In The News

Isolation from the rest of the world, a shroud of obsessive secrecy, allows North Korean leaders to brutalize their own citizens. A ruined economy leads to desperation, with thousands of escapes reported in recent years. The horrific stories from victims take years to emerge, only after prisoners escape and survive – spending months hiding and traveling through China and Southeast Asia until they...

More than 9000 people have been reported killed in a year of Syrian unrest, after the government used troops and tanks to crack down on determined protesters, and thousands of Syrian refugees try to escape the violence by crossing into Lebanon and Turkey. Human rights advocates had lauded application of the United Nations’ Responsibility to Protect doctrine in Libya to end the violence by Muammar...

Violent riots broke out in Britain in August, and researchers, searching for reasons, examined the messages relayed by rioters over social media. Many of the calls to don disguises and join the mayhem were in a dialect labeled Multicultural London English by sociolinguists and Jafaican by the media – a post-racial blend that emerged from the more than 300 languages and dialects spoken by youth...