Photo of the Day

The U.S. Border Patrol takes people into custody near Falfurrias, Texas. Brooks County has become an epicenter for would-be immigrant deaths. In 2012 sheriff's deputies found 129 bodies there, six times the number recorded in 2010. Most of those who died succumbed to the punishing heat and rough terrain that make up the ranch lands of south Texas. Migrants typically spend a few days in a “stash house,” such as the Casa del Migrante, in Reynosa, Mexico. Many are ignorant of the treacherous journey ahead, and don’t know that even documented U.S. residents lack basic labor protections and are in a fight for a domestic workers’ bill of rights.

Photo: Eric Thayer/Reuters

Around 1,000 Harley-Davidson enthusiasts from all over China descend upon Qian Dao Lake, in Zhejiang Province, to attend China’s fifth annual Harley-Davidson National Rally. Motor biking in China is uneasy riding. Major Chinese cities ban motorcycles from circulating on highways and main avenues. Chinese tax authorities assess Harley-Davidson motorbikes as luxury items; sometimes taxes alone are equivalent to the bike’s U.S. price tag. Furthermore, transportation authorities place Harleys in the same category as electric bikes, horses and bicycles, which means they cannot be driven on primary thoroughfares. Because of this, China’s Harley riders, like you, have plenty of reasons to say, “No Más.”

Photo: Carlos Barria/Reuters

Company officials cry after a fire at a factory belonging to a large garment exporter in Dhaka, Bangladesh, on Thursday, May 9, 2013. Eight people were killed when the fire swept through the building in an industrial district of the Bangladeshi capital, police and an industry association official said. The fire occurred one day after the United Colors of Benetton admitted that it bought garments from the Rana Plaza factory building that collapsed April 24 in Savar, Bangladesh, and killed more than 1,000 garment workers. In response to the Rana collapse, the Bangladesh government promised quick reform. If you want to protect the lives of the people who make your clothing, check your labels.

Photo: Andrew Biraj/Reuters

A missing person poster for Amanda Berry, one of three woman found alive after vanishing for about a decade in their Cleveland, Ohio, neighborhood, is pictured in front of the home of Berry’s sister Beth. The three Cleveland women were freed Monday, May 6, from a house that authorities tried to visit several years ago, police said on Tuesday. Three brothers, one of them a school-bus driver who owns the house, are under arrest. Hundreds of thousands of children go missing every year, according to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, and you can help get them back home safely.

Photo: John Gress/Reuters

A man shows a girl how to hold an airsoft gun during the NRA Youth Day at the National Rifle Association’s annual meeting in Houston, Texas. The National Rifle Association is showcasing women members and emphasizing that increasingly it’s not just men who own firearms and oppose gun-control efforts. Female membership is up, the nation’s leading advocate for gun ownership says, and its revamped website features profiles of “armed and fabulous” women and describes how women are bringing “new energy” to the NRA. Women are also bringing new energy to the national pledge to stand against gun violence.

Photo: Adrees Latif/Reuters

Jeffrey Maybee and Chris Richardson (L) sit next to Breanna Alexander and Stacy Parrish as the two couples wait to be joined in civil unions in Denver, Colorado. Colorado joined eight states that allow same-sex civil-unions on April 30, 2013. Nine other states (plus the District of Columbia) permit same-sex marriage. Opponents to marriage equality contend that allowing LGBT couples to enter into long-term alignments of stability and love will result in people who have married goats filing papers to adopt human children while hellfire rains down from a cloudy sky. Despite these dire consequences, Americans are lining up to take the marriage equality pledge.

Photo: Rick Wilking/Reuters

Vanessa Moreno, 24, holds her two-month-old baby, Makayla, at Prototypes residential treatment program in Pomona, California. Prototypes is part of the Second Chance Women’s Re-entry Court program, one of the first in the U.S. to focus on women. It offers an alternative to prison for women who plead guilty to nonviolent crimes and volunteer for treatment. Of the 297 women who have been through the court since 2007, 100 have graduated, and only 35 have returned to state prison. Up to half of the women released from California’s prisons are re-incarcerated within three years. Keeping mothers and daughters out of jail is one step toward empowering women around the world.

Photo: Lucy Nicholson/Reuters

People watch as rescue workers dig for survivors at the Rana Plaza factory building that collapsed Wednesday, April 24, in Savar, Bangladesh. The preventable disaster killed at least 300 people who were constructing garments to be worn in western countries. Bangladesh’s unbeatable low production costs are irresistible to overseas retailers. Police had ordered the Rana Plaza building evacuated a day prior to its collapse, but employees were ordered back to their stations. Last November, 112 garment workers perished in a fire at a Bangladesh factory that had no emergency exits. Companies including Walmart and Benetton immediately issued statements distancing their operations from the collapsed factory. If you think the labels you wear should do more than issue statements to protect the lives of the people who make your clothes, phone, email or send a message with your credit card.

Photo: Reuters

A sign reads “Thanks” as people gather in Paris to celebrate the passage of a French law allowing same-sex couples to marry and adopt children. French lawmakers passed the Marriage for All bill on Tuesday, a flagship reform pledge by France’s Socialist President François Hollande. The measure sparked often-violent street protests and a rise in homophobic attacks. The law legalizes same-sex marriage and gives gay and lesbian couples adoption rights. France’s conservative opposition has promised to mount vigorous challenges to prevent the law’s implementation. That effort might be more beneficially spent in learning five ways to support same-sex marriage.

Photo: Charles Platiau/Reuters

Police try to detain supporters of the Aam Aadmi Party during a protest outside the residence of India’s Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in New Delhi. Angry crowds demonstrated in the capital after a five-year-old girl was allegedly raped, tortured and kept in captivity for 40 hours, reviving memories of a fatal sexual assault on a woman that shook the country last December. Perhaps you are hesitant to be dragged away by armor-clad policemen. You may not even live in India. Still, you have a voice and resources to stand with women around the world against violence, rape and fear.

Photo: Adnan Abidi/Reuters

With the U.S. Capitol in the background, crosses symbolizing grave markers are placed upon the National Mall in Washington, D.C., April 11, 2013. The PICO National Network’s Lifelines to Healing and Sojourners held a 24-hour vigil featuring a gathering of Newtown clergy and 3,300 grave markers to “remind Congress action is needed on gun violence prevention.” The markers represent the number of people killed in gun violence since the tragedy at Sandy Hook Elementary School. In response to this vigil, and to the 80 percent of Americans who support universal background checks for gun buyers, the Senate voted yesterday to kill expanded checks. Congress won’t on its own, but you can take a stand against gun violence.

Photo: Kevin Lamarque/Reuters

When the Boston Marathon bombs exploded, peace activist and Red Cross volunteer Carlos Arredondo was waiting near the finish line. Arredondo was in Boston to support a runner racing in the memory of Arredondo’s son, Marine Lance Corporal Alexander Arredondo, who was killed in the line of duty at Najaf, Iraq, in 2004. Immediately after Monday’s detonations, Arredondo joined the rush of responders who ran toward the explosions and to the aid of spectators and participants felled by the blasts. The instinctual urge to help lives in all of us, and we can all do something to help in the wake of the Boston Marathon bombings.

Photo: Darren McCollester/Getty Images

Female North Korean soldiers patrol along the banks of the Yalu River opposite the Chinese border city of Dandong. The United States media went on high alert for a North Korean missile launch on Thursday after Congressman Doug Lamborn (R-Colorado) read from a “mistakenly” declassified Defense Intelligence Agency report. The DIA report expressed “moderate confidence” that North Korea “currently has nuclear weapons capable of delivery by ballistic missiles.” No other intelligence agency has verified this nuclear contention, but the power of such an uncorroborated threat is one more reason to demand a world with zero nuclear weapons.

Photo: Jacky Chen/Reuters

Airport personnel take a body temperature reading of a boy as he arrives at Hong Kong International Airport. A strain of bird flu that has been found in humans for the first time in eastern China is no cause for panic, the World Health Organization said on Monday, as the number of people infected rose to 24, with seven deaths. The “Spanish flu” pandemic of 1918 killed up to 40 million people worldwide, prior to the advent of commercial air flight. The Spanish flu’s parallels to the H1N1 pandemic of 2009 are strong motivational factors—despite the assurances of the WHO—to learn how to keep yourself safe when the next pandemic strikes.

Photo: Tyrone Siu/Reuters

A boy works at a poppy field in the Jalalabad province of Afghanistan. Between 2011 and 2012, production of opium poppies, the raw material for heroin, spiked by 18 percent across Afghanistan, providing from 80 to 90 percent of the world’s supply. In July 2000, Afghanistan’s Taliban government proclaimed opium farming to be un-Islamic, enforcing a 91 percent reduction in poppy cultivation. Opium farming has risen with each year of the U.S.-led occupation of Afghanistan. The Taliban’s yearly revenue from taxing the current opium crop is estimated to be $155 million.

Photo: Parwiz/Reuters

Soldiers of the U.S. Army’s 23rd chemical battalion give a demonstration of their equipment during a ceremony to acknowledge the battalion’s official return to the 2nd Infantry Division based in South Korea, at Camp Stanley in Uijeongbu, north of Seoul, April 4, 2013. A North Korean Army spokesman warned the U.S. on Wednesday that its military had been cleared to wage an attack using “smaller, lighter and diversified nuclear” weapons. Apparently, North Korea’s supreme leader, 30-year-old Kim Jong-un, is being slow to realize that it is time to demand nuclear zero!

Photo: Lee Jae-Won/Reuters

People sleep on charpoy beds near a railway station in Karachi. Charpoy bed guesthouses are set up at night from 9 p.m. to 7 a.m. for the homeless, passengers and drivers, charging about 40 Pakistani rupees ($0.40) per night. Floods made more than four million Pakistanis homeless in the past three years, and 60 percent of the country’s population lives on less than two U.S. dollars per day. In the United States, the number of people lacking basic housing rose throughout 2012, and a majority of reporting U.S. cities said homeless families with children had been denied shelter. Those kids can be helped.

Photo: Akhtar Soomro/Reuters

During the Cold War, the Berlin Wall was a portion of the great iron curtain that had been brought down between the free world democracies of the west and the communist tyranny of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Republics. Today, the wall is a symbol of the tyranny of real estate development. A worker adjusts the clamp of a crane after removing a piece of the former Berlin Wall, now known as East Side Gallery, in Berlin. Some 200 people protested against the controversial removal of parts of the former East German border fortification, making way for construction of luxury apartments.

Photo: Thomas Peter/Reuters

Danny Josephson (L) and his wife Jesse (R) ride in his father Kent Josephson’s 1953 Willys Jeep with a Browning .30 caliber machine gun attached during the Big Sandy Shoot in Mohave County, Arizona. The Big Sandy Shoot is the largest organized machine gun shoot in the United States. Shooters from all around the country attend the celebration of rapid-fire firepower. Vintage and replica style machine guns and cannons are displayed and discharged during the event. The shootout is expected to go off with zero casualties, but if the day adheres to the national average, 87 people will be shot to death elsewhere in the U.S.

Photo: Joshua Lott/Reuters

Palestinian groom Emad al-Malalha, 21, walks with Manal Abu Shanar, 17, his Egyptian bride, inside a smuggling tunnel beneath the Gaza-Egypt border in the southern Gaza Strip. Al-Malalha, who said that his bride was not given a permit from Egyptian authorities to enter the Gaza Strip, brought her from neighboring Egypt through a smuggling tunnel to celebrate their wedding in his native Gaza. Egypt views the network of smuggling tunnels as conduits for militants and weapons moving into Sinai from Gaza. In February, the Egyptian military flooded the tunnel system with sewage.

Photo: Ibraheem Abu Mustafa/Reuters

Children in Aurora, Colorado, demonstrate how they might take shelter under a bulletproof blanket sold by Elite Sterling Security LLC. A wave of national outrage in the aftermath of the December 14, 2012, gun massacre of 20 children and six adults at an elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut, raised calls for new laws to combat gun violence, specifically a ban on assault weapons such as the one used at Newtown. Yesterday, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid confirmed that an upcoming Senate gun bill would not include an assault weapons ban. Still, Americans have the right, and perhaps obligation, to pledge against gun violence.

Photo: Rick Wilking/Reuters

Two protesters hug after hearing the verdict in the trial of Trent Mays and Ma’lik Richmond outside the juvenile court in Steubenville, Ohio. Mays and Richmond were found guilty of raping a 16-year-old girl at a party last summer while she was in a drunken stupor in a case that gained national exposure through social media. Mays, 17, and Richmond, 16, members of Steubenville’s “Big Red” football team, were found delinquent in the sexual assault of the girl in the early morning of August 12. Witnesses said she was too drunk to move or speak. Unlike those witnesses, you can take a stand to protect women around the world from rape, violence and fear.

Photo: Jason Cohn/Reuters

Attendees are seen on a black-and-white high-definition camera monitor displayed at the seventh annual Border Security Expo in Phoenix, Arizona. Products and services from more than 100 companies are on display, showcasing the latest technology in security products from armored vehicles to long-range surveillance cameras. The show traditionally draws law-enforcement officials from around the country, but with expected government budget sequestration cuts, attendance was down during the first day of the three-day expo. As pathways to citizenship are being negotiated for America’s undocumented residents, enhanced border security has become an increasingly hot-button priority.

Photo: Joshua Lott/Reuters

Participants, acting as people who have not been able to return home due to a strong earthquake, wear protective blankets as they take part in a disaster drill at Yurakucho subway station in Tokyo to mark the second-year anniversary of the March 11, 2011, earthquake and tsunami that killed thousands and set off a nuclear crisis. Japan’s worst disaster since World War II, the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear meltdown killed almost 19,000 people and stranded 315,000 evacuees, including refugees who fled radiation from the devastated Fukushima atomic plant. In its wake, some nations of the developed world have reevaluated nuclear power.

Photo: Issei Kato/Reuters

An Afghan woman, one among a group taking a tour around Kabul to mark International Women’s Day, looks out from a helicopter window at the International Airport in Kabul. While dire by any standards, the treatment of women in Afghanistan is by no means exclusive in the world of egregious human rights abuses inflicted upon people born as girls. Afghanistan is a shoe-in for any list of ten worst countries to live in as a woman; so are Pakistan, Congo, India and at least a dozen others, which means it is still time to pledge to help empower women around the world.

Photo: Mohammad Ismail/Reuters

Jailed gang members stand inside the maximum-security jail of Izalco in Sonsonate, El Salvador. Incarcerated members of the country’s two most powerful gangs, MS-13 and the 18th Street gang (Mara 18), celebrated mass with members of civic organizations and Bishop Fabio Colindres to mark the first anniversary since the two gangs signed a truce in March 2012.  Brokered with the assistance of Monsignor Fabio Colindres, the truce between the two gangs—which were incubated on the streets of Los Angeles, California, in the 1980s—coincided with a 53 percent drop in the country’s homicide rate.

Photo: Ulises Rodriguez/Reuters

Palestinians push their way to board a bus as a new “Palestinian only” line is made available by Israel to take Palestinian laborers from the Israeli army crossing of Eyal, near the West Bank town of Qalqilya, into Israeli cities. Palestinian workers are being encouraged to use the new line instead of traveling with Israeli settlers on a similar route. The benefits are said to be twofold: Segregated buses, according to Transportation Ministry officials, will “relieve the distress” of the Palestinian workers, and West Bank settlers will be relieved from sharing a bus with people some of the settlers perceive as security risks.

Photo: Uriel Sinai/Getty Images

America’s debate over how best to repair and optimize the nation’s educational system is crucial to the future of the U.S. as a country populated by an informed citizenry, but that vital discussion is also a luxury. These Syrian students are taking classes at the Bab Al-Salam refugee camp in Azaz, near the Syrian-Turkish border. The United Nations Refugee Agency tallied the number of registered refugees and individuals awaiting registration due to displacement by Syria’s civil war at 950,131 as of February 26, 2013. Factoring the increase of that total in the intervening days is a math problem that does little to empower women around the world.

Photo: Hamid Khatib/Reuters

Female and male Marine recruits listen to instructions as they prepare for a swimming test during boot camp at Marine Corps Recruiting Depot, Parris Island, South Carolina. Male and female recruits are expected to meet the same standards during their swim qualification test. All female enlisted Marines and male Marines who were living east of the Mississippi River when they were recruited attend boot camp at Parris Island. The Pentagon cleared female soldiers for combat positions in January, greatly enhancing the career trajectory for female service personnel, and ranking America’s military women among the world’s most empowered.

Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images

A woman and child walk next to graffiti in downtown Reykjavik, Iceland. Many in the EU expected Iceland’s recovery from its 2008 banking collapse to be stronger, given the way smaller economies can bounce back from deep recessions. The International Monetary Fund had originally forecast annual growth of around 4.5 percent from 2011 to 2013. Growth now is under half that. If Iceland’s stall is a harbinger of economic stagnation for Europe as a whole, expect a resurgence of the 2011 Los Indignados protests, precursors to America’s Occupy movement.

Photo: Stoyan Nenov/Reuters

A Malian soldier checks for identification papers from bus passengers at a checkpoint in Gossi. Mali is at the intersection of open rebellion and sustained insurgency. At the arrival of fighter jets and 4,000 French ground troops toward the end of January, Islamist leaders made an orderly withdrawal from major towns and appeared to vanish in the country’s northern desert regions. Unfortunately for peace prospects, rebel groups are believed to be cooperating across the borders of Chad and Nigeria, the Malian government is corrupt and divided, and its army contains pro- and anti-coup factions. Such are the detours on the road to reconciliation.

Photo: Joe Penney/Reuters

An Israeli soldier of the Caracal battalion helps her comrade with her helmet during a 23-kilometer march in Israel’s Negev desert, near Kibbutz Sde Boker. The Caracal battalion, two-thirds of whose members are women, was established in 2004 with the purpose of incorporating female soldiers in combat units. The Caracal patrols Israel’s border with Egypt to intercept infiltrators from the Sinai desert. U.S. Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta recently announced that the Pentagon had lifted a ban on women filling combat positions. You may be unavailable for frontline warfare, but you can tell Congress to step up and reauthorize the Violence Against Women Act.

Photo: Darren Whiteside/Reuters

People throng Singapore’s Vivocity shopping mall. A government white paper revealed that the Southeast Asian city-state’s population may increase 30 percent to more than 6.9 million by 2030, with nearly half the population expected to be foreign-born. Many residents are criticizing plans to accept further immigration, concerned about the added strain on housing, transportation and healthcare and the diminishing identity of the Singaporean community. Singapore is a tiny country, about the size of a football field in Rhode Island, but even if it were an expansive nation of wide-open spaces, those anti-immigration worries would be familiar tropes from sea to shining sea.

Photo: Suhaimi Abdullah/Getty Images

Although the papacy of the Roman Catholic Church is widely accepted to be an until-death-do-us-part position, 85-year-old Pope Benedict XVI is breaking with precedent and resigning while still alive. Benedict—the first pope ever to join Twitter—cited health concerns as motivating his retirement. The former Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger took the Catholic Church’s top job at age 78 in 2005; his last day of infallibility will be February 28. Before he was pope, Benedict spearheaded efforts to weed out sexual predators among the clergy. As pontiff, he contended that condoms fail to present a “real or moral solution” to the AIDS crisis. He also viewed homosexuality as “an objective disorder,” while condemning homophobic violence or speech as “deplorable.”

Photo: Giampiero Sposito/Reuters

A woman raises a knife in protest of Egyptian President Mohamed Mursi and members of the Muslim Brotherhood during a march against sexual harassment and violence against women in Cairo. The rally comes in response to recent cases of sexual assault in both Tahrir Square and Cairo’s Mohamed Mahmoud Street. Some anti-sexual harassment activists suspect that recent attacks—which occurred during political demonstrations—may have been planned in advance. Despite advances in personal security, healthcare and fundamental human rights, much work still needs to be done in the struggle to empower women around the world.

Photo: Amr Abdallah Dalsh/Reuters

Ronnie Chambers, Jr. looks at his mother, Tahitah Myles (obscured), as she collapses during the funeral for his father, Ronnie Chambers, 33, a victim of gun violence in Chicago. Ronnie Chambers was the last of single mother Shirley Chambers’ four children—all shot to death in Chicago over a period of 18 years. Chicago has some of the strictest gun control laws in the country, along with severe income inequity and poverty-stricken neighborhoods where residents are segregated from meaningful jobs and quality public education. Faced with stories like Shirley Chambers’, more and more Americans are pledging to take a stand against gun violence.

Photo: John Gress/Reuters

A member of the “Community Police,” run by local residents of towns to police their neighborhoods, takes part in a night patrol in the town of Ayutla, in the Costa Chica region of the southern state of Guerrero, Mexico. Residents of Ayutla took up arms three weeks ago to patrol and defend their communities from organized crime and gangs that have plagued the region. The Community Police announced it planned to parade in public 30 detainees accused of crimes ranging from theft to extortion, the start of what it calls a “community trial.” Corruption and criminal infiltration during the country’s longstanding war on drugs has eroded confidence in Mexico’s official law forces.

Photo: Henry Romero/Reuters

Ukraine’s former Interior Ministry General Oleksiy Pukach reacts inside a defendant’s cage after a guilty verdict was announced during a court session in Kiev, Ukraine. Pukach had been charged with the murder of opposition journalist Georgiy Gongadze, a well-known reporter who criticized top-level authorities for corruption and fraud. Gongadze was kidnapped in central Kiev in 2000 and found dead in a forest outside the capital more than a month later. Pukach was sentenced to life imprisonment in connection with the death. According to the latest numbers from Reporters Without Borders, 88 journalists were killed while bringing truth to light in 2012.

Photo: Gleb Garanich/Reuters

A Japanese visitor touches the death wall at the Auschwitz concentration camp. A ceremony to mark the 68th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz by Soviet troops and to remember the victims of the Holocaust was held in Auschwitz-Birkenau on Sunday, January 27. In 2005, the United Nations designated January 27 as an annual international day of commemoration to honor the victims of the Nazi era and to develop educational programs to prevent future genocides. This year’s theme is “Rescue During the Holocaust: The Courage to Care.” It’s a theme that never goes out of date, and needs you to keep it alive.

Photo: Peter Andrews/Reuters

U.S. Specialist Jennifer Fifield of the 2nd Battalion of the 12th Cavalry Regiment attends a briefing at the forward operating base of Liberty camp before leaving for a mission in Baghdad’s northwest Sunni neighborhood of Ghazaliya—way back on April 1, 2007. Almost five years after Fifield posed for this portrait, the Pentagon has lifted its ban on women fighting in front-line combat positions. In the past 11 years of nonstop war, the U.S. has deployed nearly 300,000 female soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan. Supporters of the move believe it will increase opportunities for career advancement among women in the armed forces.

Photo: Fabrizio Bensch/Reuters

Men in Bangalore, India, dress in skirts in a demonstration against rape and sexual abuse of women. Activists who met on Facebook for a common cause named their movement “New Socialist Alternative” and are holding coordinated protests across India. The December 2012 death in New Delhi of 23-year-old physiotherapy student Jyoti Singh Pandey from injuries inflicted during a gang rape appalled the world, but India consistently ranks among the world’s countries where women most need your pledge of empowerment. Signs around the men’s necks read: “Men, Don’t Skirt the Issue. Speak Up, Support Women” and “Teach Your Sons Not to Rape.”

Photo: Manjunath Kiran/AFP/Getty Images

Teodora Spanjers, 80, (L) poses with Ginny Bravos, 86, in a swimming pool locker room in Sun City, Arizona. Sun City was built in 1959 by entrepreneur Del Webb as America’s first active retirement community. Webb predicted that retirees would flock to a community where they were given more than a house with a rocking chair. Today’s residents keep minds and bodies active by socializing at over 120 clubs with activities such as square dancing, ceramics, roller-skating, computers, cheerleading, racquetball and yoga. Throw in dodgeball, and the generational divide would blur to almost nothing.

Photo: Lucy Nicholson/Reuters

A man works at an illegal oil refinery in Nigeria’s oil state of Bayelsa. Thousands of people in Nigeria engage in a practice known locally as “oil bunkering”—hacking into pipelines to steal crude then refining it or selling it abroad. The practice, which leaves oil spewing from pipelines and regularly results in fatal pipeline explosions, siphoned off around a fifth of Nigeria’s two million barrel a day production last year, according to the finance ministry. Nigeria is Africa’s leading petro-state, but massive thieving of oil revenues by the country’s elite has placed its populace among the poorest on the planet.

Photo: Akintunde Akinleye/Reuters

A wounded Syrian child sits on a stretcher as he is treated in a temporary medical center. He was injured during a shelling by forces loyal to President Bashar al Assad in Aleppo. The graffiti behind reads: “Liberate Meng,” a small town outside Aleppo that houses a military airport. The 21-month war has displaced more than 2.5 million people inside Syria and sent 600,000 seeking refuge in neighboring countries. The United States contends that Assad can play no future role in Syria, but Russia—Assad’s biggest arms supplier—disagrees. The real question is, will this boy play a future role in Syria?

Photo: Muzaffar Salman/Reuters

A trained bailiff lowers a restrained demonstrator from a tree during a protest against the construction of a road by-pass near Hastings in southeast England. The environmental civil disobedience known as “tree sitting” can be traced back to the 1978 tree-sitting action that led to the establishment of New Zealand’s Pureora Forest Park. For decades, activists have taken up residence in trees in Northern California’s redwood forests and throughout the U.S. Pacific Northwest to prevent logging. Environmentalists in Texas are currently occupying trees in an effort to reroute the Keystone XL oil pipeline, reminding all Americans to exercise their right to go out on a limb to change the world.

Photo: Luke MacGregor/Reuters

Surinamese Maroons— descendants of runaway slaves who formed independent settlements—perform the fire dance during the annual celebration of Black People’s Day, in Paramaribo, Suriname. The celebrations bring the country’s black communities together to express their cultural values. Although Suriname abolished slavery in 1863, and the practice is abhorred at a policy level by every government on Earth, the U.N.-based International Labour Organization estimates that 21 million people worldwide are trafficked in modern-day forced labor. Human rights activists are attempting to eradicate slavery where they find it, and they need you to demand safety for them while they work.

Photo: Ranu Abhelakh/Reuters

Ultra-Orthodox Jewish men take part in a yoga class at a studio in Ramat Beit Shemesh, some 12 miles from Jerusalem. Almost a dozen devout Jewish men meet weekly at the studio, the only one of its kind in a neighborhood where tensions have flared in the past between religious and secular Jews. The studio offers gender-separated classes in accordance with religious beliefs held by the ultra-Orthodox against mixing of the sexes in public. Israel is not alone in coming to grips with minority religious beliefs that conflict with majority mores, especially when the lines blur between religious tolerance and basic civil rights.

Photo: Ronen Zvulun/Reuters

A school bus passes angel paintings set along the route to the Chalk Hill School in Monroe, Connecticut, where the Sandy Hook Elementary School children will attend classes in the year 2013. On December 14, 2012, Adam Lanza, age 20, shot to death 20 children and six adult staff members at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Connecticut. The mass murder has rung in the New Year with heightened calls for a government plan to curtail America’s epidemic levels of gun violence. You can join that discussion, here.

Photo Carlo Allegri/Reuters