International

Image: Ireland’s Minister for Social Protection Leo Varadkar launches his campaign bid for Fine Gael party leader in Dublin Clodagh Kilcoyne/Reuters. Trained doctor takes insurmountable lead in race to succeed Enda Kenny and is being compared to Justin Trudeau and Emmanuel Macron. Padraic Halpin Ireland is on the verge of a huge generational change in its political […]

Image: Ariana Grande was performing at the Manchester Arena as part of her Dangerous Woman tour/ Getty. Women and girls don’t have to carry Kalashnikovs to strike fear into the hearts of medieval-minded murderers. They just have to remain defiant in the face of oppression, joyous and liberated and unhidden Holly Baxter. I have two younger sisters, […]

Image: Armin Laschet, top candidate of Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union celebrates after the North Rhine-Westphalia state elections. Photograph: Kay Nietfeld/AFP/Getty Images. Editorial. Last week France, next month Britain. Yet even by these standards, Sunday’s German regional election in North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW), won – on exit poll projections – in emphatic fashion by Chancellor Angela Merkel’s […]

Image:Yameen Rasheed’s family submit a petition to Maldives Police Services to investigate his murder.  Dying Regime on Flickr. 48 rights groups strongly condemn the brutal murder of popular blogger Yameen Rasheed in what is believed to be an attack motivated by his political and social commentary. Maldivian authorities are urged to hold all perpetrators to […]

Image: Emmanuel Macron: new French president. Photograph: Denis Charlet/AFP/Getty Images. Any other result would have been a European catastrophe and, for once, thank goodness, the opinion polls got it right. Emmanuel Macron has swept Marine Le Pen aside to become France’s next president. Mr Macron won by an even wider margin than the polls have consistently […]

Image: Iranian elections traditionally have a high turnout. copyrightAFP. By Siavash Ardalan, BBC Persian.  Iran is due to hold a presidential election on 19 May, in which the incumbent Hassan Rouhani will fight for a second term. The polls are seen as critical to the future direction of the Islamic Republic. Here are some issues to know. It […]

Ted Andersen/Geneva. The World Health Organization (WHO) on Friday endorsed the world’s first-ever vaccine for dengue fever, a potentially deadly mosquito-borne virus that threatens to infect close to half of the world’s population. Unlike malaria, there is no established cure for dengue fever, which can cause severe nausea, bone pain, headaches, rashes, bleeding and even […]

Luis Robayo  Saturday 8 April 2017 MOCOA — It’s really, really hard to watch the survivors and their pain and trauma. There are many people who have lost six, ten or more relatives. Not to mention friends, neighbors and acquaintances who also died. Out of all the things that I have covered — the armed conflict in […]

Image: Myanmar’s opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi speaks to the Myanmar community living in Singapore, on the island of Sentosa in Singapore September 22, 2013. Credit: Reuters. BY ANTONI SLODKOWSKI ON. .. With a festering Rohingya crisis, increased fighting with ethnic armed groups and a slower economic growth, Suu Kyi has struggled to match expectations. Yangon: […]

Image: Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Some 50 years ago, there were no schools of journalism. One learned  the trade in the newsroom, in the print shops, in the local cafe and in Friday-night hangouts. The entire newspaper was a factory where journalists were made and the news was printed without quibbles. We journalists always hung together, […]

18 March: A Le Pen campaign rally in Metz, France. Photo by Elyxandro Cegarra/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images.18 March: A Le Pen campaign rally in Metz, France. Photo: Getty Images. Matthew Goodwin. A victory for Marine Le Pen, coming after Brexit, would underscore that Europeans have moved from instinctive scepticism about the EU to active rebellion. It […]

Image: 15  women activists participated at the recently concluded CEDAW- Sri Lanka session. In its concluding observations  of the recently concluded consideration of the 8th Sri Lanka report,  Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women” (CEDAW)  has  expressed its concerns on many unresolved issues including difficulties faced by the war affected […]

Geneva/Vienna (3 March 2017) – Leading monitors of freedom of expression around the world have come together to issue a Joint Declaration on freedom of expression, focusing this year on so-called fake news, disinformation and propaganda. The action was taken by the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Freedom of opinion and expression, David Kaye, along […]

Image: The sister of Jefferson Bunuan carrying his photo as they prepare to take his body to Manilla South Cemetery. August 1, 2016.© 2016 Carlo Gabuco for Human Rights Watch. Peter Bouckaert. More than 7,000 people have been killed in the Philippines’ bloody “war on drugs.” New Human Rights Watch research finds that the killing […]

The body has been accused of unfairly targeting Israel, and Trump aides are questioning its usefulness. By NAHAL TOOSI and ELIANA JOHNSON The Trump administration is considering pulling the United States out of the United Nations Human Rights Council, a body that has been accused of being biased against Israel and criticized for including abusive […]

By Aaron Blake President Trump berated the media repeatedly at his press conference on Feb. 16, calling CNN, the New York Times and other outlets “dishonest” and “very fake news,” for reporting unfavorable stories about him. (Video: Reuters / Photo: Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post) It’s pretty clear what President Trump is doing by going after the […]

Commit to Protect Students, Teachers, Schools, and Universities During War. (Paris) The French and Canadian governments should be congratulated for becoming the latest countries to endorse the international political commitment known as the Safe Schools Declaration, said the Global Coalition to Protect Education from Attack (GCPEA). The endorsement came during the international conference on the […]

Image:Clashes with police turned violent in December, when around 1,000 veterans formed a human shield between police and ‘water protector’ protesters Getty Images. ‘We’ve stood in the face of fire before. We feel a responsibility to use the skills we have’ Samuel Osborne – @SamuelOsborne93 US army veterans are returning to Standing Rock to protect […]

Image:Popular poster – Chaurasi Devataon-wali Gai [Ravi Varma Press – 1897] By Sadanand Menon. The cow, the bull and the buffalo have waddled themselves into the centre of India’s politics, exposing its bovine underbelly. The cow has been milked in Indian politics for over a century now; the bull has sharpened its horns over the […]

Image:Cameron Harris in his home office in Annapolis, Md., on Monday. He created a fake story about an electrical worker who stumbled upon stacked boxes of ballots pre-marked for Hillary Clinton. Credit Gabriella Demczuk for The New York Times. By SCOTT SHANEJAN. 18, 2017 ANNAPOLIS, Md. — It was early fall, and Donald J. Trump, […]

Credit Carlos Barria/Reuters By KATIE ROGERS The Women’s March on Washington, a project that began with a Facebook page in the hours after the election of Donald J. Trump, quickly grew into a movement. Many thousands of people could visit Washington to march on Jan. 21, the day after the inauguration. Here’s what we know […]

Image copyright AP: The allegations against Donald Trump in the documents read like something from a bad film By Paul Wood BBC News, Washington. Donald Trump has described as “fake news” allegations published in some media that his election team colluded with Russia – and that Russia held compromising material about his private life. The BBC’s […]

Artsy Editorial. By Molly Gottschalk. In September of this year, Facebook censored—and quickly reinstated—the iconic 1972 photograph of a nude, nine-year-old girl fleeing a napalm attack in Vietnam. The Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph is a defining image of the horrors of the war and a catalyst for Western opposition. Throughout history, images such as Napalm Girl, […]

Image: Rehabilitated manual scavenger, Usha Chaumar, 40, stands on the stairs of her newly built three storey house in Alwar, Rajasthan, India on 24 September 2016. Credit: Anindito Banerjee. By Anindito Mukherjee  Nai Disha is an initiative that rehabilitates manual scavengers, especially women, and provides them with vocational training to find alternative livelihoods. She didn’t […]

Cynthia M. Wong, Senior Researcher, Internet and Human Rights. This week, the European Union’s top court once again found that blanket data retention mandates are hostile to privacy and democratic freedoms, and incompatible with EU law. Such mandates require service providers to store data on all of the provider’s users for a set period. The […]

Image:A gate at the entrance to the Pray Sar prison near Phnom Penh, 8 December 2016,  AP Photo/Heng Sinith. This joint statement was originally published on cchrcambodia.org on 18 December 2016. Our organisations welcome the recent Opinion adopted by the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention (WGAD) that recognises the arbitrary nature of the […]

Image:Can Dundar, editor-in-chief of Cumhuriyet, leaves the Justice Palace after his trial in Istanbul on Friday  Credit: OSMAN ORSAL/REUTERS. Turkey holds at least 81 journalists, fueling global high of 259 New York, December 13, 2016–Turkey’s unprecedented crackdown on media brought the total number of jailed journalists worldwide to the highest number since the Committee to […]

Image:The media is meant to report the truth, but the structure and vested interests of the Indian press have stopped that from happening. The daily dose of news. Credit: Mike Prince/Flickr CC BY 2.0 By Pushparaj Deshpande. James Madison famously argued that “the advancement and diffusion of knowledge is the only guardian of true liberty”. […]

Anas al Basha stayed behind in the city to comfort children and sent his salary to his parents to help when they fled to the countryside. by   Caroline Mortimer @cjmortimer . A social worker who dressed up as a clown to cheer up traumatised children in Aleppo has been killed by an air strike.  […]

Image courtesy  of CNBC. by Tariq Ali Fidel Castro, Cuba’s leader of revolution, has died aged 90. Here is an extract from Tariq Ali‘s introduction to The Declarations of Havana, Verso’s collection of Castro’s speeches. On 26 July 1953 an angry young lawyer, Fidel Castro, led a small band of armed men in an attempt to seize the Moncada barracks in […]