Liang Lei heard the screaming crowd before recognizing the problem. Three weeks ago, people gathered outside an apartment building in Liaocheng, a city in eastern China. A two-year-old boy was hanging outside a window, with his head stuck between the bars. Liang jumped into action. “I got there and found the boy barely moving,” Liang told China Daily. “His legs…
Demotix/Sayed Baqer Alkamel. All rights reserved. “What happens after isqat al netham – the downfall of the regime? What would you do?” I asked a 20-something youth activist, shortly after Bahrain’s uprising in 2011. He stared; assessing me, and the question I had just asked him. I don’t think it had ever occurred to him. After a…
“Mama, you know octopus can grow a new tentacle if they lose one.” Those were my son’s first words upon waking. His eyes popped open like a doll and he relayed that fact as if in the middle of a conversation. What followed was the usual morning rush: Get up, get dressed, make oatmeal, pack…
Student participants on the 1009th Wednesday Demonstration in Seoul, South Korea, February 15, 2012. JoonYoung Kim/Flickr. Some rights reserved. On Wednesday 6th January 2016, the 24th year anniversary of the weekly rally in front of the Japanese Embassy in Seoul by the Korean victim-survivors of Japan’s Military Sexual Slavery, solidarity actions were held at various…
AC-130H Howitzer. Flickr/US Air Force. Some rights reserved.The United States air-force's assault on a hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan on 3 October 2015 is reported to have killed twenty-two people and injured thirty-seven, with twelve staff of the aid organisation Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders / MSF) among the dead. Whatever investigators discover about the…
Nathan Webster/Demotix. All rights reserved. When the radical totalitarians of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant—known to themselves as the Islamic State but usually labelled by the acronyms in English of ISIS or ISIL, and Daesh in Arabic—burst out of eastern Syria into north and central Iraq in the summer of 2014 they…
On Tuesday, one of the worst chemical bombings since the Syrian war began occurred in a northern rebel-held town, killing at least 72 people, including 10 children, according to reports. Russian officials have blamed terrorists, while activists and the British foreign secretary, Boris Johnson, suggested that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad was behind a “barbaric act.” For his part,…
Editor’s note: Amanda Gillespie is Manager of Extraordinary Ability Cases at Samuel Christensen Law Firm. She’s been hunting down wild H-1Bs for people of extraordinary ability since 2003. It sounds simple: Americans want jobs, but there simply are not enough to go around. So when someone in the unemployment line hears of a foreigner getting work…
Slums in Rio de Janeiro. Flickr. Some rights reserved. Given that the cycle of Latin American progressive politics (progresisimo) appears to be coming to an end, it seems the right time to develop an in-depth analysis of the phenomenon, one that goes beyond providing political or economic snapshots or dwells on secondary data, but rather tries…
Palazzo Giusso (Napoli). Wikicommons/Sistermone. Some rights reserved.Over the last few months, a campaign inviting Italian academics to abstain from participating in the latest nationwide research assessment exercise (VQR 2011-2014) has been gaining momentum. It all started with a petition signed by around 14,000 academics calling for the government to back off on its decision to…