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“The only way to heal was to take action” - Jaclyn Corin, 17, USA

I never imagined it would happen to me. Parkland was labelled the safest community in Florida, but when tragedy hit and a mass shooting took place at school, I knew the only way to heal was to take action.

When my friends and I came together, we didn’t have a plan. We literally started work on a living room floor. Being young worked in our favour. We weren’t adults trying to guess what worked for young people and we weren’t asking for permission. Other kids from across the nation saw what we were doing and felt they could do it too.

By Tamara Moussa Beirut, Lebanon.

On December 10, 2017, Iraq declared its victory over the armed group calling itself Islamic State (IS), which had been attempting to establish a so-called Islamic Caliphate in the country since late June 2014. In what we can begin to call post-IS Iraq, thousands upon thousands of civilians bear scars from crimes the armed group committed against them and their loved ones. The legacy of these crimes is likely to affect, not only the survivors, but generations to come.

IS wreaked havoc on the civilian population in Iraq, at times brutally targeting ethnic and religious minorities, including Christians and Yezidis in Northern Iraq. Four years on, Yezidi women and girls are left with harrowing physical and psychological trauma as a result of horrifying sexual violence and enslavement by the armed group, even as they continue to live with the angst of not knowing the fate and whereabouts of their relatives who went missing as a result of IS actions.

The BC government has launched an Environmental Assessment Revitalization process as part of its commitment to reshape the way BC makes decisions about natural resource projects, industrial activities and more.

YOU have an opportunity to help shape the future of environmental assessments in BC by providing your input.

BC’s current environmental assessment law is failing British Columbians and the lands and waters we rely on. Amnesty International has joined 23 other environmental, social justice and community groups in putting forward a shared vision of what future environmental assessments should look like.

This article was originally published in Foreign Policy. 

On July 10, the Chinese authorities finally ended their de facto house arrest of Liu Xia, a painter, a poet, and the widow of the late Nobel peace laureate Liu Xiaobo, and allowed her to leave for Berlin.

It’s worth considering what distinguishes Liu’s case from those of the many dissidents and activists who continue to be held in Chinese prisons or prevented from leaving the country. The two-pronged approach of private and public diplomacy paid off in Liu’s case, and may yet yield results for others, however dark the situation looks.