Slavery

Maliwan Clinton recalls her first taste of America with a shudder. In this fabled land of the free, she was enslaved behind razor wire and around-the-clock guards in an El Monte sweatshop, where she and more than 70 other Thai laborers were forced to work 18-hour days for what amounted to less than a dollar an hour.

TRIPOLI, Libya - Ahmed Mostafa and his friends paid thousands of dollars among them to get to Libya recently, traveling with gangs of smugglers through Western Africa. It was to be their escape from the sprawling slums of Ghana's capital city, Accra. Mostafa had heard rumors of arbitrary arrests and Libyan lynch mobs during the war last year in which longtime Libyan leader Moammar Kadafi was ousted and killed. But he was counting on luck: "It was not something I really thought about," he said.

Fifteen Asian women, forced into sex slavery by the Japanese army during World War II, sued the government of Japan Monday, seeking unspecified but substantial damages for years of rape, beating, starvation and other forms of mistreatment that continue to haunt them into old age. Lawyers in the case said that it is the first suit filed in U.S. courts directly against the Japanese government for war crimes.

After that stint on Comedy Central 's “The Daily Show,” the Tucson Unified school board is probably wishing it had hired a media consultant before trying to explain its position on the district's controversial Mexican American Studies program.  Normally, when people are featured on a television show, they call family and friends and let them know the time and channel. That might not be the case for board member Michael Hicks, who appeared in a segment about the ethnic studies controversy.  Hicks was interviewed by comedian Al Madrigal on the satirical news show Monday about his decision to oppose the school district's Mexican American Studies program, which was shuttered in January to keep the district from losing more than $14 million in state aid. The Tucson school board voted to end the program after Arizona's education chief had ruled the district in violation of a controversial state law banning classes designed for a particular ethnic group or that "promote the overthrow of the U.S. government.

"Work abroad. High pay. No experience needed." Such ads appear daily on the Internet and in newspapers across Russia and other nations of the former Soviet Union. In many cases, according to a coalition of women's and human rights groups here, they are the hook that lures girls and women into sexual slavery.

Former World War II prisoners of war and other activists stepped up their pressure against Japanese corporations in the United States, announcing Tuesday a nationwide class-action lawsuit alleging that the companies brutalized POWs and forced them to perform slave labor in Asia during the war. The lawsuit, part of an escalating U.S. offensive to win reparations for Japanese war crimes, targets five corporate giants: Mitsubishi International Corp., Mitsui & Co. (USA) Inc.

Kang Il-chul rides in the back of a van packed with gossiping old women. The 82-year-old girlishly covers her mouth to whisper a secret. "We argue a lot about the food," she says, wrinkling her nose. "To tell you the truth, some of these old ladies are grouchy." There are eight of them, sharing a hillside home on the outskirts of Seoul, sparring over everything from territory to room temperature. Some wear makeup and stylish hats; others are happy in robes and slippers.

Re "Slavery's staying power," Opinion, March 23 Benjamin Skinner's article is a useful discussion of the more appalling working conditions in today's world. Still, calling these practices "slavery" is a stretch. The practices Skinner describes are illegal in the countries in which they occur. They are also not racially specific. In contrast, the slavery practiced in the U.S. was legal in much of the country and enforced by the justice system. Additionally, U.S. slavery was specific to persons qualifying, under the laws of the day, as African by blood.

Re "The Faces of Slavery," editorial, Oct. 26: Thank you for saying what all Americans must someday understand and accept. Slavery is the history of us all. Only when we understand this will we truly be able to bury racism and bigotry in its permanent grave. TOM HENNESSY Altadena

After that stint on Comedy Central 's “The Daily Show,” the Tucson Unified school board is probably wishing it had hired a media consultant before trying to explain its position on the district's controversial Mexican American Studies program.  Normally, when people are featured on a television show, they call family and friends and let them know the time and channel. That might not be the case for board member Michael Hicks, who appeared in a segment about the ethnic studies controversy.  Hicks was interviewed by comedian Al Madrigal on the satirical news show Monday about his decision to oppose the school district's Mexican American Studies program, which was shuttered in January to keep the district from losing more than $14 million in state aid. The Tucson school board voted to end the program after Arizona's education chief had ruled the district in violation of a controversial state law banning classes designed for a particular ethnic group or that "promote the overthrow of the U.S. government.

A federal judge appeared dubious Monday about a lawsuit filed by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals that seeks the release of orcas from SeaWorld on anti-slavery grounds. PETA attorney Jeffrey Kerr told U.S. District Judge Jeffrey Miller that invoking the anti-slavery 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in hopes of freeing the orcas is "the next frontier of civil rights. " But Miller told Kerr that he cannot find a legal precedent for allowing a lawsuit to be filed on behalf of the orcas under the 13th Amendment.

A decade ago, Shyima Hall was smuggled into the United States as a 10-year-old slave, forced to cook and clean inside the home of a wealthy Irvine family and, at night, sleep on a squalid mattress in a windowless garage. On Thursday, the Egyptian-born 22-year-old stood before a federal judge in Montebello with nearly 900 others and was sworn in as naturalized U.S. citizen. The ceremony capped a hard-scrabble journey that began with Hall's rescue, wound through the foster care system and ended with her living on her own, working, and with ambitions to become a federal agent.

During Bill Clinton's presidency, he frequently mentioned that he could look out the window of the Oval Office and enjoy a straight-line view of the Jefferson Memorial on the Tidal Basin. But where, I wondered as a biographer of that man from Monticello, was Jefferson looking? I recently toured the National Mall, which allowed me to answer that question. Jefferson, in his ring of white marble columns, is looking across the waters of the Tidal Basin at the newly installed Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial, which was dedicated Sunday.

In this village that still bears the name of the old Santa Barbara sugar plantation, Susana Baca is trudging through a field of sweet potatoes. Not 48 hours earlier, the internationally acclaimed diva of Afro-Peruvian music returned from Paris, the last stop in her latest world tour. But on this day, she is visiting her mother's tumbledown hometown, a neglected part of Peru that is the cradle of its multiethnic history, where the descendants of black slaves and Chinese and Japanese field hands have lived together for generations, intermarried and even now continue to work the land.

BOOKS Are Lies Ruining America? In the wake of high-profile perjury and obstruction-of-justice cases such as those of Martha Stewart, Barry Bonds and Bernard Madoff, journalist James B. Stewart, author of "Tangled Webs: How False Statements Are Undermining America," will investigate how American ethics have broken down and what can be done about it. Henry Weinstein, a founding faculty member of the UC Irvine School of Law, will moderate....

Forget funding the government or sorting out conservative social policies. In some quarters, the question of the day in Congress was, "What would Henry Clay do?" Revered as the nation's "Great Compromiser," Clay has made an extraordinary number of cameos in the current budget drama — a saga filled with people who claim to be aspiring to, but moving slowly toward, compromise, great or not. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) on Thursday declared that Clay — a former House speaker best known for the slavery compromises that delayed the Civil War — was "one of the greatest speakers of all time.

A decade ago, Shyima Hall was smuggled into the United States as a 10-year-old slave, forced to cook and clean inside the home of a wealthy Irvine family and, at night, sleep on a squalid mattress in a windowless garage. On Thursday, the Egyptian-born 22-year-old stood before a federal judge in Montebello with nearly 900 others and was sworn in as naturalized U.S. citizen. The ceremony capped a hard-scrabble journey that began with Hall's rescue, wound through the foster care system and ended with her living on her own, working, and with ambitions to become a federal agent.

I can't let Forrest G. Wood's attack on Christianity go unremarked (Letters, Oct. 25). Christianity was the "ideological justification" for the enslavement of Africans only because the slave traders and owners happened to be Christian. To lay slavery in America at the feet of Christianity is the same sort of sloppy reasoning that condemns Islam because there are people who use it as the "ideological justification" for blowing up innocent people. Let's keep in mind that it was the same Christianity that provided the "ideological justification" for the Abolitionist movement that helped end the institution of slavery in America.

Reporting from Placerville, Calif. -- Accused kidnapper and rapist Phillip Garrido pleaded not guilty Thursday to charges that he and his wife abducted an 11-year-old school girl near South Lake Tahoe and held her as a sexual slave for almost 20 years. Jaycee Dugard, now 30, gave birth to two daughters while in captivity in a ramshackle encampment of tents and soundproof sheds behind the Garridos' Antioch home. Garrido, 60, is the father. He and wife Nancy, 55, have confessed to snatching Dugard as she walked to the school bus in 1991.

As President Obama's second year in office comes to an end, a bitter battle is underway among Democrats over whether he has broken his promises and sold out his principles, or merely made the kind of rational compromises that prudent leaders are required to make. Hurt, betrayed and surprised, some of his original supporters are now deriding him as spineless and weak, while others insist that his tactics allowed him to achieve all he possibly could have in today's partisan political environment.