Inside the U.K. houses of parliament, the grown-ups were at work. Outside, thousands of others — many of whom were not old enough to vote — were doing their best to make sure business was anything but usual. With their chants echoing down the streets, they were among an estimated 1.6 million students in over 120 countries who left school on March 15 in protest of adult inaction on climate change. “It shocks me how great a length we have to go to be heard,” said 16-year-old Miranda Ashby, who’d traveled more than two hours to London with roughly 50 of her classmates. “We are protesting now because if not now, when?”

The school climate strikes started with teen activist Greta Thunberg standing vigil outside Sweden’s parliament one Friday last August. “When I first started this strike, I didn’t really expect anything,” Thunberg told TIME on March 14, shortly after Norwegian lawmakers nominated her for the Nobel Peace Prize.

Thunberg’s idea has grown into a global movement; the March 15..

New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has garnered international praise for her empathetic but defiant response in the wake of the terror attacks on two mosques in the city of Christchurch that shocked and devastated the country.

Since the shootings killed 50 and injured dozens, Ardern has expressed the grief of the tiny island state that has prided itself on being an open and tolerant society. She has shown compassion and empathy for the survivors and the families of those killed while being vocal in her determination to deny the gunman what he had most desired – notoriety.

Ardern said she would do everything in her power to deny the gunman a platform to elevate his white supremacist views. “You will never hear me speak his name,” she said in parliament

New Zealand’s first female prime minister and at 38 the world’s youngest female head of state, Ardern has led calls for a united global front to fight rising white extremism.

TIME addressed a question to Ardern during a press c..

(MILAN) — A bus driver in northern Italy abducted 51 children and their chaperones Wednesday, threatening them over a 40-minute ordeal before setting the vehicle on fire when he was stopped by a Carabinieri blockade.

Officers broke glass windows in the back of the bus and got all the passengers to safety without serious injury before the flames destroyed the vehicle, authorities said.

As he was apprehended, the driver said he was protesting migrant deaths in the Mediterranean, Commander Luca De Marchis told Sky TG24.

De Marchis told Sky TG24 that the driver, an Italian citizen of Senegalese origin in his 40s, threatened the passengers, telling them that “no one would survive today” as he commandeered the bus carrying two middle-school classes to a nearby gym in Cremona province, some 40 kilometers (25 miles) from Milan.

ANSA quoted one of the students as saying the driver took all their phones and ordered the chaperones to bind the students’ hands with cable ties, threatening to sp..