Amnesty International called for the release of three anti-slavery activists imprisoned in Mauritania, including UN Human Rights Prize recipient Biram Ould Dah Ould Abeid.
Pari Ibrahim of the Free Yezidi Foundation spoke at New York's Institute for the Study of Human Rights on the ongoing genocide and sexual slavery of her people at the hands of ISIS.
Kurdish parliament leaders charged that ISIS is selling abducted Yazidi women in Mosul, and that an Iranian Quds force has intervened against ISIS—with US connivance.
The US dropped plans for a rescue mission for besieged Yazidis—over the protests of Yazidi leaders—as the "terrorist" PKK joined US-backed Peshmerga in the fight against ISIS.
As a team of US military advisors head for Nigeria, the Internet conspirosphere bristles with baseless theories about how Boko Haram is a CIA creation. Will you please shut up?
In a video message, Boko Haram commander Abubakar Shekau claims a deadly Abuja bomb attack, and taunts President Goodluck Jonathan—as well as Barack Obama.
Michoacán's blood-drenched Knights Templar cartel have amassed a land empire in the Mexican state, using the avocado industry to launder narco profits.
Mauritania's opposition parties will boycott upcoming elections, seen as legitimizing a dictatorship, while a "Global Slavery Index" names the country as the world's worst offender.
Specious charges that the Tuareg still practice slavery are being used by Mali’s regime—and echoed by the Western media—to justify the mounting wave of ethnic attacks.
In an egregious and all too revealing faux pas, Amy Goodman appears to have put a mouthpiece of the German far right on Democracy Now as a "former UN expert" to discuss Venezuela. This is one Alfred de Zayas, who is given Goodman's typical sycophantic treatment—all softballs, no adversarial questions. We are treated to the accurate enough if not at all surprising line about how the US is attempting a coup with the complicity of the corporate media. Far more interesting than what he says is de Zayas himself. Not noted by Goodman is that he is on the board of the Desiderius-Erasmus-Stiftung, a Berlin-based foundation established last year as the intellectual and policy arm of Alternative für Deutschland, the far-right party that has tapped anti-immigrant sentiment to win an alarming 94 seats in Germany's Bundestag. He has won a neo-Nazi following with his unseemly theories of Aliied "genocide" against Germans in World War II. (Image via Democracy Now)
A top US sportswear company announced that it has dropped a Chinese supplier over concerns that its products were made by forced labor in detention camps in Xinjiang. Reports have mounted that the hundreds of thousands of ethnic Uighurs believed to be held in a fast-expanding system of detention camps are being put to forced labor for Chinese commercial interests. An Associated Press investigation tracked recent shipments from one such detention-camp factory, run by privately-owned Hetian Taida Apparel, to Badger Sportswear of North Carolina. After long denying that the camps exist, Chinese authorities now say they are "vocational training centers" aimed at reducing "extremism." (Photo via Bitter Winter)
Migrants and refugees in Libya are facing severe human rights violations, according to a UN report. The UN Support Mission in Libya and the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights collaborated to generate the report, which is based on some 1,300 first-hand accounts, detailing human rights violations by state officials and armed groups, as well as abuses committed by smugglers and traffickers. The report finds that Libya "criminalizes irregular entry into, stay in or exit from the country with a penalty of imprisonment pending deportation, without any consideration of individual circumstances or protection needs." This policy has resulted in arbitrary and abusive detention of migrants, with widespread forced labor, torture and sexual exploitation. (Photo: Alessio Romenz/UNICEF)
