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Italy’s colonial past is largely absent from public debate in the country.

Last month, an anti-racist group in Milan asked for the removal of a statue of the journalist Indro Montanelli, pointing out that he bought a 12-year-old Eritrean girl as a “temporary wife”—that is, a sex slave—when he was a young colonial soldier in the 1930s. It was no secret. Montanelli, a celebrity conservative journalist who also enjoyed a following among the left, repeatedly bragged about the episode until his death in 2001. He resorted to overtly racist tropes, describing the girl, whose name was either Fatima or Destà, as “a docile tiny pet” and stressing that he was repulsed by her smell. He dismissed the charges of pedophilia, claiming that African girls are different from Europeans: “At 14, they’re women; at 20 they are old.”

During Italy’s occupation of the Horn of Africa, it was fairly common for Italian soldiers to take local girls as temporary wives, a practice known as “madamato” (from the word “madama,” or mistress), which Italians authorities considered legal—and even encouraged—until 1937, when the Fascist regime outlawed it in the name of racial purity. Obviously the only possible union was between Italian men and African women: The local male population wasn’t even allowed to have contact with white women.

Saudi Arabia said on Saturday it would issue fines for 19 offences related to public decency, such as immodest dress and public displays of affection, as the Muslim kingdom opens up to foreign tourists.

a visa regime allowing holidaymakers from 49 states to visit one of the world’s most closed-off countries

Violations listed on the new visa website also include littering, spitting, queue jumping, taking photographs and videos of people without permission and playing music at prayer times

The carnage in the 1990s wiped off an entire generation of Bosniaks and now, we are quietly losing the few survivors. The brave men and women, eyewitnesses to an attempt to destroy a whole nation, are dying in silence and anonymity. With their passing, we are also losing their stories, experiences and wisdom. This is a major loss not only for us Bosniaks, but also for humanity as a whole. 

The carnage in the 1990s wiped off an entire generation of Bosniaks and now, we are quietly losing the few survivors. The brave men and women, eyewitnesses to an attempt to destroy a whole nation, are dying in silence and anonymity. With their passing, we are also losing their stories, experiences and wisdom. This is a major loss not only for us Bosniaks, but also for humanity as a whole. 

As the dark clouds of ethnic and religious tensions gather yet again across the world, the experiences of these Bosniaks not only about surviving a genocide but also living through the post war era and dealing with all the disappointments surrounding the promises of transitional justice are more relevant and significant than ever before.

talk about the ‘Kerala model’ of dealing with the Coronavirus pandemic, and how the state has managed to have India’s lowest mortality rate for this infection

Dr Raman Gangakhedkar, head of the Indian Council for Medical Research NIV, Pune, said, “Kerala is offering one of the best containment strategies and it is unparalleled. So we will continue to refer to the Kerala model as far as testing and containment strategies are concerned.” 

how does a state with limited revenue end up being able to effectively manage a pandemic of such magnitude? Practice helps. Kerala has a long experience with infectious tropical diseases, like Chikungunya, H1N1, and more recently Nipah. Though the latter was then an unheard-of viral strain that jumped species to humans, the healthcare system was able to deal with the outbreak and contained its death toll to the districts where the outbreak began. “I think what worked for us was our systematic approach, communication with the public, and teamwork,”

international activists, groups and institutions are increasingly focusing on the United States as a villain, not a hero, on the subject of human rights. While the U.S. has never fully escaped such scrutiny — consider the post-9/11 fury over torture, Guantanamo Bay and drone strikes — former officials and activists say that, under President Donald Trump, American domestic strife is raising an unusual level of alarm alongside U.S. actions on the global stage. Some groups also flag what they say is an erosion of democracy in a country that has long styled itself as a beacon of freedom.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has created a commission tasked with rethinking the U.S. approach to human rights. Pompeo argues there’s been a questionable proliferation of what counts as human rights. Critics fear the commission, whose report is due this summer, will undercut the rights of women, LGBTQ people and others

“The Trump factor is huge, if not the determinative factor” in the battered U.S. reputation, said David Kramer, a former assistant secretary of State for human rights in the George W. Bush administration. “People advocating and fighting for democracy, human rights and freedom around the world are disillusioned by the U.S. government and don’t view the current administration as a true partner.”

My family and I live in Lagos, Nigeria, a tightly packed city with a land mass of only 1,171 sq kilometre and a population anywhere between 15 and 22 million, depending on who you ask. If New York never sleeps because the lights are always on and there’s always somewhere to be, Lagos never sleeps because there’s no power, it’s much too hot indoors and you might as well have a good time while you’re out trying to catch a breeze. Going by the dictionary definition of the word "slum" - "a squalid and overcrowded urban street or district inhabited by very poor people" - my home city is the largest one in the world. And across my continent, more than 200 million people live in one.

Sourcing water is arduous and expensive, so people are unlikely to prioritise frequent hand-washing. Public transportation consists mostly of privately owned vehicles in which intense proximity is inevitable.

Street trading and open-air markets are such a fundamental part of the fabric of Lagos that we joke that you could leave home in just your underwear and arrive at your destination fully dressed

Reporters Without Borders (RSF) is launching Tracker-19 to monitor and evaluate the impacts of the coronavirus pandemic on journalism and to offer recommendations on how to defend the right to information.

Called “Tracker 19” in reference not only to Covid-19 but also article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, this project aims to evaluate the pandemic’s impacts on journalism. It will document state censorship and deliberate disinformation, and their impact on the right to reliable news and information. It will also make recommendations on how to defend journalism.

without journalism, humankind could not address any of the major global challenges, including the climate crisis, biodiversity loss, discrimination against women and corruption.

revolutions are periods in which social actors with different agendas (peasants stealing rabbits, city dwellers sacking tollbooths, lawmakers writing a constitution, anxious Parisians looking for weapons at the Bastille Fortress) become fused into a more or less stable constellation. The most timeless and emancipatory lesson of the French Revolution is that people make history. Likewise, the actions we take and the choices we make today will shape both what future we get and what we remember of the past.

That comparisons can so easily be made between the beginning of the French Revolution and the United States today does not mean that Americans are fated to see a Reign of Terror or that a military dictatorship like Napoleon’s looms large in our future. What it does mean is that everything is up for grabs. The United States of America can implode under external pressure and its own grave contradictions, or it can be reimagined and repurposed.

Life will not go back to normal for us, either, because the norms of the past decades are simply no longer tenable for huge numbers of Americans. In a single week in March, 3.3 million American workers filed new unemployment claims. The following week, 6.6 million more did the same. Middle-class Americans who placed their retirement savings in the stock market have recently experienced huge losses. Even before the pandemic, black Americans on average had only 7 percent of the wealth of white ones (Native Americans, even less). Among non-Hispanic white Americans, deaths from drug abuse, suicide, and alcohol continue to rise. Nearly 2.5 million people are incarcerated. Trust in existing institutions (including the Electoral College and Congress) was already vanishingly small.

In Liverpool, shocking new data shows that there has been an unprecedented rise in infant mortality in recent years, with academics attributing at least a third of those deaths to rising child poverty.

we now have clear evidence of how the government's agenda over the past 10 years has directly and negatively affected people's lives

This week, Professor Sir Michael Marmot's review into Health Equity in England was published, 10 years after he first warned that growing inequalities in the country would lead to worse health outcomes for people.

“I can’t believe in the richest country in the world. …” This is the expression of incredulity and dismay that precedes some story about the fundamental impoverishment of American life, the fact that the lived, built geography of existence here is so frequently wanting, that the most basic social amenities are at once grossly overpriced and terribly underwhelming, that normal people (most especially the poor and working class) must navigate labyrinths of bureaucracy for the simplest public services, about our extraordinary social and political paralysis in the face of problems whose solutions seem to any reasonable person self-evident and relatively straightforward.

The American commonwealth is shockingly impoverished.

American liberals and leftists tend to over-valorize the Western European model, but there is no doubt that the wealthy countries at the core of the EU have far more successfully mitigated the most extreme social inequalities and built systems for health and transportation that far outstrip anything in the U.S. Even in their poor urban suburbs or, say, the disinvested industrial north of France, you will find nothing like the squalor that we still permit—that we accept as ordinary—in the USA. Meanwhile, in our ever-declining adversary-of-convenience, the Moscow subway runs on time.

Aristotle (384–322BC) was not only a philosopher but also a pioneering giant of political science. He observed and classified how city states of his time did their politics, identifying six regimes in all. The three “ideal” ones – where rulers would rule for the benefit of all citizens – were monarchy, aristocracy, and polity. Respectively, that meant rule by the one, the few, or the many. He called their real-life equivalents – where rulers ruled for their own benefit – tyranny, oligarchy, and democracy.For Aristotle, whether states were oligarchic or democratic was deeply ingrained in their ways of working – the politics of structure itself. He believed that cities that chose their office holders, jurors and judges by lottery were democratic and that those using elections were oligarchic – that’s Greek for government of, by, and for the few.

He argued that lotteries extinguish the electoral campaigning advantages of wealthier, more expensively educated candidates over poorer adversaries. He reasoned that a handful of people, grown used to generations in office, are easier to corrupt than the many.

Citizens were ever ready for lottery selection as judges, jury or political office holders – active decision makers in the affairs of their city. That they were chosen by lot – not election – was the critical issue for Aristotle.

18 October marks the 35th week of mass demonstrations involving millions of people in cities across Algeria. It follows a week of even larger marches, by students, workers and the general population for democracy, against repression of young people in the protests, against corruption and that an illegitimate parliament is now attempting to debate laws such as the Hydrocarbon Bill.

Upon the trigger of President Bouteflika’s decision to stand for a fifth mandate, violating the constitution, following Friday prayers, millions of Algerians took to the streets to demonstrate for democracy –breaking a wall of fear against protest.And they have occupied that space ever since.

Every Friday since that date, millions of Algerians have marched in every city of the country. Every Tuesday millions of students have marched. And every week, concessions and reforms have been made in response.

teens who are trying to make sense of social issues aren’t finding progressive activists willing to pick them up. They’re finding the so-called alt-right. I can’t tell you how many youth we’ve seen asking questions like I asked being rejected by people identifying with progressive social movements, only to find camaraderie among hate groups. What’s most striking is how many people with extreme ideas are willing to spend time engaging with folks who are in the tornado.Spend time reading the comments below the YouTube videos of youth struggling to make sense of the world around them. You’ll quickly find comments by people who spend time in the manosphere or subscribe to white supremacist thinking. They are diving in and talking to these youth, offering a framework to make sense of the world, one rooted in deeply hateful ideas. These self-fashioned self-help actors are grooming people to see that their pain and confusion isn’t their fault, but the fault of feminists, immigrants, people of color. They’re helping them believe that the institutions they already distrust — the news media, Hollywood, government, school, even the church — are actually working to oppress them.

Deeply committed to democratic governance, George Washington believed that a representative government could only work if the public knew their representatives. As a result, our Constitution states that each member of the House should represent no more than 30,000 constituents. When we stopped adding additional representatives to the House in 1913 (frozen at 435), each member represented roughly 225,000 constituents. Today, the ratio of congresspeople to constituents is more than 700,000:1. Most people will never meet their representative, and few feel as though Washington truly represents their interests. The democracy that we have is representational only in ideal, not in practice.

Journalism can only function as the fourth estate when it serves as a tool to voice the concerns of the people and to inform those people of the issues that matter. Throughout the 20th century, communities of color challenged mainstream media’s limitations and highlighted that few newsrooms represented the diverse backgrounds of their audiences. As such, we saw the rise of ethnic media and a challenge to newsrooms to be smarter about their coverage. But let’s be real — even as news organizations articulate a commitment to the concerns of everyone, newsrooms have done a dreadful job of becoming more representative

The Conservatives have become a vehicle for well-drilled fanatics who, like the Militant tendency forty years ago, infiltrate constituency parties in order to deselect MPs who offend doctrinal purity.

There is no more Conservative figure than Dominic Grieve, the former attorney general. His offence? Standing up for parliamentary democracy and the rule of law. These are, it seems, hanging offences in Boris Johnson’s Conservative Party.

the Conservative Party came into existence in the wake of the French Revolution as a defender of institutions – church, monarchy, parliament, rule of law – against abstraction, ideology and ultimately political violence.

At the interview in London, only she and another northern girl, a farmer’s daughter from Sunderland, took the time to chat to the secretary. It turned out that the secretary was part of the selection panel, and it was the two northerners who won the fellowships.

“Populism provides a narrative for people who have lost their identities that were tied to meaningful work,” she said. “When people lose that then they’re looking for something. There’s a feeling they’ve been robbed and deprived of a golden age, and they want that back and populist politics feeds upon that, and provides scapegoats for losing it.”

“Liberal democracy hasn’t been delivering,” she argued. “If I go back to my home town, it’s still no better than it was when I was growing up in terms of opportunity. The shops are boarded up in the main street. Nothing new is coming in. There’s just no kind of sense of optimism. And when I visit my relatives here in the US in Wisconsin and other places, there’s a lot of sense of: the rest of the world is kind of moving on and leaving us behind. People see that as being closely associated with liberal democracy.”