The Strip – The New York Times

A weekly comic strip featured in the Sunday Review.

Source: The Strip – The New York Times

Brussels′ Great Mosque and ties with Salafism | News | “Saudi Funded”

The Great Mosque of Brussels is financed by the Muslim World League, which receives most of its money from the Saudi Arabian government. The story of the mosque began in 1967, when Belgium’s state coffers were empty and the nation was looking for access to cheap oil.

Source: Brussels′ Great Mosque and ties with Salafism | News | DW.COM | 21.11.2015

Humans of New York

“I came from Malaysia as part of a work-study program where I worked as an au pair. The company assigns you to an American family, and you take care of the children and do ‘light housework’ in exchange for a place to live and $195 per week. My first year was with a family in Connecticut. They were very nice to me. But when they moved away I was assigned to a family outside of Boston. It was a very difficult year for me. I had no car, no friends, and no activities. I was supposed to have free time while the kids were at school, but the mother would always cut it short so I could do laundry or start cooking meals. She criticized everything I did. One time she asked me to wash winter coats during my free time, and then got mad when I didn’t do it right away—even though it was during the summer. She treated me like an employee, but then gave me extra chores because I was ‘part of the family.’ I even had to take care of the pets. I felt trapped because the company made it extremely difficult to get reassigned. My only other choice was to go back home. But I was lucky, I guess. A lot of my friends in the program had it worse.”

Source: Humans of New York

The Refugees of Roanoke – The New York Times

More than a decade later, none of that has come to pass. Today, Roanoke’s biggest festival is a celebration of diversity called Local Colors. Pearl Fu, the Chinese immigrant who spearheaded its creation, is known for greeting every foreign-born stranger she sees at the grocery store with, “Hi, where you from?” Roanoke is now a place where you can hear a dozen languages spoken at the bus stop at the end of my street.You can also hear a lot of sad stories. Most of the Somalis spent years in camps awaiting U.S.R.P. approval. A Somali Bantu eighth grader I met in 2005 spent the first 12 years of his life in one of those camps, in Kenya. His mother was a widow; his father had been killed when the civil war came to his village in 1992. “Some day a soldier came and said, ‘Give me your money,’ and he did not have no money. So they killed him,” he told me. Here in the United States, he got in a fight at school after an African-American teen chided him for being “too black.” Because he spoke English, he did all his family’s grocery shopping and was responsible for writing their rent and utility checks.

Source: The Refugees of Roanoke – The New York Times