Marilyn Mosby has captured the world’s attention after she announced she was pressing charges against Baltimore officers in the death of Freddie Gray. By the end of her speech, the Baltimore prosecutor’s name was a top trending term on Twitter in the United States. The #MarilynMosby hashtag has been used over 700,000 times on Twitter in the week since the protests began.
An infographic is being used by some teachers in Baltimore schools as communities try to create learning opportunities in the classroom after the city’s riots. Frederick Douglass High School in Baltimore received several visitors this week including members of the Baltimore Ravens American football team and rapper Wale in an effort to calm the unrest. Several Douglass students were involved in confrontations with police on Monday.
With water levels at a record low in California, vigilantes are using social media to shame their neighbours into saving more water. #Droughtshaming – a practice that began online last year – is back again as California enters its fourth summer of extreme drought. Residents who catch their neighbours wasting water are posting pictures and videos, often with addresses, on Facebook and Twitter as well as via apps. (It is the home of Silicon Valley, after all.)
Domestic workers in Ecuador need to respect their work to change attitudes, according to a long-term live-in help. Lenny Quirós, 48, has been a domestic worker for more than 20 years but chooses never to work more than two years for the same employer as a puertas a dentro, or “behind-doors”, as a live-in help is called.
Protests continued across Brazil on Sunday, capping a week of unrest that saw more than 1 million people marching across the vast country demanding an end to corruption and social inequity. More than 60,000 marched over the weekend, and a major protest is scheduled next Sunday for the final in Rio of the Confederation Cup soccer tournament, a run-up to next year’s World Cup and 2016’s Olympic Games, which are being held in Brazil.
THE 50,000 fans who travelled to Chile’s National Rodeo Championship Finals in late March may have been surprised to see that Michelle Recart had qualified. As an amateur and mother in her late 40s, Ms Recart looked the very antithesis of the typical competitor in what is a famously elitist and chauvinistic sport. But apart from being a woman, Ms Recart was little different from her rivals. Like them, she comes from a wealthy family that has been involved in rodeo for generations. Her father is the former president of the Federation of Chilean Rodeo.
Sexual assault and rape continue to occur at striking rates amongst University of Cambridge students, an exclusive Varsity survey has revealed. According to the survey, which was conducted online over a two-week period, 16 per cent of respondents admitted to being victims of sexual assault and/or rape. The figure seems to be in line with national statistics relating to sexual assault amongst university and college students. A recent survey conducted by the National Union of Students (NUS) showed that 14 per cent of female students were sexually assaulted during their time at university or college. The survey responses paint a remarkable picture of student attitudes and experiences regarding sexual assault. Most notably, Varsity found that sexual assault among students continues to remain vastly under-reported: only 1 in 6 respondents who admitted to being assaulted reported the incident to authorities
Reading back on this interview I did for Cambridge University’s Varsity, I get the impression I did not like this man much…or that he gave me a very hard time trying to interview him. Still, a fascinating figure.
Talking to Peter Tatchell is like trying to get blood from a stone, which is surprising considering he has so much to say. Like all successful campaigners, Tatchell has an agenda and a ruthless knack for shaping his media coverage, something that he does not fail to implement in this particular instance in the plush environs of one of the Union’s reception rooms. Born in Australia in 1952, Tatchell escaped conscription to the Vietnam War in 1971, coming to England on the eve of the Gay Liberation Front movement in which he became a prominent member. Finishing his education in London, Tatchell became a freelance journalist focusing on foreign news, before 22 years of involvement in Labour politics during which he was defeated as the Labour candidate in the 1983 Bermondsey election.
Olivia Crellin interrogates Annie Machon on her life after MI5.
Annie Machon, former MI5 agent, is the image of glamour and guts. Her blonde hair, of the bombshell variety, frames a face that, far from being that of the reserved and stealthy spook, exudes energy, enthusiasm, and openness. Unlike her former partner, the whistleblower David Shayler, Machon seems to have emerged relatively unscathed from the years immediately following the couple’s attempts to reveal serious MI5 blunders in 1996.
Now working as a self-professed “author, media pundit, journalist, campaigner and prominent public speaker”, she has made a “new way of life” out of selling herself, her past, and her story. And she’s doing a good job.
Strangely this term, as I dutifully participate in the various and very important seminars, lectures, library sessions necessary to the not-unpleasant-finalities of final year, I have started to notice many many more familiar unfamiliar faces flitting around the Sidgwick Site than I had previously thought existed. Of course, one is invariably unobservant. English students are often recluses, I tell myself, and with heads in books the only thing one really notices with any interest in the Faculty is a particularly avant-garde hair-do.
But, no, there is something happening…there is a new bunch of beaming students that I have never seen before. It’s a mystery but one that is revealed in a lightening bolt revelation one sleepy 9am. The new bunch of beaming students are not what is grabbing my eye, it is the bright blue hoodies catapulting their wearers to the front of my early morning still-asleep attention. In matching turquoise outfits complete with a term calendar of events on their backs, a human sandwich board of doctrinal goodness, I have discovered previously camouflaged members of Cambridge’s Christian Unions.