How US sex traffickers recruit jailed women for prostitution

“The pimps would use bail as a way to control us and keep us in debt bondage,” said one trafficking survivor from Tampa, Florida. She claimed she was forced to work as a prostitute to pay off her bail debt and locked inside a house and beaten if she didn’t bring home enough money.

China's campaign of destruction at Larung Gar

China's attempts to block evicted residents from returning to Larung Gar violates Article 13 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which states that “everyone has the right to freedom of movement and residence within the borders of each state.”  These restrictions, along with the enforced cancellation of prayer ceremonies at the site also violate Tibetans' rights to freedom of peaceful assembly and association under Article 20 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The subsequent restrictions imposed on former residents from being able to practice at Larung Gar or joining new monasteries are also in violation of these rights, along with Article 27 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, which specifies that “everyone has the right to take part in cultural life and to the freedom indispensable for creative activity”

"Nobody can do it for me"

"Everyone has to make their decisions, but I think we can safely say millions of others are here to offer support and hope. Nobody can do it for me, but I don’t have to do it alone."

Deluge of electronic waste turning Thailand into 'world's rubbish dump'

“Places like America and Europe need to realise they are going to have to start recycling their own electronic waste and stop sweeping the negative effects from north to south,”

As Mexico’s oil sector sputters, crime and violence rattle industry towns

They beat his bare buttocks with a paddle and repeatedly threatened to rape him. One of the assailants put a gun to his head, while another grabbed his cell phone and began posting live video to Herver’s own Facebook feed.

Boulez - Livre pour quatuor à cordes - Quatuor Diotima

Confirmed Artists to Represent Their Countries at the 2019 Venice Biennale

We're keeping a running list of the curators and artists who have signed on for next year's art extravaganza.

Tourists: go home!

In Lisbon, too, they are feeling the negative impact of mass tourism. Fátima Bernardo, assistant professor of social sciences at the University of Évora in Portugal, fears that the Alfama district in Lisbon may face a similar fate to Ciutat Vella

What we know so far about the Jokhang fire

Earlier this year, Lhasa's Jokhang temple, one of the most sacred sites in Tibetan Buddhism, was engulfed in flames. Since then, Free Tibet has been working tirelessly to uncover the truth of what happened at the Jokhang and the extent of the damage. This report details our findings so far and, for the first time, reveals satellite photography of the site taken shortly after the blaze was put out.

Szymanowski - String Quartet No 2 Op 56 - Belcea Quartet

Observations of the missing baryons in the warm–hot intergalactic medium

A theoretical solution to this paradox locates the missing baryons in the hot and tenuous filamentary gas between galaxies, known as the warm–hot intergalactic medium.

Venezuela: impunity amid dismal human rights situation

Under the previous Attorney-General, who was replaced in August 2017, 357 security officers were reportedly under investigation in relation to the killings. But since then, there has been no information publicly available about the cases, with a key obstacle being that the Bureau for Scientific, Criminal, and Forensic Investigations (CICPC) that is in charge of the investigations, is also allegedly responsible for most of the killings. 

The OLPs were in January 2017 replaced with another operation, called the Operations for the Humanitarian Liberation of the People, which is much less transparent and difficult to track than the OLPs, but civil society accounts suggest that the killings have continued. The report also documents the killing of 39 detainees in the state of Amazonas in 2017 and of seven members of an alleged armed group in Caracas in 2018, where security forces allegedly used excessive force. 

Impunity also appears to be pervasive in favour of security officers allegedly responsible for the killing of at least 46 people during protestors last year. The former Attorney-General had issued at least 54 arrest warrants but so far, the UN Human Rights Office is aware of only one case in which a formal trial has started. Evidence has reportedly disappeared from case files, and members of the Attorney-General’s office in charge of investigating the cases were replaced when the new Attorney-General took office in August last year. The Bolivarian National Guard (GNB) has also reportedly blocked investigations.

World trending to hit 50% renewables by 2050

The clean energy analysis firm estimates that in a mere 33 years, the world will generate almost 50 percent of its electricity from renewable energy, and coal will make up just 11 percent of the total electricity mix.

Add in hydroelectric power and nuclear energy, and greenhouse-gas-free electricity sources climb to 71 percent of the world's total electricity generation. 

A company called NET Power has begun testing a unique demonstration power plant in La Porte, Texas, that burns natural gas but releases no emissions into the atmosphere. How can it do this? The natural gas is burned in pure oxygen rather than ambient air, and the resulting heated carbon dioxide (CO2) is used to power a turbine instead of heating steam or gas.

EU votes for copyright law that would make internet a 'tool for control'

Earlier this year, a group of 169 European academics specialising in intellectual property urged MEPs to reject the “misguided” plans, which they said would “likely impede the free flow of information that is of vital importance to democracy”. Scores of academics have since added their names to the letter, which also says the proposals would be likely to harm journalists, photographers and many “non-institutional creators and producers of news”, including freelancers. The UN’s special rapporteur on freedom of expression, David Kaye, has also raised concerns about “prepublication censorship”, with automatic filters being unable to detect fair comment, satire, criticism and parody. In a rare feat, the law has united consumer and tech lobbies in opposition

The Washington state law prohibits home and mobile Internet providers from blocking or throttling lawful Internet traffic and from charging online services for prioritization. The rules will be enforced by the state attorney general under Washington's Consumer Protection Act.

Swiss authorities propose major money-laundering law reforms

Switzerland’s federal government appears poised to crack down on money laundering in the wake of banking scandals and investigations linked to FIFA chiefs 

The basis for killing network neutrality rules is bogus

“A whole lot of other issues aren’t getting much attention,” he noted. Like, “how to close the digital divide, how to improve digital equity."

As Trump courts Kim, a reminder of the regime's brutality

- a female prisoner losing consciousness after enduring a beating designed to trigger premature labour, with prison officials killing her baby before she could regain consciousness;

- a prisoner raped by a security officer, after which the officer pushed a wooden stick inside her vagina and beat her lower body, resulting in her death within a week;

- the deliberate starvation, malnutrition, overwork and death of countless prisoners, including between 1,500–2,000 prisoners, mostly children, who are believed to have died each year from malnutrition in one camp alone, with many other prisoners beaten to death for failing to meet production quotas;

- a soldier supervising a forced labor site rolling a log down a steep mountainside, killing ten prisoners as they were carrying logs up the mountain;

- routine public executions of prisoners, carried out in front of both children and adults, designed to subdue the prison population.

...

These examples make up only some of what is in the report. The IBA report estimates between 80,000 and 130,000 individuals are being held in these prisons today, accused of political wrongdoing. The reason for incarcerating children, according to this study, is that the regime enforces a policy of eliminating the "seed" of three generations of its political enemies.

“He’s the head of a country, and I mean, he’s the strong head, don’t let anyone think anyone different,” Trump said. “He speaks and his people sit up at attention. I want my people to do the same.”

"I fear that today’s unjustified firing of a dissenting voice on the editorial pages will only serve to diminish an opinion section that was once one of America’s best"

China has backed United Nations sanctions against North Korea, but it has also recently indicated it is willing to offer economic assistance — a move some see as intended to anger Washington.

Immediately after the meeting Trump claimed that North Korea had begun the destruction of a missile engine testing site or would begin as soon as Kim returned from the summit. In return Trump ordered the suspension of military exercises with South Korea, a longstanding demand of the Pyongyang regime. This week the Pentagon confirmed that planning for the next scheduled exercises in August had halted

Sources inside the notoriously secretive state say that a top army general has been executed by firing squad – because he gave his troops and their families extra food.

[North Korea’s fear of Chinese control is one area where North Korean and American interests of containing China actually align.]

“Taiwan is grateful to the efforts of like-minded countries that have chosen to take a stand against Chinese bullying of private enterprises,”

[America’s economic prospects are clouded in doubt to make other countries gradually move away from its currency and T-bonds.]

[China has been accumulating indebtedness faster than it has been growing. When so-called hidden debt is taken into account, the country is now incurring maybe one-and-a-half times as much debt as it is producing nominal gross domestic product, even if the official GDP figures were not substantially inflated, which they most certainly are.]

[Trump’s policies are causing a consolidation of a shared anti-American security outlook that unites the various groups found across the Shia world.]

World Cup: Repression and War Crimes

Free speech campaigners rolled out a soccer pitch in central Paris on Wednesday with posters of jailed journalists as the players, in a demonstration about press freedom in Russia on the eve of the World Cup.

On the international stage, Russia is providing weapons, military support, and diplomatic cover to the Syrian government, despite evidence that Syrian forces have committed war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Ponsatí’s lawyer considers summoning former Spanish ministers to Scotland court

In an interview with the Catalan News Agency last month, Aamer Anwar, Ponsatí’s lawyer, claimed that the Spanish authorities are making "an abuse of the European arrest warrants” in trying to extradite Catalan officials abroad, and he accused the Spanish judiciary of “changing the rules of the game” to ensure the officials are returned to Spain. "The Spanish authorities keep shifting the goalposts. They can’t keep trying once, and then twice and then three and four times,” he said, calling such behavior “unacceptable.”

Don't let the EU break our Internet

Tell your MEP to save it before 20 June. On 20-21 June, the European Parliament will vote on the Copyright Directive. Members of the parliament are the only ones that can stand in the way of bad copyright legislation. Tell them you need them to protect your Internet against surveillance and censorship machines

Alice in Wonderland (Unsuk Chin)

Materials as Musical Muses

The emotional connection offered by music, Buongiorno Nardelli hopes, could help audiences realize how rich and beautiful materials can be. He is now designing an installation in the form of a gigantic crystal structure embedded with sonified data from that material. Visitors to the installation would have the sensation of walking inside a crystal and hearing the beating of its phonons or the relentless dance of its electrons.

Anthony Braxton after his concert in Porto

Thanks to Anthony Braxton who told us everything. Thanks to the saxophonist and composer João Guimarães, for holding the lighting and posing interesting questions.

Response to the Belgian Art Prize exclusionary shortlist 2019

As active practitioners, we know that a thriving and complex artistic landscape is only possible when artists of different genders, sexualities, ethnic backgrounds, social classes, generations and so forth, are able to access and participate in it, and enrich it with their sensibilities and world views. In contrast to the apathy demonstrated in the selection of 2019 candidates, we wish to affirm to each other that we stand for an inclusive artistic community that finds its strength in diversity.

The flagrant exclusivity of this year’s prize candidates and its denial of not only social but also aesthetic reality (gender being just one of its glaring discriminatory categories) does not represent how we see ourselves, or our community, and raises consequential questions on how privilege might be distributed within it. The Belgian art world is still very far from having the openness we aspire towards, but we believe it is ready to recognise and reject the regressive affront this year’s selection has forced upon it.

In 2018, the art world and society at large are finally acknowledging inherited failures, and we insist on not sustaining them by assenting to the kind of agenda advanced by the BelgianArtPrize. We sign this letter to collectively and visibly inform you that we stand for a different set of values than what you’ve put forward as representing our community. We demand that Belgian public arts forums and institutions make the concerted effort to root out overt discrimination, not through nominal representation, but by acting to assimilate celebration of our diversity.