Late one night in 1987, Moroccan policemen arrived at a house in the occupied city of Laayoune, the capital of Western Sahara, and demanded to speak to Aminatou Haidar. It would only take 10 minutes, they told her panic-stricken family; but those minutes stretched into days, weeks, months and then years. The 20-year-old was disappeared without trial to a secret facility not far from her home, where guards tortured her, subjecting her to starvation and threats of rape — the price for painting graffiti and circulating leaflets calling for a free Western Sahara.

The day she was released, more than three years later, she was unable to stand, her body almost broken from the ordeal. But Haidar was not deterred from activism and since has become a leading voice of resistance to Moroccan repression in the territory, regarded as Africa’s final colony. “It made me stronger and more determined, and I was even more conscious of the necessity to lead a struggle for self-determination,” she says.

Now, at age 53, she’s become a voice of restraint — pitted against a new generation of pro-independence activists eager to take up arms and fight back.

No disrespect to Denver and Atlanta fans, but the first NFL preseason game of 2019 was a reminder to some teams that their marquee stars are AWOL.

Two of football’s best running backs — Ezekiel Elliott of the Cowboys and the Chargers’ Melvin Gordon — are among four players who have yet to report to camp, each opting to pull a Le’Veon Bell. The message? “Pay me now or I won’t play!”

Ngân Vuong Bao, a teacher in Danang, Vietnam, started to potty train her daughter when she was 7 months old. “I placed her on the potty and whistled the way every Vietnamese mom does,” she recalls. Within a month or two, Bao Junior had gotten the hang of using the potty for No. 2s. She was fully trained before she hit 18 months.

In Vietnam — where some mothers begin the process within a week or two of giving birth — Bao was seen as a late starter.