The Royal Spanish Academy of Language has announced it will revise the official definition of the word "marriage" in the DRAE (Royal Spanish Academy Dictionary). This change will mark the first time the DRAE recognizes marriage as more than the union of two opposite-sex partners, reports elpais.com. The new definition will include the...
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I had the pleasure of visiting the ALBA archives a couple of weeks ago with Alan Levine, a New York-based civil rights attorney with a longstanding interest in the Lincolns. In the early 1960s, fresh out of Yale Law School, Alan took a job on Wall Street, a decision which he soon regretted. In...
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Last Friday, June 15th, President Obama announced that his administration would stop deporting young undocumented immigrants who entered the United States as children, if they meet certain criteria. While the President acknowledged that this was not a "permanent fix" to the deportation issues that have only been exacerbated under his presidency, his action, "effective...
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The uruguayan government has announced its decision to control the means of production and distribution of marijuana, making it the first country in Latin America to do so. The goal of this measure is to combat drastic consumption and narcotrafficking in a drug war that, according to politician Eleuterio Fernández Huidobro, "has already been...
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Last week the 1929 Picasso painting, mujer en sofá rojo was vandalized at the Menil Collection of Houston, Texas. The vandal approached the painting unhindered and spray painted the figure of a bull with the word "conquered" below it, reported elpais.com. Fortunately, the museum houses a conservation laboratory and the painting was salvaged...
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The Vatican will consider taking punitive actions against bishop Fernando María Bargalló after videos and photographs showing him embracing a woman and displaying flirtatious behavior were distributed by various argentine media outlets. Despite the photographic content, Bargalló insisted that the woman he had been seen with was a childhood friend, reported elpais.com. In...
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An appeals court on Tuesday ordered the government to investigate the 1976 assassination of an American by Chilean police secret agents in Washington, the AP reports:
The American, Ronni Moffitt, was an assistant to Orlando Letelier, a former Chilean cabinet minister and a leading critic of Gen. Augusto Pinochet, the Chilean dictator....
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The Supreme Court in Madrid has denied an appeal from the Fundación Francisco Franco to relocate a statue of Franco on horseback to its original location in the La Plaza de San Juan de la Cruz. The statue was removed from the plaza in 2005 by the Ministry of Development. According to elpais.com,...
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This year marks the 75th anniversary of the evacuation of 4,000 children from Spain by sea to the United Kingdom. A broadcast at 11:00pm on Monday, June 18th (tonight) on bbc.co.uk told the "heart-warming story of how British people welcomed the Spanish children, and strived to make a difference during [the Spanish...
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En español aquí. 1937. A picnic in Toro Park, 9 miles from Monterey, California. Several hundred Spaniards from the Monterey Peninsula and the Santa Clara Valley enjoy a pleasurable get-together. But the raised clenched fists remind us that a war is going on in Spain, and that this social gathering 6,000 miles away in...
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What Was a Young Dutch Pilot Doing in Civil-War Spain? Saturday, March 20, 1937. Farmers at work in a vineyard near Narbonne, in southern France, see a Dutch plane circling for hours. At four in the afternoon, a car arrives whose driver unfolds a white sheet. At this signal, the plane lands on a...
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Carmelo Delgado, a Puerto Rican law student in Madrid, fought as a militiaman on the Republican side until he was taken prisoner by the rebel forces and shot. Can his remains be recovered? In their moving graphic novel El abismo del olvido, which deals with the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War, Paco Roca...
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As Patricia Schechter dug into her family’s history, she uncovered one of the untold stories of the Spanish labor movement: an Andalusian strike in early 1936 grounded in a rich legacy of disciplined pacifism and sturdy worker cooperatives. After the July 1936 military uprising that unleashed the Spanish Civil War, hundreds of men from...
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Vince Lossowski (1913-1984), who was born and raised in Rochester, New York, in a Polish working-class family, served with the International Brigades from August 1937 until September 1938. In 1942, he was recruited for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), along with half a dozen of his fellow Lincoln Brigade vets. During World War...
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The roots of fascism lay right here in the United States. In fact, anti-Blackness is a persistent feature of fascism in all its forms. But there is a long lineage of Black antifascists that still have things to teach us. When the House Un-American Activities Committee was first created, in May 1938, its chair,...
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Despite their name, the famous International Brigades of Spain’s Republican Army included thousands of Spanish soldiers who served alongside the foreign volunteers. Among them was César Orquín, an anarchist from Valencia who served as a commissar in the Lincoln Battalion. Details of his extraordinary life, long shrouded in mystery and scandal, have recently come...
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Over the many years I spent researching the presence of the International Brigades in the town of Vic and its surroundings, in northern Catalonia, I’d always been curious about the case of Simon Bulka, a medical captain, and his wife, the nurse Chrissie Wallace, both from Scotland, who were assigned to the International Hospital...
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The lives of Ruth and Haya Meites, two sisters who left Jewish Palestine in order to help Republican Spain in its struggle against fascism, illustrate the level of international women’s participation in the Spanish Civil War—and its limits.
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“Oh, you were a premature antifascist,” the chair of the Yale Classics department replied to Bernard Knox when, during a job interview in 1946, Knox told him about his stint with the International Brigades preceding his US army service during World War II. “I was taken aback,” Knox wrote later. “If you were not...
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Contemporary Spanish photographers are finding new ways to return to the memory of the Civil War, departing from the sober documentary approach that was dominant until recently.
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ALBA's project to provide a complete list of the more than 2,800 individuals who left from U.S. territory to fight with the Spanish Republic
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