A ceasefire that had brought a fragile calm to eastern Ukraine for much of the spring collapsed into renewed heavy fighting this month, as clashes around the government-held town of Marinka and shelling across Donetsk pushed the death toll from more than a year of conflict past 6,400 — even as diplomats and monitors alike…
What began less than two weeks ago as a protest over a 20-cent bus fare increase has become the largest wave of demonstrations Brazil has seen in two decades — and the grievances driving people into the streets now extend far beyond public transportation. From a Fare Hike to a Movement The protests trace back…
A Bahraini court ordered the release of prominent human rights defender Nabeel Rajab this week — and authorities immediately took him back into custody anyway, opening a new investigation on entirely separate charges before he could walk free. A Pattern of Arrest, Release, and Re-Arrest Rajab, president of the Bahrain Center for Human Rights and…
Khaled Sid Mohand vanished on a Saturday. The 40-year-old journalist — a regular contributor to French Public Radio’s France Culture, an occasional correspondent for Le Monde, and an occasional contributor to FSRN — missed his daily security check-in call to a colleague in Beirut on April 9, and hasn’t been heard from since. Now, colleagues…
Six months after the earthquake that killed an estimated 230,000 people and leveled much of Port-au-Prince, international relief officials are warning that Haiti’s reconstruction faces a threat almost as fundamental as the rubble itself: a landscape stripped of nearly all its forest cover, decades before the ground ever started shaking. A Country Already Running an…
Since Mexico’s government sent the military into the streets to fight drug cartels in 2006, at least 140,000 people have been killed. Cartel leaders get arrested or killed with some regularity, and the violence escalates anyway. Canadian journalist Dawn Paley spent years asking why the standard cops-versus-cartels story never seemed to explain what she was…
Each October, journalists and human rights advocates mark the anniversary of Brad Will’s death — a killing that, years later, remains formally unresolved, its actual perpetrators never definitively identified or held accountable. A Journalist Embedded in the Movement He Covered Brad Will was a 36-year-old video journalist affiliated with the New York City Independent Media…
A small protest turned tense outside Rio de Janeiro’s military club this week, as police dispersed demonstrators with tear gas after a memorial marking 50 years since Brazil’s 1964 military coup was inaugurated at what’s widely considered the epicenter of ongoing sympathy for the country’s former dictatorship. A Coup Remembered, and Contested The demonstration came…
Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto departed for a previously scheduled trip to China this week, just days after his own attorney general announced that 43 students who disappeared more than a month ago in the state of Guerrero are now presumed dead — a decision critics say reflects a government dangerously out of step with…
More than 200 veterans and active-duty service members of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan gathered outside Washington, D.C. this week to do something few of them had ever done publicly before: testify, in their own words, about what they saw and did while deployed. Echoes of Vietnam, Four Decades Later The four-day event, called…