As the world scrutinizes the ongoing political turmoil in Libya, Syria and to an extent Yemen in the Middle East, Tunisia and Egypt are attempting to reform political stability on their frontier. Tunisia is taking a step in that direction by recently charging the ousted President Ben Ali with a number of legal cases.

Come April sunshine and May flowers, where we shed off the heavy winter coats to don the sunglasses and flip flops! The arrival of spring has always marked the joyful end of the academic year to us college students, with spring festivities such as Spring Weekend and Pangy Day held on campus to commemorate the arrival of the season and its temperate weather. Yet as we frolic around amidst the fresh green grass and blooming flowers, few of us ponder the historical significance of spring around this time of the year.

On Dec 26, 2004, a 10 year old Indonesian girl was on the beach in Aceh, Sumatra when she noticed the tide rapidly receding. Recalling what she had recently learned in class about tsunami warning signs, she quickly warned people around her to evacuate the beach, saving numerous lives when the fatal waves of the tsunami struck.

Countless organizations have protested against government authorities silencing the media. Despite the tireless efforts of organizations such as Reporters Without Borders (RSF) and the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), the number of journalists and media staff being killed, jailed or exiled has been in the hundreds during the past decade alone. CPJ reports that 145 journalists were jailed in 2010, and 85 have been exiled from their home countries from June 2009 to May 2010. Ninety-five journalists have been assassinated this past year, many of them hailing from Pakistan, Mexico, Honduras, Afghanistan and the Philippines. Thus far, 14 journalists have been killed in 2011.

A plethora of languages exist across the continents, each language a mother tongue to a specific race or culture. The phrase “mother tongue” usually refers to the native language of the speaker; it is often the single predominant language being spoken in the country. Here, we take a look at three Mount Holyoke students from three separate continents, hailing from different multilingual societies and speaking utterly different languages.

One of the greatest revolutions of the past decade is the advancement of social media. Ranging from social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace to YouTube and Twitter, these websites have considerably altered the face of the Internet world, as well as our perspectives on news and information. Aside from serving personal interests for communication or functioning as an outlet for expression, social media has also become a vital tool for mass communication due to its efficiency—this is reflected in its statistics alone.

I had always thought of the Turkish people as a rather homogenous society. In Turkey, Islam is the predominant religion, despite the country maintaining its secularist views.

It would be hard, to say the least, to condense the life of alumna Chin Oy Sim after her graduation from Mount Holyoke College in 1992. “It was quite a hodge-podge!” she said. “Not unlike my self-designed major at Mount Holyoke, Third World Development Studies, comprising of courses in Women’s Studies, Anthropology, Geography, Politics and Economics.”

What most of us will consider a personal right to gather and share information or express viewpoints on the World Wide Web is actually a privilege for citizens in several countries across Asia including Singapore, Vietnam, China and Malaysia. The governments of these countries impose limits and restrictions on what their citizens are allowed to [...]

“All art revolves upon the larger universal ideas and struggles. We are constantly rehashing the same questions, problems, issues. I picked the plays because they each have an extraordinarily complex vision of how to tell a story to expose an idea,” said Brooke O’Harra, Visiting Assistant Professor of Theatre Arts.