Citizens told to complain if rights have been breached, as number of applicants surges before deadline
Businesses and public bodies have been warned by the Brexit rights regulator not to discriminate against EU citizens as the new post-Brexit immigration regime enters into force at midnight.
The warnings come as Home Office helplines for EU citizens living in the UK were reported to be “jammed” by a last-minute surge in EU citizens applying to remain in the UK by the midnight deadline. Charity workers helping applicants said they were also struggling to get through to the specialist hotline reserved for advisers. Continue reading... http://dlvr.it/S2pLGr
Jamie Spears said he’s had no power over his daughter’s affairs for nearly two years after pop star called court arrangement ‘abusive’
Britney Spears’s father has asked the court overseeing his daughter’s conservatorship to investigate her statements to a judge last week on the court’s control of her medical treatment and personal life, which she called overly restrictive and abusive.
James Spears, who goes by Jamie, said in a pair of documents filed late on Tuesday night that he has had no power over his daughter’s personal affairs for nearly two years. Continue reading... http://dlvr.it/S2pLG3
A strain of Covid-19, called the Delta variant, has spread across Australia, triggering lockdowns in multiple states and territories. Governments and health experts worldwide have warned that this variant is highly infectious, with the NSW premier describing transmission in a recent case as “scarily” fleeting. Medical editor Melissa Davey explains what we know about the Delta variant, and the challenges this strain could pose in containing Australia’s outbreak
You can also read: Continue reading... http://dlvr.it/S2nrrl
Warehouse worker who became ‘Yang Million’ – China’s first retail investor in government bonds
In February 1988, Yang Huaiding, who has died aged 71 of diabetes, saw the opportunity that enabled him to give up being a warehouseman at a ferroalloys factory in Shanghai to become a retail investor – China’s first. Eventually his success led to him being popularly referred to as Yang Bai Wan (Yang Million).
His example served as an inspiration to ordinary Chinese people looking for ways to change their livelihoods after years of the communist planned economy. With his immediately recognisable buzzcut and endless insights into the city’s stock market in his awkward yet distinctive Shanghainese-accented Mandarin, Yang represented a rags-to-riches tale that paralleled the country’s transition from pure communism to semi-capitalism. Continue reading... http://dlvr.it/S2kRRv
Remains of man found in Latvia had DNA fragments and proteins of bacterium that causes plague
A hunter-gatherer who lived more than 5,000 years ago is the earliest known person to have died with the plague, researchers have revealed.
Stone-age communities in western Europe experienced a huge population decline about 5,500 years ago, an event that is thought to have subsequently enabled a huge migration of people from the east. Continue reading... http://dlvr.it/S2kRPp
* New guidelines designed to slow spread of Covid variant
* 68% of LA county residents over 16 have had at least one shot
Health officials in Los Angeles county now strongly recommend that people wear masks indoors in public places, regardless of their vaccination status, to prevent the spread of the highly transmissible Delta variant of the coronavirus.
Related: Biden to visit Miami on Thursday as 150 still missing after condo collapse – live Continue reading... http://dlvr.it/S2jwWm
Three inches of graphite capture all manner of thoughts. Ann Wroe delves into her collection
Over the years I have built up a collection of these strays. Their very simplicity is delightful; a thin stick of wood around a vein of graphite. Warmth and cold are combined in them; precision, and a certain childish innocence. Some of these pencils evidently belonged to children: stout sticks with pink erasers at one end. Others were picked up on the local golf course, snapped (with frustration, I assume) into wounded halves. All are carefully sharpened, to make them presentable. I even have a spiral pencil shaving, picked up on Parliament Hill, because its glossy bright-blue edge against the paper-thin wood is beautiful. My latest rescue pencil will fit right in.
Pencils are discarded, as lighters and umbrellas are, because at some crucial moment they fail in their purpose. They refuse to ignite, quail before a shower, or simply snap. But pencils have merely suspended their usefulness. Their potential still lies within them. They can go on setting down by the thousand the words by which the world works. (Thomas Traherne talks of light as “God’s pencil”. He means a fine brush in 17th-century parlance, but pencils are worthy of that metaphor.) So though the point has broken off my wasp-casualty, that doesn’t deter me. I’m sure three inches of graphite remain to catch all manner of thoughts.
Or maybe to conjure them. Something about the way a pencil nestles in the hand, confiding, humble and powerful at the same time, seems to draw out ideas and words. It is never just a mere instrument. It has the feel of a master and teacher, as well as a friend. Knowledge and past felicities – that exact word found, that exact light caught – accumulate in it. Pencils often have a wise look, and seem to grow wiser with age.
My most venerable examples are the smallest. One, pale blue and sharpened with a penknife, belonged to my uncle and went with him on hurdle-making, building and thatching jobs, teetering over his ear and scratching measurements on barn walls. Another, red and slightly bitten in her anxious way, was my mother’s and travelled in her handbag, to make lists and cross lists off. There lies another virtue of the pencil: its strong evocation of those who have used it, living skin against warm wood.
Yet the pencil’s marks are worryingly fragile. I have worked on Percy Bysshe Shelley’s notebooks, 200 years old, where the pencil-scrawled originals are forbidden to all but the most careful hands. Shelley used pens and ink-bottles both at his desk and out of doors, but he preferred pencils in the open air, and perhaps not just for practical reasons. To look on his pencilled drafts is almost to see the graphite dust sifting away before your eyes – blown by the wild West Wind, perhaps.
When I write with a pencil, I too assume it won’t fix words as my faithful black Biros will; I transfer them to ink fairly fast. The pencil’s job is to snatch, make a first stab at creation, before the thought is set in stone. That ephemeral quality is another reason to treasure them, while they last.■
Crematorium workers are struggling to cope with the numbers of dead from COVID in India.
Deen Dayal Verma, a crematorium worker in Barabanki, Uttar Pradesh, sits in the shade inside the crematorium compound where he works [Saurabh Sharma/Al Jazeera]
Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh – Deen Dayal Verma has never burned as many bodies as he has this year.
Sitting under the shade of a cement roof at a crematorium in Barabanki city, the 55-year-old who has been a crematorium worker for the past six years, says with a wry smile: “Actually, no dead body has come today. Has COVID-19 come to an end or are the bodies being taken to other crematoriums?”
In India, where cremation on a funeral pyre made from wood has long been part of an elaborate ritual to honour the dead, the religious significance of laying the dead to rest has been all but abandoned as the bodies stack up during the second deadly wave of COVID.
As Deen Dayal waits for the work to come in, he puffs on a bidi (a mini-cigar filled with tobacco flakes and wrapped in a tendu leaf tied with string).
“I have not kept count of the bodies, but in April and May, I worked from 5 in the morning until midnight every day. I think I would have lit more than 100 funeral pyres in April alone. There has been no end to the dead bodies coming to this crematorium,” he says. “Before the second wave of COVID-19, three to four dead bodies used to come in per week.”
The Barabanki crematorium, where Deen Dayal Verma works. Barabanki is 30km (19 miles) east of the Uttar Pradesh state capital of Lucknow. Uttar Pradesh is India’s most populous state [Saurabh Sharma/Al Jazeera]Deen Dayal is the only person still working at this crematorium. He has a small, two-room house allocated to him on the site, where he lives with three of his children – his elder daughter, Soni, 14, takes care of her two younger brothers during the day. His wife has returned to the family home in a village 48km (30 miles) away, where his other four children remain, but Deen Dayal has not visited for two months for fear of passing the virus on to others.
The crematorium has become so busy that Deen Dayal says he no longer waits for the municipal cleaner to arrive each morning – he gets on and does it himself so that families will not have to wait around for the crematorium to be ready.
“Over the last two months, the workload has increased so much that I have now developed a habit of waking up early. I don’t want to make people wait with the dead body; I do not feel good for people waiting with the dead bodies for their turn for the cremation.”
The state of Uttar Pradesh, which is more populous than Brazil, has been the worst affected in India during the second wave of COVID, with people struggling to obtain oxygen, hospital admissions and healthcare. The state has recorded more than 20,787 deaths, with thousands more thought to have gone unreported due to the lack of proper COVID testing. As of June 3, India had officially recorded 337,787 deaths.
Deen Dayal Verma, a crematorium worker, sits outside the two-room lodgings he shares with three of his children. He remains outside the house at all times [Saurabh Sharma/Al Jazeera]
‘Family members refuse to touch the bodies’
The once highly respectful ritual of cremating family members has undergone a huge shift as a result of the pandemic, says Deen Dayal.
Before, cremations were an important cultural custom in the Hindu faith. People came in large numbers to pay their respects to the dead before the body was placed on a funeral pyre and burned. According to Hindu scripture, “just as old clothes are cast off and new ones worn, the soul leaves the body after death and enters a new one”. Hindus believe that burning the dead body and, hence, destroying it, helps the departed soul get over any residual attachment it may have developed for the deceased person.
“Earlier, cremations were performed with the utmost respect but now for many of the families, it has become a burden. In many cases, funerals have been reduced to just getting rid of the dead body because people are very scared of contracting the virus,” he explains.
“Many times, family members refuse to touch the dead body, and in many cases the family members insist that I only show them the face once before lighting the pyre, so they can pay their last respects.”
Deen Dayal has never been tested for COVID, nor has he been vaccinated. He has no personal protective equipment (PPE). All he has been given by the local municipal government which oversees the crematorium is a “Corona prevention kit”, containing vitamin C tablets, zinc tablets and five days worth of an anti-parasitic drug.
“I listen to everyone. I wear a mask and gloves, use a sanitiser, although I know that is not enough, but I do not have any other option,” he says.
Deen Dayal Verma outside the crematorium lodgings he shares with his daughter, Soni, 14 and two younger sons. His six-year-old son, Sunny, fractured his wrist while playing with his siblings [Saurabh Sharma/Al Jazeera]For the cremation of each dead body, Deen Dayal is paid Rs 500 (about $7) and he asks the family to provide gloves, masks and sanitiser.
His family is terrified by his job – he speaks to his wife and other four children by telephone as often as possible. “There are nine people in my family (himself, his wife and seven children) and they all are very scared of the COVID situation. They keep asking me to stop doing this work but if I stop setting up and lighting the pyres, then who will do it and what will I do? The only work I know is this. If I stop doing it, how will I feed the family?” he asks.
“I try to take precautions to keep myself away from the infection but this is a very risky job. I have to do it because I want to treat every dead body with the utmost respect, otherwise I will not be able to face God when I die.”
Soni applies oil to her father’s arm outside the family house in Uttar Pradesh [Saurabh Sharma/Al Jazeera]
‘I see him crying at night’
Deen Dayal’s 14-year-old daughter, Soni, says that the family back in their home village will not allow him to visit for at least four days after cremating a dead body these days – so there is little point in him making the 48km (30-mile) journey there every Tuesday as he used to do. At their lodgings on the crematorium site, he must remain outside at all times.
“To answer nature’s calls he goes out in the fields and does not use the toilet we have access to. He eats and sleeps outside and sometimes he gets irritated when he cannot play with my younger brothers.
“I have seen him cry at night but he never mentions the reason behind it.
“We all know that he misses us a lot and we also miss him. It has been months [since] we have gone out with him in the evening to the markets to eat samosa and do grocery shopping. We miss the bedtime stories about the Gods he used to tell us.”
Soni does her best to care for her younger brothers while her father is working, but it is not easy. One of them – six-year-old Sunny – fractured his wrist while playing.
Inside the lodgings at the crematorium where Deen Dayal lives with three of his children [Saurabh Sharma/Al Jazeera]Back at the family home, his wife and eldest daughter work as domestic help in nearby houses, earning about $130 per month. They say this is enough to feed the family. There is no gas connection to either that home or the crematorium lodgings, so the family uses firewood to cook.
“We tried very hard to convince our father to return to our native village and not do the cremation work but he is adamant,” says a frustrated Soni. “He did not listen to us and is still doing the work despite knowing the large number of people dying from COVID.
“My mother has had arguments with him, but he has never paid any importance to what we were saying. My father has also developed a drinking habit and in the past, he had liver problems, so we are extremely worried for him.”
Earthenware pots containing the ashes of the dead hang on a tree outside the crematorium in Belai, close to the Ganges river [Saurabh Sharma/Al Jazeera]
‘I have to do the job of the priest’
In Belai Ghat, on the banks of the holy Ganges river in Belai, Unnao, Uttar Pradesh, about 64km (40 miles) north of Lucknow, Ankit Dwivedi is telling someone over the phone to make sure the body they have is tightly wrapped in a plastic sheet if they want him to perform a cremation.
These days, with some priests afraid to oversee cremations due to the pandemic, the 23-year-old crematorium worker also performs their duties. Although he is not a priest and has received no training, it is Ankit who now quickly recites the funeral hymns before lighting a body.
“A lot of people are dying and no one knows the reason [because of the lack of COVID testing],” he says. “There are high chances of COVID being behind this sudden surge in deaths so to protect myself, I have been asking everyone to wrap the dead bodies in a plastic sheet before they come to the ghats [the river banks].”
In more normal times, this is a deeply holy site – the Ganges river is considered the holiest in India. After bodies are cremated, family members bring the ashes from the nearby crematorium to place in the river, in the belief that the soul of the dead person will be cleansed by the waters.
Now, because crematoriums cannot keep up with the workload, Ankit says, more and more families have taken to burying the dead – once considered unacceptable in the Hindu religion. There is no other choice – the crematoriums are full and people have to get rid of dead bodies quickly because of the risk of infection and the social stigma attached to those who have died from COVID.
“This COVID disease has changed a lot of things. People now want to bury their dead ones if they can’t get the cremation done as fast as possible. The reasons behind it are both poverty and fear of COVID,” Ankit says.
“Before the pandemic, 10 to 12 cremations were being performed at this ghat each week but in the months of April and May I have performed at least 25 cremations every week and never in my life have I seen such a large number of deaths. I pray to God to not show us a similar situation ever again.”
Ankit Dwivedi, 23, pictured outside the house he shares with his parents and older brother in Belai, near the Ganges river where he is a cremation worker [Saurabh Sharma/Al Jazeera]Every day is the same for Ankit. “I wake up at around 5.30am and then I reach the river bank by 6am. I stay there all day and eat whatever I get from the people who bring dead bodies with them or else I buy cucumber, watermelon and other things that are grown on the river bank.
“Before the pandemic, I used to pedal myself home on my bicycle in the afternoon for lunch but the situation is not the same now. I have isolated myself as I do not want to harm my family by carrying any kind of infection with me. My parents are older and I fear for them. My stuff has been separated by the family and my dinner is placed outside my room before I reach home.”
Once he is there, he remains isolated in his own room, and no one else is allowed to enter.
Ankit comes from a family of cremation workers. They have been in the funeral business for more than five decades. They have also studied the Sanskrit language, so that they can learn about the cremation rituals in Hinduism.
A funeral pyre burns at the Bahriach crematorium close to the shore of the Ganges river in Belai, Unnao [Saurabh Sharma/Al Jazeera]He used to have a busy life outside of work – but no longer. “Now I cannot even meet my friends or go to play cricket with them. All I do is perform the cremations, eat, sleep and repeat. This has been my routine on loop for the last two months and there is nothing else happening in my life.
“All I care about these days is my stock of face masks and sanitiser because these are the only things that are going to save me from COVID and my family will be safe only if I am safe,” says Ankit.
“I had a habit of massaging my parents’ feet every night before going to bed but now I keep a distance of 10 feet when I am with my mother and only have contact with my father when he comes to leave me my tea early in the morning. This is a really sad feeling because there is no life without family and if this pandemic does not come to an end, then I am sure I will either slip into depression or die from the isolation.”
Ankit washes his hands carefully after work before entering the family home [Saurabh Sharma/Al Jazeera]
‘I feel like a vulture who feeds on dead bodies’
The one “bonus” is that Ankit, the sole breadwinner in the household, is earning a good deal more money. The standard fee of Rs 500 ($7) per body he cremates has risen to Rs 2,000 ($28). But the family finds little joy in this.
“Performing cremations is our family business but now I feel like a vulture who feeds on dead bodies,” says Ankit’s father, 50-year-old Vipin Bihari, who has retired from funeral work. “I have never seen such a large number of deaths in my life and my son has to see and work in this unfortunate situation. Our family never thought of changing the profession but now I feel like our kids should do something else.”
Dismayed by the prospect of the family remaining in the cremation business, Vipin says he is considering opening a grocery shop nearby which he can pass on to his children instead.
He adds that his wife desperately misses their son even though he is living in the next room. “Every night my wife asks me to stop Ankit from going to the river bank and performing the cremations but if he stops doing this then what else will we do to earn our bread and butter? She cries, she fights with me. She fights with Ankit too but consoles herself watching the family and understanding that Ankit is the sole breadwinner now. We do not own land and our elder son is sick [with a long-term illness] so all the burden of earning is on Ankit only.”
Ankit reads alone in his room at the family home. He must stay separated from the rest of his family in case has contracts COVID during his work at a crematorium [Saurabh Sharma/Al Jazeera]Ankit says he feels “like I am cheating my religion because people are burying more dead bodies and not burning them as per the religious rituals but what more can I do?
“As my father says, ‘we are no more than vultures’. We feed on dead bodies. The more dead bodies, the more money but no one pays us happily. A lot of time I feel that this money is even worse than begging but this is my life and I accept it the way it is.”
Analysis: scientists say the Delta variant should make the government think twice about resting all its hopes on vaccines
If the new health secretary is to be believed, we are about to embark on an “exciting new journey” come 19 July. Sajid Javid, like the prime minister, appears confident that restrictions will be lifted irreversibly on that date. The data, however, is beginning to tell a different story.
When Boris Johnson said his government would be guided by “data, not dates”, the scientific community – for the most part – endorsed the cautious approach. Now, the signs are ominous. Driven by the highly transmissible Delta variant, cases are once again starting to rise exponentially. Vaccination rates have slowed. An exhausted NHS is seeing a rise in hospitalisations. Over half of all people in the UK are not fully vaccinated. Continue reading... http://dlvr.it/S2fWxm
Works by the 20th-century masters recovered nearly a decade after their theft from the country’s biggest state art gallery in Athens
Greek police have recovered two paintings by 20th-century masters Pablo Picasso and Piet Mondrian, nearly a decade after their theft from the country’s biggest state art gallery in Athens.
A statement late on Monday said the two works were in the hands of the police, but provided no detail on their condition and on whether any arrests had been made. Continue reading... http://dlvr.it/S2fWtc
Authorities consider giving other jabs to medics after 10 fully vaccinated doctors die in June
* Coronavirus – latest updates
* See all our coronavirus coverage
At least 10 out of 26 Indonesian doctors who have died from Covid-19 this month had been fully vaccinated with Sinovac, prompting authorities to consider whether medics should receive alternative doses to boost immunity.
Indonesia, which has relied on the Chinese-made vaccine for its health workers, is struggling with a new surge in coronavirus cases. The latest outbreak, driven by new variants, has overwhelmed hospitals and burial sites in Jakarta and on the island of Java. On Monday the country announced 20,694 new infections. Continue reading... http://dlvr.it/S2f1my
If you’re a digital native and consider yourself immune to all scams, the thieves have you right where they want you.
For years now, the Better Business Bureau’s survey research has shown that younger adults lose money to swindlers much more often than the older people you may think of as the stereotypical victims. The Federal Trade Commission reports similar figures, with 44 percent of people ages 20 to 29 losing money to fraud, more than double the 20 percent of people ages 70 to 79.
The Better Business Bureau’s latest report revealed a new twist: When criminals redoubled their efforts as homebound people spent more time online last year, they succeeded in bringing the median loss per scam for adults ages 18 to 24 to the same level — $150 — it was for the much more flush 65-plus crowd.
When we look at the kinds of scams that work on young people, there’s nary a Nigerian prince in sight. The targeted activities vary widely, from the online shopping that these victims may do nearly every day to their once-in-a-blue-moon handling of paper checks. Illegal schemes also target the student debt payments they must make and the jobs they seek to afford them.
So let’s lay out what these scams look like — and remind ourselves how we might best reach young people who think they are invincible.
Online Retail Scams
The false promise of a rare or surprisingly cheap product isn’t a new form of flimflam, but the internet sure makes it easier — especially if you’re accustomed to frequently buying online.
Online purchase scams accounted for 64 percent of the reports of lost money to the Better Business Bureau last year, up from just 13 percent in 2015. And according to the bureau’s data, 83 percent of young adults who were exposed to such scams fell for them, more than any other age group.
There are two trends to be aware of here.
First, don’t be blinded by puppy love. Pet and pet-supply scams have historically made up 25 percent of the online purchase scams reported to the Better Business Bureau — and that ramped up to one-third this past year as pandemic pet purchases boomed. The American Kennel Club and the Humane Society of the United States offer tip sheets online to try to keep you from being both dogless and out the median dollar loss of $660 that the bureau reports.
Second, Amazon is everywhere — including as a vector for fraud. Given its size, con artists try to impersonate Amazon more often than any other company’s brand.
The company offers some geeked-out advice for spotting trouble in an unsolicited “Amazon” offer:
Real Amazon sites have a dot before amazon.com in the URL.
If you get a message saying you need to update your payment method, always go directly to the Amazon site on your own to see if it’s true — not through a link in the message.
The company doesn’t send links that have strings of jumbled numbers in them.
Also of note: Scammers sometimes thumb their nose at the Better Business Bureau itself by pretending to be the organization when initiating Amazon scams.
Employment Scams
Millions of people were left jobless through no fault of their own during the pandemic, so it’s no surprise that these scams proliferated. And grifters took to offering bogus jobs that are particularly attractive to young adults.
Postings for foot-in-the-door, exposure-to-creative-industries gigs like assistants and receptionists are common ploys for people with bad intentions. The same goes for postings for warehouse and shipping work, an area that boomed during the pandemic and offers jobs for which many people are qualified.
The scams frequently request dates of birth and Social Security numbers, which can be used to commit the worst forms of identity theft. Another form of fraud asks for a few hundred dollars to cover supplies or training for positions that turn out not to exist.
Of survey respondents who encountered employment scams, 32 percent said theirs had originated on the job listing site Indeed, far surpassing other popular platforms, the Better Business Bureau noted in a report from last year.
Indeed seems well aware of this and posts tips to avoid this form of fraud. (The company probably ought to force you to read the warnings before letting you look at a single listing.) Among them is a kind of self-own: “Never agree to a job that involves opening multiple accounts and/or posting ads on Indeed or on other sites.”
In short, Indeed wants you to watch out for Indeed scammers getting you to use Indeed to run Indeed scams.
Fake-Check Scams
These often involve a very real piece of paper, which appears to be drawing on a business or personal bank account, or rendered as a money order or a cashier’s check. It looks so authentic that the recipient doesn’t catch on and the bank doesn’t immediately reject it.
Then comes the con, which is a follow-up message asking for some of the money back: “Sorry, this is an accidental overpayment” or “Please use some of the money to perform mystery shopping of online money transfer services.”
These checks can arrive in the mail, appearing to be a prize or a rebate — just the kind of payment that your banking app can quickly digest through your phone’s camera. Often, they’re a twist on an employment scam: A hustler overpays the applicant the hustler just hired, supposedly by accident — and then wants some of the money back.
People in their 20s are more than twice as likely as older adults to fall prey to this sort of thing, according to the Federal Trade Commission. Many of them haven’t used checks much, and they may not be aware that while federal rules require banks to make funds from checks available quickly, those same banks may take many more days to root out a fake one. Once they do, they usually want the money back from the victim for having introduced the bad check into the system.
Student Loan Scams
This is already a problem, but it could get a lot worse very soon.
Tens of millions of borrowers have their federal student loan payments on pause right now, thanks to governmental efforts to keep them out of financial trouble during the pandemic. But as soon as Oct. 1, a switch will flip and most of those people will need to start the repayment process.
Even in the best of times, it’s hard for student loan borrowers to get good help from their servicers. And meltdowns seem inevitable this fall.
“It just makes the situation totally ripe for scammers,” said Seth Frotman, executive director of the Student Borrower Protection Center.
You can expect a flood of thieves offering “free extended forbearance” or “Biden forgiveness plans” that do not exist. Then they’d try to redirect victims’ payments or use their personal information for identity theft. Or both.
The Federal Trade Commission and the Department of Education offer tips for scam avoidance. And when the Pennsylvania attorney general shut down an entity called Unified Holding Group, it revealed some eye-opening details about just how elaborate these cons can be.
Among other things, the company told borrowers to ignore outreach from their legitimate loan servicers and had just-stilted-enough-to-be-legit language on its website saying things like “We find integrity fosters a positive reputation and a sense of security in all our business interactions.”
So What Can We Do?
It is deeply unsatisfactory to default to “more awareness” as a partial solution to scams that prey on systemic complexity and inequity that shouldn’t exist in the first place. But here we are. Again.
Young adults out on their own could stand to slow down a bit. Perhaps Instagram instabuying isn’t necessary, for instance. And remember that scammers succeed more often with the stressed and the lonely. If you are either, stay wary.
Early education is crucial. If there’s a personal finance class in your kid’s school, ask the teacher whether there’s a section devoted to fraud and thievery. Studying the techniques of the crooked with wonder, awe and begrudging respect as opposed to scolding didacticism might improve things.
Even better would be your own educational campaign — a kind of true-crime drama. Chances are you’ve seen a scam in action, even if you weren’t taken in. So unspool tales of your own near-victimization — or worse. Sure, you might become the subject of temporary mockery. But the story is likely to stick.
Derrick Bell at Harvard Law School, April 1990.STEVE LISS/GETTY IMAGES
In the 1992 book ‘Faces at the Bottom of the Well,’ Derrick Bell used the techniques of fiction to dramatize his ideas about racism
By Adam Kirsch for WSJ
In the life of any big idea, there comes a moment when it stops belonging to the thinkers who invented it and becomes public property. Today, critical race theory is undergoing that kind of transformation. When the term came into use in the 1970s and 1980s, it described the work of scholars like Derrick Bell, Richard Delgado and Kimberlé Crenshaw, whose work was hotly debated in legal academia but little known outside it. But over the last year, critical race theory has moved to the center of American political debate.
In their book “Critical Race Theory: An Introduction,” Mr. Delgado and Jean Stefancic list several of its core premises, including the view that “racism is ordinary, not aberrational,” and that it “serves important purposes, both psychic and material, for the dominant group,” that is, for white people. In recent years, these ideas have entered the mainstream thanks to the advocacy of the Black Lives Matter movement, which was catalyzed by several high-profile cases of police violence against Black people, as well as the New York Times’s 1619 Project and bestselling books like Robin DiAngelo’s “White Fragility” and Ibram X. Kendi’s “How to Be an Antiracist.” Critical race theory also informs instruction at some schools and other institutions.
These ideas have now become a major target of conservative activism. In September 2020, the Trump administration issued a memo instructing executive branch departments to cancel “any training on ‘critical race theory,’” which it equated with teaching “that the United States is an inherently racist or evil country.” This year, legislators and school boards in many states have introduced proposals to prohibit the teaching of critical race theory in schools, with Florida’s State Board of Education adopting such a rule earlier this month.
A rally against critical race theory in Leesburg, Va., June 12.
PHOTO: ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDS/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
Far more Americans have learned about critical race theory from its opponents than from the theorists themselves. That may be inevitable, since their writing was mostly aimed at other scholars. But at least one major work is more accessible: “Faces at the Bottom of the Well,” the 1992 book by Derrick Bell, who is often described as the founder or godfather of critical race theory.
Bell died in 2011, but the response to his work foreshadows today’s controversies. In “Faces,” he blends the genres of fiction and essay to communicate his powerfully pessimistic sense of “the permanence of racism”—the book’s subtitle. Bell’s thought has been an important influence on some of today’s most influential writers on race, such as Ta-Nehisi Coates and Michelle Alexander.
Derrick Bell was born in Pittsburgh in 1930, and after serving in the Air Force he went to work as an attorney in the Civil Rights Division of the Eisenhower Justice Department. He left the job in 1959 after being told that he had to resign his membership in the NAACP to avoid compromising his objectivity. That experience reflects a major theme in Bell’s work: Can traditional legal standards of objectivity and neutrality lead to justice for Black Americans, or does fighting racism require a more politically engaged, results-oriented approach to the law?
In 1971, Bell became the first Black professor to receive tenure at Harvard Law School. As he writes in “Faces,” “When I agreed to become Harvard’s first black faculty member…I did so on the express commitment that I was to be the first, but not the last, black hired. I was to be the pioneer, the trailblazer.” But the school was slow to hire more Black faculty, leading Bell to leave in protest in 1990. He ended up spending the last part of his career at NYU Law School.
These experiences inform “Faces at the Bottom of the Well,” which is made up of nine fables, some with a science-fiction twist. In one story, a new continent emerges in the Atlantic Ocean, with an atmosphere that only African-Americans can breathe. In another, the U.S. institutes a system where whites can pay for permission to discriminate against Blacks—a kind of cap-and-trade scheme for bigotry.
These far-fetched scenarios allow Bell to explore very real questions about belonging and trust. Are Black people at home in America, or should they think of themselves as sojourners in a land that will never belong to them? Is racism a social problem that can be solved, or is it a permanent condition like mortality, which can only be met with defiance?
Not every story in “Faces” has a dark ending, but most do—especially the last and most famous, “The Space Traders.” In this tale, aliens arrive on earth and make the U.S. government an offer: In exchange for miraculous technologies that can heal the environment and ensure prosperity, they demand to carry off the entire Black population of the U.S. in their spaceships. When a referendum is held on whether to accept the aliens’ offer, “yes” wins with 70% of the vote.
“ Bell suggests that the overwhelming majority of white Americans would agree to send their Black fellow citizens to an unknown fate. ”
Since the U.S. population was about 12% Black in the 1990 census, Bell is suggesting that the overwhelming majority of white Americans would agree to send their Black fellow citizens to an unknown fate. This conclusion reflects his theory of “interest convergence,” which says that white Americans will only act in the interests of Black people if it also serves their own interest. When the interests of whites and Blacks are opposed, Bell argues, whites will always choose to put their own interest first.
For Bell, this is the lesson of American history. As he observes in “The Space Traders,” “Without the compromises on slavery in the Constitution of 1787, there would be no America.” Similarly, after the Civil War, whites in the North and South sacrificed the rights of former slaves for the sake of sectional reconciliation. Bell suggests that the same thing would happen in the alien scenario, and the story ends with a nightmarish vision of Black Americans being herded onto spaceships: “Heads bowed, arms now linked by slender chains, black people left the New World as their forebears had arrived.”
The image suggests that 400 years of American history have changed nothing in the relationship between Blacks and whites. At the heart of the debate over critical race theory, then and now, is whether such a view is justified. Ms. Alexander, author of the 2010 bestseller “The New Jim Crow,” wrote in the foreword to a 2018 reissue of “Faces” that “As a law student, I read nearly every word Bell wrote; as a civil rights lawyer, I was haunted by his words and ultimately forced to admit the truth of them.”
Other commentators have strongly disagreed. The political scientist Adolph Reed, Jr., whose work focuses on race and inequality, wrote about a conference he attended at Harvard Law School in 1991, where “I heard the late, esteemed legal theorist, Derrick Bell, declare on a panel that blacks had made no progress since 1865. I was startled not least because Bell’s own life, as well as the fact that Harvard’s black law students’ organization put on the conference, so emphatically belied his claim.” Mr. Reed dismissed the idea as “more a jeremiad than an analysis.”
“ Bell argues that the struggle for racial equality is worthwhile even though it will never succeed. ”
In the conclusion to “Faces,” Bell argues that the struggle for racial equality is worthwhile even though it will never succeed. Like the French existentialist Albert Camus, who saw Sisyphus’s eternal effort to roll a boulder uphill as a symbol of human endurance in an absurd world, Bell demands “recognition of the futility of action” while insisting “that action must be taken.”
To the journalist and historian James Traub, who profiled Bell for the New Republic magazine in 1993, this amounted to a recipe for paralysis: “If you convince whites that their racism is ineradicable, what are they supposed to do? And what are blacks to do with their hard-won victim status?”
For his supporters and critics alike, Derrick Bell remains a central figure. Nearly three decades after the publication of his most widely read book, his stark vision of the racial divide in American society and history has retained its power to provoke debate and activism across the political spectrum.
Phumlani Majozi writes on the state of our education system from the perspective of those on the inside
I was in my home province, KwaZulu Natal, a few weeks ago. Spending a few days in my hometown of Stanger, also known as KwaDukuza, was pleasant as always.
While there, I visited my high school teachers. Meeting them was a wonderful, humbling experience. It reminded me of my beginnings.
The first teacher I met taught me maths in grade 12. He is now principal in one of the primary schools in the region. A remarkable man who contributed time and resources in my growth when I was a young star. I am who I am today because of him; and other teachers who supported me in my pursuit of education. If these teachers had not shown up in my life, I may have been telling a different story today.
The conversation with my maths teacher, in his office, over coffee and tea, was intellectual. It focused on the matters of South Africa’s public education. Though I thought it was important to have the dialogue, I found the content unpleasant; because it was more about the ills of the country’s public education system. I listened more than I spoke. I have not taught in South Africa’s public education system since 1984, my maths teacher has.
His thought is that South Africa's public education system is a disaster. That the education officials and administrators do not take education seriously. He also pointed to the teachers union the South African Democratic Teachers Union (SADTU) as one of the culprits in the weakening of education. The union puts members’ interest first, not children’s education, he said.
Administrators can be a joke. During our discussion, he recalled one regional education director who assigned a mathematics literacy teacher to teach English in one of the schools in Stanger. How do you take a teacher qualified to teach mathematics literacy, and assign him to English? Such irresponsible decisions are amongst the things that harm South Africa's public education and disadvantage children.
And one of the saddest things is that in some schools the highlight of the day for teachers is the nutritional programme, not test scores. There is not much focus on school work to improve the learners’ test results. Teachers come and hang around for the meal of the day, and then go home, my maths teacher said.
The next day I visited my high school, and met my technology and accounting teachers. My technology teacher told me that the learners are not passionate about education. He said that my generation had a positive attitude toward education, in contrast to today's learners in the school. My maths teacher had echoed the same thing the day before. Learners are not driven to pursue knowledge.
You see the fact that learners are not motivated to work harder in their studies is concerning. Children’s disillusionment with education is a reminder that some of the fundamental things in South Africa's education cannot be fixed by government policy. All the government can do is provide access to educational resources; motivation is something they cannot provide. It is parents who have to motivate their children to learn.
I was asked to address two grade 12 classes. In my motivational address, I told the learners that how their future will turn out is in their hands. It does not matter the socioeconomic status of the families they come from; they can do it. They have the brains and the teachers to support them.
I come from a family where I was the first person to study beyond matric and earn South Africa’s two university qualifications. My parents never had that privilege. Working harder and seeking support from my teachers helped me.
Now let me briefly explain what can be done to make South Africa’s public education better.
In a nutshell, it is two-fold. Government's education policy needs to be reformed, and private citizens in townships and rural areas need to change their behaviour toward education.
Policy changes must include a strong, competitive curriculum; with an emphasis on entrepreneurship, science and technology. Politics need to change too. The ANC government should abandon the alliance with teachers’ unions.
Labour union SADTU, has been a blockade to genuine education reform, as my maths teacher astutely argued. As part of reform, low-fee independent schools will also need to be encouraged by the government.
The biggest responsibility lies with private citizens. They must hold the education officials accountable. And parents have a critical role to play in their children’s education. Even if they are not educated or well-off, they can encourage their children to be disciplined, and to work harder.
Because if children are not motivated to learn, no government policy can improve their test scores. They need good test scores to become most successful professionals or businesspeople.
South Africa's education will only be improved by the country's private citizens. They must view education as a very important mechanism in improving their economic development. If they slack off, their children's future will remain bleak.
Phumlani M. Majozi is a senior fellow at African Liberty. His website is phumlanimajozi.com. Follow him on Twitter: @PhumlaniMMajozi
Rassemblement National fails to win region in south of France stronghold after rivals form ‘Republican front’
Marine Le Pen’s far-right party has suffered a serious electoral blow when it failed to win a regional election in its stronghold in the south of France.
The Rassemblement National (RN) had pinned its last chances on taking the Provence-Alpes-Côte-d’Azur region (PACA) after emerging victorious from last week’s first-round vote, although by a small margin. Continue reading... http://dlvr.it/S2Znwz
Tracy Brabin was leafleting with colleagues for byelection when group was allegedly followed and assaulted
Labour activists in the Batley and Spen byelection have been pelted with eggs and kicked in the head while on the campaign trail, the region’s mayor has said.
Tracy Brabin, the newly elected mayor of West Yorkshire, said she was leafleting with colleagues, volunteers and campaigners in the Whitaker Street area of Batley on Sunday when they were followed, verbally abused and physically assaulted by a group of young men. Continue reading... http://dlvr.it/S2Zntl
China's National Space Administration has released footage captured by the country's Mars probe. The videos and photos taken by the camera installed on the Zhurong rover of the Tianwen-1 spacecraft show the lander deploying a parachute before touching down on the surface of Mars and the rover driving away from its landing platform. State broadcaster CCTV said Zhurong had been working on the red planet for 42 days and had moved 236 metres so far
* China’s Mars rover drives across planet a week after landing
Continue reading... http://dlvr.it/S2ZPFK
My partner and I live on the West Coast; our families live on the East Coast. When we go home, we make detailed plans for seeing our parents to keep our visits evenly divided and fair. Over the past few years, though, when we’re visiting my family, my partner’s mother has a habit of stopping by unannounced and staying for the day. (Once, she stayed overnight!) This upsets me; she is preventing me from spending time alone with my parents. We’ve told her these days are reserved for my family, and that my parents don’t encroach on her designated time with her son, but she continues to drop by. I want her to respect my private time with my family. Any advice?
DAUGHTER-IN-LAW
It’s tempting to conclude that your partner’s mother is a rule-breaking monster. (And she may be!) What could be fairer, after all, than dividing a six-day visit into three days with your family and three days with your partner’s? Here’s the problem, though: Sometimes neutral rules (like yours) affect people in different circumstances very differently.
Let me give you an example from my marriage. My mom was a widow and a little lonely. My husband’s parents are married with an active social life. My mom needed our visits more than my in-laws did. So, we spent more time with her. Now, this may not be your situation — and more important, it may not be what you and your partner want. (That counts, too!)
By your own account, you and he have clearly asked his mother to stop dropping by. So, ask again, and this time, explore why she’s having trouble respecting your request. Or maybe (and this is just an idea) you and your partner can split up briefly and spend some time with your families individually and then some time with them together. Added bonus: A mini-break from our partners (whom we love)!
Image
Credit...Miguel Porlan
Saving It for Later
My boss regularly buys lunch for the entire staff. When he does, there is a person in the office who always orders an appetizer, entree and dessert. Everyone else just orders a sandwich or salad. One day, this person said to me: “This is dinner for me tonight!” as she ordered a meal of penne à la vodka. Is this appropriate? Why does this bother me so much?
COLLEAGUE
Let’s start with the more interesting question: why this bothers you. I think your sense of fair play is offended by a colleague who takes advantage of your boss’s generosity. (I assume she doesn’t order three-course lunches when the company isn’t picking up the tab.) Still, if your boss doesn’t mind, why should you? I’d M.Y.O.B. here.
I agree that your colleague seems grabby. On the other hand, this occasional greed may help her feel better about any number of workplace grievances. And rest assured: Your boss is being reimbursed by the company for the cost of the lunches (or they’re being deducted as a business expense on his taxes).
The Noise Next Door
I am a caregiver for my husband who was diagnosed with multiple myeloma. He also has leukemia and an inoperable brain tumor. Our next-door neighbors recently installed loud wind chimes very close to our house. They keep us awake day and night! My husband needs his rest, and I have to give him 30 pills a day, which is hard when I’m sleep deprived. Their house is like a fortress, so we wrote them letters (including my husband’s dire diagnoses). But nothing changed. The husband is a doctor, but they seem not to care. Ear plugs and noise machines don’t help. Any advice?
ANDI
I’m so sorry for your troubles! Coldhearted neighbors seem like the last thing you need. For now, forget about contacting them again. Your town may have a noise ordinance. Call its administrative offices or the nonemergency number at the police department and ask if they can help you.
Also, tell the medical team that’s treating your husband what’s going on. Maybe a social worker can get involved. Or perhaps someone on your husband’s medical team knows the doctor-husband and can call on your behalf. If readers have other ideas, please send them in, and I will pass them on to Andi. Good luck!
Finders Keepers?
Friends of mine were vacationing in a small town and waiting for a local restaurant to open. It had rained, and the street was dotted with puddles. Their teenage daughter stuck her toe in one and found a diamond ring with a good-sized stone. Her parents let her keep it. Would you consider this a “finders keepers” situation?
JILL
Much to the chagrin of playground veterans, the law is often more complex than “finders keepers, losers weepers.” Our common law (the jurisprudence created by lawsuits and judges’ legal decisions) recognizes a finders keepers doctrine.
But many states have passed laws that require finders to try to confirm that the property was truly abandoned — and not merely lost. This often involves police reports. So, it’s a complicated situation. (And how much could you really enjoy a ring that turned on someone else’s sadness?)
When people ask Kawana Anderson how she is these days, she responds with, “I’m doing.”
Nearly two years ago, on what would have been her son’s 17th birthday, she attended his wake. In a room adjacent to where he lay in his coffin was a cake with white frosting and green flowers. Her family sang “Happy Birthday.” The next day, he was buried.
I never got to meet John Givan Jr., but I know that he was a funny teenager who liked to play the drums and had a penchant for activism. His short life ended abruptly: He was walking on the sidewalk the night of Sept. 10, 2019, when a vehicle approached and he was shot.
Kawana Anderson, center, dances in celebration of her son, John Givan Jr., following his funeral service in October 2019.
(Francine Orr / Los Angeles Times)
The case remains unsolved. That year, John was one of at least 540 people killed in Los Angeles County. His family was one of many I spent time with as the lead reporter for The Times’ Homicide Report, a database documenting each victim in the county.
For eight years, this was my assignment. Now, as I leave the beat and The Times to return to my home state of Arizona, I find myself reflecting on what I saw, learned and, most of all, felt while chronicling so much death.
I wrote about an 86-year-old widow who was stabbed in her home in tony Windsor Square. I met with the families of numerous teenagers gunned down, including a 14-year-old shot as he walked home from playing basketball and a 16-year-old who posted about the dangers of gang violence on social media only to become a victim of it.
Many times, people asked how I could write about such a sad topic. It’s because through people’s worst days, I witnessed their strength. They wanted to tell their loved ones’ stories; I just had the privilege of listening.
Perhaps the most startling lesson from this reporting was not seeing how people mourn the dead but how they carry on with life.
On July 4, 2013, I was called to my first homicide scene, the killing of Ervin Cavitt, the 26-year-oldson of a prominent gang intervention worker. Cavitt was at a party celebrating a gang’s birthday, what’s called a “hood day.”
Detectives walked me through the scene, which was quiet and smelled of cigarettes. I remember looking at the neat lawns of nearby homes in Manchester Square, wondering if the residents would ever know what happened so close to their safe havens.
That August, an 18-year-old aspiring firefighter was killed while riding in a white Buick Electra with two friends. Detectives told me that there was no indication that Bijan Shoushtari was a target.
Friends and relatives of Bijan Shoushtari gather in Leimert Park to remember the teen, who was shot to death while riding with a friend on Crenshaw Boulevard.
(Luis Sinco / Los Angeles Times)
This was one of the first victims I covered who was probably mistaken for a gang member. The youngest of three children, Bijan came from a close-knit family who welcomed me into their home.
Bijan’s family showered me with anecdotes, and I kept thinking the eternal question so many others have asked: How could such a bad thing happen to such a good family?
Many times — after reporting from candlelight vigils, funerals and cemeteries — I drove away with a tight jaw and a lump in my throat. In 2015, after an elderly man was decapitated in his Inglewood apartment, I had nightmares. I had to start a fitness routine to quiet my wandering mind, and I started placing boundaries on my time and energy.
The next year, Autumn Johnson, a 1-year-old girl, was killed in Compton with a bullet meant for her father. I couldn’t get the image of her small white casket out of my head. I still can’t. Tears felldown my face as I drove on the 110 Freeway back to the office.
Darrell Johnson and Blanche Wandick release doves at Angeles Abbey Memorial Park.
(Barbara Davidson / Los Angeles Times)
Autumn Johnson, 1, was killed at her Compton home in 2016.
(Johnson family)
But no matter how difficult the reporting, I always felt that the mission of the Homicide Report — to give victims a voice — mattered.
While I was reporting, some sources would tell me about other family members or friends who appeared in the report. This was a point of pride, because the Homicide Report was sometimes the only place where these acts of violence were acknowledged. In the communities most hit by violence, there’s a sense of being left behind, of no one seeming to care.
The beat also showed me the parts of Los Angeles that people consider dangerous. As a Latina journalist who looks white, I had a pass in places where darker skin may have made me a target. I could venture from one gang’s territory to another. Many thought I was a social worker.
I got to know anti-violence activists in the Black community who for years have been fighting to make the streets safer. Although Black people comprise 9% of the Los Angeles County population, they represented 34% of the victims in 2020, a disparity that helps explain the passion of the activists. The more vigils and funerals I attended, the more I ran into family members I had met covering earlier homicides.
I also learnedthat the idea of closure is fiction. And the conventional idea of justice — a guilty verdict or plea, a person in prison — is much more complicated.
Blanche Richardson-Wandick, LeAra Gillum and Jeffery Wandick hold a plaque engraved with the face of Autumn Marie Johnson, who was killed at age one.
(Francine Orr / Los Angeles Times)
The plaque engraved with the face of Autumn Marie Johnson.
(Francine Orr / Los Angeles Times)
I met Jeffery Wandick the day after the 1-year-old girl, Autumn, was killed. She was his granddaughter. I walked up to his house and introduced myself. I sensed a notebook would only distract, so I put it away, and Wandick and I spoke about gang violence and the streets. I didn’t take any notes.
The night before, in February 2016, four men drove to what prosecutors called “enemy gang territory.” One man got out of the vehicle and shot at a house. Autumn was shot as she lay in her crib.
After reward offers and news conferences, four men were arrested and charged with murder, but Wandick knew that the prosecution would be difficult. Without a snitch, there wouldn’t be solidevidence, and eventually he stopped going to court to watch. In the end, the four pleaded to lesser charges.
“I just had to let it go,” he told me recently. “I won’t allow it to consume me.”
Instead Wandick remembers his granddaughter when he sees a beautiful flower or a bird flying free. In his frontyard he has a plaque engraved with her face.
“I’ll never forget about her,” he said. “I see Autumn every day because she’s the screen saver on every computer that I have.”
For Lenell Ellis, the sight of butterflies will always remind her of her slain son Robert. In March 2016, I met Ellis in her Torrance apartment after a man sprayed gunfire into a crowded South L.A. strip mall that included a toddler. The gunman could have been aiming for rival gang members, but he killed Robert, 27, who had just gotten a haircut.
Lenell Ellis at Hermosa Beach, her son’s favorite place, in May. He was killed in a 2016 shooting at a South L.A. strip mall.
(Francine Orr / Los Angeles Times)
Lenell Ellis holds a book of photographs of her son.
(Francine Orr / Los Angeles Times)
Back then she told me that when she visited the crime scene after the shooting, there was no sign that a life had been violently taken. She felt like the killing was invisible. Eventually, police found the shooter, who was convicted and sentenced to 90 years to life.
Sometimes she thinks about what Robert would be doing if he were alive. Each year, she celebrates his birthday with his friends. They eat his favorite foods, like crab legs and tacos, and share memories.
After he was killed, she found photos on his iPad of him with butterflies attracted to him like a magnet. Now, whenever she sees butterflies she thinks of her son.
“It feels like when I see those, it always happens to be the time I need to see them,” she said.
Recently I caught up with Bijan Shoushtari’s mother, Marsha. I recently became a mother, and Marsha a grandmother. We chatted about the babies, who are about a month apart in age.
I told Marsha that motherhood revealed why surviving relatives had so often asked me the same question. They wanted to know if I was a parent. I know now that those men and women were trying to show me the scale of their pain, that the immense love felt for a child is immediate and indescribable.
Marsha told me that, before Bijan’s death, she used to come home from work and see mothers who had lost a son or daughter on TV. She’d say, “I can’t imagine that happening to me.” Then, it did.
It has been eight years, and Marsha said she has been able to cope only because of the support of her friends and family. Her family speaks of Bijan often, and her grandson, Ace Bijan, is named after him.
His killing remains unsolved.
“People have asked me, ‘Won’t you be glad when you get closure?’” she said. “Sure, I’ll be glad when they’re caught, but that’s not going to bring me closure.”
Her sentiment echoed what Anderson told me a couple of days earlier. “I will never be OK,” she said.
Kawana Anderson holds her daughter, Heaven-Leigh Givan, during a vigil for her son outside George Washington Preparatory High School in September 2019.
(Francine Orr / Los Angeles Times)
I met Anderson in 2019 at a vigil for her son at his former high school. There, people wore shirts screen-printed with photographs of the teenager. People marched and shouted, “Justice for John!”
That was the first time that Anderson told me of her son’s activism. When he was 14, she took him on a caravan of volunteers that traveled from Sacramento to Arizona, New Mexico and Texas to protest anti-immigrant rhetoric. In a video montage from the trip, John is seen at the border talking through the fence.
“No human being is illegal,” he said. He’s also shown rapping about police brutality. “I refuse to let that be me,” he declared.
Recently, I checked in with Anderson. She said she continued to be proud of her son each day, but she constantly wonders why him, why her son? She consoles others experiencing the death of a loved one. In private, she tells herself that she has to move on,to live.
“I don’t try to use my son as an excuse to not do something or do something that I should not do,” she said. On the weekends, she spends time with Jordyan, his daughter, who is now 2 years old. She wears a locket with her son’s picture inside.
“My son left a piece of him behind,” she said. “I can only be grateful for that.”
At night, she sometimes leaves candles lighted outside her doorstep, for her son to find his way home.
Candles sit on Kawana Anderson’s doorstep.
(Francine Orr / Los Angeles Times)
Santa Cruz, a former Times staff writer, is a reporter for ProPublica in Phoenix.
Nicole Santa Cruz is a former Los Angeles Times staff writer and lead reporter for the Homicide Report. She joined The Times in 2009 and previously covered Orange County and national news such as the Gabrielle Giffords shooting and the Louisiana oil spill. She is a graduate of the University of Arizona.
![Deen Dayal Verma, a crematorium worker in Barabanki, Uttar Pradesh, sits in the shade inside the crematorium compound where he works [Saurabh Sharma/Al Jazeera]](https://www.aljazeera.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Pic1.jpeg?resize=770%2C513)
The Barabanki crematorium, where Deen Dayal Verma works. Barabanki is 30km (19 miles) east of the Uttar Pradesh state capital of Lucknow. Uttar Pradesh is India’s most populous state [Saurabh Sharma/Al Jazeera]
Deen Dayal Verma, a crematorium worker, sits outside the two-room lodgings he shares with three of his children. He remains outside the house at all times [Saurabh Sharma/Al Jazeera]
Deen Dayal Verma outside the crematorium lodgings he shares with his daughter, Soni, 14 and two younger sons. His six-year-old son, Sunny, fractured his wrist while playing with his siblings [Saurabh Sharma/Al Jazeera]
Soni applies oil to her father’s arm outside the family house in Uttar Pradesh [Saurabh Sharma/Al Jazeera]
Inside the lodgings at the crematorium where Deen Dayal lives with three of his children [Saurabh Sharma/Al Jazeera]
Earthenware pots containing the ashes of the dead hang on a tree outside the crematorium in Belai, close to the Ganges river [Saurabh Sharma/Al Jazeera]
Ankit Dwivedi, 23, pictured outside the house he shares with his parents and older brother in Belai, near the Ganges river where he is a cremation worker [Saurabh Sharma/Al Jazeera]
A funeral pyre burns at the Bahriach crematorium close to the shore of the Ganges river in Belai, Unnao [Saurabh Sharma/Al Jazeera]
Ankit washes his hands carefully after work before entering the family home [Saurabh Sharma/Al Jazeera]
Ankit reads alone in his room at the family home. He must stay separated from the rest of his family in case has contracts COVID during his work at a crematorium [Saurabh Sharma/Al Jazeera]
