If you can get to Kyoto in April, you should. The cherry trees bloom in mid-March and usually reach their peak in early April. But even if you miss Sakura season, you really need to see this place. The former Japanese capital is filled with ancient temples and shrines. This is also the place to go to learn how to make sushi.

For "Daze of Justice," his first film, Siv says he was drawn to the idea that people of his mother’s generation, who had long kept silent, were now seeking justice. What they find, and what the audience discovers over the course of the film, is that for victims of war, justice is often illusive, like an exotic animal one hears of but rarely sees. In another scene from the film, Siv’s group of survivors sit under a veranda alongside Pheng and a crowd of others - presumably victims or their descendants - as they watch a screen depicting the court proceedings happening just inside. 

In recent months, the impoverished Southeast Asian country has been enmeshed in a series of strikes involving garment workers who stitch clothes for Western brands. Workers are demanding a doubling of the minimum wage, saying they can’t live on their current $80 monthly income. Late last week the government responded with a violent crackdown. Elite units wielding Chinese-made weapons, batons, and steel pipes chased protesters through the streets. Five were killed and dozens were injured.

Through the 1970s, a dark tide of blood and memory washed over their nation and has stained every generation that followed. While the name most associated with this massacre is Pol Pot, the truth is that many collaborated to exterminate the population. One such man, Kaing Guek Eav (known as Duch), was a central force behind the Khmer Rouge prisons M13 and S21, where thousands of Cambodian citizens lost their lives to a government gone mad. 

On February 5, after lying in state for almost four months, Norodom Sihanouk -- the king who abdicated twice, led his country into the horror of the Khmer Rouge and then out of that darkness -- was cremated on an ornate funeral pyre inside a 15-storey-high crematorium, while 100 guns fired a salute and 90 Buddhist monks, one for each year of his long life, chanted shlokas around his flower-bedecked coffin.

On the 900-mile trek of mostly desert that stretches between Eritrea and Egypt, hunting for humans has become routine. Eritrean refugees who have fled their homeland fall prey to Bedouin or Egyptian traffickers. The refugees are held for ransom. Those with relatives abroad who can pay for their release might survive. Those who do not are often killed. The United Nations confirms that some are harvested for their organs — their livers and kidneys sold on the black market — while others, the young and able, are sold off.