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Historic Parliament Square in London pays homage to 11 male statues—mostly white, middle-aged, male aristocrats—but now, after nearly 200 years, the first female figure stands among them.

What's the opposite of "above reproach"? "Below reproach?" If so, then the prestigious Swedish Academy, which oversees the Nobel Prizes, finds itself way below reproach: convulsed in scandal. Eighteen women have accused Jean-Claude Arnault, a French-Swedish photographer and cultural figure with close ties to the Academy, of sexual assault.

“We are looking into a broader pattern or strategy to buy the silence of the women." That’s the phrase law-enforcement officials used to define the reason they were seeking court approval for the FBI raid on three New York premises of Michael Cohen, Trump’s secret-keeping fixer.

Winnie Mandikizela-Mandela died on Monday, April 2, at age 81. She was a leader in South Africa's fight against apartheid, named "Mother of the Nation" by the people of the Townships—the poorest, those who suffered most.

The Me Too movement is about women daring to speak painful truths that we’ve been forced to bury from fear and shame, truths about what’s been done to us, about the secrets of our lives. But is it possible that women suffer even more from being compelled to keep the secrets of men's lives?

Our entire country, with the exception of legislators under the financial thrall of the NRA, has been moved by the high-school students’ walkouts and demonstrations, and I'm no exception. But I wanted to listen to the students more closely, and to think about their cause, which really is about more than gun reform. It’s about having a voice.

Last week, I referred to the genesis of the Second Amendment, and its original intent. The volume of listener response, stunned at hearing facts I mentioned in passing, made me realize it was time to revisit this subject in greater depth. I'd done just that a few years ago, but there are lots of new readers on this blog post, and besides, in this "information age," facts can get buried under so-called information. Some scholars still disagree with aspects of this finding, but it's pretty well-documented history, thanks to the work of Roger Williams School of Law professor Carl T. Bogus in 1998, as well as that of historian Richard Hildreth as early as 1840 (on the antebellum South), and in 1995 of Clayton Cramer, on the Second Amendment basis for the Black Codes adopted after the Civil War, requiring emancipated Africans and African Americans (but not whites) to obtain...

Last week, appalled and disgusted after the Parkland, Florida high school shooting, I wrote that I had nothing more to add to what I‘d already said and written about guns, and god knows we're all tired of repeating ourselves on an issue that should have been dealt with intelligently ages ago. But I'm not done, after all.

It’s a teeth-gnashing decision when major news breaks just as you’re on deadline with another story, but if you don’t somehow squeeze the latest in, a whole week will have elapsed before you can address it.