Every Monday on Global Comment, we share the slow, thoughtful, considerate words that our brains – and souls – need but that it’s easy to miss in our busy world. We distil the best of the web and recommend just three links every week that you absolutely must see.
No fluff, no fuss, just three exceptional reads.
Here are this week’s recommendations:
One Woman Died on an Alaska Mayor’s Property. Then Another. No One Has Ever Been Charged. (Kyle Hopkins / ProPublica)
Kirk and Norton, both Inupiaq, had each dated sons of the former borough mayor, and the sons had previously been convicted of beating each of them. One of the sons had admitted to strangling Kirk twice before. Another pleaded guilty to kicking Norton in the stomach when she was six months pregnant.
No one has ever been charged with a crime in connection to the deaths.
Bringing up the Bodies: The forensic anthropologists who redress migrant death in Texas (Caroline Tracey / The Baffler)
OpID started in 2013 in response to the growing crisis of migrant death in the Texas borderlands. While people have long crossed the U.S.-Mexico border, migrant deaths in the borderlands have increased significantly since 1994. That’s the year the U.S. Border Patrol began to ramp up enforcement of common day-laborer crossing sites, an initiative that came to be known as “Prevention Through Deterrence.” Instead of deterring migration, however, the approach pushed routes into harsh, remote, and—at the time—less-patrolled areas.
Initially, routes shifted to Arizona’s Sonoran Desert. When Tucson’s Pima County Office of the Medical Examiner, which also serves the state’s border counties, noticed the increasing migrant deaths, they developed a protocol for addressing them, including the creation of a nonprofit organization, the Colibrí Center for Human Rights, to work with families searching for missing loved ones. Since 2002, about two-thirds of the migrant remains recovered in Arizona have been identified—nearly twenty-five hundred individuals.
Miriam Margoyles reads a letter from a fiesty Irish care home resident (LettersLive)
@letterslive The absolute legend that is Miriam Margoyles reads a letter from a fiesty Irish care home resident 👀 #miriammargolyes #funnyvideo #countydown ♬ original sound – Letters Live
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