Shortly after the world celebrated Nigeria’s success in going a year without a single diagnosed case of polio on July 24, disturbing new outbreaks crippled children in Ukraine and Mali. Two cases in Ukraine turned out to be ”vaccine-derived,” feeding local fears of the vaccine, and providing fodder to anti-vaxxers worldwide.
Ahmed Mohamed is rapidly becoming America’s favorite geek. The 14-year-old ninth grader from Irving, Texas, is still out of school after making a clock and bringing it to class Sept. 14—then being arrested under suspicion of bomb-making in an incident many are attributing to Islamophobia.
Ahmed Mohamed is a bright ninth grader from Irving, Texas who likes making electronic gadgets like radios himself. This should make him a dream student, but when he brought his homemade clock to MacArthur High School on Sept. 14 to show his engineering teacher, he ended up handcuffed by police, the Dallas Morning News reports.
The Schengen agreement is almost synonymous with the European Union itself. The treaty that lets people travel between 26 of the EU’s member countries without showing any documents is, next to the euro, the single most visible day-to-day manifestation of European unity in people’s lives. And it’s coming under increasing strain.
At the end of another week of (very small) achievements in managing Europe’s refugee crisis—the EU agreed on a quota system and US president Barack Obama said the US would house 10,000 Syrians—people marched on Sept. 12 to express their solidarity. All over Europe and in the US, signs in many languages welcoming the refugees and condemning xenophobia showed that for every refugee-hater there are compassionate fellow human beings.
Beating 300-to-1 odds, Italian tennis player Roberta Vinci bested Serena Williams in the US Open semi-final, halting the American’s pursuit of a Grand Slam and moving into the first all-Italian final of the tournament, to be played on Aug. 12.
Being far from the people you love is one of the most challenging experiences in life, even with today’s cheap and easy trans-continental video-calls. So one can only imagine how hard it was for our ancestors not so long ago, when international phone calls were luxuries and the only way to keep in touch by writing letters that took days, sometimes weeks, to arrive.
If your Instagram feed is suffering from selfie fatigue, then you’re probably following the wrong people. Try adding these three: Ismail Ferdous, Dmitry Markov, and Adriana Zehbrauskas.
Things might be changing in Silicon Valley.
The much-anticipated agreement about Europe’s refugee crisis, announced yesterday (Sept. 9) by European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker, couldn’t have come sooner.
So contentious is the refugee crisis facing Europe that even the words used to reference it have come under fire. The concern is that the words ”refugee,” “asylum seeker,” and ”migrant” risk dehumanizing the people, who are being hidden behind the labels used to define them.
To fight racial stereotypes, start with education. On Aug. 25, two men from Hartford, Connecticut organized a flash mob of sorts at a local elementary school, bringing 100 black men in suits to greet children on their first day of class.
Don’t you love your life—your single-origin morning coffee, your holidays in nature, your conscious-consumption choices? Those heavy-frame glasses, that analog camera, the washed-out Instagram filter. You’re mindful, grateful, #blessed.
When the “Ice Bucket Challenge,” a viral challenge to collect funds for research on ALS, took over social media last year, many people joined in—but just as many mocked and criticized the phenomenon as mere “slacktivism.” Pouring ice cold water over your head, they argued, could not really help find a cure for ALS, a terrible neurodegenerative disease.
Several newspapers, including the Independent, the Guardian, and the Times, will run variations of the same picture on this morning’s front pages. It’s the image of a Syrian child, lying face-down on a beach. He reportedly drowned, and so did his five-year-old brother, when the boat carrying him to Europe sank in the waters between Turkey and Greece.
Two Ukrainian children have been paralyzed by polio, in the first recorded outbreak of the virus in Europe since 2010. One is four years old, and the other only 10 months old. Both cases were confirmed on Sept. 2 by the World Health Organization (WHO), reports Reuters.
The Extraordinary Jubilee of Mercy, the holy year of celebration and forgiveness of all sins for the Catholic Church, is beginning on Dec. 8, and the establishment is readying for it. In a detailed letter, Pope Francis laid out some ground rules for the estimated 30 million pilgrims expected to travel to Rome between December and the following November, along with some notable, if temporary, reforms for everyone else.
It’s been just over a year since India was officially declared polio-free, and the country’s public health system has just achieved another remarkable result: tetanus is no longer listed as a public health threat.
One of the arguments some Italians use to justify their opposition to immigration is that, in a country struggling with rampant unemployment, foreigners “steal Italians’ jobs“ (link in Italian). But consider this: according to data collected by the chamber of commerce, the most common surnames of new entrepreneurs creating jobs in seven of the country’s biggest regions are not Italian.
Grammar nerds have long been fighting over whether it is acceptable to use “they” as a gender-netural pronoun to replace he or she, but for the University of Tennessee the debate is settled. Not only it’s okay, it’s recommended—and so is the use of other gender-neutral pronouns, including ze, hir, hirs, and xe, xem, xyr.
She’s one of the most successful players in tennis history, so it should come as no surprise that people are really looking forward to watching Serena Williams pursuit of the Grand Slam—winning all four major tennis competitions (the Australian, French and US Opens, and Wimbledon) in one season.
When Francesca Pardi sent Pope Francis her children’s book, Why do you have two moms? she probably wasn’t expecting a response.
As it turns out, humanity is pretty happy.
When Adama Sankoh, 40, Sierra Leone’s last-known Ebola patient was released from the hospital on Aug. 24, she did so dancing and singing—accompanied by the hospital’s staff. Indeed, after nearly 9,000 confirmed cases and over 3,500 deaths, seeing an end to the biggest-ever Ebola epidemic is a reason to celebrate. But president Ernest Bai Koroma, who joined the ceremony, warned the participants: “The Ebola fight is not yet over. Go and tell members of your community that.”
