Free Republic

Antoinette Sandbach is not an obvious target for progressive opprobrium. She may have been elected as a Conservative MP, but she sacrificed her career for the Europhile cause – defecting to the Lib Dems and losing her safe Tory seat. Ms Sandbach has been named by a Cambridge researcher as a descendant of 19th-century slave owner Samuel Sandbach, involved in the slave trade in Guyana. Others, too, suffer from what might be called colonial guilt. The BBC journalist Laura Trevelyan was so affected by learning that her Trevelyan ancestors owned more than 1,000 slaves on the Caribbean island of Grenada...

I grew up in a small city in the New York suburbs. My parents scrimped and saved to give us a saner life than in the Bronx. Unlike most other towns in the county, our area was diverse, with a wealthy population in opulent estates; a middle class group (mine); and a large, low income population, mostly comprised of black residents. In the 60's, liberal policy makers conceived of forced busing so that deprived kids could enjoy tonier surroundings. The utopians envisioned the dazzling spectacle of ethnic bonding. At my elementary school, the black kids arrived each day by bus...

Rick Bragg, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for The New York Times, has been suspended for two weeks from writing for the paper, the Columbia Journalism Review has learned. The news comes after the Times published an Editors’ Note Friday clarifying Bragg’s handling of a front-page feature story last June in the small, oyster-shucking town of Apalachicola, Florida. Earlier in the week, a reader had written to the Times expressing concern that Bragg had never been spotted in Apalachicola. According to the Editors’ Note, and Bragg himself, it was Bragg’s intern at the time, J. Wes Yoder, who did all the...