Displacement camp outside Aleppo. According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), one of multiple hardships impacting some of the over three million Syrian refugees who have fled to neighboring countries since the start of the conflict is the problem of statelessness. This is not only an issue for Syrians whose personal documents were lost or destroyed in Syria. Among the most vulnerable are children of single mothers with no present fathers. It is nearly impossible for these mothers to register their children’s nationality. The consequences are grave: children may be denied basic services such as education and healthcare, including vaccinations, and they may be unable to return…

On election night, anxiety and fear exponentially increased among transgender, LGBTQ, and other marginalized communities as the reality of Donald Trump’s presidency began to materialize. There was a spike in the number of people who reached out to hotlines the night of the election and the day after. Steven Mendelsohn, spokesperson for LGBTQ support group The Trevor Project, revealed that calls to its suicide prevention hotline were more than double usual numbers. An estimated 2,000 people reached out to the Crisis Text Line, a 24-hour text support line. Outreach was made mainly from the LGBTQ community and from people who had LGBTQ-identifying friends. Chief data scientist Bob Filbin said most…

YouTube has minted whole genres of sports celebrities—from avant-garde dunkers and teenage gymnastic teachers to benevolent bodybuilders and video game commentators—but perhaps the most successful are the trick shot auteurs. Frisbee savant Brodie Smith, Australian trio How Ridiculous, and the five Texas bros behind Dude Perfect have accrued millions of fans for their impossible feats of athleticism involving Nerf Blasters, go-karts, paper airplanes, and every thinkable variation of basketball shot.  They’ve also spawned a generation of followers. Tommy (who didn’t wish to disclose his last name), a 15-year-old from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, had been watching Dude Perfect for three years when he started his own YouTube channel, That’s Amazing, last January. He originally used the channel to demonstrate cheat codes for the mobile game…

Teresa Rodriguez celebrates Podemos coming third in Andalusia. Demoted/JaviTorres. All rights reserved.The party Podemos has been representing the hope of millions of Spaniards to overcome the crisis that hit Spain, part of the massive protests since 2011 that have rocked local political structures and spread throughout Europe. In its internal constitution process and its leadership elections, the party presents a new model of horizontal internal organization, with broad participation from its base in its debates and discussions. It proposes a left-wing programme for the country. The path chosen, however, is not easy, and there are internal contradictions within the left spectrum itself. Let us look at some of the challenges…

Click:cnc machining china When 90-year-old Derek Taylor lost both his partner and sister, he understandably began suffering from an intense sense of isolation and loneliness. “The older you get, the less people seem to contact you,” Taylor said in an interview with BBC News, “and I thought, what can I do to stop being lonely?” It wasn’t long before Taylor decided to do something concrete about it. And it’s a good thing he did. A 2012 study published by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences revealed that adults over the age of 51 have a higher risk of mortality when suffering from social isolation. The study also showed…

Truth may well be the first victim of war, and in the current crisis provoked by events in Ukraine, fair-minded and dispassionate accounts are rare. In this regard, Conflict in Ukraine: The Unwinding of the Post–Cold War Order by Rajan Menon and Eugene Rumer is all the more to be welcomed. This book is a genuine attempt to engage with some of the more difficult issues, and avoids some of the pitfalls of which so many contemporary accounts have fallen foul. Conflict in Ukraine is an excellent account of some of the main threads which have combined to bring the world to the brink of one of the most dangerous confrontations of the post-war…

p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px ‘Times New Roman’; color: #333333; -webkit-text-stroke: #333333} p.p2 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px ‘Times New Roman’; color: #333333; -webkit-text-stroke: #333333; min-height: 15.0px} span.s1 {font-kerning: none} span.s2 {text-decoration: underline ; font-kerning: none; color: #0000ff; -webkit-text-stroke: 0px #0000ff} Future astronauts might have all the water they need already waiting for them on Mars. That’s because NASA has announced the discovery of a massive body of underground ice on the planet which they say is roughly the size of Lake Superior, 2,900 cubic miles.  NASA has completed more than 600 passes over “The Utopia” deposit region, which they say is bigger than the…

A Mozambiquan casual bricklayer without papers, living in a camp with hundreds of others displaced by xenophobia near Johannesburg. Demotix / Antonella Ragazzoni. All rights reserved. In April 2015 another wave of xenophobic violence swept over South Africa. Starting in Durban, the attacks on foreigners spread to suburbs in Johannesburg and to Cala in the eastern Cape. Between six and 15 people were killed. Thousands fled to makeshift camps and Zimbabwe and Mozambique sent buses to evacuate their citizens. The violence started after a speech on 21 March by the Zulu king, Goodwill Zwethilini, in which he invited “foreign nationals to pack their belongings and to go back to their…

Adnan Menderes, Turkish prime minister, 1960.Wikicommons. Public domain.Turkey heads to the polls on Sunday. The outcome will decide the future of Turkish politics for years to come. These elections, despite some voting irregularities, will be generally free and fair. Nevertheless those who follow developments in Turkey would have noticed declining democratic capital in the country once hailed as a democratic model (or example) for the Middle East to follow. Nowadays very few people make such claims. If anything, Turkey is noted for its lack of democratic rights, especially those pertaining to the freedoms of expression and assembly since the Gezi Park protest almost exactly two years ago.  This of course…

For the past two years, the Oscar nominations and subsequent awards have looked like a sky of puffy clouds drifting aimlessly. That the nominations were mostly white was the source of much consternation in the world of social media, as very deserving films and staffs were shut out at the awards. In 2015, the Oscar’s snubbed Selma, arguably one the greatest feature civil rights film of all time. In 2016, they snubbed Creed—not only a film with a black lead in Michael B. Jordan and a black director in Ryan Coogler, but the only Rocky sequel worth talking about since Rocky II. In many ways, #OscarsSowhite was a on a…