WEEKEND HEADLINES: Somali arrests / Koua Fong Lee freed

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Watch for updates throughout the weekend –

Two Minnesota Somali women were charged with aiding al-Shabaab in a new federal indictment released Thursday. Both women were released after a court hearing, and will return to court for further proceedings, according to MPR. The indictment charges Amina Farah Ali, 33, and Hawo Mohamed Hassan, 63, both of Rochester, with sending money to al-Shabaab. Ali talked to MPR about the FBI investigation in July 2009, and said they told her to stop shipping old clothes to refugees: Continue Reading

Weekend Update | Shirley Sherrod / Americans with Disabilities / Sheriff Bob / Seward’s Oak / more

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Keep checking back – updated throughout the weekend!The right-wing attack on Shirley Sherrod succeeded in introducing a heroic figure to the mainstream media, after they – and the Obama administration and the NAACP – recovered from their initial knee-jerk defensive response. Time Magazine published an article introducing the real Shirley Sherrod and her long-time struggle for justice within the USDA:  It was 1985, 20 years after her father was murdered by a white man who was never prosecuted, and the nearly 6,000-acre collective farm she had helped form in the early 1970s to create a sort of African-American utopia in the midst of Georgia’s white farming community was going under.It’s a struggle she shared with her husband, SNCC leader, Freedom Rider and life-long civil rights activist Reverend Charles Sherrod. PBS includes a profile in their “This Far By Faith” documentary:Charles Sherrod was born in Petersburg, Virginia in 1937 and raised by his grandmother, a devout Baptist. Sherrod grew up singing in the choir, attending Sunday school and even preaching to other children at Mount Olivet Baptist Church. He first became aware of racism at age two, when his mother yanked him out of a front seat and pulled him to the back of a bus. Continue Reading

Twin Cities schools / BP, Gaza, Afghanistan

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I’m a fan of MPR’s “Five by 8″ – five stories highlighted by 8 a.m. by Bob Collins in his NewsCut blog. They range from the deadly serious (competing video accounts of Israel’s attack on the Gaza flotilla) to the whimsical (robots creating robots) to the silly (do dogs prefer HDTV?) A little later than 8 a.m., my picks for the stories of the day include Twin Cities school news and lay-offs, Gaza news coverage, attacks on peace talks in Afghanistan, and BP’s ongoing failures as the oil slick nears Florida beaches.

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Peter Erlinder – Minnesota lawyer still jailed in Rwanda

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Here are some updates on Peter Erlinder, the Minnesota lawyer jailed in Rwanda on allegations of “genocide ideology.” A charge of “genocide ideology” means that an individual said something that the government disagrees with about the Rwandan genocide of 1994, and particularly about any involvement by the current president. Continue Reading