The air around Grenfell Tower is heavy, five years after the fire that claimed the lives of 72 residents. It’s heavy with the tears of the families who have gathered at the site to mourn their loved ones, heavy with longing for all the lives that could have been, and heavy with the quiet strength of a community that is still confronting a disaster of unimaginable scale. Jo is standing with her cousin before the memorial wall, pointing out the name of her boyfriend written on a small brown heart along with the other survivors.

(CNN) The southern French port city of Marseille has made headlines in recent months over the deaths of several young people in drug-related shootouts, in what is often referred to as a "settling of scores." A spate of killings this summer, including that of a 14-year-old boy named Rayanne in mid-August, prompted two visits from President Emmanuel Macron in September and October and a promise of billions of euros to tackle the problem.

The last few years have seen a tidal wave of transphobia sweep the UK, vilifying and dehumanising trans people and in many cases, stripping away what little safety they had in the public sphere. Among the most high-profile debates waged has been the question of whether trans people — particularly trans women and transfeminine people — should be allowed to access single-sex spaces for survivors of sexual violence.

(CNN) Schoolteacher Katrina Sam has lived in Lytton in the Canadian province of British Columbia all her life, but a week after a disastrous wildfire, the town she grew up in is almost entirely gone. Lytton itself is a village of just 250 inhabitants, but over 1,000 people live in the surrounding Indigenous reserves, and the population is largely made up of Indigenous Nlaka'pamux people. IR18 -- the reserve Sam is from -- has been entirely wiped out, save for one fireproof home.

(CNN) Dr. Satyendra Kumar Tiwary thinks of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi as superhuman. A leader like Modi comes along "once in 2,500 years," he says, and should be remembered among the greats in India's history, like Mahatma Gandhi, and even the Buddha. "The world will never see another leader like Modi," said the 47-year-old professor of general surgery from Varanasi, which is both Modi's parliamentary constituency and one of the holiest cities for Hindus.

On a snowy afternoon in January, 24-year-old Thanujan Sellathurai delivered a speech in front of a small crowd of protesters from the Tamil community in Geneva. He called for the United Nations, which has several of its agencies headquartered there, to condemn the “brutal atrocity” that had just taken place in Sri Lanka. Authorities at the University of Jaffna, on the northern tip of Sri Lanka, had ordered the bulldozing of a memorial paying tribute to the victims of the Mullivaikkal massacre.

‘This is what democracy looks like.’ These words have long been the rallying cry of the Black Lives Matter movement. They were chanted for days on end in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014 after a Black teenager, Michael Brown, was fatally shot by a police officer. Last summer, they echoed around the globe when hundreds of thousands of protesters took to the streets to demand justice for Black lives following the killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor at the hands of the authorities.

María says she hopes the new law will also result in a wider change of attitude. "My biggest hope is that no more women will have to die [as a result of clandestine abortions], that sex education is taught in every last corner of the country so that women don't have to resort to abortions, and that women will no longer be judged or mistreated by health workers."

Dark-skinned South Asians have always had a complicated relationship with Bollywood. For many of us, the way the industry glorifies and fetishises fair skin makes us question why we are so rarely given representations of people who look like us. Bollywood’s colourism has become an open secret – from its actors endorsing the skin-whitening cream Fair & Lovely (now renamed ‘Glow & Lovely’ following public outcry earlier this year), to the casting of white actors to play Indians, the message is clear.

PARIS (Reuters) - France is guilty of human rights abuses of homeless people and laws guaranteeing a home for all fail to protect the most vulnerable, a U.N. Special Rapporteur said on Friday. France, like most European countries, has seen a rise in homelessness in the past decade, fueled by fallout from the global financial crisis and an influx of migrants from Africa and the Middle East.