Human Rights

We all know the obvious culprits of the Western diet that can be harmful to our children’s health…the dreaded fast food, but could our diet actually harm children in the developing world even on a good day? According to new research from Italian scientists in the August 2-6 issue of the Proceedings of the National […]

    There is one piece of breaking news this afternoon that sent both my Twitter and Facebook feeds into a frenzy: Federal Judge Vaughn Walker has ruled that Proposition 8, the bill that amended the Californian Constitution to prohibit granting marriage licenses to same sex couples, is unconstitutional. From the ruling: “Proposition 8 fails […]

I am now writing from Port-au-Prince, Haiti. I arrived here on Sunday and am freelancing for several organizations for the next few months. While I will try to keep a broad lens for the blog, I thought I would kick it off with a post on human rights in Haiti, as the human rights situation […]

Last month the Chinese government announced that police have used DNA technology to reunite 730 families, whose children were missing, and are now speeding up the establishment of a national DNA database to assist in reuniting missing children and their families. “The DNA database has helped reunite 730 children with their families,” Meng Qingtian, an […]

The current administration has placed some priority on issues affecting children, however in light of the recession much of this has failed to materialize in state budgets.  How do your representatives vote when it comes to issues effecting children?  Vote Kids released the 111th Congressional Scorecard this month, which shows how each member of the […]

*Russian spy Anna Chapman gets her own action figure in the United States. Gets serenaded by Russian President Vladimir Putin? *Colorado Senate candidate Ken Buck says that you should vote for him in the Republican primary because, unlike his opponent, he does “not wear high heels.” Maybe we should start a “Ken Buck Should Campaign […]

Earlier this month, the United Nations General Assembly made a unanimous and historic vote to establish the first United Nations (UN) entity which will be exclusively dedicated to women’s empowerment and gender equality.  UN Women is the result of years of hard work and negotiations between UN member states, international NGOs, policymakers and tireless advocates around […]

In the UK a recently released study showed that 55% of children in the United Kingdom, who have been identified as persons victimized by human trafficking and subsequently rescued will eventually become missing persons. The main reason for the high percentage rate of missing child survivors is due in direct relation to a lack of […]

The central theme of the International AIDS Conference was supposed to be the war on drugs. As I highlighted in my last post, criminalization has been proven to fuel the epidemic, while engaging directly with people with a higher risk for HIV significantly decreases transmission and death. The conference was in Vienna expressly to “bridge” […]

By Cordelia Rizzo Tired of the erosion of the social fabric caused by the proliferation of organized crime heists and other social misfortunes in Mexico? Televisa, one of the country’s largest TV consortiums, thinks it has an American Idol-style answer for you! It is indeed quite a contest. Last June, it introduced Iniciativa México, a […]

Prisons are considered “hotbeds” for HIV. Some prisons in the world have HIV rates up to 65 percent, and the HIV rate of prisoners is often significantly higher than that of the outside community—Zambian prisoners have a prevalence of 27 percent, while the national HIV rate is 15 percent. This is in part due to […]

Sean Patrick Murphy just posted a good review of The Stoning of Soraya M. over on the Global Films blog. The film is based on the book of the same name by French-Iranian writer Freidoune Sahebjam which tells the true story of one of Iran’s many stoning victims under Sharia law. More than anything, it […]