Nagasaki, approx. 1300 metres from epicentre. 10 August 1945. Recuerdos de Pandora/Flickr. Some rights reserved.A quarter of a century after the end of the Cold War, the spectre of a nuclear Armageddon continues to haunt mankind. The detonation of the world’s first atom bomb over Hiroshima 70 years ago not only brought the Second World War to a swift conclusion but ushered in a nuclear age. Japan was further reminded of the dangers of nuclear power ­– even when used for peaceful purposes – by the meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant after the tragic events of 11 March 11 2011 (hereafter known as 3/11). Although the damage from the…

About Today’s human rights networks are sophisticated and dense, but access to important global conversations is still restricted by geography, language, money, and power. To address these limitations, we created openGlobalRights (oGR) in summer 2013. With support from the Ford Foundation, University of Minnesota, and University of Ottawa, we are creating a multilingual, online space dedicated to debating human rights strategies from all perspectives and disciplines; global South and North; non-governmental and governmental; activist and academic; non-legal and legal. oGR is hosted online by the London-based digital commons, openDemocracy. Together, we are building the world’s first all-digital, truly global, human rights knowledge hub. We promote and nurture strategic discussions across geographic,…

Anyone who’s familiar enough with Gordon Ramsay to want the star chef’s feedback on their cooking knows exactly what they’re in for. The star chef is known to be fair in his assessments, but also brutally, colorfully, profanely honest in his criticisms.  We’ve seen it on Hell’s Kitchen, we’ve seen it on Gordon Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares, and now we’re seeing it in his most public forum yet – Twitter.  People sent photos of their culinary creations to the chef in the hopes that he would offer his opinion. And he certainly did just that, offering up a mix of praise, encouragement, and his trademark disbelief that some people could be…

I went to Syria under the auspices of the Assad government’s Ministry of Information, accompanied much of the time by a government minder. I had no other means of going to government-held territory. I was unable to cross the lines into other areas, and witness the devastation there caused by the government, and hear responses from its victims. I accept that my report is therefore selective, but it is authentic and I believe that the people I met deserve to have their stories told. Bradley Secker/Demotix. All rights reserved. It could have been a society wedding in London, Milan or Paris. Instead, the packed event took place in the heart of…

One fantastically predictable outcome of one of the internet’s most unpredictable videos is the surge in brilliant parodies and memes.  The viral-of-all-viral videos of an unsuspecting father getting videobombed by his young kids during a BBC interview is a Family Circus cartoon for the ages. With viraldom also comes the backlash—including the widely shared, spontaneous racial bias of assuming the woman in the video was the family nanny and not his wife. We’ll let this brilliant entry (above), created by comedian Kevin Fredericks, into the next wave of clever and heartwarming parodies of absurd family drama gives us some great, if temporary, relief from absurd politics. And here, the original.   

Refugees arrive in boats on European shores. Ben White/ CAFOD. Flickr. Some rights reserved.The images of refugees fleeing war zones and seeking any means to enter territories more stable than where they came from accompany violent conflicts wherever they take place in the world. The images of refugees fleeing to Europe from the regional war in Syria and Iraq have been particularly poignant in 2015. The stories of the paths of flight, across Turkey, over the Aegean sea to a Greek island, from the island to the Greek mainland, from there to the Macedonian border and then across Macedonia and Serbia into Austria, possibly passing through Hungary, Croatia and Slovenia…

As Cincinnati Bearcats head volleyball coach Molly Alvey paced the sidelines last season, the new mom was focused on her team. She had no stray thoughts about whether her baby son Isaac was napping on schedule or lingering concerns about what he was eating, she says, because he was in the stands of every match. Thanks to Cincinnati’s policy that pays for young family members and their caretakers to accompany coaches on the road, Isaac learned to clap as Alvey and husband Phillip White, associate head coach, helped propel the Bearcats to the NCAA tournament for the first time since 2011. The road trip childcare policy is just one aspect of…

Demonstration against violence in Colombia. Flickr. Some rights reserved. If everything goes according to plan, the government of Juan Manuel Santos and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) will be signing in the coming weeks an agreement to put an end to more than 50 years of armed conflict. This is certainly momentous news for Colombia, but also for the international community, which has expressed unanimous support for the process currently under way in Havana. Much has been said about the role of the international community in achieving peace and implementing the future agreement. I would like to propose here an analysis of the other side of the coin:…

Drawing comparisons to legendary athletes is a fool’s errand. How many times have we heard about “the next Michael Jordan?” But that hasn’t stopped critics from comparing 12-year-old Jamaican sprinter Brianna Lyston to Olympic sensation Usain Bolt.  Aside from the obvious similarities—both hail from Jamaica and run track—there’s one other thing they have in common. They both run so fast it seems as if they’re playing on an entirely different level.  Here is Lyston in her most recent race, smoking the field by more than half a second in the 200 meter:  Since watching a 12-year-old outrun a field of tweens doesn’t provide much context for Lyston’s achievement, let’s stack her up against the adults. …

In November of last year, the Obama administration submitted several motions to dismiss a case in which they were named as defendants for failing to act on the behalf of children to address global warming and securing a more habitable future.  The motions were rejected, and the case is now heading to trial. Only, in keeping with federal statutes, the sitting president, Donald Trump, has been substituted for Barack Obama as a defendant. The twenty-one plaintiffs, children between the ages of 9 and 20, are arguing that the federal government is hindering their constitutionally granting the pursuit of life, liberty, and property by remaining inactive on climate change initiatives, despite possessing compelling data…