Digital Journal

Amnesty International and Mexican actor Gael García Bernal have launched a series of films depicting the plight of irregular migrants in Mexico. The four films are being called The Invisibles (Los Invisibles). The premiere of The Invisibles, which record the journey of hundreds of migrants from the border between Guatemala and Mexico on their way to the United States, coincides with the start of this year’s Global Forum on Migration and Development, taking place in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. The...

A second reporter who wrote about a controversial road-building project outside Moscow has been badly beaten up by unidentified assailants. The assault came two days after another leading journalist was attacked in a savage assault. Anatoly Adamchuk was attacked by men outside his newspaper's office and was being treated for head trauma at a hospital, according to colleagues at the Zhukovskie Vesti newspaper where he is employed, the Associated Press (AP) has reported. The paper is based in...

A Japanese journalist has been arrested in eastern Myanmar (Burma) for illegally crossing over the border from Thailand. Toru Yamaji, who sneaked into Myanmar to cover Sunday's elections, has been charged under the country's Immigration Act. Yamaji, a reporter with the APF news agency, was detained on Sunday itself in Myawaddy, on the country's eastern border with Thailand, the Associated Press (AP) reported. APF is a Tokyo-based news organisation relaying photos and stories, including online...

When the burqa debate was raging across the world, a young Pakistani women's rights activist, who doesn't wear a headscarf as a rule, travelled to Jalalabad in Afghanistan to see for herself what it meant to wear one. This is her story. Gulalai Ismail, a 24-year-old university student in Islamabad, needed to go to Afghanistan in August on an assignment. The consultancy on the evaluation of a gender-based violence project made her fly to Kabul. And then onwards to Jalalabad. For someone who does...

Archaeologists have found a piece of a stone axe 35,500 years old on sacred Aboriginal land in Australia, the oldest object of its type ever found. The shard of stone was found in Australia's lush and remote far northern reaches in May, and has marks that prove it comes from a ground-edge stone axe. The discovery was made by a Monash University researcher and a team of international experts. The previous oldest ground-edge axes were 20,000 to 30,000 years old, and the conventional belief was...

This is bad news for males. Female boa constrictors can produce babies without mating. Scientists have found that the babies produced from this asexual reproduction have attributes previously believed to be impossible. Males are not needed anymore. This is the first time that asexual reproduction, known in scientific terms as parthenogenesis, has been attributed to boa constrictors, according to scientists from the North Carolina State University (NCSU). They have published their findings online...

The plague pathogen originated in or near China. Then it evolved and emerged multiple times to cause global pandemics. And it spread far and wide, an international team of scientists has found using DNA fingerprinting analyses. Researchers from Ireland, China, France, Germany and the United States, examined the past 10,000 years of global plague disease events. Their collaborative research traced the roots to somewhere in or around present-day China. The plague spread over various historical...

A hundred days later, the litany of woes is piling up for victims of the devastating floods that ravaged Pakistan. Bad news is that the waters still remain. Worse still is the fact that aid is fast drying up. According to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), funding for the Floods Relief and Early Recovery Response Plan is only at 40 per cent of the requirements of USD$1.93 billion. An estimated 14 million people are in need of urgent humanitarian...

A painting said to be of Sir Sean Connery posing for an art class wearing only a thong is slated to go on public display soon. Robert Webster, known as Rab, painted the actor in 1951 while a student at the Edinburgh College of Art. The previously unseen oil painting shows bare back of Sir Sean, now 80, with his head turned to one side and wearing a thong. Webster died last month aged 83, according to BBC News. The painting was made long before Dr No (1962) was to make Connery a film legend. Nick...

The universe is getting more crowded by the day. New telescopes and technologies are allowing astronomers to discover new astronomical objects all the time, such as ten new galaxy clusters found recently by the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT). An international team of scientists led by Rutgers University astrophysicists have discovered these 10 new massive galaxy clusters from a large, uniform survey of the southern sky. They found the galaxies using a breakthrough technique that detects...