fullard and her team have not seen De Kock since his release though they figure they will eventually be able to start their collaboration again though her team submitted two reports detailing the assistance he gave them – assistance that helped De Kock “slowly but surely recreate his identity” Fullard tries not to focus on whether or not she has helped to rehabilitate a killer She tries to focus instead on his lesser-known victims marginal on the landscape of death.” She wants to maintain her distance coming face-to-face with the larger-than-life figure who killed your comrades and tried to destroy your cause breathing person whom you can’t simply dismiss “He’s resigned to the fact that he’ll never escape the Prime Evil identity,” she reflects “I did say to him once that he can still make a change I said: ‘The final chapter has not been written.’” the gift of the artwork Homs by Syrian artist Rabi Koria was officially accepted at the Kamerlingh Onnes Building The tableau can be viewed in the KOG restaurant The tableau Homs was a gift to Leiden Law School from Leiden alumnus Jan Maarten Boll former member of the Dutch Council of State and a retired lawyer The gift is now official following the signatures of Dean Joanne van der Leun and the donor who was Dean when the idea for the gift arose The artwork is made up of a collection of images on the right hand side showing buildings in the Syrian city of Homs which were damaged in the war and on the left hand side piles of papers and documents In 2015 the artist Rabi Koria was a recipient of the Royal Award for Modern Painting for the tableau In 2016, on the occasion of the gift, a symposium entitled Kunst en recht, kunst en onrecht  (Art and justice art and injustice) was held in the Lorentz lecture room at the KOG He talked about the artwork and spoke to a number of professors about art and (in)justice Looking to access paid articles across multiple policy topics Interested in policy insights for EU professional organisations storage and utilisation of CO2 requires the construction of pipelines and network planning to enable industry to access geological storage areas and synthetic fuel producers to access (renewable) CO2 sources Opinion Advocates for ideas and draws conclusions based on the author/producer’s interpretation of facts and data EU legislators currently discuss a Commission proposal to create geological CO2-storage capacity to store 50 million tonnes of CO2 per year. [Photo credit: Fernando Garcia Esteban/shutterstock.com] The complicated relationship between humans and gulls is resulting in a declining gull population A major cause is the disappearing wasteland in the port of Rotterdam IDE student Joanna van der Leun designed a nest for the gulls which can be installed on the roof of harbour sheds You are strolling on the dike of Scheveningen a bird shoots at you in a swoop and grabs the fries You drop everything right away and take cover but the gull population is under pressure in the Netherlands the Black-backed Gull in particular is struggling who graduated from the Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering at TU Delft this year wanted to use her graduation project to do something to help gulls and humans coexist Gulls increasingly seek refuge in the city But then you come into contact with people Joanna started from a systemic design approach: as a designer you solve complex problems by first looking at systems and then using creativity to design solutions and interventions. She worked under the wings of Prof Bregje van Eekelen There are currently 20,000 breeding pairs in the port of Rotterdam but in recent years their numbers have been steadily declining their population exploded from the 1990s onwards They could feast on dead fish thrown back by fishing boats Those fish are now processed into fish oil "So they increasingly seek refuge in the city where there is ample food," Joanna explains Think of struggling municipalities like The Hague  There are relatively few people and fallow land is still available This also keeps the animals away from the city and from breeding sites where even more vulnerable birds nest." It is precisely this fallow land that is so popular with the Black-backed Gull in recent years the fox has also been active in the harbour "So the gulls are looking higher up," Joanna continues "But the roofs of those cheap harbour sheds are not designed for birds breeding they sometimes jump off the roof because of the heat They end up on the ground among people and the gulls attack to protect their chicks."   Joanna designed a gull nest that can be installed on the roof of sheds She gained her knowledge from research into gull habitats and by looking at the harbour from a gull perspective This is how she discovered that low vegetation is important as protection from the elements and also as a way to hide from other gulls and predators The design is 80cm in diameter and has a patch of gravel at the front for breeding This is surrounded by a little wall that protects from the wind Behind the wall is a cavity which provides shelter from the sun and possible enemies "The nests should be at least a metre apart I think it is important to take that into account when we intervene in an environment Joanna thinks solutions like this could be important for humans "The Black-backed Gull is a protected species the port might not be allowed to release new sites due to Natura 2000 legislation I have also heard from experts like Roland-Jan Buijs that there could well be a mass colonisation of gulls to the city I think it is important to take that into account when we intervene in an environment." Contact: Landbergstraat 15 2628 CE Delft +31 (0)15 27 89807 Route planner Links for students: BSc Industrial Design Engineering Master programmes IDE | Student portal Other links: Our people Employee portal Opening Hours Disclaimer Privacy & Security SINGAPORE — He might not have a constituency or a grassroots team but that has not stopped Kok Heng Leun from holding his own unique Meet-the-People Sessions (MPS) Since becoming a Nominated Member of Parliament (NMP) this March after the arts community repeatedly put his name forward Kok — a playwright/director and artistic director of multi-award-winning theatre company Drama Box — has assembled several town hall meetings in auditoriums and held more intimate classroom-sized open sessions called Statement(s) for The Arts: Connecting Policy and Practice art-makers are invited to talk about how various government policies have impacted them you can probably still make convincing speeches in Parliament but you won’t know the right questions to ask to effect change Kok’s meetings are quite different from the MPS held by MPs with a constituency they’re rarely one-to-one: Kok is always outnumbered by diverse people sharing their experiences and views these sessions have seen artists such as Sean Tobin (head artistic director of M1 Singapore Fringe Festival and actors Brendon Fernandez and Judee Tan drop by he must explain to these people that as someone who is not part of a political party and with limited financial means (Kok has even gone on sabbatical from Drama Box he cannot promise immediate redress of their dissatisfactions “It’s not a situation where somebody says that the covered walkway is too dark and I get the town council to immediately address that,” he said which always comes with a lot of baggage: Who implemented it and why Is changing the mindsets of people making these policies what we need to do What I can do is use everybody’s input to know what to bring up in Parliament Input from many voices makes for a more convincing case a network of arts practitioners from various disciplines were very involved in discussing various potential amendments to the Public Entertainments and Meetings Act in 2014 They came together for extensive consultations about the proposed Arts Term Licensing and after registering their opposition and reasons the Media Development Authority withdrew it from the Bill.” Kok added that he will ensure that the issues discussed are all on public record such as the report that was put out after the recent town hall meetings about arts grants “The National Arts Council explained that certain concerns might not be immediately resolvable are we going to do something about it?’,” explained Kok “I want to complete a shadow report about various issues such as censorship and funding during my term so that if there are periods without an NMP representing the arts in future the community can continue to update it as documentation I am grateful that people have been willing to share their voices.” Numerous volunteers have stepped up to help put the sessions together including Cultural Medallion winner Alvin Tan but I just get word of his events out there,” said the artistic director of The Necessary Stage “His monthly take-home NMP stipend is less than S$2,000 — he can’t afford a communications department He pays his researchers and everything is gone I call people — and we persuade people to come Some might not put faith in it or think it’s another talk by an MP but we combine forces to assure them we are serious.” The Substation has also been lending itself as a venue for Kok’s initiatives including for the Arts NMP in Residency programme as part of Post-Museum's Survey: Space Various others have been volunteering their skills in research even more people have showed up to share their concerns … and not just for Kok to use as parliamentary material “The sessions have revealed the extent of common concerns like exploitation of freelance art-makers,” revealed Kok “I was moved by the sense of community when an attendee said ‘I always thought there’s no point trying to stand up for certain benefits I feel artists deserve But after hearing everybody speak today about wanting the same things it’s easy to stay solitary and not listen to anybody else Conversation helps us realise we are not alone.” Tan added: “People at the sessions started analysing instead of whining and discussing whether they can get together and do something on the people level exploring alternatives to Singapore’s hierarchical mindset of ‘Leave things to the government because they know best’ Solving a problem can be two-pronged: We can look to authority but we also shouldn’t treat people like Heng Leun as kitchen gods to demand things from Artists and government working to solve the same problems can seem surprising to some who see them as mutually antagonistic Kok himself — whose pet art form of forum theatre had been denied funding for being seen as having Marxist connections — believes this is not so “People and the government sometimes have different versions of stories When I was presenting Both Sides Now — a forum theatre project regarding death and dying in Singapore — I worked with government bodies to discuss their concerns about this issue My job as an MP now is not so different from my art-making: Presenting stories that might not be heard to people who need to hear them but I’ve always asked people to stand up and speak out That’s difficult if you are not doing the same yourself.” Two more open sessions — Statement(s) for the Arts by Kok Heng Leun — will take place on 23 and 24 September 2016 Todayonline.com and Today Online domains and apps are now part of 'Channelnewsasia.com' domain We know it's a hassle to switch browsers but we want your experience with TODAY to be fast Upgraded but still having issues? Contact us Professor Joanne van der Leun has been reappointed as Dean of Leiden Law School by the Executive Board of Leiden University She has been appointed until September 2025 new administrators will be appointed for each portfolio in successive order During the months of May and June Stefaan van den Bogaert will temporarily replace Joanne (due to a stay abroad by Joanne van der Leun) As Dean, Joanne van der Leun is the chairperson of the national Raad van Decanen Rechtsgeleerdheid (RDR – Council of Deans of Law Schools) and a member of the national SSH council she is also a member of the taskforce digital economy of the Economie Board Zuid-Holland (EBZ) and Una Europe This website is using a security service to protect itself from online attacks The action you just performed triggered the security solution There are several actions that could trigger this block including submitting a certain word or phrase You can email the site owner to let them know you were blocked Please include what you were doing when this page came up and the Cloudflare Ray ID found at the bottom of this page Nollywood actress Iyabo Ojo is undoubtedly one of the fashionistas of Nollywood. The Yoruba actress and filmmaker, who made her cinema debut as a producer this year, has stunned her fans and followers with her latest post. The lover of Paulo Okoye via her Instagram page shared jaw-dropping photos as she bragged about her beauty. “Queen mother toh ta leun”, she captioned the photos of herself wearing a sultry gown. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Queen Mother (@iyaboojofespris) One Ife Akinbode, gushing over her look One Megajohnson_creative wrote, “So stunning “You’re so beautiful mama” In January, Iyabo Ojo turned heads with her jaw-dropping look at billionaire businessman Razaq Okoya’s 85th birthday party. The movie star, who wore a white gown, white turban, and purple bag to the event, noted how she was oozing elegance and dripping in glory She appreciated the designers and stylists behind her look and also appreciated the Okoyas for the invitation While counting down to her birthday in December Iyabo shared a video of herself in her luxury car as she revealed that there was no more keeping quiet and it was time for her to shine Sometimes back, Iyabo, in a  interview made a shocking revelation about her childhood The Yoruba actress also spoke about how her dad disowned her when she insisted on getting married to her late husband Iyabo Ojo was once married to the father of her two kids, Priscilla and Festus Ojo, Mr. Ademidun Ojo. Unfortunately, the marriage packed up shortly after the birth of their two children Nollywood veteran actor Patrick Doyle was recently on PlusTV Africa’s “Tea Time” show where he spoke about a need for a balance of family.. Idris Okuneye better known as Bobrisky has expressed his gratitude to actress Eniola Badmus for turning up for him Nigerians on Instagram have resorted to insulting and blasting Nigerian music artist manager and the founder of record label Made Men Music Group who is well known for playing the role of Jennifer West Ham boss David Moyes has lambasted the VAR decision to cancel a goal scored by one of his players Minutes after denying ever cheating on her estranged husband Korra Obidi has been slammed with receipts Ola took to her Instastory on Instagram to open up about her marital status and why she left the.. Gist Lover has set the internet in a frenzy after unveiling the alleged crisis rocking Rita Dominic’s marriage Fine Boy Nollywood actor Frederick Leonard has called out his female colleagues for stinking The movie star who obviously couldn’t stand the offensive smell.. Rita Dominic has stepped out for the first time with her husband Fidelis Anosike since news of his alleged affair.. Ibidun Ajayi-Ighodalo’s mum had planned to gift her a house on her 40th birthday which would been on July 19 Eucharia Anunobi has reacted to the reports that she is allegedly having an affair with her 27-year-old colleague;  Identified as...