In Brazil, thousands gathered Tuesday for the funeral of Dorothy Stang, the American nun and environmentalist who was murdered Saturday. She had struggled for decades to protect the Amazon rain forest and to support the landless movement in Brazil. Many have accused logging interests of being behind the killing. Development, logging and farming have destroyed as much as 20 percent of the Amazon’s 1.6 million square miles. A fellow nun from Brazil said “They wanted to shut her up because she was messing up their plans.” Dorothy Stang is seen as the most prominent activist to be murdered in the Amazon since Chico Mendez in 1988.

Civil Rights Commission Purges Reports Critical of Bush
This news from Washington: in one of its first official acts, the newly reconfigured US Commission on Civil Rights has removed 20 recent public reports from its website. Many of the reports were critical of the Bush administration. One of the purged reports was titled “Redefining Rights in America: The Civil Rights Record of the George W. Bush Administration.” In December Bush replaced the top two officials on the commission including longtime chair Mary Frances Berry. Bush then named a long time critic of affirmative action named Gerald Reynolds to head the Commission. In 1997 Reynolds criticized affirmative action as a “corrupt system of preferences, set-asides and quotas.”