A grand jury ruled that Darren Wilson should not be indicted for the shooting of unarmed black teenager Michael Brown in July. Protests in Ferguson, where the incident took place, flared up once again. Michael Brown's family called for all police officers to wear bodycameras. Obama called for peace. Within a week, another grand jury ruled that Daniel Pantaleo, the officer who killed Eric Garner by using a headlock, would not have to face trial either, even though a headlock is banned among the New York police. That whole bodycamera argument fell by the wayside; the entire killing of Eric Garner, who was also black, had been filmed by a friend and uploaded to YouTube. Yet still, protestors say, the officer got away with it.
Protests against police discrimination against black people have been going on all over America and beyond in places as far flung as London and Hong Kong. The chant is 'hands up, don't shoot' - Michael Brown's last words, and 'I can't breathe' - Eric Garner's last words.
The Interview, James Franco and Seth Rogen’s film about North Korea wasn’t only annoying for us, but pissed off North Korea so much that Pyongyang hackers got into Sony Pictures and leaked a whole load of private correspondence about all of the celebrities and studio bigwigs who work there. We refused to report on them because, well, they’d been stolen. In the end, Sony were forced to pull the film, amidst claims that they'd given in to terrorism.
Vlogger Zoella was ‘outed’ for using a ghostwriter in her debut novel, the one which sold 78,000 copies in its first week, which is more than any Harry Potter novel. She later admitted ‘Of course I was going to have help from Penguin's editorial team in telling my story.’ And the world went on spinning.
Malala Yousafzai was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in a ceremony in Oslo, Norway along with Indian children's rights activist Kailash Satyarthi , as part of their tireless campaigns to bring education to girls. However, just two weeks later, the Taliban massacred 126 people at a school in Pakistan in seeming retaliation. They had said she had joined ‘Western Satanic forces’ and was seeking to ‘promote Western culture not education’. After the attack, a Taliban spokesman said: ‘We selected the army's school for the attack because the government is targeting our families and females’ Yep, looking to educate women is ‘targeting’ them.
Banger(s) of the month: Even though she didn’t win The X Factor with it, Fleur East’s rendition of Uptown Funk was so good that Mark Ronson and Bruno Mars had to release it five weeks early. It shot to number one. And just FYI, Ed Sheeran won a BBC Music Award for album of the year, but we basically knew that after he was at number one in the charts for a monumental 10 weeks (and counting!)
We were watching: Every single Christmassy film on offer. Definitely not *The Interview. *
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Illustration by Sophia Den Breems
This article originally appeared on The Debrief.