MITRA-MANDAL- PAGE: Today@VOA: Yazidi sex slave tells her story

Informing, engaging & connecting the people of the world.

November 28, 2016


VOA EXCLUSIVE: A shortage of fighter pilots has become so dire that the U.S. Air Force is struggling to satisfy combat requirements abroad . The Air Force is now training about 135 more pilots than two years ago, but that effort is undercut by the number of fighter pilots who have chosen to leave the Air Force, resulting in too few squadrons to meet the combatant commanders' needs.

On This Day in American History

On November 28, 1942, at the prior urging of U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, the first Ford bomber, the B-24 Liberator, rolls off the assembly line in Ypsilanti, Michigan. The government makes Ford and America's other automakers an economic offer they cannot refuse. For participating in the war effort, automakers are guaranteed profits regardless of production costs.

Cambodians working in Silicon Valley — generally considered the technology capital of the world — pride themselves in contributing to the digital revolution, but sometimes the culture shock gets to them. More than one-third of Silicon Valley workers are foreign-born, yet some struggle with the realities of being an immigrant in the tech capital of the world.


'When IS lost Kobani, I was handcuffed and raped by four men.' In the summer of 2014, Khalifa, then a 20-year-old Yazidi mother of one, was kidnapped by the Islamic State terror group and sold as a sex slave. In the year that followed, she was bought and sold several times, and endured other unimaginable horrors. She tells her story to VOA in Iraqi Kurdistan.

Hazara refugees — an ethnic group some believe is descended from Genghis Khan — can't work, enroll in school, or travel in Indonesia, where the government does not recognize refugees. Boredom is an overwhelming reality as the refugees wait to be resettled some place like Germany or the United States. Reporting from Indonesia, VOA learns the refugees are finding ways to put all of those empty hours to good use.

VIDEO: Hope Refugees United is a soccer team with something to prove. It started with young men kicking around in the Greek refugee camp they call home. But now, as VOA reports from Athens, the players are dreaming big. With the help of an influential friend, they're getting ready to compete in a league with other Greek teams.


McIntosh College. St. Catharine College. Bethany University. Most Americans have probably never heard of these schools, but they have one thing in common: they've all closed over the past 10 years. Experts warn yearly closings of small colleges could triple in 2017 because it's hard to make the grade when bigger schools offer more variety for the same cost.