non-state actors
The Turkish Prime Ministry released a report outlining Turkey's humanitarian aid to Gaza and Iraq that amounted to over $8 million. The country's state-run aid agencies and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) are spearheading efforts to help victims of Israel's constant bombings in the Gaza Strip and people displaced by the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) offensive in Iraq.
After hours spent performing cartwheels, American show tunes and a series of jazzy dance routines in a cramped studio on West 28th Street in Manhattan, 8-year-old Futaba Kawakami left TADA Youth Theater camp earlier this week, clammy and slightly hoarse. She pulled off her new camp T-shirt, the one with the slogan Sing! Dance! Act! emblazoned on the back, and marshaled enough energy to ask her mother for ice cream.
The event is part of a project, ID100, bringing together key academics, think tanks, NGOs, international bodies and the general public to address the world’s biggest environmental, political and socioeconomic problems. The project is being led by researchers from the University’s Sheffield Institute for International Development (SIID).
Google’s motto is “Don’t be evil.” Can the company practice what it preaches – even in Cuba? A delegation of Google employees, headed by executive chairman Eric Schmidt, traveled to Cuba this past week in an effort to advocate for removing government restrictions on the Internet. The executives met with Yoani Sanchez, a prominent blogger and dissident who runs the independent 14ymedio news portal, a site blocked in Cuba.
The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria has taken to Twitter to spread its message, trumpet bloody successes, and recruit potential jihadists, but its social-media campaign has come under attack from forces that range from the U.S. State Department to the mysterious group of hacker-activists who call themselves Anonymous.
Inside his room at the Addis Ababa University campus, 23-year-old Bereket reached into a cupboard and pulled out a pack of Sensation Honey condoms. He had used them with the last three women he had intercourse with. Bereket, who did not want to use his last name because of cultural sensitivities about sex, said he prefers this brand because it's “modern,” adding that he avoids the free condoms that are widely available in Ethiopia because he cannot be sure of their quality.
France has gone so far in the debate over .wine and .vin as to demand an overhaul of how ICANN is structured and run. TheFinancial Times reported over the weekend that Paris planned to call for an international "general assembly" to oversee ICANN with a "one country, one vote" policy at a meeting on Monday. The French have also said that proceeding with the domain names could "imperil" talks on a transatlantic trade deal between the EU and the U.S.
In the months leading up to the first round of presidential elections April 5, and again now in the run-up to the runoff vote, tens of thousands of Afghans have been meeting up in schools, police stations, homes, public parks, women’s prisons, shelters and other communal spaces in villages throughout the country to watch and participate in these mobile theater performances. They're aimed at encouraging Afghans to believe in the power of their vote — in the first democratic transfer of power in Afghanistan after 30 years of war — and to stand up to the Taliban.