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Netizen Report: Ethiopia Arrests Leading Journalists and Activists in ‘State of Emergency’ · Global Voices
Netizen Report Team

Mahlet Fantahun and friends greet Befeqadu Hailu upon his release from prison on October 21, 2015. Photo via @miniliksalsawi
On March 26, Ethiopian authorities arrested journalists Eskinder Nega and Temesghen Desalegn, Zone 9 bloggers Befekadu Hailu and Mahlet Fantahun, and De Birhan Blog author Zelalem Workagegnehu. All have previously been jailed for their work as journalists or human rights activists.
They weren’t the only ones to be targeted during the week of March 26. A local source of Global Voices, who asked not to be named, estimated that more than 20 journalists, academicians, and prominent opposition figures were arrested. Civil society advocates from around the world called for the release of 11 journalists in a letter issued by the Association for Human Rights in Ethiopia.
Nega, who is a prominent political journalist, had previously spent nearly seven years behind bars on terrorism charges. He was released from prison several weeks ago, on February 14, only to be re-arrested this week.
Nega sent a message from prison describing the “inhumane” condition in which they are being held:
…our condition in prison is inhuman, to say the least. Better to call it jam-packed than imprisoned. About 200 of us are packed in a 5 by 8 meter room divided in three sections. Unable to sit or lay down comfortably, and with limited access to a toilet. Not a single human being deserves this, regardless of the crime, let alone us who are detained unjustly. The global community should be aware of such a case and use every possible means to bring an end to our suffering.
Temesghen was taken from the prison to Zewditu hospital “due to severe back pain he developed during his jail time in recent past.”
Hailu and Fantahun have both worked with the Global Voices community. In 2014, they were arrested along with seven of their blogger and journalist colleagues, all due to their participation in the Zone9 collective blog, where they wrote about their government's obligations to human rights and constitutional law.
After 12 weeks of arbitrary detention, the writers were charged under Ethiopia’s anti-terrorism proclamation and spent more than a year behind bars. Shortly before a state visit by then-US President Barack Obama in July 2015, some were released without explanation. The rest were acquitted and released in October 2015.
Since then, both bloggers have lived under close surveillance by state authorities.
All this has taken place in a tumultuous political environment. Since mid-2015, thousands of Ethiopians have begun to demand more political freedoms and social equality and a stop to government land grabs in the Oromia region, which is home to Ethiopia's largest ethnic group. The government response has been brutal: Hundreds have been killed, thousands have been arrested, and critical voices — both on and offline — have been systematically silenced.
In late 2017, Ethiopia’s ruling coalition began to splinter, resulting in political fallout and the January 2018 resignation of Hailemariam Desalegn as prime minister.
So far, 7,000 people have either had charges against them dropped or been pardoned — but as of this week, some of those released have been re-arrested. Their fate remains uncertain.
Data scientist-turned-whistleblower Christopher Wylie, the former head of research for Cambridge Analytica, told UK parliamentarians that the Indian National Congress, a prominent opposition party in India, was a client of the controversial data mining firm.
Allegations that other Indian political parties (including Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s BJP party) had contracts with the UK company are also circulating.
In his deposition before a UK parliamentary committee on March 28, Wylie described various activities of the data mining firm, which has dominated headlines since mid-March, when journalists from The Observer and The New York Times revealed that the firm exploited Facebook users’ behavioral and psychographic data — without their knowledge — in service of the US presidential campaign of Donald Trump.
In his deposition, Wylie was critical of the company’s work in India and in Kenya, where Cambridge Analytica was hired by the ruling Jubilee party. In a tweet, he compared it to “modern-day colonialism.”
Cambridge Analytica was also involved in election data mining with the intent to undermine elections in Nigeria, Africa’s most populous nation.
On the heels of the Cambridge Analytica revelations, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s chief cabinet secretary told reporters on March 27 that the Japanese government is investigating unlawful use of personal data gathered from Facebook. Japan’s Personal Information Protection Act prohibits companies from sharing user data with third parties without explicit consent from users.
Shortly after news broke of Cambridge Analytica’s non-consensual exploitation of Facebook user data, the Electronic Frontier Foundation published a short guide to help Facebook users limit the degree to which third-party apps can access your data. Check it out here
Turkey’s parliament passed a new law that empowers the country’s broadcast regulator to impose a licensing scheme for online video platforms (such as YouTube, Periscope and likely Facebook) that will allow the regulator to monitor and sanction platforms that do not promptly comply with content removal requests from the government. All platforms will be required to obtain a license from the regulator — those that fail to do so will risk being blocked altogether.
Syria’s Council of Ministers passed an amendment to Cybercrime Law 17/2012, which penalizes “anyone who incites or promotes crime through computer networks” with prison sentences ranging between one and three years and a fine of up to US$1,500. The amendment creates a specialized court of first instance for cybercrime cases, whose rulings can then be challenged at the Court of Appeal. Previously, individuals charged under the Cybercrime Law could be tried in any court, including military tribunals.
Responding to Myanmar’s notorious criminal defamation law, local tech hub Phandeeyar has launched an online database called #SayNOto66d, in partnership with a coalition of 22 civil society organizations. Under Article 66D, a person can be fined and/or imprisoned for up to three years if they are found guilty of “extorting, coercing, restraining wrongfully, defaming, disturbing, causing undue influence or threatening to any person by using any Telecommunications Network.”
According to the database, 61% of those who have been prosecuted under the law were “raising awareness of issues and holding others to account.” Half of the cases involved criticism of the state. All those who have been charged under the law have also been convicted.
Australian Green Party Senator Jordan Steele-John put forth a motion to support laws protecting strong encryption in digital communication technologies and to fortify requirements for investigators to obtain a warrant before undertaking digital surveillance of citizens suspected of criminal activity.
Afef Abrougui, Ellery Roberts Biddle, Nwachukwu Egbunike, Rohith Jyothish, Karolle Rabarison, Mong Palatino, Nevin Thompson, and Sarah Myers West contributed to this report.

author: Netizen Report Team


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Tunisian MPs Propose Legislation Criminalising ‘Cyber Defamation’ · Global Voices
Afef Abrougui

Tunisian members of parliament are proposing a bill that would criminalise online defamation. On 22 March, sixteen legislators from the Nidaa Tounes party in the ruling coalition, along with one independent MP, submitted a proposal to amend the country's penal code by adding two articles on what they call “cyber-defemation'”.
Assembly of the Representatives of the People in Tunisia. Photo by Sami Mlouhi [CC BY-SA 4.0], via Wikimedia Commons
If adopted, the amendments would prescribe a two-year jail sentence and a fine of three thousand Tunisian dinars against those convicted of publishing content “that could harm public order, good morals, sanctity of the private life, and the honour” of individuals and ”official institutions”.
In their proposal, the MPs argue that the penal code is not “up to date with technological developments, particularly in the information sector” and that there is a need to “protect the Tunisian society” from “behaviours and violations that exceed press freedom” such as insults and abuse. Indeed, Tunisia's penal code already criminalizes defamation. What this group of MPs seeks to do is create a special category for “cyber defamation”.
The proposal comes just a few weeks after Tunisia was invited to join the Budapest Convention on Cybercrime which requires signatories to have in places ”conditions and safeguards under its domestic law” that ”shall provide for the adequate protection of human rights and liberties”.
The bill, which is barely two pages long, also refers to a law that is no longer in force: the repressive 1975 Press Code, which regulated print media under the dictatorship of Zine el Abidine Ben Ali.
Following Ben Ali's ousting in 2011 and as part of reforms in favour of freedom of speech and press freedom, interim authorities adopted a new press decree (Decree No. 2011-115 of 2 November 2011) which replaces the 1975 Code and enshrines greater protections for press freedom. The 2011 decree guarantees  journalists’ access to information, confidentiality of sources, abolished licensing requirements for print media and prison sentences for defamation and slander against journalists.
By proposing this bill, which seeks to restrict freedom of expression and references a repressive law that is no longer in force, one can only wonder how its supporters view Tunisian's progress in the areas freedom of expression and press freedom.
Their support for the bill marks a clear breach of their commitment to honour the 2014 Tunisian constitution that guarantees freedom of expression and the right to access information and communication networks, and bans prior censorship.
In a statement denouncing the bill, the Tunisian Syndicate of Tunisian Journalists noted:
هذا المشروع ينم عن عقلية استبدادية وتضييقية للحريات تحن إلى زمن الديكتاتورية، ويعكس جهلا فضيعا بمكاسب الثورة التونسية في مجال حرية الرأي و التعبير بدليل أن هذا المشروع يحيل إلى مجلة الصحافة لسنة 1975 والتي الغيت مباشرة بعد سقوط نظام بن علي. وهو ما يوحي بان النواب الذين اقترحوا المشروع يعيشون في عصر ما قبل الثورة.
…this bill is the result of a repressive mindset restrictive of freedoms, reflecting a nostalgia for the dictatorship era. It shows a a terrible ignorance of the gains of the Tunisian revolution in the areas of freedoms of opinion and expression since the bill refers to the 1975 Press Code, which was abolished immediately after the fall of the Ben Ali regime. This implies that the MPs who proposed the bill are living in a pre-revolutionary era…
In addition to referring to a legislation that is no longer in force, the seventeen MPs are using misleading language that implies that the internet in Tunisia is not regulated. One of the MPs who signed the proposal Mongi Harbaoui wrote on Facebook that the bill would protect individuals from “chaos and moral decay”.
In fact, even though Tunisia does not have a comprehensive cybercrime law, it does have in place unconstitutional laws that regulate online and offline speech like defamation, criticism of public officials and institutions, and content deemed to be in violation of “good morals” and “public order”.
Article 86 of the Telecommunication Code stipulates that anyone convicted of “harming others or disrupting their lives through public communication networks” may face up to two years in prison. The Penal Code has provisions that criminalise defamation and the spreading of content “liable to cause harm to public order or good morals”. Military institutions are also protected from criticism under provisions of the Military Code.
These provisions continue to be used today to prosecute and jail bloggers, activists and journalists. Just recently, blogger and member of parliament Yassine Ayari was sentenced by a military court to 16 days in jail for “undermining the morale of the army” over a 2017 Facebook post in which he mocked the appointment of a senior military commander. Ayari was previously jailed in late 2014, also over Facebook posts critical of the military institution.
Instead of updating the Tunisian judicial arsenal and bringing it in line with the constitutional protections of freedom of expression and press freedom, the proposed legislation only undermines such protections. It remains unclear when and if the bill will be debated in parliament, but that will likely result in fierce resistance not only from human rights groups but also from other MPs.

source: news-globalvoices

license: Creative Commons - Attribution - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

author: Afef Abrougui


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‘They Beat Me Everyday With an Electric Cable…They Smashed My Head Into the Walls’ · Global Voices
Hassan Chamoun

Lensa (left) with her aunt Ganneth (right). Photo shared by friends of Lensa on social media and used with permission.
When 21-year-old Lensa Lelisa Tufa and another (as of yet unidentified) Ethiopian domestic worker attempted to flee the house of their employers in Beirut on March 11, 2018, they saw no other alternatives but to jump from the balcony on the second floor.
But Lensa was the only one who jumped. The other woman, fearing injury upon seeing Lensa's state, did not.
When Lensa was admitted to hospital with two broken legs, she recorded a five-minute-long video with the help of her aunt Ganeth explaining her situation.
The video, in Amharic, was then uploaded on March 26 by the page “This is Lebanon“, which focuses on exposing abuses faced by migrant domestic workers in Lebanon, with English subtitles. At the time of writing, nearly 100,000 people have viewed the video.
In the video we hear her saying that:
[…] From the very beginning they were abusing me […] They tortured me and I couldn't do anything to save myself. They beat me everyday with an electric cable and wrapped my hair around their hands and dragged me around the room. They smashed my head into the walls. […] There were four of them abusing us. […] They took turns abusing us. […] He was pushing his fingers into my eyes. […] I said to myself, ‘How long can I carry on?’ […] There was another Ethiopian girl with me and the same things were happening to her. She decided to jump from the balcony with me.
It was soon revealed that the employers run a haute couture fashion company called Eleanore Couture.
In response, “This is Lebanon” organised a protest which was attended by around 40 activists in front of company in Jdeideh, in the northern part of the Greater Beirut area.
While her aunt Ganeth was initially denied to visit her in the hospital, she was eventually allowed following pressures on social media, according to Lebanese journalist Anne-Marie El Hage writing for the Francophone daily L'Orient Le Jour.
Lensa is one of many migrant domestic workers in Lebanon forced to work and live in difficult conditions under Lebanon's notorious “kafala” (meaning sponsorship) system.
One of the many people who uploaded a photo of themselves with #IAmLensa to support Ethiopian worker Lensa Lelisa in Lebanon. Source: This is Lebanon. Used with permission.
As the advocacy organization Migrant-Rights.org explains, the set-up makes these workers vulnerable to abuse:
Kafala is a system of control. In the migration context, it is a way for governments to delegate oversight and responsibility for migrants to private citizens or companies. The system gives sponsors a set of legal abilities to control workers: without the employer’s permission, workers cannot change jobs, quit jobs, or leave the country. If a worker leaves a job without permission, the employer has the power to cancel his or her residence visa, automatically turning the worker into an illegal resident in the country. Workers whose employers cancel their residency visas often have to leave the country through deportation proceedings, and many have to spend time behind bars.
A protester hold a sign under the “Eleanore” shop. The sign reads: “abolish the Kafala system!”. Photo by author.
Migrant domestic workers in Lebanon have repeatedly demanded the end of the kafala system and the ratification of the International Labor Organization's convention 189, which ensures human rights be respected for all domestic workers.
According to statistics from Lebanon's intelligence agency that were obtained by the humanitarian news and analysis agency IRIN, migrant domestic workers in the country die at a rate of two per week.
Unsurprisingly, Lensa said she wanted to change employers, but the latter's daughter threatened to send her back to Ethiopia if she tried to do so. The exchange was quoted by El Hage:
Si je peux marcher de nouveau, une fois guérie, je veux changer d’employeur et travailler au Liban. » Réponse à laquelle la fille de son employeuse a rétorqué : « Je suis prête à la renvoyer chez elle, alors. »
“If I can walk again and be well, I want to change my employer and work in Lebanon.” The daughter of the employer then answered: “I'm ready to send her back home, then.”
And as El Hage explains, there have been many attempts to cover up this story:
Pour ce faire, il aura fallu le laisser-faire de tous, celui de l’hôpital, de la gendarmerie, du médecin légiste, du bureau de recrutement dont nous avons uniquement le nom et les coordonnées d’une employée éthiopienne, de l’ambassade d’Éthiopie aussi, qui ont lâché la jeune femme aux mains d’employeurs abusifs, et fermé les yeux sur les dangers qu’elle encourt aujourd’hui.
For this to happen, many had to turn a blind eye. From the hospital, to the police, to the medical examiner, to the recruitment office which only provided the name and contact info of an Ethiopian employer, to the Ethiopian embassy as well, which abandoned the young woman to her abusers, and turned a blind eye to the ongoing dangers she is in.
Lensa even had to deny jumping in the presence of the employers:
Ils se sont contentés de prendre acte de sa déposition, donnée en présence de ses employeurs et visiblement dictée par ces derniers : « J’ai glissé, en étendant du linge » et « Non, je n’ai pas besoin d’aide ». Même le médecin légiste a certifié qu’il n’y avait pas de contusions, alors que les photos montrent une jeune femme sévèrement blessée, couverte d’ecchymoses.
They simply took note of her testimony, in the presence of her employers who visibly told her what to say: “I slipped while putting up the laundry” and “I don't need help”. Even the medical examiner certified that there were no bruisings, despite photos showing a young woman severely injured and covered with bruise.
In addition to being sent back to her abusers by the hospital, Lensa has an additional month and a half of doctor-recommended resting ahead of her.

author: Hassan Chamoun


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Experience Tokyo’s ‘Street of the Day’ With YouTuber Mimei · Global Voices
N'Donna Russell

“Takashi Murakami's cafe, mysterious gacha & Nakano sights Tokyo vlog”. Screencap from Mimei YouTube channel.
With her energetic, friendly commentary set to vibrant background music, popular Tokyo-based vlogger Mimei shows off the various streets of Japan's most populous city, one day at a time on YouTube, Instagram, Twitter and other social media channels.
Mimei, who hails from Auckland, New Zealand, originally joined the video-sharing site in 2010 after living in Japan for a year, and “Mimei Land” is actually an off-shoot of her which catered to Japanese audiences.
She describes “Mimei Land” as a place to “share my life, my adventures, and my strange discoveries with you”. Mimei's YouTube channel currently has over 162,000 subscribers, and has amassed over 14 million views since it was created in August 2011.
Fans of the channel, who Mimei lovingly refers to as “Pineapples”, are treated to videos that show off the many sides of Tokyo, from the backstreets of the city, to the Kagurazaka Shopping District, and to the world famous Shibuya crossing. Almost every video begins with the “Japanese Street of the Day”, and features bustling streets from various locations around Tokyo. Learn more about Mimei in her video introduction.
Mimei's Instagram account is also popular, and features snapshots of Tokyo and other places.
ok, i will let it go after this last picture ? can't wait to see the cherry blossoms again next year ✨
A post shared by  mimei (@mimeiland) on
In addition to exploring the hidden treasures of Tokyo, Mimei Land features videos exploring other places of interest within Japan, including Himeji Castle and the famous deer of Nara.
The channel also features footage all about her travels to other countries, including South Korea and Germany.
spent the day at Himeji with my best friend in the world yesterday ?? 昨日友人と一緒に姫路城に行ってきた☺
A post shared by  mimei (@mimeiland) on
Mimei's personal interests add charm to the videos, with topics ranging from vegan eateries in Tokyo, trying out weird gashapon (capsule toy) vending machines, and taste-testing the latest featured drinks at Starbucks Japan.  The excitement of documenting her adventures in Tokyo is balanced with small vlogs featuring her husband, fellow Japan Youtuber PDR-san, and their three cats.
Each video is crafted with stylish shots of various areas of Tokyo, coupled with catchy electronic music, all of which stem from Mimei's love of photography and editing videos.

author: N'Donna Russell


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How English-Language Pronouns Are Taught Around the World · Global Voices
PRI/PRX's The World

A teacher writes an English sentence on a blackboard during an English class. Cambodia. Photo: © Masaru Goto / World Bank. CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
This story by Nicola Prentis for GlobalPost originally appeared on PRI.org on March 28, 2018, and is republished here as part of a partnership between PRI and Global Voices.
The teacher holds up a pen in the first lesson and says, “It’s my pen.” The students, English language learners who could be any age from preschool to pensioner and from any country in the world, echo, “It’s my pen.” The teacher then takes a pen from one of the students and says, “It’s her pen.” The class repeats.
Later, for review, the teacher holds up a student’s pen and invites someone to supply the right response. A student offers, “It’s his pen,” and the teacher, with raised eyebrows but an encouraging smile says, “His pen?” stressing the word to signal the error and, perhaps, gesturing to the pen's owner. The student quickly corrects the mistake: “It’s her pen.”
Globally, close to 1 billion people are learning English as a Foreign Language (EFL), and all of them encounter binary gender pronouns from the earliest lessons. It’s a grammar point covered at the beginner level. Making observations about binary gender appears in exams for young children with questions such as, “Is your best friend a boy or a girl?” and “Is your teacher a man or a woman?” But as gender awareness grows and new words and grammar around gender identity enter the language, EFL teachers are potentially at the forefront of influencing the way a billion people around the world think about gender.
In the pen exercise, there are two main ways the pronoun activity could be changed: A student describing possession could answer with, “It’s their pen.” Or, the teacher could talk about some of the new gender-neutral pronouns, so students have other options besides his or her at their disposal, should they need it — like nir, vis, eir, hir, zir and xyr.
EFL materials, on the whole, have been including singular they for years. “Everyone was talking about gender balance in materials,” says English Language Teaching consultant Frances Amrani recalling her work with Cambridge University Press in 2000. “We were encouraged to think about it on all projects. On my first project, [a course book called “Vantage”] for the Council of Europe […] we agreed that ‘their’ was commonly used as a neutral singular pronoun and that it dated back to [the 14th or 15th century].” An example sentence about singular their made it into the grammar explanations at the back of the pre-intermediate-level book.
When it comes to teaching singular they to refer to people who identify as nonbinary, it’s unlikely that course books will reflect this usage anytime soon. Although they are based on “corpus data” — huge banks of language as it is being used — EFL course books will always have a lag between when something recurs enough to have become standard in written or spoken language and when it appears in a teaching syllabus. Authors and editors also have input into what is included. “If words catch on and become widely used really quickly and are of obvious use, like ‘selfie,’ then they'll probably make it in quite quickly. Others that are a bit more niche will inevitably take longer,” says lexicographer Julie Moore.
Bearing in mind the time it takes to publish a new course book, it would mean at least another few years before “This is Sarah’s pen, give it to them” is printed in learning materials.
That might sound slow, but look at the word Ms., which took about 70 years before it was in widespread use in 1972 and was probably only established in course books in the mid-'80s.
Browsing through his collection of old books, the EFL methodology writer, Scott Thornbury, says he found no instances of Ms. in a 1976 course book, “Strategies,” (Longman Publishing Co.), but quite a few examples of Mrs. and one Miss. But, by 1979, while the textbook, “Encounters,” (Heinemann), presents the same choices for filling out an official form, including Mr., the Teachers’ Book notes:
Point out Miss/Mrs distinction. If students ask, explain Ms as modern term for both Miss and Mrs.
The Cambridge English Course Book 2 Teacher's Book (1985) didn’t wait for students to ask:
Finish by making sure that students know first name, Christian name, surname, Mr, Mrs, Miss, Ms.
Finally, by 1986, Ms made it into a students’ book with Headway Intermediate offering Ms, along with Mr, Mrs, and Miss, as an option in writing formal letters.
Could we expect a progression like this to happen faster nowadays, with the internet zapping new words around the world and into corpus databases?
Some independent, digital publishers are moving faster and with a focus on individual student needs. Sue Lyon-Jones, an EFL author and publisher of web-based courses, cites the growing trend for singular they as one of the reasons she’s chosen to incorporate nonbinary they in an online grammar lesson. But also she feels “equipping English language learners with vocabulary to talk about themselves and their identity is an important part of our job.”
Similarly, teachers in their own classrooms have a certain amount of freedom to adapt the published materials they use in class and teach language they think is important, without waiting for justification from corpus. Nonbinary they is already popping up in EFL classrooms across the world.
Leigh Moss, who’s taught in Vietnam and Italy, is using it in classes. “I teach ‘they’ as gender neutral since xe/ze isn't in common use and I have non-binary friends who prefer ‘they’ and this is how I'd use it,” says Moss.
Jessie Fuller, an EFL teacher in Brazil, agrees. “I normally use ‘they’ for gender neutral, then only get into ‘ze’ if a student seems interested.”
Teachers can always find a way to present language so it doesn’t confuse. They regularly teach incredibly complex or nonintuitive things. Take the phrase, “How do you do?” It’s typically taught at the early levels despite being a question that isn’t really a question, and it having nothing to do with the manner in which you do anything at all. It has to be taught with an explanation, at least briefly, of the social and cultural nuances that accompany it: It’s only used the first time you meet someone, only in very formal conversations and, these days, probably only with older generations or the very upper classes.
Singular they, or the concept of nonbinary pronouns, doesn’t look any more linguistically complicated than “How do you do?” and no more conceptually or culturally challenging than removing the marital status of women when you address them. Whether it will take 70 years to make nonbinary pronouns mainstream like Ms., time will tell. But teachers who teach them will spread them far beyond the 400 million or so people who speak English as a first language.

author: PRI/PRX's The World


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Highly Trained and Educated, Some Foreign-Born Doctors Still Can’t Practice Medicine in the US · Global Voices
PRI/PRX's The World

Dr. Michelle Bholat (left) stands with Dr. Luis Zúñiga (middle) and Dr. Félix Argueta (right), who are participants of UCLA's International Medical Graduate Program in June 2017. Bholat is a co-founder of the program. Foreign-born doctors Zúñiga and Argueta are expected to be matched with a residency program in 2019 and will work for a few years in underserved areas. Credit: Courtesy of UCLA Health
This story by Joey Peters originally appeared on PRI.org on March 28, 2018, and is republished here as part of a partnership between PRI and Global Voices.
Consuelo López de Padilla fits the profile of a doctor with top-of-the-line medical training.
She spent 15 years in her native Venezuela studying medicine and working as a doctor. In 2001, she left the Andean hills of her home country for the frigid flatlands of southern Minnesota to spend three years researching at one of the world’s most prestigious health centers, the Mayo Clinic.
But after starting a family in the US, she never returned to Venezuela. She’s also never been able to work as a doctor.
Though she completed residency in Venezuela years ago, López de Padilla must go through residency in the US again if she wants to practice family medicine here. For years, she’s been struggling to match into another program.
“I wish I didn’t have to do it, but at this point, this is the system,” she said.
There are as many as 65,000 unlicensed foreign-trained doctors across the country like López de Padilla who have medical training and experience in their home countries but can't practice in the US, according to the Massachusetts Immigrant and Refugee Advocacy (MIRA) Coalition. Meanwhile, many organizations are anticipating physician shortages in upcoming years. A 2017 study from the Association of American Medical Colleges, for example, anticipates a deficit of 100,000 doctors across the country by 2030. As underserved areas continue to grow, some states are finding that unlicensed foreign-trained doctors are key to solving the problem.
Programs in Los Angeles and in Minnesota are helping doctors like López de Padilla jump through the hurdles of practicing medicine — from passing exams to obtaining residency training. In return, participants promise to provide care in underserved communities. Massachusetts and other states are eyeing these programs as models to ease the path for internationally trained doctors while alleviating the doctor shortage.
While nine out of 10 medical students trained in the US get accepted to a residency here, just half of the foreign-trained medical graduates like López de Padilla make it, according to the National Resident Matching Program. At the same time, the number of US residency positions have grown only incrementally since Congress capped their funding levels more than 20 years ago.
Foreign-trained doctors often run into three main problems. First, residency programs generally look for doctors who graduated from medical school within the past five years. Second, US residencies want their candidates to have at least one year of clinical experience within the country, regardless of how much clinical experience an applicant may have abroad. Third, they need to study for and obtain high scores on multiple US Medical Licensing Examination tests.
All of these steps exist because no international body accredits medical schools across the world.
“The quality of medical training varies from country to country,” said Joe Knickrehm, a spokesman for the Federation of State Medical Boards.
López de Padilla, who currently works as a research associate in the Mayo Clinic’s musculoskeletal gene therapy lab, acknowledged these requirements exist because US health providers may have concerns about who they’re bringing into the system. But she also questioned where the line should be on learning the same things over again.
“Being in the same training, in my opinion, is a waste of your time and not the best use of resources,” she said.
The programs in California and Minnesota are trying to help foreign-born doctors navigate that system. In the last decade, the University of California Los Angeles’ (UCLA) International Medical Graduate (IMG) Program has helped match 117 foreign-trained doctors into family medicine residency programs.
Patrick Dowling, who co-founded the UCLA program in 2007, said that about five million Californians lack English proficiency and 15 million Hispanics live in the state. The demand for more Spanish-speaking doctors has long been pressing.
At the same time, Dowling and his colleagues have known of foreign-born doctors who had qualifications but were relegated to working in other industries.
“We found a large group of [foreign-trained doctors] working menial jobs, from construction to McDonald’s to janitor to sanitation, you name it,” Dowling said.
Foundation money supports UCLA’s IMG program. It is selective — Dowling estimated it accepts about 12 of 100 to 150 applicants each year, all of whom must be permanent residents.
But Dowling said the payoff for enrollees is the hands-on experience at community clinics and letters of recommendation they can earn in the program. In many cases, foreign-trained doctors shadow practicing doctors to get the one year of clinical experience needed in their residency applications instead of directly treating patients. In these cases, foreign-trained doctors are limited to observation because they’re not licensed to work on patients. In comparison, those with US degrees can treat patients right out of medical school and only need a residency to practice independently.
Minnesota's International Medical Graduate program started in 2015 and has helped foreign-born doctors find medical training and prepare for the board exams. The state-run program also funded four residency positions for foreign-trained doctors in the Minneapolis and St. Paul area.
Yende Anderson, the program’s coordinator, said the number of residency positions will increase to six this summer. After residency, each doctor will be required to spend five years practicing in one of the state’s underserved areas, where physician shortages abound. To date, none have completed their residencies.
López de Padilla, for her part, got help from the Minnesota program to enroll in three community clinic rotations. She’s currently studying for exams and observing a doctor at a community health clinic.
Faced with daunting obstacles, some foreign-trained doctors give up. That’s what Afsaneh Moradi did after nearly a decade of trying. She first came to the Boston area from Iran in 2007 to be with her husband and family. By then, she had seven years of experience between medical school and working as a doctor in Qom, an area located roughly 80 miles southwest of Tehran.
After moving to Boston, Moradi said she spent roughly five years studying for and taking the required board exams. For the next four years, she applied to hundreds of residencies. Originally, she focused on internal medicine residencies, but she soon expanded to other areas like psychiatry.
“I applied to literally anything and everything,” Moradi said.
She also shadowed as many doctors as she could; at one point she spent six months commuting three hours a day to Worcester, Massachusetts, to volunteer at Saint Vincent Hospital.
Today, she juggles three part-time jobs as an instructor for medical assistant students, a medical researcher at Cambridge Health Alliance and a social worker at the Somerville Public Library.
Exhausted and frustrated from four years of applying for residencies, Moradi gave up last year and doesn’t plan to start trying again. She attributes the bulk of her rejections to a low number of US residency positions that are not in step with the demand from medical students.
“How many times do you want to get rejected?” she said. “I don’t see a point.”
But she also told her story to Massachusetts state senator, Jason Lewis, a Democrat who represents the northern area of Greater Boston. Lewis sponsored a bill to establish a state commission to study barriers and pathways for foreign-trained doctors.
“In Massachusetts, even though we have a world-class health care system, we still have many gaps where we have patients who find it difficult or have to wait in order to see a doctor,” Lewis said.
Creating pathways for unlicensed foreign-trained doctors could ease those problems, Lewis said.
So far, the Senate passed a version of Lewis’s bill. If it clears the full legislature and is signed into law, the commission will have one year to come up with recommendations to present to the state legislature.
Though this process would inevitably take time, MIRA Coalition Legislative Affairs Director Amy Grunder said a similar commission birthed the Minnesota IMG program. She emphasized that industry stakeholders like the state’s health licensing boards will want to weigh in on any future changes.
“You want to get the people in the room that might have opposition,” Grunder said, adding that they’d then “explore together how to address the problem.”
Morandi, for her part, said she hopes that her home state will find ways to ease the burden of foreign-trained doctors, even if it doesn’t work out for her situation.
“It’s not about lowering the standards; we don’t want that,” she said. “It’s about taking advantage of people that are already qualified.”


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Marvia Malik, Pakistan’s First Transgender Newscaster, Wants to Change Societal Attitudes Toward Her Community · Global Voices
Anas Saleem

Marvia Malik, 21, is believed to be Pakistan's first transgender news anchor. Screenshot of video by VisualTV Live via YouTube.
Marvia Malik has made history in Pakistan's media industry by purportedly becoming the country's first transgender news anchor.
The 21-year-old from Lahore, who has a bachelor's degree in journalism, applied to work at Kohenoor News, a private news channel. The chief executive officer of Kohenoor News, a private news channel, says Malik was hired on merit, and Malik made her on-air debut on 23 March.
#Pakistan first transgender newscaster on screen now – Maavia Malik pic.twitter.com/uXJipyrEfL
— Shiraz Hassan (@ShirazHassan) 23 de marzo de 2018
In an interview with newspaper Dawn, Malik, whose first job was in a beauty salon as a makeup artist, explained how she viewed the news anchor opportunity:
Everywhere we go, a transgender person is looked down upon. But there’s nothing we can’t do; we’re educated, have degrees, but no opportunities, no encouragement. This is what I want to change […] I’m here to change my community’s destiny, not represent myself as an individual. […] I have set out on this journey to change lives of transgenders.
Malik's success has been praised by celebrities, journalists and activists from all over Pakistan and beyond. British-Pakistani actor and activist Riz Ahmed, in a recent Instagram post, lauded her and commented:
In some ways Pakistan has been ahead of the curve in certain aspects of trans rights. In other ways, it has lagged behind. Hoping we can all learn from each other in paving the way to greater inclusion.
Congratulations to Marvia Malik. In some ways Pakistan has been ahead of the curve in certain aspects of trans rights. In other ways it has lagged behind. Hoping we can all learn from each other in paving the way to greater inclusion.
A post shared by  Riz Ahmed (@rizahmed) on
Pakistan has a mixed record when it comes to gender minorities.
The term “transgender” in Pakistan and elsewhere in South Asia usually refers to a more specific group of individuals known as hijras, who are considered to be neither completely male or female. Activists and non-government organizations have long lobbied for their official recognition, and in a landmark 2011 ruling, Pakistan's Supreme Court ordered the country's election commission to collect data from the transgender community and register them as voters.
In 2017, Pakistan issued the first-ever passport with X to mark a third gender. And earlier this year, Pakistan issued the first driving licenses to transgender people.
But transgender people continue to face discrimination and violence in Pakistan. Many find it difficult to secure employment and turn to begging or sex work to survive.
Malik mentioned this reality in her interview with Dawn, and said she hopes to change this in a specific way:
She wants to push for a law making mandatory for families to give transgender persons their share in property as a boy or girl is. “Transgenders are forced to dance and beg because they have no other means to make ends meet. When they are shunned by families, they have nowhere else to go. My trans friends who have masters degrees don’t have jobs which is why they end up on streets or become sex workers. This is why I want to push for a law so a transgender if disowned, can make a living out of the share in the property.”

author: Anas Saleem


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Kidnapping of Ecuadorian Journalists Shows Colombia’s Peace Process Is Far from Over · Global Voices
Daniela Gallardo

“#WeAreMissing3. We are with you.” Photo of the editors of El Comercio newspaper, widely shared online and part of the campaign NosFaltan3.
The kidnapping of a journalist team by a dissident group of FARC (which stands for Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia in Spanish) on the border with Ecuador represents another complicating factor to Colombia’s road to peace after more than 50 years of armed conflict.
The process has resulted in the turning over of around 9,000 firearms and the lowest murder rate in three decades (24 homicides per 100,000 residents). However, not all of FARC's members have agreed to the peace agreement, and some have banded together into groups that also include narcotraffickers.
So far this year, four bombs and two car bombs have hit Ecuador. In January 2018, Ecuador’s President Lenín Moreno declared a state of emergency in several areas of the country due to an attack in the city of San Lorenzo in Esmereldas province on the border with Colombia, which left 14 people injured and caused serious damage to police buildings.
While the Ecuadorian government was taking stock of the damage, social media and the press raised another alarm: two journalists and a driver from El Comercio newspaper were kidnapped on the morning of 26 March 2018 in the town of Mataje, also in Esmeraldas province.
On the day that Interior Minister César Navas confirmed the news, he alongside the defence minister, attorney general, ombudsman, and military and police leaders met with legal representatives of the newspaper and the families of the kidnapped people to advise them about the protocols to follow in these circumstances.
During the press conference in which Navas made the official announcement, he also mentioned the likelihood that those kidnapped would be in Colombia.
According to Colombian military commander General Alberto Mejía, the man behind the kidnapping is the leader of the FARC dissidents in southeast Colombia, Walter Patricio Artízala Vernaza, also known as “Guacho”. The general told RCN Radio that intelligence he had received showed that the guerrilla fighter and men under his command are those holding the Ecuadorians.
Interior Minister Navas told a local radio station that surveillance operations and raids in the border area had upset the dissident FARC groups (which are deemed illegal by the state) and that the kidnappers “are not looking for money [and have not] asked for ransom”.
César Cedeño, an expert in military operations, analyzed the implications of these incidents. He argued that the case of El Salvador is useful to understand the violence which has come into Ecuador, and that the groups still in the border region should be viewed as “hybrids of criminal and insurgent organizations”:
En la guerra civil salvadoreña pasó lo mismo: las maras [o pandillas] que hoy día son tan famosas por su incidencia en la seguridad ciudadana de América Central y Estados Unidos, fueron producto de ese proceso de paz. Exguerrilleros del Frente Farabundo Martí para la Liberación Nacional que no se desmovilizaron, usaron sus habilidades de combate para dedicarse a actividades criminales. Eso son las maras.
The same happened in the Salvadorian civil war: the maras [gangs] which today are so infamous for their impact on citizens’ safety in Central America and the United States, were a product of that peace process. Ex-guerrillas of the Farabundo Martí Front for National Liberation who did not demobilize used their combat skills to dedicate themselves to criminal activity. These are the maras
He continued:
Ese caso muestra que, en efecto, esto es lo que puede estar pasando en el proceso de paz colombiano. Es probable que estos remanentes de las FARC hayan tomado una decisión simplemente racional para no desmovilizarse: un cálculo de utilidades esperadas versus costos esperados. Si se mantenían en la insurgencia, los retornos podían ser muy importantes en términos del comercio de estupefacientes y armas. El costo es el que ya tenían: el acoso constante del ejército y la policía colombiana.
That case shows that, in effect, this is what could be happening in the Colombian peace process. It is likely that these remnants of FARC have taken a simply rational decision to not demobilize: a calculation of expected profits versus expected costs. If they stay as an insurgency, the returns could be very significant in terms of the narcotics and weapons trade. The cost is what they face already: the constant harrying of the Colombian army and police
Since the announcement of the kidnapping, journalists from all sorts of media organizations gathered together on the night of 27 March for a vigil in Quito’s Plaza Grande to demand the liberation of their colleagues. They asked the government to do everything possible to ensure the two journalists and driver with El Comercio come back safely to their families.
On social media, the hashtag #NosFaltan3, which means “We are missing three”, was the most popular for discussion of the topic:
El ministro de Defensa, Patricio Zambrano, en la vigilia en la Plaza Grande de Quito #NosFaltan3 #LosQueremosDeVueltaYa pic.twitter.com/QOHBkbTKNe
— El Comercio (@elcomerciocom) 28 de marzo de 2018
The Defence Minister, Patricio Zambrano, at the vigil in Quito’s Plaza Grande
Un plantón silencioso, triste… muy sentido. Esta noche, periodistas y amigos de tres colegas secuestrados nos reunimos en la Plaza Grande. #NosFaltan3 y #LosQueremosDeVuelta@lahoraecuadorpic.twitter.com/wTUKQ6NEQD
— Leonardo G. Ponce (@Leonardogponce) 28 de marzo de 2018
A silent, sad vigil…strongly felt. Tonight, we journalists and friends of the three kidnapped colleagues meet at Plaza Grande
Thinking of the wider impact, Ecuadorian novelist and journalist Eduardo Varas reflected on a conversation with journalism students about the impact that the incident could eventually have, not only regarding the right to peace and security in Ecuador, but also for those who wish to work as journalists:
Hablamos sobre que el mejor periodista es el que duda y el que busca resolver esa duda a través de la investigación. Y me dijeron que eso también significaba que ejercer el oficio nos expone como personas. No lo había pensado así. No en ese nivel. La realidad más cercana no nos daba razones para verlo de esa manera. ¿Se puede enseñar periodismo en estas circunstancias? ¿Cómo quitar el temor en el rostro de jóvenes que te miran como si no pudieran creer lo que está pasando? No lo sé.
We spoke about how the best journalist doubts and tries to resolve this doubt through investigation. And they told me that this also means that working in this job exposes us to risk. I had not thought about it like that. Not on that level. The more immediate reality had not given us any reason to view it in that way. Can journalism be taught in these circumstances? How can you remove the fear from the faces of young people looking at you as if they cannot believe what is happening? I don’t know.

author: Daniela Gallardo


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What Were Global Voices’ Readers up to Last Week? · Global Voices
L. Finch

Photo by Jeff Boyd via Flickr. CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
At Global Voices, our community researches, writes, edits, and translates stories with a mission to support human rights and build bridges of understanding across countries, cultures, and languages.
We don't publish just to grab clicks or follow a news trend. We do, however, like to keep track of the ways in which our hard work has impact around the world.
To that end, one useful metric is how readers respond to our stories and translations. So let's take a look at who our readers were and what caught their attention during the week of March 26-April 1, 2018.
Last week, our stories and translations attracted readers from 215 countries! The top 20 countries represented across all of Global Voices’ sites were:
1. United States
2. Brazil
3. Peru
4. France
5. Japan
6. United Kingdom
7. Spain
8. Mexico
9. Canada
10. Italy
11. Germany
12. Colombia
13. Taiwan
14. India
15. Russia
16. Bangladesh
17. Argentina
18. Indonesia
19. Madagascar
20. Tanzania
But that's only a small slice of the diversity of our readership. Let's use the True Random Number Generator from Random.org and take a look at a few other countries on the list:
162. French Guiana
44. South Korea
68. El Salvador
114. Georgia
36. Hong Kong
The English-language site is where the majority of original content is first published at Global Voices. The top five most-read stories of last week were:
1. A Romanian in the UK: On the Thin Line Between ‘Undesirable Migrant’ and ‘Welcomed Contributor’
2. Netizen Report: Ethiopia Arrests Leading Journalists and Activists in ‘State of Emergency’
3. A Muslim Scholar Seeks to Link Israel and Indonesia Through the Hebrew Language
4. ‘They Beat Me Everyday With an Electric Cable…They Smashed My Head Into the Walls’
5. Highly Trained and Educated, Some Foreign-Born Doctors Still Can’t Practice Medicine in the US
Lingua is a project that translates Global Voices stories into languages other than English. There are about 30 active Lingua sites. Below is last week's most-read story or translation on each active language site.

author: L. Finch


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A Children’s Costume Contest in Macedonia Sparks Outrage With ‘Portable Adolf’ Hitler Entry · Global Voices
Marko Angelov

Screen shot of a photo of a child dressed as Hitler submitted for Mask'n'mall contest, edited to hide the child's identity and the identities of people who shared/liked/commented.
It probably sounded like a wholesome social media branding opportunity: A mall in Skopje, Macedonia, hosted a masquerade competition for kids to celebrate April Fool's Day, in which parents uploaded photos of their little ones in costume and winners were determined by the number of “likes”. Prizes included gift cards, Bluetooth speakers, and mugs with the photos printed on them.
What could possibly go wrong?
However, then the “Mask'n'mall” contest published a photo of a small boy dressed in a homemade black Nazi uniform, complete with a swastika armband and a haircut and mustache similar to Adolf Hitler's.
An angry backlash by Facebook users quickly ensued, and several online media outlets reported about the scandal. A few hours after it was posted, the contest organizer removed the photo from their Facebook page. However, social media users refused to let the discussion die, and re-posted screenshots.
Some users speculated that the parents were trying to ridicule Nazism or make some sort of statement with the costume (other than endorsing the Third Reich), but a majority of commenters simply expressed disgust over “portable Adolf”, as the incident came to be called.
A similar line of discussion took place on Twitter, with some trying to justify the act by invoking Charlie Chaplin in the 1940 film “The Great Dictator”. However, such points of view were usually met with derision.
Обично децата се маскираат во своите јунаци. И да, она не е смешно.
— Биггус Дицкус (@Glava123) April 2, 2018
[For April Fools’ Day] children usually dress up as their heroes. And yes, this is not funny.
Ај што го маскирале детево, го маскирале. Туку како му објасниле во што е маскирано? „Сине, ти си Хитлер, еден чичко што убивал Евреи зошто не ги сакал, убав тој на мајка ?”?
— вина невина (@nalutilus) April 2, 2018
All right, I can see that the parents provided the costume for the kid. But I can't imagine how they explained the costume to him? “Son, you are now Hitler, an uncle that killed Jews because he didn't like them, my dear mommy's boy ?”?
Antisemitic and pro-Nazi messages are not unusual in Macedonia, which only recently moved away from under the increasingly authoritarian rule of the VMRO-DPMNE party. Even though Macedonian law prohibits hate speech, works by Hitler are freely disseminated and promoted.
Following the masquerade scandal, some Twitter users warned about this phenomenon:
Инаку во супермаркет лабаво на најдобра позиција си се продаваат „Мојата борба“ и „Еврејското прашање“ на негосподин Хитлер, но сигурен сум дека ете некој ќе објасни дека тоа и не е така страшно, ете може да не се согласуваме со различни мислења и стилови све е океј олабавете.
— Slobodan Jakoski (@FlavrSavr) April 2, 2018
By the way, on the top shelf in a major supermarket, in a very relaxed manner, they sell the books “Mein Kampf” and “The Jewish Question” by non-mister Hitler. But I am sure that someone will appear to explain “that it's not so horrible, that it might just be a matter of disagreement with different opinions and styles, so all is OK, chill”.
Just few days ago, human rights expert and activist Zharko Trajanoski posted a photo of a selection of titles at a “mini book fair” in another shopping center, with a sarcastic comment:
“What a ‘super funny’ offer. Hitler, Free Masons, Illuminati, conspiracy theories and Putin all in one place.” Photo and comment by Zharko Trajanoski, used with permission.
Yet another Twitter user pointed to the hypocrisy of people condemning Hitler masquerade incident who themselves promote nationalism, which by definition divides the people into “us” and “them”:
Сите се згрозија од сиротото детенце маскирано како Хитлер. Кој, нели, бил расист и нацист.
Дури и оние кои се дереа по улица „Смрт за Шиптарите“ и „За чиста Македонија“, што е точно она што го правел и Хитлер
— Mindрluмbеr (@mindplumber) April 2, 2018
Everybody was appalled by the poor kid dressed as Hitler. Who, we all know, was racist and a Nazi.
Even those who shouted “Death to Albanians” [using an ethnic slur] and “For a clean Macedonia” in the streets, which is exactly what Hitler was all about.

author: Marko Angelov


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A Surinamese Non-Profit Becomes the Voice for Animals Losing Their Habitats · Global Voices
Kori Tuitt

A sloth in the wild in Suriname. Photo by Stellar Tsang, courtesy the Green Heritage Fund Suriname, used with permission.
One conservation organization in Paramaribo, Suriname, is putting its efforts into rescuing wildlife and preserving their habitat. Started in 2005 by Monique Pool, Green Heritage Fund Suriname advocates for animal rights by educating people.
While Suriname is a lush country, city areas impacted by deforestation are pushing animals out. The Green Heritage Fund is working to help those animals — sloths, mostly — as well as preserve the ecosystems for dolphins and other marine life.
Global Voices spoke with Pool about the important work her organization does.
Monique Pool, founder and director of the Green Heritage Fund Suriname. Photo by Stellar Tsang, used with permission.
Global Voices (GV): Tell us about Green Heritage Fund Suriname. What's a typical work day like?
Monique Pool (MP): I think most people think we are either running behind sloths and anteaters, or maybe watching dolphins all day. I wish…but actually, we have a lot of tasks. We plan for new activities and then in between, we get calls for rescues. Sometimes we have one rescue a week and sometimes we have two rescues in one day.
GV: Tell us about some of these activities, and your goals as a non-profit.
Close-up of a sloth that was rescued by Green Heritage Fund Suriname. Photo by Stellar Tsang, used with permission.
MP: We have four programs. The Xenarthra Program is basically the rescue, rehabilitation and release of wildlife. It’s also about [preserving] the ecosystem that they live in, to ensure that there’s enough left. We’re not just the normal conservation organization. We’re also looking more and more at the wildlife welfare of animals that are losing their habitat, especially in the city.
The second program is the Dolphin Program. While that's the one species the program is focusing on, we also started looking at the broader picture — all the animals that share the ecosystem with this dolphin and the health of that ecosystem. Together with WWF Guianas, the Nature Conservation Division of the Suriname Forest Service, and the Protected Areas Commission of Guyana, we’re actually implementing a regional Marine Spatial Planning project. In the end, the aim for that program is to have a marine protected area.
Our third program is Education and Research. For us, education is the main focus of what we do because we feel if you don’t raise awareness or don’t educate people, you will never be able to protect areas. Education is a really important part of our efforts. It’s cutting through all of our programs and education, of course, includes advocacy.
The fourth program is Green Community Development. If the community invites us, we help them look for alternative ways of earning money.
GV: Why did you decide to focus your energies on the well-being of sloths?
MP: It’s more or less of a coincidence that we started doing that. I had lost my dog and while I was looking for him through the Animal Protection Society, I volunteered to take care of a baby sloth. Then I started becoming interested in why specifically sloths were being reported [to the Animal Protection Society] so much. We started focusing more on that whole group because they are very special animals — not just the sloths, but also anteaters. I became more and more curious, and started looking online for resources.
GV: How have development and deforestation impacted the lives of sloths in Suriname?
MP: All wildlife that shares the habitat with the sloths are affected when there is deforestation — but sloths are so slow, they cannot get away. The moment the machines start coming in, the monkeys will flee, the birds will go away, the snakes will leave because of the ground moving in a certain way. The animals will be gone, with the exception of the animals that are too slow to do that. These include the sloths, the silky anteaters (small anteaters that live very high in the trees), and the tree porcupines.
When we do the rescues, those are the animals that we mostly catch. We normally release all healthy animals within a week.
Deforestation is happening in the interior where there is illegal gold mining, but those areas are already heavily hunted, so there is not that much wildlife. Most of our animals come from the coastal zone, with maybe 96% coming specifically from the city.
A sloth makes its way along a heavily polluted piece of land in Suriname's capital city, where many animals are in danger of losing their habitat. Photo by Stellar Tsang,  courtesy Green Heritage Fund Suriname; used with permission.
GV: How do you care for the sloths once they come to the sanctuary?
MP: First, we assess their health status. If they are healthy, we release them within two to three days. Because of the hunting going on in Suriname, we normally do releases [in areas we deem safe].
[For injured animals], the most challenging part is providing food that they will eat. Once the animals eat, you can provide the full treatment they need before releasing them. But if they refuse to eat, they will die, even if they get the treatment; then, we need to make a decision about what to do. Sometimes we will release an animal if we see that being in the forest and being able to take care of itself will heal it. But we don’t do that very often — almost never — because a weak animal or injured animal is just food for predators.
Monique Pool and a member of her team with a rescued sloth. Photo by   Stellar Tsang, courtesy Green Heritage Fund Suriname; used with permission.
GV: What is the most difficult aspect of your work?
MP: When we have an animal that is really badly injured, the most difficult part is having to deal with people’s awareness about what they did to the animal. I remember this one animal — people had caught a two-fingered sloth because they wanted to eat it. Then they thought it was pregnant and because they didn’t want to eat a pregnant animal, they tied it up and let it sit in their yard. After maybe ten days, they called us. The wire had completely ruptured through the flesh of its leg and we had to euthanize the animal after we brought it to the vet.
For a week or more, the volunteer and I…we just couldn’t sleep thinking about that. It’s not just dealing with the suffering of the animals, but the ignorance of the people. That really gets me most, the ignorance.
GV: Conversely, what is the most fulfilling part of what you do?
MP: It’s an incredible thing that I am living in a country where these special animals live, where we can see them in the wild and where they still have reasonably untouched habitats. It’s just something I appreciate very much, that I live here — not just where sloths live, but also where these amazing dolphins live. It’s something I’m very grateful for. I’m grateful that I can speak on their behalf and help protect their habitat.
GV: How can people help your organization and the work that it carries out?
MP: There are two ways. One is to spend time, helping and volunteering with us. There can also be volunteering from a distance. There is a form on our website, where it says ‘Volunteer’. People can fill out their name, tell us what their skills are and how they want to help us. For example, our website administrator lives in the United States.
The other thing, of course, is donations. We live off of donations. That would help continue this work.
GV: How do you use social media to gain support and raise awareness?
MP: We use social media to emphasise our message ‘a wild animal belongs in the wild’, and we use the #notapet hashtag in a lot of our posts. We actively use our Facebook page to raise certain issues and we have used social media to promote a petition we started in 2011 and repeated in 2013 to fight against the selling of wildlife in the streets.
GV: Is there anything people may not realise about the kind of conservation work you do?
Monique Pool releases a rescued sloth back into the wild, where it belongs. Photo by Stellar Tsang, courtesy Green Heritage Fund Suriname; used with permission.
MP: One thing that is really good for people to know is that we do not keep animals in enclosures. There are a lot of people who call and say, ‘We want to come and see the animals’, or want to touch them. We don’t have animals in cages. We absolutely don’t do hugging. We ourselves even limit how much we touch the animals. Sloths are solitary animals, so they are not used to social interactions, even within their species — so you can imagine how other types of interaction can be very stressful for them.
Instead, we take people on releases because we have so many rescues and releases. It’s often a very beautiful moment, because you can see when they are sitting in a cage [on the way to being released], these animals get really depressed. Once you release them, you can actually see how their energy changes; how they get off into the forest, and it’s really amazing to see that. We allow people to take as many pictures as they want, because of course this is what we want to promote — that wild animals belong in the wild.

author: Kori Tuitt


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Why Did More Than 200,000 Koreans Petition to Shutter a Popular Website? · Global Voices
Oiwan Lam

Screen capture images from Ilbe website. The post is titled, “How to find out if a woman is marriage material”. It suggests that if one beats up his girlfriend and she still comes back to him, she is the right person to marry.
An online petition started on January 25, 2018, called for the South Korean government to ban a website called Ilbe Storehouse, claiming it is full of hate speech against women, liberals, and ethnic and sexual minorities.
The site was founded in 2010 as a daily collection of popular online information. Unlike other web forums in Korea, the site does not have a username system. Such a setting is designed to uphold the principle of anonymity. That, alongside its non-hierarchical structure among users, has attracted many young people who seek to defy mentorship and authority.
By August 2017, Ilbe had nearly 30.8 million visits per day and was the 24th most popular website in all of South Korea. Its popularity is viewed by some critics as representative of a “dramatic rise of South Korea’s angry young men”.
The online petition, signed by 235,167 people, demanded that the administration take action against Ilbe as the site is a major source of disinformation related to social and political issues. The petition said (via Korea Herald):
The language used there are foul and discriminative, and there are so many contents showing composite photographs defaming and sexually harassing others…
In response to the call for Ilbe’s shutter, the presidential office explained (via Korea Herald) that upon review, the Korea Communications Standard Commission does, at least in theory, have the power to shut down the website:
When more than 70 percent of the uploaded content is illegal information, the commission either shuts down or blocks access to the site…
Between 2012 to 2017, the website had received 1,500 orders from the government to delete offensive posts. However, the Communications Standard Commission also pointed out last year that there are no legal regulations restricting hate speech in South Korea.
On Twitter, many opinions about Ilbe were posted in favour of the petitioners. When answering a Twitter user’s inquiry about Ilbe, a reporter from HajinsunTV said:
I think because Ilbe is a source of bad “jokes” about politics and society (eg misogyny) and it poisons the Korean society. If you are a user of this site, it means that you participate in sharing its toxicity into the world.
— Hajinsun #NW5 (@HajinsunTV) March 9, 2018
This is not the first time Korean people signed a petition asking for Ilbe to be shut down. A petition was first launched in October 2017 after male users of the site uploaded photos of women, claiming that the women were their “cousins” during Cheosuk holidays. The photos attracted numerous comments that could be qualified as harassment. The October petition attracted 43,000 signatures.
In addition to posting photos of women, quite often the site's content suggests approval of sexual violence. For example, the top image in this post showing a man holding a baseball bat comes from an Ilbe post called “How to find out if a woman is marriage material”. It suggests that if one beats up their girlfriend and she still comes back to them, she is the right person to marry.
Ilbe is not only offensive to women, but also other marginalized and vulnerable social groups — foreigners, North Korean defectors, Chinese Koreans and even disaster victims.
Members of Ilbe often call Korean women, “kimchi bitches” and Chinese people, “cockroaches”. Some speech made by Ilbe members go as far as to support explicit acts of violence. In June 2017, an Ilbe member wrote on the forum that he would throw acid at female Kpop band Twice at the airport:
TWICE decided to abandon our country because they’re making so much money in Japan…Yeah sure, money’s great, money’s the best. You guys can abandon Korea but you better not return ever again. I’ll be waiting at the airport with 10 liters of hydrochloric acid [if you try to return].
Furthermore, some Ilbe members have taken action in real life. @AskAKorean gave some concrete examples concerning the Ilbe community’s hate culture:
The most disgusting display of political theater I've seen still is Ilbe's “gluttony strike,” mockingly holding a feast in front of the hunger-striking parents of Sewol ferry victims.
This is not quite there yet, but it is getting close. https://t.co/bwbFVz7kU6
— T.K. of AAK! (@AskAKorean) March 28, 2018
In October 2014, about a hundred Ilbe members held a pizza feast next to a group of protesters who were on hunger strike to protest government’s inaction in the aftermath of the Sewol ferry disaster. The disaster, which took place on 16 April 2014, killed 325 people — the majority were secondary school students.
Ilbe members have made comments about other political issues. Petitioners have pointed out what they consider some of the most egregious displays, such as when in January 2018, Ilbe users mocked former President Roh Moo Hyun with derogatory billboard ads, transforming the late president into a Koala bear figure in Times Square NYC. Roh is nicknamed Roh-ala and the bear figure is an e-sticker, frequently used on Ilbe among many others images (see top image).
Roh had been a target of a right-wing smear campaign since he committed suicide in 2009 while under investigation for corruption by right-wing President Lee Myung-bak. Some political analysts believe the investigation and the online smear campaign led to the victory of another right-wing president, Park Geun-hye, in 2012. The current left-wing president, Moon Jae-in, was a close friend of Roh.
And on 7 March 2017, a vulgar banner was found hanging outside South Korea’s National Assembly, put there by members of Ilbe. The banner had four images that showed opposition Minjoo Party lawmaker Pyo Chang-won and his wife’s faces photoshopped onto various naked bodies, including two mating animals. The banner was a response to Pyo’s support of the exhibition of a satirical painting called “Dirty Sleep” at the National Assembly. The painting depicts former President Park Geun-hye in the nude after she was impeached by the national assembly and constitutional court on corruption charges.
Ilbe’s words and actions often outrage, but its supporters defend the site with arguments about free speech, labeling criticisms as the result of leftist bias.
Cultural critics point out that the popularity of Ilbe is symptomatic of a divided society — between the right and the left, the rich and the poor, the old and the young, women and men, the haves and have-nots. Shutting down the site may be able to block the spread of negative energy in the short term, but it cannot cure the collective psychology rooted in a divided political and economic structure.

author: Oiwan Lam


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With ‘Sharp Eyes’, Smart Phones and TV Sets Are Watching Chinese Citizens · Global Voices
Oiwan Lam

Public domain photo via Pixabay
Communities in rural China are facing a new generation of surveillance technology that interconnects citizens’ everyday activities and interests with their government's ever-growing appetite for monitoring its population.
The system, known as “Sharp Eyes”, relies on technological measures — and on the idea that people should be willing to monitor and report on their neighbors, friends and even family members.
A rural version of China's infamous Skynet surveillance project, Sharp Eyes first launched in 2011 in an effort to extend the reach of China's surveillance system to mainland rural communities. Unlike Skynet, Sharp Eyes encourages villagers to take part in person-to-person surveillance in order to reduce public security costs.
Most recently, the Sharp Eyes Project was written into the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Central Committee’s first documents of February 2018, following their decision to remove term limits for position of the president and leader of the party.
A 28 February report from Legal Daily said that by 2020 China will have a comprehensive nationwide surveillance network, wherein law enforcement and security officials will have easy and quick access to data collected by any individual surveillance camera in the network.
Skynet, the predecessor to Sharp Eyes, uses artificial intelligence and facial recognition technologies to track the identities of people whose faces are caught on public security cameras.
Launched in 2005, the system now works in real time, and can identify a person in just a few seconds. By September 2017, the Skynet had set up over 20 million surveillance cameras nationwide. At present, apart from tracking criminals, the Skynet system is widely used to identify and fine jaywalkers in major cities.
Chinese authorities now want to extend the system to rural regions, in the form of Sharp Eyes.
In contrast to Skynet, Sharp Eyes will appropriate private household TV sets and smart phones in order to decentralize the surveillance system. Some are worried that the system will be further appropriated for the monitoring of private spaces — that once the mobiles and TVs are connected to the network, their built-in cameras and microphones could be turned on by the network operator in order to surveil citizens in their own homes.
These fears were further validated by a censored public relations post from a subcontractor of the Sharp Eyes project, Guangdong Aebell Technology Corporation.
In the post, the company explained that their Sharp Eyes operating system is set to build a decentralized, real-time mutual surveillance system:
美電貝爾與時俱進，積極響應國家戰略「雪亮工程」建設的號召，根據多年的音視頻研發實驗，不斷創新，圍繞快速發現，快速報警，快速回應，快速處置的實際應用需求，研發了一套「電亮工程平台系統」。
該系統利用家庭電視和智能手機推動視頻監控入戶到人，打造立體化的社會治安防控體系，推進社會治安綜合治理信息化系統建設，實現人人可監控，處處可監看，時時時可響應。
Aebell is evolving in the interest of serving the national strategic Sharp Eyes project. Based on our experiments with sound and video recording technologies, and our subsequent innovations, we have developed an operating system for the Sharp Eyes project that can fulfill in real-time our needs for tracking criminal activities, instant reporting on crime, instant response and reaction.
The system appropriates household TV sets and smart phones to enhance the extension of surveillance system to households and individuals. The system contributes to the construction of a comprehensive crime prevention and public security system, along with an integrated informational public security system that turns mutual, real-time and ubiquitous surveillance into reality.
How exactly does the decentralized surveillance system work? Legal Daily interviewed a public security volunteer who resides in Linyi City, Shandong province. Linyi City made international headlines after the unlawful house arrest and escape of human rights activist Chen Guangcheng, who is seeing-impaired.
The volunteer said she could keep an eye on the village while taking care of her grandchildren at home by making use of the smart community operation system installed in her household TV. The platform has granted her access to six surveillance cameras in the village, allowing her to undertake a “virtual patrol” of the village just by pressing a few buttons.
She also said that she had assisted in the arrest of a burglar in 2017 through the police alarm button on her TV remote control.
According to the Legal Daily's report, there are more than 360,000 surveillance cameras installed in Linyi City, out of 2.93 million surveillance cameras in all Shandong province. The province has set up 2,491 surveillance centers to operate the network.
Online comments concerning the project are heavy censored. But some of the more satirical (and less obvious) comments on the issue are still circulating on Chinese social media:
我提议，每个人都应在微观层面上为国家“雪亮工程”添砖加瓦。勤翻男友手机；窥探邻居换衣；如厕不要关门。真正做到把“雪亮”牢记在心灵里，落实在行动上，雕刻在品质中。在细节处彰显中国特色社会主义的先进性是每一个公民义不容辞的关荣与责任。
I suggest that every single individual should contribute to the national “Sharp Eyes project” by checking your boyfriend’s mobile phone as frequently as possible, by snooping your neighbors while they are changing their clothes, by keeping your toilet door open while you are doing your business. You have to take “Sharp Eyes” into your heart, act it out and make it materialize. In all the minute details, we have to manifest the progressiveness of Socialism with Chinese Characteristics. This is the glory and duty of every single citizen.
A report from the business sector showed that by December 2017, the government had spent RMB 3.1 billion yuan (approximately half a billion US dollars) on the Sharp Eyes project. As the project has now been incorporated into the CCP central committee’s planning document, Chinese society will enter a new era of so-called “mutual surveillance”.


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Bangladesh Is the World’s ‘Most Vegetarian Country’? Not Quite. · Global Voices
Rezwan

Fish on display in a fish market in Sylhet. Image from Flickr by David Stanley. CC By 2.0
A recent article published by British newspaper the Telegraph named Bangladesh as the “most vegetarian country in the world”. The report cited a 2009 study by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations which showed that only four kilos of meat are consumed by each Bangladeshi in a year, a stark contrast to the 120 kilos of meat consumed by a person in the US.
However, social media commenters were quick to point out that the label of “vegetarian” was inaccurate: Bangladeshis consume very little meat because fish is a traditional staple and because meat is generally expensive.
Sumit Kumar Banshal from New Delhi, India, warned readers to base their judgment on the Telegraph's article in its entirety, not just on the misleading “vegetarian” headline:
This is stating the lowest consumption of meat per capita as the vegetarian country!! First of all low meat consumption does not make one vegetarian even metaphorically!!
Secondly, Bangladesh is a fish eater country at first place so there should be less consumption of meat!!
Very ill-use of statistical inference in this article!!
Bangladesh is one of the most populous countries of the world with an estimated 163 million people in 2016 in an area of 56,980 square miles (147,570 square kilometers). It has a largely agricultural economy and the staple food of Bangladeshis is rice, fish, and daal (lentil) with a wide range of other curries. Bangladesh is renowned for its sweet water fish cultivation and it stands fourth in the world in terms of fish production.
Given that it is a majority Muslim country, proteins such as beef and poultry feature more prominently on menus that include meat. However, a lot of vegetarian dishes are common in households, because average Bangladeshis, especially those living in rural areas, often cannot afford meat as a component of all their meals.
Expat Bangladeshi IT professional Bickey Russell commented on Facebook about a typical urban food menu in Bangladesh:
I'm not an expert by any means, but to my knowledge, Bengali culinary heritage is mostly all about fish and vegetables. While growing up in Dhaka in the late 90's, beef/chicken were not everyday items served at home. Sure, Bangladeshi food has some amazing meat dishes (e.g. kacchi, tehari, kababs etc etc.), but these are still fairly “modern” introductions to the cuisine. Also, meat is still super expensive for the average person/family in the country.
According to an op-ed in the Dhaka Tribune by Mahmood Sadi, “The per capita meat requirement of Bangladesh is 43.25 kilos, but the availability of it is only 9.12 kilos, indicating an almost 79 percent deficit. Because of the lack of purchasing power, the consumption came down to about four kilos.”
The lack of purchasing power indicates that meat is becoming dearer in Bangladesh for a variety of reasons. Sadi notes that almost half of the meat consumption in Bangladesh is red meat, mostly from cows. Bangladesh needs more than 3 million cows to meet the demand; around 1 million cows are sourced from within the country, and the rest are legal and illegal imports of cows from neighboring India.
In 2014, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) party came to power and took a number of steps to protect cows as cattle are considered sacred in the Hindu religion. In the subsequent years, India has allowed fewer cattle to be exported to Bangladesh, which led to a 50% spike in the price of beef, significantly more than the world average. As a result, beef is now a luxury for many poor in the country and there is an increase in consumption of other forms of protein.
A butcher shop in a Dhaka, Bangladesh, market. Image from Flickr via International Food Policy Research Institute. 2010. CC: BY-NC-ND 2.0
Some opinions were harsh in criticizing the Telegraph claim, which earned coverage in some local news outlets of Bangladesh. Shayan S. Khan, a commenter on Facebook, lashed out:
It's bad enough that some travel journalist at the Telegraph goofed up badly trying to be clever with some statistics, it's way more tragic though when it gets unquestioningly republished in our media, the level of daftness is unbearable.
Development worker Rashed Rahgir questioned the hype:
Is it an achievement?
Or the glass is half empty point of view.
The lowest per head protein consumption! https://t.co/Kwg6a7VnHx
— Rashed Rahgir (@rrahgir) March 29, 2018
Many pointed out that the majority of Bangladeshis do not adhere to a vegetarian lifestyle; the president of the Vegetarian Society of Bangladesh claimed only a very small portion of people may be vegetarians. Marie, the author of a vegan travel blog, noted that in Bangladeshi cuisine there are often traces of meat in the food and its hard to get a decent vegetarian meal.
And Nadia Khan commented on Facebook:
You can’t even find a decent vegetarian place in Bangladesh less talk about most people eating vegetables mostly!

author: Rezwan


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Diplomatic Storm Strikes When Trinidad and Tobago Refuses Hurricane-Hit Dominica an Ease on OAS Contributions · Global Voices
Janine Mendes-Franco

Trinidad and Tobago’s Ambassador to the Organisation of American States (OAS) Anthony Phillip Spencer, during the Regular Meeting of the Permanent Council in Washington DC, USA, on March 23, 2018. Photo credit: Juan Manuel Herrera/OAS, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.
When the Caribbean nation of Dominica was ravaged by Hurricane Maria in September 2017, the island's 73,000 inhabitants faced near total devastation including loss of life, landslides, infrastructural damage, and hundreds of millions of United States (US) dollars in economic losses.
As Dominica began to pick up the pieces, its neighbours rallied in the relief effort during what was undoubtedly one of the worst Atlantic hurricane seasons on record.
However, when Trinidad and Tobago prime minister Dr. Keith Rowley offered accommodation to Dominican hurricane victims whose homes had been destroyed, waiving immigration restrictions for a period of six months, xenophobic comments arose on social media.
The trend was quickly countered by “right-thinking” social media users, but tensions rose again on March 23, 2018, after Dominica's ambassador asked members of the Organisation of American States (OAS) to waive the island's quota contributions for a period of two years (a value of approximately US $20,000) while it got back on its feet.
While most member states agreed, Trinidad and Tobago's representative expressed “reservations”, suggesting instead the deferral of payments and the implementation of a payment plan subject to annual review. The motion went ahead despite Trinidad and Tobago's objections, but the vote caused a social media firestorm.
Trinidadian Facebook user Caroline Taylor commented:
This made me feel sick. And sad. And angry. […] I really hope the people of Dominica know that not all Trinbagonians are as graceless as this official position might indicate, and this objection makes many of us feel deeply ashamed.
Anthony Phillip Spencer, Trinidad and Tobago’s OAS ambassador and acting representative during the vote, maintained that he was simply following the instructions given by the country's Ministry of Foreign and CARICOM (Caribbean Community and Common Market) Affairs.
There were soon calls for the sacking of Dennis Moses, the minister in charge, who issued a statement suggesting that Trinidad and Tobago's position at the OAS meeting was “misrepresented”:
A suggestion by a public servant at an OAS meeting that Dominica's dues not be collected at this time but be deferred to some future time in no way reflects any change in our demonstrated concern for the welfare of the people of Dominica.
Political satire website Wired868 rebuked Moses’ claim, revealing details of correspondence that laid out clear instructions for how the country should vote.
Facebook user Teocah Arieal Ainka Dove suggested that Moses’ statement was not enough:
If this […] truly reflects what the Ambassador stated to the journalist, that he was sent this position by the Ministry and did not act on his own accord, then for the sake of our Dominican brothers and sisters and CARICOM, can the Minister (not via Press Release), but via either the Parliament or a Live TV/Radio interview, indicate what really happened in this matter, once again apologize to the people of Dominica and find a tangible way to make amends.
Trinidad and Tobago prime minister Dr. Keith Rowley has requested an investigation into the circumstances that led to the opposing vote, which he reportedly said was  “not in alignment” with the country's policy toward Dominica. He has since received “a full report of the details of the OAS mishap”.
Meanwhile, Dominica handled the snub with grace. Trinidadian morning show host Hema Ramkissoon contacted Dominica  prime minister Roosevelt Skerrit about the controversy, and posted his response on Facebook:
The relationship between Dominica and Trinidad and Tobago is still solid. The Trinidad Government and indeed the whole of TT have been very supportive of our efforts. I do not think the PM would have been aware of the vote at the OAS prior. This is one of the usual miscommunication occurrences which happens to all of us from time to time.
We in Dominica are heartened and touched by the continued love, care and concern which TT continues to demonstrate towards us; and this transcends all strata of society including political parties. Much thanks from we [sic] in Dominica!
Subsequent reports added that the prime ministers of both countries planned to meet “to renew their ‘solid’ relationship that might have come under strain following the decision […] not to back a waiver […] on its assessed quota contribution to the Organization of American States”.
While some Dominican social media users were dismissive of Trinidad and Tobago after the vote, others were not so quick to forget the assistance the twin islands rendered after Hurricane Maria last year.
In one Facebook thread, Michelle Bernard advised against “tarnish[ing] all Trinidadians with the same brush”, while Colin Sampson scoffed at the idea of CARICOM, a community network of 15 Caribbean countries, in the first place.
An editorial in the Trinidad Express added:
What could have possessed this country to stand against a sister Caricom country at the hemispheric forum is simply unfathomable. […]
It is a shame that will be very hard to live down. Dominica, we are sorry.

author: Janine Mendes-Franco


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Education Against the Odds: How a Student and Mother from Afghanistan’s Central Highlands Stole Social Media’s Heart · Global Voices
Maisam Iltaf

Image shared on Facebook by teacher Yahya Erfan, widely shared and used by media outlets across the world.
The image was one that spoke of love and determination.
In mid-March, a student sheathed in a blue scarf took an exam on the floor of an outdoor classroom in provincial Afghanistan with a baby lying across her lap.
Yahya Erfan, a professor at the university where the exam was taking place, took a photo of the scene and posted it to his Facebook account.
It promptly went viral.
The 25-year-old woman in the photo, Jahantab Ahmadi, sat cross-legged, her face bent over her exam papers in concentration as her two-month child bawled due to an earache.
Jahantab, a mother-of-three, hails from the remote settlement of Hoshto, in the Miramar district of Afghanistan’s Daikundi province.
To sit the exam in the provincial capital Nilli, Jahantab had to travel two hours on foot over coarse mountainous terrain and a further nine hours on public transport along a rough, bumpy road.
The photo became a source of inspiration for social media users in a country where timelines are too often full of the news of bloody attacks.
Inspiring photo from social media: this mother is taking university entrance exam while taking care of her child, in Daikundi. Afghan women are unstoppable. pic.twitter.com/lus0eeuH48
— Shaharzad Akbar (@ShaharzadAkbar) March 19, 2018
Twenty years from now, that child will see this photo in a better Afghanistan (…where the wars, the suffering will become history, photos like these a reminder of the strength of those who stood firm in the face of it all) #fb https://t.co/wuJ0v5f2Or
— Mujib Mashal (@MujMash) March 19, 2018
Despite coming from a conservative society, where many men oppose women’s education, Jahantab is fortunate enough to enjoy her family’s support and admiration.
Her husband, Musa Mohammadi, who comes from a poor family, has been a vital pillar of support.
Shortly after the photo appeared on social media, the pair had reason to celebrate — Jahantab passed the university entrance exam known as the kankor, scoring 152 points out of 360.
Jahantab’s story triggered offers of financial help both inside and outside the country.
One UK-based organization, the Afghan Youth Association, recently launched an online GoFundMe campaign to help pay for her university fees.
The campaign has so far raised more than $14,000 – a fortune in a country where about 39 percent of the population lives in poverty.
Thanks to the campaign and other funding, Jahantab is now enrolled at a private university in Kabul where she majors in Economics.
Afghan social activist Zahara Yagana was a key mover in attracting aid to Jahantab's cause and has been posting updates on the young student's progress.
Despite the billions of dollars put into education by international donors, illiteracy, especially female illiteracy, has remained a hard-to-solve problem in the post-Taliban period.
A 2017 survey conducted by the Central Statistics Organization reveals 84 percent of Afghan women are illiterate and only two percent of women have access to higher education, a figure that shrinks to virtually null if the country's major cities are taken out of the equation.
A 2017 Human Rights Watch report charting the decline of girl’s education in the country, said that “an estimated two-thirds of Afghan girls do not attend school”.
HRW also found the development efforts of the government of Afghanistan and its international partners have “significantly faltered” in recent years, as the country's strategic and military importance to the West diminishes.

author: Maisam Iltaf


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‘It Is Sad to Realise That When Police Officers Are Sued, the Victims Are Judged Instead’ · Global Voices
Emma Lewis

(L-R): Ana Paula Riveira (Brazil), Shackelia Jackson (Jamaica), and Katrina Johnson (USA) in Kingston, Jamaica, holding photographs of their deceased relatives. Copyright, Amnesty International/Mario Allen, used with permission.
This is the second installment in a three-part series that features three women — from the Caribbean, South America and North America — brought together by the shared experience of losing a loved one to police brutality. Read the first part here.
Brazilian human rights activist Ana Paula Oliveira, recently met two of her peers — Shackelia Jackson from Jamaica and Katrina Johnson from the United States — in Kingston, Jamaica's capital city. The women were there as part of an Amnesty International campaign, A Journey for Justice in the Americas, which focuses on the struggles of families who have had a loved one killed by the police.
Although each police killing had a different context, they each felt the need to continue fighting for justice for themselves, their families, and all those who find themselves in similar situations.
Moreover, with the Latin America/Caribbean region having the highest homicide rates in the world, public opinion tends to sympathise with punitive policing methods, according to surveys such as the Vanderbilt University/USAID LAPOP Report. Women like Ana Paula, Shackelia and Katrina are therefore in need of greater support from their respective countries’ judicial systems, as well as from the society at large.
Ana Paula Oliveira became a prominent activist against police brutality in Brazil after her 19-year-old son Jonatha was killed in Rio de Janeiro in May 2014, during what police officers said was an “armed confrontation” with residents. In the case’s latest hearing in 2016, one officer claimed Jonatha was a drug dealer, an accusation that was refuted by all five defense witnesses who were at the scene. They all told the court the same story: the police officers fired at the crowd, hitting Jonatha, a mere bystander.
Although she was speaking through an interpreter, Oliviera's message was poignant, personal and universal: “When I fight for justice for my son, it makes feel like I’m still taking care of him.”
Oliveira (AO) spoke to Global Voices (GV) about her struggle:
AO: On May 14, 2014, it was around 3:30 p.m. when Johnatha left home to take his girlfriend to her home. On his way back home, there were police officers doing surveillance in the area and there was an altercation between them and some residents from the community. Police officers allegedly fired shots in the air to disperse the crowd. There were a lot of people on the street. At this moment, Johnatha was passing by and was shot in his back, fired upon by a police officer from the Police Pacification Unit in the favela of Manguinhos. Later on, during the legal process, we were informed that Alessandro Marcelino de Souza, the policeman that shot Johnatha, was already being accused for previous crimes — three homicides and two attempted homicides. When my family and I knew that Johnatha was dead, it was very painful and we became angry, because besides all the suffering and pain, we had to prove that Johnatha was innocent. Police officers said that Johnatha was a suspect, but it's not true.
She described what motivated her to continue campaigning:
It is important to do this in his memory. I needed to tell the truth. I needed to show everyone that his case was not an exception. Every day, black young men are killed by the police in favelas and other marginalised areas. While I’m still alive, I will fight. I know that when I raise my voice it is not only for my son — it is also for all the other families that suffer as I do and that can’t fight for justice. If I don’t fight, I will become sick and die. When I fight for justice for my son, it makes feel like I’m still taking care of him. It’s like I’m still experiencing motherhood for him.
The strength comes from the love that I feel for him. It comes from the support from my family and the support from mothers in the same situation. It comes from the support of other mothers that have the same will to fight for justice, the same will to fight against impunity of agents responsible for the enforcement of law. Even feeling pain, it is important to contribute, even with a small part, to make mothers transform the grief into fight. It is important to help them to become the voice of their sons.
GV: Could you name one area in which the problem of extrajudicial killings could be tackled effectively in Brazil?
AO: Strengthening laws is important, Nevertheless, in Brazil, some laws exist but are ineffective. If the public authorities and mechanisms of control were effective in their roles, other killings would not have happened. If there was the commitment of our judicial system, there wouldn’t have been other killings. It is sad to realise that when police officers are sued, the victims are judged instead. It is clear enough for the relatives of victims that the judicial system is unequal.
Oliveira appealed to her fellow Brazilians for a deeper understanding of and empathy for the plight of marginalised populations:
In theory, there is no death penalty in Brazil. However, we can see the armed hand of the government deciding who is going to live who is going to die in favelas and other marginalised areas. People are being executed. Families are being destroyed. It is sad to realise that part of our society supports all this. When someone celebrates the death of a resident in a favela, he or she is also responsible for the murder, and have blood on their hands. Don’t be indifferent. The fight must be for life!
Meanwhile, in Jamaica police killings continue to rise. As at April 1, 2018, there were 31 Jamaicans killed by the police, with three shot dead by the police in the parish of St. James (currently under a State of Public Emergency) on the Good Friday holiday.
In Brazil in 2016, police officers — including off-duty officers — killed 4,224 people, an increase of 25% in just one year. The recent shooting of a high-profile activist has provoked widespread protests and calls for justice (including from African-American celebrities).
And in the United States, an Inter-American Council on Human Rights (IACHR) hearing in December 2017 concluded with comments by the Jamaican Commissioner Margarette May Macaulay, Special Rapporteur for the United States, who “articulated that police brutality is also a problem in her home country of Jamaica. She urged the U.S. to establish independent review mechanisms for crimes by police, outside of the normal prosecutorial system, as they have recently instituted in Jamaica. She also encouraged the United States to improve training, provide full reparations to victims, as well as address the issue of wide access to firearms.”
When asked how she feels about the future, for herself and her country, Ana Paula observed:
I have to believe in better days. I have to have hope.

author: Emma Lewis