Many individuals have pointed to the astounding efforts of New Zealand to control COVID-19. Along with the international community, the country’s handling of the coronavirus was also praised by its citizens. This played an important role in the re-election of Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, who orchestrated early virus restrictions. Her immediate plan was to not just control the spread of the virus, but eliminate it entirely.
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2019 Nobel Peace Prize winner and Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed is facing a critical moment as ethnic tensions boil. Abiy was elected in 2018 and is seen by many outsiders as a reformer seeking to lead Ethiopia away from the current system of ethnic federalism towards a more unified, secular federalist form of government. Under the constitution, Ethiopia is divided into nine ethnically-based regions that are each granted a significant amount of autonomy from the central government.
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Amidst a growing trend of increasing migration out of Honduras, a caravan of more than 2,000 Honduran migrants unsuccessfully attempted to move through Central America towards the United States before being stopped in Guatemala, reports The Wall Street Journal.
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he Syrian refugee crisis has been a large topic on the international stage yet is far from being solved. Amid a global pandemic the situation is increasingly more complicated for these refugees looking to rebuild their lives.
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A refugee is defined as “someone with a well-founded fear of persecution for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership in a social group or political opinion”. A migrant, meanwhile, is defined as “someone who voluntarily leaves his or her country of origin to seek a better life and who does not face impediments to returning home”. Yet for the five million people who have fled from Venezuela since 2015 neither of those definitions accurately describes their circumstances.
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The Rohingya population is an estimated one million in Myanmar, which has a majority Buddhist population. Although the Rohingya can trace their origins centuries back, the government denied the Rohingya legal recognition as one of the country’s official ethnic groups. In 1982, the country passed the Burma Citizenship Law, which essentially denied the Rohingya citizenship and left many stateless. The government of Myanmar sees the Rohingya as “illegal immigrants from Bangladesh,” says BBC News.
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North Korea is one of, if not the most, surveillance-heavy countries on the planet. The Asian country is infamous for its strict government, tyrannical dictators, and repressive policies. Many have suffered at the hands of harsh rulers who continue to impose strict censorship and surveillance. It is virtually impossible to fully understand North Korean life as an outsider.
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The extent of the UAE surveillance program is both amazing and terrifying, but they did not assemble it alone. Reuters launched an investigation into a program called Project Raven, a joint operation between the Emirati government and a UAE-based cybersecurity firm called DarkMatter.
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While the rest of the world enjoys the relatively free and uncensored Web, China and its citizens face a different reality. Since the beginning of Maoist-era China, information has been tightly controlled to protect the government’s interests and control the populace.
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The System of Operative Search Measures, or SORM, was once used by the Soviet Union to monitor phone calls. Now it is being used in Russia to track geolocation and IP addresses. The program was resurrected by the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) in 1995 to surveil online activity and has grown in scope as the internet became an ever greater essential of day-to-day life.
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