Paul is one of the 900 students in the College Bound Dorchester (Boston) program, which helps people who have been in prison rejoin society and build new futures by helping them resume their education. Most of the students are high-school drop-outs, studying to pass their General Educational Development test, also known as the GED. Some others are preparing for college. The program’s goal is to enroll 250 of their students […]
Paul Burns sits behind a battered wooden desk. He meticulously takes notes from his book “HVAC Fundamentals: Volume 1: Heating Systems, Furnaces and Boilers,” studying the craft of heating and ventilation repair. He bends his head towards the book and whispers the sentences in chapter nine: “Indoor Air Fundamentals.” He pulls up his shirt’s sleeves. Both his arms are full of tattoos. “I got a couple tattoos. I got some […]
Venezuelan pop singer Miguel Ignacio Mendoza was part of a crowd of thousands of people on the streets of Caracas on April 10. He wasn’t giving a concert, but taking part in demonstrations against the Supreme Court’s decision to dissolve the National Assembly, a decision the Court later reversed after three days of nationwide protests. The largely peaceful protestors—including Mendoza, more popularly known as Nacho—were met with tear gas fired by […]
After the Department of Homeland Security terminated the Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for 2,500 Nicaraguans, 1,040 Sudanese and 59,000 Haitians living in the United States, people from the other 7 countries living in the U.S as TPS holders fear to receive the same notification from the DHS. The other two biggest communities living in the U.S under TPS include 57,000 Hondurans and 200,000 Salvadorans, who could be asked to leave […]
It is after 2 p.m., and all Abel has had to eat is a single mango. He still does not know if he will have to go to bed on empty stomach. He is sitting on a blue plastic bench, behind a table on which he sells fruit juices half a block from Carúpano’s Hospital . Abel should be in school, but the economic crisis that has stroke the region […]
Originally published at Prodavinci.com So far in this decade, the Internet has shown its power to share ideas and promote freedom. The web has allowed the development of ‘citizen journalism’ that already proved successful: it denounced government repression and an excessive use of the force the so called ‘Arab Spring’ in Tunisia, Libya, and Syria, capturing videos, images and texts that were reported live to the world, passing all sorts […]
Originally published at Prodavinci.com. By the end of 2014, the legendary culture magazine Rolling Stone published an article in which they denounced a collective rape at the University of Virginia. The piece triggered a huge media coverage about sexual crimes on university campuses, and put on the spotlight the indifference of colleges for apparently not taking action to stop this outrageous events from happening. Months later, the magazine had to […]
Originally published in Prodavinci.com After 96 people testified during 15 days in Boston’s court, the jury declared Dzhokar Tsarnaev guilty of 30 charges, 17 of them making him a candidate for the capital punishment. The 10 members of the jury now have a question to answer: will Tsarnaev be incarcerated for life or will he receive the death penalty? The accused is only 21 years old and was born in […]
Originally published at Prodavinci.com In 2010, a couple of South Koreans spent more than 12 hours in one of the pc bangs (internet coffee shops for gamers) that exist in Seoul, playing a videogame called Prius Online. In the fantasy game, they fed a virtual baby, called Anima, while their real daughter, flesh and blood but who was never named, starved to death. Kim Yoo-Chul, 41, and Choi Mi-Sun, 25, […]