Syria conflict: Calls for air drops of humanitarian aid to besieged towns
The US, UK and France have urged the UN to begin air drops of humanitarian aid to besieged areas in Syria.
They said the Syrian government had failed to respect a 1 June deadline for widespread aid distribution agreed by world and regional powers.
About 4,000 people in the besieged Darayya suburb of the capital Damascus have been without food aid since 2012.
A convoy reached the area on Wednesday but carried only a small amount of medicines and other non-food items.
The UN Security Council will meet on Friday to discuss the air drops.
US state department spokesman John Kirby said hundreds of thousands of Syrians needed "sustained and regular" access to aid.
Generation revolution: how Egypt’s military state betrayed its youth
Two years after protests unseated the dictator Hosni Mubarak, a 15-year-old girl in Cairo was ready to risk her life to defeat her country’s brutal army. And she was not alone
Thursday 2 June 2016 06.00 BST
Ruqayah crouched behind a sandbag wall, blinking away the sweat running into her eyes. The sun was directly overhead and the acrid smell of burning plastic stung the back of her throat. Shouts and screams rose thinly over gunfire, helicopter rotors and the rumble of armoured bulldozers.
It was the middle of August 2013, soon after the Eid feast that marks the end of Ramadan, and the security forces were clearing the huge protest camps at Rabaa and al-Nahda squares in central Cairo. Their tens of thousands of inhabitants were demonstrating against the removal of the president, Mohamed Morsi, in a military coup at the beginning of July. Beside Ruqayah huddled another teenage girl and a young man, pressed as close as they could get to the rough hessian of the sandbags. To the side, sprawled on the concrete with blood pooling around them, lay the bodies of two men who had been shot dead by police snipers.
Whipped with cables and brainwashed into fighting and dying for Isis: Liberated Raqqa residents on life under jihadists
In the third of a four-part series examining Isis, Patrick Cockburn hears from those who have been liberated from Isis’s brutal regime around its de facto capital
When Isis first arrived in her village two years ago, Ameena, a 51-year-old Sunni Arab widow with three sons, was happy when they told people to pray. “I thought that they were real Muslims,” she recalls. “But after a few months they started poking their noses into all the details of people’s lives.”
Ameena, who comes from the village of Fatisah north of Isis’s de facto Syrian capital Raqqa, says that it was not only Isis’s emphasis on religion that explains their initial popularity but the fact that they were seen as part of the revolution against President Bashar al-Assad.
Germany votes on Armenian genocide resolution amid warnings from Turkey
German lawmakers are to debate a resolution that would see the mass deaths of Armenians under the Ottoman Empire in 1915 referred to as "genocide." Turkey has warned Berlin of consequences if it supports the wording.
Thursday's vote in the Bundestag, Germany's lower house of parliament, comes at a time when German Chancellor Angela Merkel is relying on Turkey to implement a migrant deal with the EU. Germany also has extensive ties with Turkey, including roughly 1.5 million Turkish residents and more of Turkish origin, dating back to a "guest worker" scheme in the 1960s and 70s.As the successor state to the Ottoman Empire, Turkey officially denies that the events that started in 1915 amounted to genocide and has lashed out at countries that have officially recognized the term.
China's Foreign Minister berates Canadian reporter over human rights
Updated 0726 GMT (1526 HKT) June 2, 2016
A Canadian reporter earned an angry rebuke from China's Foreign Minister over a question about the country's human rights record.
"Your question is full of prejudice against China and arrogance," Wang Yi said, visibly angry, after iPolitics reporter Amanda Connolly asked about missing Hong Kong booksellers and Canadian Kevin Garratt, who has been charged with spying in China.
"Other people don't know better than the Chinese people about the human rights condition in China and it is the Chinese people who are in the best situation, in the best position to have a say about China's human rights situation," he said.
In Mexico, a justice system where 'citizens are heard' begins to take root
PROGRESS WATCH
Judicial reforms aimed at greater transparency and more timely trials are set to be implemented federally and across all 31 states and Mexico City by June 18.
MONTERREY, MEXICO — A man in bright orange garb takes a seat at a sleek wooden desk here on a recent afternoon. He intermittently wipes away tears with open palms and looks anxiously over his shoulder, trying to catch the attention of a young woman in the small courtroom gallery who is there to support him.
The defendant, accused of violently kidnapping someone, was arrested that morning. The fact that he’s in a courtroom, awaiting a judge the same day, was unimaginable in Mexico just a few years ago.
Mexican trials have historically been conducted in writing, with victims, witnesses, the accused, and even lawyers rarely gaining access to a judge. This created an opaque system of justice that presumes guilt over innocence and gives prosecutors vast power. It has also led to severely overcrowded prisons, with pretrial detentions that can last for years even for petty crimes, and impunity rates that hover near 98 percent.
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