God's Grace In Action

Here is a news article in which one can discern God's Grace in action:

Accuser, Exonerated Man Are Friends
AOL
posted: 6 DAYS 13 HOURS AGOcomments: 1213filed under: Law News, National NewsPrintShareText SizeAAA

(March 9) - When Jennifer Thompson identified Ronald Cotton as her rapist in 1984, she was sure she had found the right man. But she was wrong.
Cotton, then 22, was convicted of raping Thompson and another woman on the same night in Burlington, N.C. He would spend the next 11 years behind bars for a crime he didn't commit.

In 1995, DNA evidence cleared Cotton of the rapes and showed that another man who was in prison with him was the rapist, a case recently covered by CBS' '60 Minutes'. Now, Thompson and Cotton are friends and have written a new book together on their story, called 'Picking Cotton.'
The two speak on the phone weekly and travel together to speak out on the problems with eyewitness evidence. Even their families are friends.

Thompson said she felt horrible guilt when she found out Cotton was not her rapist. "Suffocating, debilitating shame," she told Lesley Stahl in a CBS '60 Minutes' interview that aired Sunday. She asked Cotton if she could meet with him at a local church.

"I started to cry immediately. And I looked at him, and I said, 'Ron, if I spent every second of every minute of every hour for the rest of my life telling you how sorry I am, it wouldn't come close to how my heart feels. I'm so sorry.' And Ronald just leaned down, he took my hands…and he looked at me, he said, 'I forgive you,'" Thompson told CBS.
"I told her, I said, 'Jennifer, I forgive you. I don't want you to look over your shoulder. I just want us to be happy and move on in life,'"Cotton said.
There have been 233 people exonerated by DNA evidence across the country, and more than 75 percent of them have been convicted at least in part because of faulty eyewitness testimony, Stahl reported.

See video at: CBS 60 Minutes or AOL.

2009 AOL LLC. All Rights Reserved.
2009-03-09 15:02:59

History Tidbits

Ancient Shoe Soles Found in Trash Pile

By Robert Roy Britt, LiveScience
posted: 8 DAYS 6 HOURS AGOcomments: 287filed under: Science News, World NewsPrintShareText SizeAAASkip over this content

(March 8) - A batch of well-preserved shoe soles have been found in an ancient trash dump in Lyon, France. They date from the 13th to the 18th centuries.
Older shoes have been found, including one from 2,000 years ago discovered in 2005 in a hollow tree trunk in southwest England. Sandals from 10,000 years ago were found in a cave in Oregon and are said to be the oldest footware ever found.

Humans began wearing shoes about 40,000 years ago, a study last year revealed.
The newfound leather soles, buried in mud, will improve understanding of how leather can be preserved and help scientists restore other leather artifacts, the discoverers said.
Michel Bardet and colleagues at the French Atomic Energy Commission detailed the findings in the American Chemical Society journal Analytical Chemistry.

Bardet explained that leather consists of collagen, a tough protein that is in human bones, too, and which can remain intact hundreds of thousands of years under ideal conditions — such as the oxygen-deprived environment in the mud. An examination of the soles found that tannin, which helps to preserve leather, had been washed out and replaced by iron oxides that leached into the leather from surrounding soil and helped preserve the soles in the absence of the tannins.
Bardet has studied ancient wood artifacts, too.

"One thing that was interesting for us ... is that both [wood and leather] are what we call 'waterlogged' materials. It's organic matter full of water," he said. "Generally, when we are working on wood found in similar conditions, the wood is in very poor condition.... Most of the cellulose has been destroyed. In the case of leather, the material seems to be in better preservation."

© Imaginova Corp. All rights reserved.
2009-03-08 12:56:33

Man Finds Images of D-Day Rehearsals
AOL
posted: 5 DAYS 3 HOURS AGOcomments: 277filed under: National News, World NewsPrintShareText SizeAAA

(March 9) - In what's turned out to be a fascinating discovery, an amateur historian has unearthed footage of American and British troops practicing for D-Day. The footage, images of which can be seen below, shows the troops in what are essentially rehearsals for the invasion of the beaches in Normandy, France, during World War II.
The footage was shot between October 1943 and June 1944 along beaches in the county of Devon, Britain, as reported by The Daily Mail of London.
Tony Koorlander, a former technical coordinator for the BBC, found the collection of 10-minute reels in a national archive in Baltimore, Md., in February. Koorlander was researching the wartime connection of his hometown of Bideford in Devon. "It's like going back and living the experience," Koorlander said in a statement.

2009 AOL LLC. All Rights Reserved.
2009-03-09 15:11:20

Black Voices Blog Heats Up

End Black History Month? I Beg to Differ
Posted Feb 4th 2009 3:00PM by Madison J. Gray
Filed under: BlackSpin, Black History 365, News

Almost everywhere you go, you hear people saying now that there's a black president, there couldn't possibly be any intolerance, bigotry or racism in this country because we've proved it by electing a black president, hence black people should shut up complaining about anything that has to do with race.

As much as I enjoy her writing, Detroit Free Press columnist Rochelle Riley in her most recent entry, entitled Now's the Time to End Black History Month somehow gives foundation to the extremists (read: nutjobs) who insist the above is true.

But her call to drop the yearly observances and instead embrace a Kum Ba Yah-flavored, sensibility toward our society is something I can't agree with -- not in the real world. ...
Actually I met Rochelle once very briefly some time ago, and felt she's a smart woman, so this isn't a personal shot at her at all. But as much as I get dissed for the things I write here, I'm sure she knows everybody takes their shots.

I propose that, for the first time in American history, this country has reached a point where we are can stop celebrating separately, stop learning separately, stop being American separately. We have reached a point where most Americans want to gain a larger understanding of the people they have not known, customs they have not known, traditions they have not known.

Who's celebrating separately? Last time I checked, there's about as much stopping other people from observing Black History Month as there is stopping me from celebrating Cinco De Mayo or anyone else from wearing green on St. Patrick's Day. In fact, every time there's a cultural or ethnic observance in this country people go out of their way to be a part of it no matter where their grandparents came from. Why is it that there are calls for us to forget about ours?

Carter G. Woodson, who founded the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History is one of the first scholars to attach importance to the role of black people in America's history. Had it not been for him, there may well be people still walking around denying our contributions not only to this nation, but to world civilization in general.

In fact, before him, most archaeologists were still teaching that Egypt was not part of Africa.

Read the rest: here.

Read Rochelle Riley's full article: here. I must say I agree with Rochelle Riley:

ROCHELLE RILEY
Now's the time to end Black History Month
BY ROCHELLE RILEY • FREE PRESS COLUMNIST • February 1, 2009

I propose that, from this day forward, we stop telling the tale of two Americas and instead document and celebrate the full and storied, multicultural and multidimensional story that is America in all of its colors, geographies and passions, in all of its ups, downs and exhortations. I propose that, for the first time in American history, this country has reached a point where we are can stop celebrating separately, stop learning separately, stop being American separately. We have reached a point where most Americans want to gain a larger understanding of the people they have not known, customs they have not known, traditions they have not known.


I propose that this month. 142 years after Congress passed the Reconstruction Acts of 1867 that allowed for the Southern states to be re-admitted to the Union, we adopt our own personal reconstruction goals to admit into our lives people who are different, people whose origins differ from ours, people who can teach us so much if we listen.


I propose that this month we become not the America of Rush Limbaugh or the America of Al Franken, but to become an America where all opinions matter and hope trumps hate. I propose that this February, we become not an America of black or white or Hispanic or Asian but an America of black and white and Hispanic and Asian, an America where each of those heritages is a mandatory part of school curriculums.


We don’t need more amendments to the U.S. Constitution; we need more amendments to our own personal behaviors, beginning with changing how we treat each other.


We cannot complain about how those outside America treat us if we treat each other worse.


So this Black History Month, 139 years after Congress granted black men the right to vote, 89 years after Congress granted women the right to vote, we can vote to no longer be a fragmented nation.

SnagFilms Film Widget: The Life And Times Of Allen Ginsberg

See original source: Here.