Group items matching

in title, tags, annotations or url

n June of 2018, Ajay Kumar, a thirty-two-year-old farmer with a thick beard and a soft voice, left Haryana, a state in northern India. He told me that political opponents had been intimidating him for being a loud and persistent activist and that they had eventually forced him to leave. His family pooled money, and he used it to fly to Ecuador, a country that he didn’t need a visa to enter. From there, he stole across the Colombian border, made his way through the rain forests of Panama, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Guatemala, and Honduras, and crossed into Mexico. He lost clothes, money, and, at one point, his shoes. He worried that he would be killed by gangs, or that he would die of drowning or dehydration. “We never know how, what, when, where we will die,” he told me recently. Two months after he left India, Kumar reached the U.S.-Mexico border, near Otay Mesa, California, and turned himself in to Border Patrol.

Kumar was one of nearly nine thousand Indians apprehended along the southern border of the U.S. in 2018—a remarkable rise from the year before, when roughly three thousand were apprehended. A decade ago, there were only ninety-nine.

Since Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party came to power, in 2014, there has been a rise in violence, threats, and intimidation against minorities and members of the political opposition in India. In the past few decades, the country’s economy has also undergone a rapid liberalization, and inequality has intensified.

China is facing global political criticism over its alleged persecution of the Uighurs - a Muslim minority group which lives mostly in the Xinjiang province in northwestern China.

China is facing global political criticism over its alleged persecution of the Uighurs - a Muslim minority group which lives mostly in the Xinjiang province in northwestern China.

It is believed that the Chinese government has detained up to a million Uighurs over the past few years in what the state defines as "re-education camps". The government is now also accused of a programme of forced sterilisation against Uighur women.

The F.B.I. arrested two men on Sunday who were photographed in the Senate chamber clad in military-style clothing and holding zip ties

Larry Rendell Brock, was arrested in Texas on the same charges after he was allegedly identified as one of the people who broke into the Capitol. The department said in its statement that images of a person who appeared to be him showed Mr. Brock clad in “a green helmet, green tactical vest with patches, black and camo jacket, and beige pants holding a white flex cuff, which is used by law enforcement to restrain and/or detain subjects.”

Eric Gavelek Munchel, 30, was taken into custody in Nashville on one count of unlawfully entering a restricted building and one count of violent entry and disorderly conduct on Capitol grounds, the department said. One of the officials involved in the case said authorities also recovered several weapons at the time of his arrest.

A prominent Saudi female activist, who campaigned for women's right to drive, has been sentenced to more than five years in prison.

the country's Specialised Criminal Court, which was set up to try terrorism cases, convicted her of various charges including trying to harm national security and advance a foreign agenda.

They have also said that she has been tortured in jail - accusations the court dismissed.

The move would complicate any effort by the incoming Biden administration to resume President Barack Obama’s thaw in relations with Havana.

A finding that a country has “repeatedly provided support for acts of international terrorism,” in the State Department’s official description of a state sponsor of terrorism, automatically triggers U.S. sanctions against its government. If added to the list, Cuba would join just three other nations: Iran, North Korea and Syria.

The State Department removed Cuba from its list of terrorism sponsors in 2015, after President Barack Obama announced the normalization of relations between Washington and Havana for the first time since the country’s 1959 communist revolution, which he called a relic of the Cold War. In return for pledges of political and social reform, Mr. Obama dropped economic sanctions, relaxed restrictions on travel and trade, and reopened an embassy in Havana for the first time in decades. In 2016, he became the first American president to visit the island since Calvin Coolidge.

In the remaining days of his administration, President Trump is rushing to put into effect a raft of new regulations and executive orders that are intended to put his stamp on business, trade and the economy.

Previous presidents in their final term have used the period between the election and the inauguration to take last-minute actions to extend and seal their agendas.

Mr. Trump signed an executive order on Tuesday banning transactions with eight Chinese software applications, including Alipay.

A Russian oligarch, nicknamed The Sausage King, has been murdered with a crossbow, investigators say.

Vladimir Marugov and his partner were in an outdoor sauna cabin when they were attacked, reportedly by two masked assailants.

Police have detained a male suspect in connection with the murder. The suspect has not been named.

The president has showcased his spotty efforts to help Americans like aid worker Aya Hijazi, who was freed from Egyptian custody after Trump’s intervention.

Aya Hijazi, an American aid worker who spent nearly three years jailed in Egypt before President Donald Trump personally intervened, endorsed Trump’s Democratic presidential rival Joe Biden on Monday.

Trump focused on himself rather than her ordeal. 

And she died shortly after 11 p.m. on Oct. 11, 2014, in a motel room in Olongapo, a port city about 100 miles north and west of Manila in the Philippines, at the hands of an American she had met earlier that evening at a nightclub, a Marine who was in the country for joint military exercises.

After discovering that Laude was transgender, Lance Cpl. Joseph Scott Pemberton, who was 19 at the time, choked her and pushed her head into a toilet bowl until she drowned. Then he took a taxi across town to Subic Bay, where his ship was docked, and, according to a shipmate who later testified in court, admitted what he had just done.

found guilty of homicide, a charge downgraded by the judge from murder, and was sentenced by the Olongapo Regional Trial Court to six to 12 years in prison, which was later reduced to a 10-year maximum on appeal.

For many years, I was skeptical about accusations of racism in the criminal justice system

Yes, I knew that blacks comprised only about 12 percent of the population yet represented 33 percent of the prison population. But those data alone did not prove that police are racists or that courts are tougher on blacks than others. The relevant criterion is not the percentage of the population, but the percentage of the criminal population, and when you consider the higher rates of offending among African Americans, the seemingly disproportionate rates of incarceration make sense. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, blacks committed 52 percent of all homicides between 1980 and 2008.

some countered, if you look at who winds up on death row, you can see the racism at work. Less than half of murder victims in the U.S. are white, yet a 2003 study found that 80 percent of inmates on death row had killed white people

“Some clearly represent political or commercial agendas, others are just absurd,”

“The problem is these are spread around by well-intentioned people in family WhatsApp chats probably because they can create a sense of control over a situation which is out of control.”

Yasodora Córdova, a Brazilian expert in online misinformation, said the tight-knit social groups that define Latin American society were one reason the region was such a “fertile ground” for fake news.

anger that should be directed at billionaires is instead directed by them. Facing inequality and exclusion, poor wages and insecure jobs, people are persuaded by the newspapers billionaires own and the parties they fund to unleash their fury on immigrants, Muslims, the EU and other “alien” forces.

From the White House, his Manhattan tower and his Florida resort, Donald Trump tweets furiously against “elites”. Dominic Cummings hones the same message as he moves between his townhouse in Islington, with its library and tapestry room, and his family estate in Durham. Clearly, they don’t mean political or economic elites. They mean intellectuals: the students, teachers, professors and independent thinkers who oppose their policies. Anti-intellectualism is a resurgent force in politics.

Myths of national greatness and decline abound. Make America Great Again and Take Back Control propose a glorious homecoming to an imagined golden age. Conservatives and Republicans invoke a rich mythology of family life and patriarchal values. Large numbers of people in the United Kingdom regret the loss of empire.

Seven European human rights ambassadors criticized Saudi Arabia on Sunday over the continued detention of at least five women's rights activists

Hathloul appeared in a Saudi court on Wednesday, as her trial was scheduled to start after 900 days in pre-trial detention.

The case of another women's rights activist, Samar Badawi, has also been referred to the special court

Beijing has dismissed Pope Francis's criticisms of its treatment of China's Muslim Uighur minority in Xinjiang.

growing group of international voices, describing the Uighurs as "persecuted" in a new book.

the Chinese government has detained up to a million Uighurs in what the state defines as "re-education camps".

They worry that it may fuel separatist yearnings in the far-western region. But in 2014, as the authorities stepped up their campaign to crush terrorism there, the government still tolerated displays of pride in Uyghur culture

after the death of Mao Zedong, Uyghur culture was allowed to flourish, as long as it avoided any hint of support for a separate Uyghur state. Uyghur writers produced poems and songs filled with universally familiar themes such as love and loss, but also conveying pride in their identity

But it fell victim to a security clampdown, launched in response to sporadic attacks by Uyghurs on Chinese belonging to the ethnic-Han majority.

As inflation soars and the value of Turkey’s currency plummets, one couple described how working families can’t make ends meet and have had to cut back on basic necessities as well as life’s smaller pleasures.

The Turkish economy has been in trouble for several years now, but in the last three months, its currency has lost nearly half its value against the dollar. Turks have been shaken by almost daily price increases in staples from flour and cooking oil to necessities such as electricity and gas. They are finding that their salaries and pensions can no longer pay for even the basics.

for fear of repercussions in a country where criticizing the government can land a person in jail.

A Catholic bishop who was accused of repeatedly raping a nun in southern India over a two-year period was acquitted on Friday, bringing an end for now to what appeared to be the country’s first case of its kind.

“Praise the Lord,” he said after the verdict in the city of Kottayam in Kerala State.

The case, believed to be the first in India in which a bishop was charged with raping a nun, highlighted deep divisions within the Catholic Church in the country. The church was slow to react to the nun’s accusations against Bishop Mulakkal, and it did so only after five of her fellow nuns protested publicly in support of her.

The announcement was presented — in official news reports, on social media — as a major victory for Chinese women. The government was set to overhaul its law governing women’s rights for the first time in decades, to refine the definition of sexual harassment, affirm prohibitions on workplace discrimination and ban forms of emotional abuse.

The proposed revisions are the latest in a series of conflicting messages by the Chinese government about the country’s growing feminist movement. On paper, the changes, which China’s legislature reviewed for the first time last month, would seem to be a triumph for activists who have long worked to push gender equality into the Chinese mainstream.

At the same time, the authorities, ever leery of grass-roots organizing, have detained outspoken feminist activists and sought to control the country’s fledgling #MeToo movement. Sexual harassment lawsuits — already rare — have been dismissed.

Desmond M. Tutu, the cleric who used his pulpit and spirited oratory to help bring down apartheid in South Africa and then became the leading advocate of peaceful reconciliation under Black majority rule, died on Sunday in Cape Town. He was 90.

“a leader of principle and pragmatism who gave meaning to the biblical insight that faith without works is dead.”

the archbishop remained unhappy about the state of affairs in his country under its next president, Jacob G. Zuma, who had denied Mr. Mbeki another term despite being embroiled in scandal.

Some Games, such as the 1936 Olympics in Nazi Berlin, saw countries (including the U.S. and the U.K.) threaten to pull out, before deciding to participate. World Wars I and II forced the cancellation of three Olympic Games—in 1916, 1940 and 1944. And other countries have been banned for a variety of reasons: Germany and Japan in 1948 because of their roles in WWII, South Africa during the era of apartheid and Russia in 2020, due to a doping scandal (although individual athletes were ultimately allowed to compete.)

The Details: Australia’s first hosting stint also marked the first Olympic boycott, with numerous countries withdrawing for a variety of political reasons. Less than a month before the opening ceremony, the Soviet Union invaded Hungary to stop the Hungarian Revolution against the Communist regime; in protest, the Netherlands, Spain and Switzerland all refused to participate. Meanwhile, the People’s Republic of China also withdrew—and would not return until the 1980 Winter Games—because Taiwan, which it considers a breakaway province, was allowed to participate as a separate country. And, finally, Egypt, Iraq and Lebanon boycotted the 1956 Olympics due to the Suez Canal Crisis following the British-Israel-French invasion of Egypt to control the waterway.

‘Blood in the Water’: Despite other countries’ boycott against the Soviets, Hungary competed in the Olympics, and its athletes received support from fans, while Soviet athletes faced boos. A violent water polo match between the two teams left one Hungarian player bleeding from the head and led to a fight among spectators and athletes. Hungary, up 4-0 at the start of the brawl, was named the winner and the team eventually won the gold medal. The Soviets, for their part, went on to win the most medals for the first time. Of Note: In a show of peace, the Olympic athletes, for the first time, marched into the closing ceremony mixed together, rather than as separate nations—a tradition that continues today.