Obscene hand gestures from around the world. IF YOU’VE TRAVELED LONG ENOUGH, you’ve probably done this yourself: you’ve given someone a thumb’s up, or an “A-OK” sign, or even a “peace” V, and they’ve said, “Whoa, yeah, you should not do that here.”
It can be hard to keep track of which gestures are obscene in which cultures, though, which is why Just the Flight put together this awesome graphic breaking down the do’s and don’t’s around the world. You can click on the image to see a larger version. Tap to Expand Embed the above image on your site Customize size Click to copy. Karens in Kentucky find new life challenging. Telling the Human Story, 3 February 2012 © G.O.Bugbee Hsar Say, his wife Ma Ma Sharal and their daughter Hsar Khel gather for breakfast in their Louisville home.
LOUISVILLE, United States, February 3 (UNHCR) – One rainy winter day in a working class neighbourhood of Louisville, Kentucky, Hsar Say flipped through the classified ads looking for jobs while his wife cooked a fish curry in the kitchen of their damp basement apartment. Above his tattered, second-hand sofa, the flag of an ethnic Karen separatist movement hung as a potent reminder of the long journey that brought him to the United States after years stuck in the Umpium Mai refugee camp on Thailand's border with Myanmar.
"We are lucky to be here, but it's not easy," said the 42-year-old Karen, who was a university student when he fled a crackdown on pro-democracy protests by the Myanmar authorities in 1988, living in jungle settlements before making his way to Thailand. Where's the freest place in the world? A London think tank has the answer. Stunning Portraits Of The World’s Remotest Tribes Before They Pass Away (46 p... Living in a concrete box with hot water pouring from the tap, a refrigerator cooling our food and wi-fi connecting us to the rest of the world, we can barely imagine a day in a life of, say, Tsaatan people.
They move 5 to 10 times per year, building huts when the temperature is -40 and herding reindeer for transportation, clothing and food. “Before They Pass Away,” a long-term project by photographer Jimmy Nelson, gives us the unique opportunity to discover more than 30 secluded and slowly vanishing tribes from all over the world. [Read more...] Spending 2 weeks in each tribe, Jimmy became acquainted with their time-honoured traditions, joined their rituals and captured it all in a very appealing way. What your country’s emoji use says about you.
Significant strides were made in the world of international emoji understanding this week, with the publication of a groundbreaking report.
Swiftkey, a British software company, trawled through “more than 1bn pieces of emoji data” to extract some enlightening trends in global emoji use across speakers of 16 different languages. While the world is still processing the findings, many Canadians are expected to react by texting each other smiling piles of poop. I don’t mean to besmear Canada; it got itself into this situation. According to the Swiftkey report, Canada uses the “smiling poop” emoji more than any of the other countries that were surveyed. Translation table explaining the truth behind British politeness becomes inte... Stop the Scandimania: Nordic nations aren’t the utopias they’re made out to be. ‘What’s there not to love?”
Actor Will Ferrell enthuses in the second episode of NBC’s expat-comedy “Welcome to Sweden.” “Picking blueberries, outhouses, a year off if you have a baby — even if you don’t have a baby, just a year off. Your family around constantly. Lagom — not too much, not too little. I mean, they’re doing it right over here.” Ferrell is in character, but his fervor is all too familiar. It is true, the old Viking tribes excel in many of these areas, but I fear, lately, we non-Scandis have become rather blinded by the Northern Lights. Consider the glowing reports on Finnish schools (the best in the world, says Smithsonian Magazine, though the latest rankings show they are slipping), Norwegian prisons (“superior” claims the Atlantic — it helps that Norway barely has any criminals) and Swedish road safety (New York Mayor Bill de Blasio wants to borrow the model, though I suspect that speeding fines that rise with income wouldn’t be popular in Manhattan).
Finland-based Soldiers of Odin are neo-Nazi White Supremacist led vigilantes. A gang of vigilantes led by a violent neo-Nazi go on night time ‘migrant patrols’ on the streets of Finland, with some talking of ‘ethnic cleansing’ in the wake of the country’s mounting immigration crisis.
The self-styled 'Soldiers of Odin' march in a mob, wearing bomber jackets with their logo on the back. They have vowed to take direct action to ‘protect their wives, girlfriends and children’ after a migrant influx to the liberal Scandinavian country. The gang – which claims to have cells across Europe – says it mobilised after a rise in migrant-related crime over the past 12 months because the Finnish government has ‘screwed everything up’. MailOnline gained exclusive access to the gang's leadership and visited its secretive headquarters – which was packed with Nazi memorabilia and White Supremacist propaganda. Scroll down for video Determined: Jari Peltoniemi pictured at the headquarters of the Kemi 'division' of the Soldiers of Odin. Many local people find the group intimidating.