world

Written by Dayo Olopade The trio of Nobel Peace Prize laureates for 2011 makes a great case for global feminism. The activists — all three from developing countries — have changed the world for themselves and for other women. In turn, Leymah Gbowee and Tawakkol Karman have received their deserved moment in the spotlight. Only…

Luxin Malande says he does the only thing he can do while in his tent city. Wait. He sits outside his shanty in Port-au-Prince not far from the historic national palace, its collapsed dome-shaped roof still visible among the rubble.  People lie nearby on the ground, muddy-faced and in tattered clothes. Others hide behind broken pillars of a collapsed cathedral as…

It started with a rumble under our feet. Then our desks began to sway, and dust fell from the ceiling. My co-workers and I looked around, at first confused and then increasingly alarmed. Perhaps if we were Californians, we would have known that the floor-shaking temblor that made headlines last month was an earthquake. But…

Three weeks have passed since England witnessed mayhem, looting and rioting on its streets. Images of rioters burning down their own communities, trashing their local amenities and clashing head-to-head were transmitted worldwide. Video footage of hooded males smashing shops and loading up cars with plasma televisions, designer clothes and sneakers stunned the British public. It…

Most African Americans — like most Americans — see England as a quaint place of afternoon teas, the queen, rose gardens and good manners. Rose gardens are not very far from Westminster Magistrates’ Court, close to the Houses of Parliament, where a young black British woman, college educated and not quite 20 years old, stood…

The peaceful protest against the police killing of a black citizen that led to violence and looting in the United Kingdom seems like déjà vu all over again. Trouble has been brewing for decades between the police and black communities in North London. It is the scene of the most recent riots in Tottenham, and…

A year before Columbus set sail for America, an African king was baptized and converted his kingdom into a Catholic nation that lasted nearly 370 years. King Nzinga a Nkuwu, ruler of Kongo, located in what is now northern Angola, decided to become a Christian not long after Portuguese mariners reached his shores in 1483.…

As a foreign correspondent for the Washington Post, Lynne Duke, who died April 19, 2013, at the age of 56, covered the late Nelson Mandela’s release from prison in 1990 and his presidency. Her experiences as a journalist covering the transformative time in South Africa as well as the region at large are chronicled in…

“Who in this room is French?” Nourdine Nabili asks a group of 25 eighth-graders in Bondy, one of the concrete working-class suburbs just outside Paris. It is April 2011 and Nabili, the 44-year-old editor-in-chief of the popular website Bondy Blog, is visiting a journalism workshop at the Jean Renoir junior high school. I am sitting…

I can’t decide if I want to applaud journalist Mac McClelland or verbally backhand her. Both reactions to McClelland’s Good-magazine essay, “I’m Gonna Need You to Fight Me on This: How Violent Sex Helped Ease My PTSD,” are visceral and near involuntary. Depending on whom you ask — another journalist, a feminist, a native of…