- The human rights situation in Afghanistan continued to deteriorate in 2023 as the Taliban committed widespread human rights violations, particularly against women and girls. Afghanistan remained the only country where women and girls could not access secondary and higher education and were banned from most employment with international nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and the United Nations (except in health care, nutrition, and primary education). Women also faced significant barriers to freedom of movement and speech. Human Rights Watch has concluded that the pattern of abuses against women and girls in Afghanistan amounts to the crime against humanity of gender persecution.
- Brave New World (Wikipedia)
Brave New World is a dystopian novel by English author Aldous Huxley, written in 1931 and published in 1932. Largely set in a futuristic World State, whose citizens are environmentally engineered into an intelligence-based social hierarchy, the novel anticipates huge scientific advancements in reproductive technology, sleep-learning, psychological manipulation and classical conditioning that are combined to make a dystopian society which is challenged by the story’s protagonist. Huxley followed this book with a reassessment in essay form, Brave New World Revisited (1958), and with his final novel, Island (1962), the utopian counterpart. This novel is often compared to George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949).