In April, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg told U.S. senators that the social media site was hiring dozens more Burmese speakers to review hate speech posted in Myanmar. The situation was dire. Some 700,000 members of the Rohingya community had recently fled the country amid a military crackdown and ethnic violence. In March, a United Nations […]
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A New Mexico judge received death threats and Islamophobic abuse on Tuesday a day after she granted bail to five Muslims charged with child abuse and accused of training children at their compound to carry out attacks, court officials said. Police raided the compound in Taos County on Aug. 3 following a tip-off that children […]
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Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull and all major political parties on Wednesday condemned a speech by a minor senator who used the term “final solution” in calling for a revival of a “White Australia” restrictive immigration policy. In one of the most divisive speeches seen in parliament since 1996 when far-right politician Pauline Hanson declared […]
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South Korea marked its first “memorial day” on Tuesday for girls and women forced to work in Japan’s wartime brothels, with both of the U.S. allies expressing concern that the emotionally charged issue could undermine their relations. Under a 2015 deal, Japan apologised to the “comfort women”, its euphemism for women – many of them […]
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The European Commission on Tuesday stepped up its latest legal case against Poland, where the ruling nationalists stand accused of bulldozing the independence of courts and judges, thereby undercutting democracy. Governed by the Law and Justice (PiS) party, the EU’s largest ex-communist state has most recently enacted laws forcing into early retirement many Supreme Court […]
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Militants behind an attack on Jordanian police supported Islamic State and investigations had revealed plans for more attacks on security and civilian targets, Jordan’s interior minister said on Monday. Jordanian police said on Saturday a homemade explosive device planted near a police van killed a policeman and injured six others the day before. The police […]
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Ethiopia has released thousands of prisoners as a new prime minister reverses decades of security abuses. No-one knows how many were tortured. But some of those torture victims are now talking openly – to the media, to their relatives and to their friends – about what happened to them after they were jailed, in many […]
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Muslims in Buddhist-majority Myanmar usually keep a low profile for fear of intimidation, but Win Lae Phyu Sin, one of the community’s rare bloggers on beauty care, has gone the other way. The 19-year-old was the centre of attraction at a recent launch of beauty products in Yangon, her striking multi-coloured make-up offset by a […]
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Tunisia’s president on Monday proposed giving women equal inheritance rights despite protests from thousands of people objecting to any challenge to Islamic law. The North African Muslim country, which toppled autocrat Zine El Abidine Ben Ali in 2011, grants women more rights than other countries in the region, and since last year has allowed Muslim […]
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Thousands of mourners on Monday buried dozens of children killed in a Saudi-led coalition air strike on a bus in northern Yemen, one of the deadliest attacks on civilians in the three-year-old war. At least 40 children were killed in Thursday’s strike, which hit the bus as it drove through a market in Dahyan, a […]
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