Every day, Mother Jones, an American magazine, publishes a photograph from a war zone or military base. The pictures, taken in places like Ramadi, Iraq, or Kabul, Afghanistan, are labeled with the date, the location and a bracing tagline: “We’re still at war.” Indeed, today marks 10 years since the beginning of the U.S.-led war in …
Update: Al-Jazeera reports that the Saudi King Abdullah has overturned the lashing verdict.
Just days after King Abdullah granted Saudi women the right to vote and run in municipal elections scheduled for 2015, a court convicted a woman of driving without permission and sentenced her to lashing. It is the harshest sentence yet and …
On Sunday, Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah granted women the right to vote and run in the next set of municipal elections, scheduled for 2015. That’s good news. But not as good as you might think.
Saudi Arabia is perhaps the most sex-segregated place on earth, a country where women can do little without a male chaperon and are not …
It’s talked about in whispers, if at all. But men and boys are all-too frequently subjected to sexual violence, particularly in times of conflict, forced confinement or war. The problem is persistent and global. For the most part, though, nobody wants to talk about it. Over the last few months, however, a handful of reports from West …
Less than six months after a hundreds-strong mob beat members of a minority sect with machetes, rocks and bamboo poles, killing three, the leaders of the barrage will walk free. The attack, which took place in a remote village in Banten province, was captured on video. Yesterday, at a heavily fortified courthouse outside the …
Fresh off a three-day tour of India, Hillary Clinton arrived on Bali Thursday to attend a regional forum hosted by the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean). Since her first visit in 2009, the United States has taken an increasingly active role in regional politics, signing treaties, strengthening ties and speaking out on …
Last week, the Guardian broke the news that in the run-up to the raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound, the CIA used a vaccination campaign as a ruse to get DNA evidence from the al-Qaeda leader’s kids. With help from a Pakistani doctor, Shakil Afridi, they set up clinics in two neighborhoods, delivering doses of the Hepatitis B …
China’s richest and most populous province, Guangdong, has reportedly asked Beijing for permission to relax the one-child policy. Yesterday, Zhang Feng, the head of its population commission, revealed that the province is pitching a pilot project that would allow some families to have two children, reports the BBC. Under the …
Sometimes, the law isn’t enough. It certainly wasn’t enough for Hena Akhter, the Bangladeshi girl whipped to death in January. After surviving rape, Hena, 14, was labelled an adulteress and sentenced, by local elders and clerics, to 10o lashes. “She couldn’t speak or eat afterwards, and she was bleeding through her nose, ears and …
You’d think Indonesia would jump at the chance to try Umar Patek, the alleged mastermind of the 2002 Bali Bombings. But the head of the country’s anti-terror agency, Ansyaad Mbai, says a high-profile terror trial is too much of a security risk. Patek, one of the leaders of the al-Qaeda linked Southeast Asian terror group Jemaah …
There’s a downside to jailing Jihadis: They corrupt your prisons. It’s a problem that’s keenly felt in Indonesia, where a decade-long crackdown on extremist groups has dramatically increased the number of radicals in jail. Terror experts have long worried about putting so many convicted terrorists in one place. Now, an investigation …
A woman, beheaded by the sword thousands of miles from home. This, at last, proved too much for Indonesia. For years, this Southeast Asian nation has been sending its citizens to work in Saudi Arabia and, for years, migrant workers there complained of poor working conditions, abuse and violence. But the surprise execution of Ruyati …
In the aftermath of World War II, George Orwell reflected on politics, power and language: “When the general atmosphere is bad,” he wrote, “language must suffer.” To wage war, to justify empire, the politicians of his time mashed words, turning English to euphemistic mush, he said. In turn, the “sheer cloudy vagueness” of political …
