Safiyyah's blog

A cold reality has been revealed. As humans and the dominating species of the world, we experience many luxuries that other species cannot, simply due to our intelligence. For example, we can roam many parts of the world freely due to us destroying the natural order that is the wilderness and making places suitable for human life to thrive. In place of forests and natural greenery, we now have concrete jungles we call cities. It is a wonderful thing to see how far humans have come since the stone ages but at what cost? Moderation doesn't seem to exist when greed takes over. Humans have already cleared half of the world's rainforests and we have driven many species to extinction. These animals are gone forever and never coming back. Climate change and habitual destruction are both consequences of our doing which is leading to our planet's demise.  When explaining the severity of the situation in his documentary: A Life on Our Planet, David Attenborough said, "We rely en

Credits Greg Johnson Penn Today There is a missing perspective in COVID-19 news and that is of women.  Women have been left out of many things over the years. Although there is now more equality between genders than there was 50 years ago, we have not reached total equality yet. The gender pay gap still exists. There is an enormous und errepresentation of women in the news. Take the coronavirus, for example.  A report commissioned by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, "uncovers a substantial bias towards men’s perspectives in both newsgathering and news coverage of the pandemic, spanning across all regions." It demonstrates the gravity of the exclusion. Across the globe, women have been left out of crucial decisions related to the coronavirus, so what happened to equality? Statistics from AKAS analysis show that in England, there is not one woman in the COVID-19 response decision-making bodies. Countries like the US and Nigeria follow closely with the majority of those

France-Presse - Getty Images Who are the Uighurs?  They are a Muslim minority who live in Xinjiang, an autonomous region of China located in the northwest. In Xinjiang, there are around 11 million Uighurs. Xinjiang has been controlled by China since it was annexed in 1949. However, many Uighurs still proudly identify their homeland by its previous name, East Turkestan.  In 2017, the Xinjiang Government passed a law prohibiting women from wearing veils and men from growing long beards. Many mosques have been destroyed and it is estimated that over 1 million Uighurs have been imprisoned in camps since 2017, in at least 85 identified camps within Xinjiang. In case you're unaware, China has been accused of keeping the Uighurs in concentration camps but they have only admitted to keeping them in "re-education centres" as they believe that the Uighurs hold extremist views and are a threat to security. Their reasoning comes from attacks in 2013 and 2014 which Uighur militants cl