Where do refugees come from? Where do they go? Which countries produce the most refugees? Which countries take the most in? Christian Behrens, a German designer who studied at Concordia, answers those questions visually with a series of interactive infographics that grew out of a Potsdam University of Applied Sciences class project on mapping global tendencies. Based on the annual Refugee Report of the UN High Commission for Human Rights, the graphic lets us look at refugee flows from several different perspectives. Which country took in the most refugees in 2008? The US? Nope. Canada? Not even close. Pakistan tops the list, at...

18 October, 2010

A scathing editorial in today's New York Times denounces a US appeal court for having "brushed off" a lawsuit by Canadian Maher Arar. As the paper put it,  Arar "was seized in an American airport by federal agents acting on bad information from Canadian officials," and "held incommunicado and harshly interrogated before being sent to Syria, where he was tortured. He spent almost a year in a grave-size underground cell before the Syrians let him go." Two courts, one in Italy and one in the United States, ruled recently on the Bush administration’s practice of extraordinary rendition, which is the kidnapping...

11 November, 2009