Shortly following a White House visit by Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who recently consolidated power for himself in a narrow, contested referendum vote, witnesses say Erdogan’s bodyguards attacked protesters carrying the Kurdish PYD flag outside the Turkish ambassador’s D.C. residence.
Rex Tillerson, former oil man with no diplomatic experience and current Secretary of State, has finally cobbled together some thoughts concerning American foreign policy and the job he has been hired to do.
The music video for “Hwages,” roughly translated as “concerns,” has been viewed about 3.2 million times since its December premiere, and for good reason—directed by Majed al-Esa of Saudi production company 8ies Studios, the incredibly catchy video shows a trio of Saudi women in niqabs overtly mocking the dystopian…
The rebel stronghold in east Aleppo is foundering as the Syrian Army advances, executing civilians and spraying the city with gunfire and shells.
On December 19, 2016, Texas will put into effect regulations requiring that all fetal remains be cremated or buried. This legislation is carried out in spite of vehement protest by both the medical community and reproductive rights activists.
Konni Burton, a Texas Tea Party state senator, has proposed a bill that would lawfully require school employees to out queer students to their parents, regardless of the students’ wishes.
In a most unusual role reversal, Hamilton could be in trouble over a casting call that seeks “non-white” actors and appears to violate human rights law.
A newscaster for PressTV, Iran’s state-run, English-language TV station, has fled the country after revealing she was sexually harassed at work for years. Two of Sheena Shirani’s supervisors have been suspended after she shared an audio recording and dozens of messages on Facebook from one of them demanding sex from…
The Human Rights Foundation has asked Nicki Minaj to cancel a performance scheduled for Saturday in Luanda, the capital of Angola. The Southern African country has been ruled by José Eduardo dos Santos since 1979. It has a long history of human rights violations and dos Santos’ government is considered one of the most…
Ensaf Haidar hasn’t seen her husband since 2012, but “the nightmare” as she calls it, began eight years ago, when her husband Raif Baidawi was first summoned by Saudi Arabian authorities for questioning about his blog. Badawi has since been sentenced to 10 years in prison for the crime of blogging, as well as 1,000…
A woman applying for asylum in Israel, who says she was persecuted in her home country of Ghana for being a lesbian, has had her application denied. A refugee committee concluded that Mavis Amponsah previously had a relationship with a man and subsequently “chose the lesbian lifestyle,” making her asylum request…
On Wednesday, Mayor Bill de Blasio’s administration released an $18 million plan that will, starting next year, allow NYC judges to keep nonviolent suspects out of Rikers by replacing bail with “supervision options including daily check-ins, text-message reminders and required drug or behavioral therapy.”
The New York Times has spent the better part of a year conducting a fairly groundbreaking investigation of labor conditions for nail salon workers, and the first installment in their “Unvarnished” series is clear, chilling, and heartbreaking to the last word. Reporter Sarah Maslin Nir starts with a scene of young…
A new report from Amnesty International says that terrorist group Boko Haram is committing war crimes in northeast Nigeria, killing at least 2,000 people in the first half of 2014 alone and kidnapping thousands more. Through eyewitness testimony, they’ve learned that the women and girls abducted by the group are…
PETA is excited to announce that Joe Arpaio, the notoriously racist Arizona sheriff who fancies himself “the world’s toughest,” is now on their preferred list after he switched the jail’s food over to a vegetarian menu. Even Pam Anderson’s on board! But has everyone forgotten that Joe Arpaio is anti-immigrant and has…
Dicks: they're just like salamanders. Am I right, dicks? Nah, I'm wrong, as usual. Though scientific progress in the contemporary world is such that 100 heroes are currently making plans to voyage to Mars for the purpose of dying, the human penis cannot just willy-nilly regenerate its majestic sheath—as of yet.
President Obama and the First Lady visited Saudi Arabia this week to pay their respects after the death of King Abdullah. Predictably, that ignited controversy: Abdullah presided over some tentative human rights reforms, but Saudia Arabia also has a brutal history of executing homosexuals, abusing migrant workers,…
An El Salvadoran woman known as "Guadalupe" currently serving a 30-year sentence for a 2007 miscarriage has been denied a pardon. Guadalupe—who was convicted of murdering her unborn baby—was expected to be cleared on Friday by the El Salvadoran Congress. But after a nail biting 43-42 vote, her release was denied.
"I did not kill. I did not kill," were the last words uttered by Laila Bint Abdul Muttalib Basim, who was beheaded Monday in Saudi Arabia after being dragged through the streets by four police officers.
The United Nations has been trying for weeks to investigate reports that Sudanese soldiers raped over 200 women and girls in late October in the village of Tabit, North Darfur. A leaked internal UN report says the Sudanese military is deliberately making it hard for its peacekeepers to investigate the claims,…
