“One for all, one for all,” chants a young man as riot police carry him away. Chistiye Prudy, a metro station in Moscow, is full of protestors, mostly young people. It is Dec. 5, 2011. They are all protesting the fraudulent Duma elections of Dec. 4. The young man who was arrested is Alexey Navalny, a blogger, activist and now opposition leader. In the weeks following his arrest, he would become the face of the Russian opposition in the West.

The catastrophic meltdown following the earthquake and tsunami at the nuclear power plant in Fukushima, Japan, remains an issue in the country. The recent decision to restart one of three inactive reactors at the Genkai nuclear power plant in Saga, which had been shut down a month ago for routine checks, has refueled the public discussion on whether Japan should rely on nuclear energy at all. According to the New York Times, Japanese reactors have to be shut down every 13 months in order to undergo a number of safety checks.

“I am sorry that we were unable to support you for a full year of study abroad. As you know, international students generally are limited to one semester of funding. In order to meet our goal of funding as many qualified students as possible, the only exceptions we made to that policy were for students who were selected for a Mount Holyoke exchange that is offered only for a full year,” read the letter I recently received in response to my study abroad application. My advisor and I had planned for me to study at Sciences Po in Paris for a whole year.

On Friday, when tensions were running high in Egypt, I was glued to my computer all day, watching Al Jazeera’s commented live stream that was broadcast from multiple locations in Cairo, Suez, and Alexandria. Turns out I was not the only one: 1.6 million viewers from the United States watched the live stream that day.

Only having daughters is a big misfortune for a family in Afghanistan. It gives other family members, friends, neighbors, colleagues—anyone, really, who comes into contact with the family and realizes that they don’t have a son-a reason to pity them and express their condolences, regardless of the family’s overall social standing.

The conflict in Kashmir dates back to the selling by the British Empire of the region, including its population, to a warlord in the 19th century. Ever since, the province has lived in a steady stream of violence and public unrest, bordering on a civil war. The Kashmiri struggle for independence has lasted for almost seventy-five years: the first public protests against a ruler happened in 1931 — since then, they have been daily reality for Kashmir’s 11 million inhabitants.

“You Russians only see the war on television and hear about it on the radio, and this is why you are quiet and do not react to the atrocities that your bandit groups under Putin’s command carry out in the Caucasus. I promise you that the war will come to your streets, and you will feel it in your lives and under your skin.” This was the grisly message Chechen rebel leader Doku Umarov conveyed two days after the suicide bombings in Moscow.

During the 2005 electoral campaign, the Christian Democratic Party in Germany proposed a surprising candidate for the office of chancellor: Angela Merkel, the head of the party at that time. Merkel was not simply the first Eastern German running for office—she was also the first woman to do so. Merkel’s candidacy caused a huge stir [...]

In the spirit of Valentine’s Day and the Lunar New Year, the Mount Holyoke News decided to explore how international students celebrate their national holidays away from home. The three stories below offer different perspectives on the subject. Vietnam by Vi Bui “Do you feel like Tet is coming?” asked my friend Thu Nguyen ’11 [...]

What do you have in common with a college girl in France or China? Probably more than you think. Chances are that you get your clothes from the same stores, meet your friends at the same restaurants, watch the same movies, listen to the same music, and read the same magazines. In an increasingly globalized [...]