If Democrats seeking the removal of historical memorials tied to racist history are serious, they should be tripping over one another to get in front of a camera and call for the removal of memorials and namesakes to Presidents Andrew Johnson, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Lyndon Baines Johnson, and Sen. Robert C Byrd.

These five men had two things in common-all had a penchant for racism to one degree or another, and all were Democrats.

Some of the memorials to them are monuments, some are groves, others are highways, bridges, colleges, and even cemeteries. Of course, the cemeteries ought not be disturbed, but they should be renamed if the Democrats are serious about rooting out the vestiges of racism.

What follows is a short description of each of the Democrats and the memorials and/or namesakes in their honor:

The BBC has produced a video that claims GIFs featuring black people amount to "digital blackface" while white people using dark-skinned emojis are guilty of cultural appropriation.

The video, presented by freelancer Victoria Princewill, who contributes to the Guardian and the Independent, begins with a 'trigger warning' in case viewers find the footage offensive.

Princewill claims the most popular 'reaction GIFs' available on social media platforms are of "black people being dramatic."

Committee on Art in Public Spaces deems image 'not appropriate'

Officials at Yale University recently censored a stone work of art on campus depicting an armed Native American and Puritan side by side, which has been described as a "hostile" image by the Ivy League institution's alumni magazine.

The stone carving was edited to cover up the Puritan's musket, while the Native American's bow was left as is, reports Yale Alumni Magazine.

The decision to censor the carving was made by both head librarian Susan Gibbons and Yale's Committee on Art in Public Spaces, the latter of which advises President Peter Salovey "on ways to better represent the diversity of the Yale community through the art and other symbolic representations found around campus," according to the university's website.

The censorship of the school's historic stone carving marks one of the first major accomplishments of the newly reconstituted art committee, which was charged in April 2016 with undertaking "an inventory of public representations ... throughout campus," according to Salovey.

A ten-year old rape victim who was denied an abortion has given birth in northern India.

The 10-year old delivered a baby girl via Caesarian section at the Government Medical College and Hospital in Chandigarh, a city in North India. Both the girl and her baby are in stable condition, according to Dasari Harish, one of the doctors caring for the girl. The girl was forced to have the baby after India's Supreme Court rejected the family's plea for an abortion three weeks ago, based on the opinions of eight doctors and an examination of the girl.

Ever pay attention to trends in the media? Some stories and narratives rise and fall in cycles, along with your awareness of them. It's kind of like a shell game, where the street hustler directs your attention to one shell as a distraction while he shuffles aside the nut with the goods in it. A 'now you see it, now you don't,' kind of thing.

When you see the same story arise frequently in the mainstream media, you can bet that it's something you're supposed to be looking at.

You see, the major corporate media operates from talking points and top-down directives. A mere 6 corporations owns some 90% of all the major media outlets, and as corporations do, they rule by memos from up high.

In my recent book Being in Time - a Post Political Manifesto, I pointed out that the West and America in particular have been led into a disastrous Identity (ID) clash. This week in Virginia we saw a glimpse of it.

In the book I argue that the transition from traditional Left ideology into New Left politics can be understood as the aggressive advocacy of sectarian and divisive ideologies. While the old Left made an effort to unite us all: gays, blacks, Jews or Whites into a political struggle against capital, the New Left has managed to divide us into ID sectors. We are trained to speak 'as a...': 'as a Jew,' 'as a black,' 'as a Lesbian.' The new left has taught us to identify with our biology, with our gender, sex orientation and our skin colour, as long as it isn't 'White' of course.

In Being in Time, I noted that it was question of time before White people would also decide to identify with their biology. And this is exactly what we saw in Virginia last weekend.

Irina Limeshko, the wife of the Ukrainian saboteur Gennady Limeshko, who was recently arrested in the Crimea for attempting to commit a terrorist act, removed a photograph from her social network page where she poses with a sniper rifle.

Limeshko issued a call for help to her husband, accusing the FSB of fabricating charges, and in parallel carried out a sweep of her pictures with firearms.

Protesters vandalized and attempted to take down the Peace Monument in Piedmont Park in Atlanta on Sunday, mistaking it for a pro-Confederate statue.

The protesters were marching in response to the violent protests in Charlottesville, Virginia, on Saturday where one woman died after being deliberately hit by a car, and two law enforcement personnel were killed when the helicopter they were in crashed.

"The Atlanta march traveled from Woodruff Park to Piedmont Park Sunday, where some damaged the Peace Monument, erected in 1911," a blog on the Atlanta Journal-Constitution website said. "The sculpture features an angel standing above a Confederate soldier, guiding him to lay down his weapon."

But the memorial attacked by protesters - some dressed in black and wearing masks - was erected to encourage healing and reconciliation:

Some deaths are imbued with a sense of mystery and strangeness which has never really been lifted. These cases surround themselves with weird clues, strange evidence and testimony, and odd circumstances, all of which serve to launch them into the realms of the most mysterious unsolved crimes. Such is the case of two young men who went missing in 1987 in the U.S. state of Arkansas and would next be seen dead under perplexing circumstances. It is a case that has never been solved, and which truly delves into the domain of murder and dark conspiracies.

It was the early morning hours, 4AM on Sunday, August 23, 1987, and a Union Pacific cargo locomotive was chugging along its tracks through the murk at a place called Crooked Creek, near the town of Bryant, Arkansas, in the United States, on its way to Little Rock. It was a smooth, routine run for the train crew and there had been no signs of anything amiss thus far, but as they rounded a bend they saw speeding up through the early morning dimness a horrifying sight; two apparently human figures partially wrapped in a green tarp and lying motionless across the tracks ahead. The barreling train blazed its horn in warning to no response, but had no chance of stopping so suddenly, and the crew watched on with horror as the train sped over the bodies, dragging them for a full mile and mangling the bodies almost beyond recognition before it ground to a halt. Train engineer Stephen Shroyer would say of the gruesome scene that unfolded upon spotting the mysterious figures:

I started lying down on the diesel horn. And I got no reaction, none at all, not so much as a flinch. And we just... passed over them. From the time that we had placed the train into an emergency position and laid down on the horn, I would estimate about three to five seconds to impact. And that may not sound like a very long period of time, but when you're bearing down a couple of children, it's an eternity, honestly.

In the wake of the gruesome incident, the horribly mutilated bodies were found through dental records to belong to two local high school boys, 16-year-old Don Henry and 17-year-old Kevin Ives. The two best friends had last been seen when they left on a hunting trip late the previous evening. Authorities found near the scene a discarded .22 caliber rifle lying on the ground near the tracks, thought to be their hunting rifle, but the reported green tarp was nowhere to be found, although the crew insisted they had certainly seen it. Police thought it may have been a case of a double suicide, but when questioned the engineer insisted that the bodies had been lying parallel on the tracks with their arms down by their sides and that they had been totally motionless, remaining unresponsive even in the face of the deafening train horn. This suggested that the two boys had already been dead when the train had hit.

Nevertheless, authorities seemed keen to quickly provide an explanation, and the state medical examiner at the time, a Dr. Fahmy Malak, wasted no time in concluding that the boys had been under the influence of marijuana and had simply laid down on the tracks to pass out. The death was ruled accidental, with Saline County sheriff James H. Steed Jr. calling it all "a strange accident," and that was that. All things considered, it was an extremely rushed investigation, and in the meantime the whole grim affair had become national news.

Read the rest of the article here.

A pastor is petitioning Chicago, Illinois to rename two parks in African-American neighborhoods, because they are named after George Washington and Andrew Jackson - two US presidents who owned slaves.

"When my children and grandchildren walk through these parks and say, 'Grandfather, wasn't he a slave owner?' how do I explain that and how do I reconcile that with their views of what heroes are?" Bishop James Dukes told WGN.

"I'm not trying to eradicate history," said Dukes, pastor of Liberation Christian Center. "Let's put history where it belongs so it can be explained and taught properly."