Human rights organizations are demanding urgent action from Papua New Guinea’s government following the killing of a young woman accused of sorcery — the latest in a pattern of brutal, sometimes fatal violence targeting women blamed for deaths or illnesses in their communities. A Killing That Drew International Outrage The case that has galvanized international…
A new United Nations report on Syria’s civil war has documented war crimes and crimes against humanity committed not just by government forces, but by non-state armed groups as well — a rare instance of the UN’s independent investigators assigning direct culpability to virtually every major party controlling territory inside the country. Starvation as a…
Thousands of Mexicans have taken to the streets and flooded social media over the past month, protesting a sweeping telecommunications reform bill that critics say would hand the government unprecedented power to surveil internet users and censor online content — transforming a law originally pitched as pro-competition reform into what digital rights advocates are calling…
Zimbabwe ground to a near-standstill this week as citizens answered a call from a previously little-known Baptist pastor to stay home from work en masse — the country’s largest act of public defiance against President Robert Mugabe’s government in nearly a decade, driven by an economic crisis that has left the country short on cash…
For nearly 40 hours, a Royal Dutch Shell icebreaker bound for Arctic oil exploration sat stalled at a Portland dry dock, blocked first by 13 Greenpeace climbers dangling from the city’s tallest bridge, then by dozens of kayakers who paddled directly into its path — a last-ditch, highly visible attempt to physically stop Shell’s Arctic…
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…
Community groups across Philadelphia are pushing back against Mayor Michael Nutter’s decision to shutter dozens of city swimming pools this summer, part of a sweeping package of budget cuts the administration says is necessary to close a shortfall exceeding $100 million. A Budget Crisis Arrives a Year Into Nutter’s Term Nutter took office in January…
A severe drought gripping large parts of central India has pushed the country’s chronic farmer suicide crisis to some of its highest levels in years, with the cotton-growing Vidarbha and Marathwada regions of Maharashtra state once again at the epicenter of a tragedy that has claimed more than 11,000 farmers’ lives since 2005. A Crisis…
The local government of Dunedin, a mid-sized city on New Zealand’s South Island, voted this week to complete its divestment from fossil fuels — closing out a process that international headlines had prematurely declared finished nearly a year earlier. A Two-Year Process Finally Complete Dunedin’s path to divestment began back in 2013, when a group…