Newsletter Archive

VIDEO: In 1950, 70 percent of the world’s people lived in small towns and the countryside. Today, fewer than half do and that’s got some people feeling left behind. VOA recently visited an Illinois town that’s lost a quarter of its population since the 1970s.

VIDEO: Fifty years ago this week, civil rights icon and Nobel Peace Prize winner Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee. On this week’s edition of VOA’s Plugged In with Greta Van Susteren, HUD Secretary Ben Carson and political strategist Donna Brazile remember King’s legacy and discuss how King might feel about today’s political climate.

This week, a US man was deported back to his native Cambodia, a country he left as an infant. Although Kosal Chhim spent most of his life in the US, his family says he never became an American citizen. The Virginia man, who was convicted of a felony domestic violence charge in 2001, on Thursday arrived back in a country he does not remember.

Banking executive Nabil Attar used to be a frequent business class flyer to Europe, but his last trip was dramatically different. He arrived aboard a packed refugee boat that barely survived its Mediterranean crossing. Today, Attar is back in business — not crunching numbers in his native Syria, but stirring up potfuls of lentil soup and hummus at a newly opened Paris restaurant.

Thousands of young people registered to vote at recent protest marches organized after a school shooting in Parkland, Florida, left 17 people dead. Most were younger than 30, according to a voter registration organization that registers mostly younger voters at concerts and music festivals. Americans can’t vote before age 18 but they can register to vote at 16 in some states. In the 2016 presidential election, millennials and Gen X-ers out-voted the Baby Boomer generation for the first time.