Barrel bomb attacks kill thousands of people in Syria every year. So why do these attacks get so little attention? The Syrian Network for Human Rights says nearly 14,000 people have been killed in barrel-bomb attacks despite a UN resolution banning the use of the weapon in 2014.
Delama Georges lives one stop from the end of the No. 2 train line in Brooklyn, right next to Holy Cross Cemetery. His proximity to so much death did not bother him until Nov. 9, 2011, when he learned that both his parents contracted cholera during a visit to his sister in Haiti. While Georges’ mother lay in a coma, brought on by dehydration from violent vomiting and diarrhea, his father died, joining more than 8,500 Haitians who died in the epidemic, which began four years ago this month.
Chile’s Mapuche population has long struggled for greater rights. So many warmly greeted President Sebastián Piñera’s recent promise to give “top priority and urgency” to finding a constitutional solution that will recognize Chile’s Indigenous Mapuche people, a 700,000-person strong minority group that constitutes 6 percent of Chile’s population. His reaction comes after a month of increased tension in the southern Araucanía region, where the majority of the Mapuche live.
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.
Poverty in the favelas of the northern Brazilian city of Recife is the main driver for a life in prostitution. Brazil plays host to the World Cup soccer tournament in June 2014, which will likely lead to an increase in demand for sex workers.
Amanda sits curled up on the sofa watching cartoons on television. She will soon turn 14, but her youth belies her past. The young girl has suffered two abortions already, the result of exchanging unprotected, adolescent sex for a pack of cigarettes or a couple of dollars. “My life was complicated. I was on the streets and taking drugs,” she says.
Listen to an interview I did in January 2012 with PRI’s The World based in Boston about Education Minister Harald Beyer’s decision to remove the words “military dictatorship” from children’s history syllabus in Chile.