Tania Aubid began her hunger strike on Valentine’s Day. “Valentine’s Day is about love and having that love for your partner — but for me to have the love, I need to start from the ground up, which is Mother Earth,” Aubid told me. Her hunger strike is in protest of the Line 3 oil…
Category: News
The generational grief of colonization
“In Guam, even the dead are dying,” Chamorro author and activist Julian Aguon writes in his new book The Properties of Perpetual Light. Aguon, a human rights lawyer and founder of Blue Ocean Law, has watched with anguish as his home island, along with the rest of the Marianas archipelago, has been environmentally degraded due…
Japan’s Olympic hopes rest on a successful Covid-19 vaccine drive
Officials in Japan say a successful coronavirus vaccination drive is vital to the country’s ability to host the delayed 2020 Olympic Games in Tokyo this summer. Yet the country has been far slower than many of its peers to begin rolling out vaccines, only approving its first one this past weekend. Now, with just five…
Why Biden’s pledge of $4 billion to help vaccinate the world isn’t enough
The Biden administration has officially committed to Covax, the global effort to fund and deliver Covid-19 vaccines around the world, including to lower-income countries. The administration will commit $4 billion to Covax, releasing the first $2 billion immediately to Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, which is one of the partners in this effort along with the…
Facebook’s news ban in Australia is draconian. But it might not be wrong.
Facebook’s sudden move on Wednesday to cut Australians off from the news (and the rest of the world from Australian news) was as surprising as it was draconian. It blocked Australians from sharing any news links, Australian news publications from hosting their content on the platform, and the rest of us from sharing links to…
Myanmar’s pro-democracy protest movement is strengthening
Myanmar saw its largest nationwide protests since the military coup earlier this month, with hundreds of thousands of people demonstrating in the streets and businesses shutting down across the country. Monday’s protests are the latest in a nearly month-long civil disobedience campaign that erupted in response to the February 1 takeover by Myanmar’s military that…
Biden is allowing asylum seekers caught by Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” program to cross the border
The Biden administration has begun allowing tens of thousands of asylum seekers who were forced to wait in Mexico for a chance to obtain protection in the United States under a Trump-era program to cross the border. Some 28,000 asylum seekers — primarily Cubans, Hondurans, and Guatemalans — have active cases in former President Donald…
Biden is using his economic plan to challenge China
The dire warning implicit in President Joe Biden’s more than $2 trillion American Jobs Plan — which promises to rebuild American infrastructure, create union jobs, and jump-start manufacturing — is that if it fails to become law, China will outcompete the United States for decades to come. Biden has been saying that China is “eating…
The US may still be helping Saudi Arabia in the Yemen war after all
In February, President Joe Biden announced that he was ending America’s “offensive” support for Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen, six years into the conflict that has killed around 230,000 people and triggered the world’s worst humanitarian crisis. Instead, the US role would be limited to “defensive” operations “to support and help Saudi Arabia defend its…
Haitian civil society leaders have a plan for the country’s future. It doesn’t involve the US.
The assassination of Haitian President Jovenel Moïse last week has left a dangerous power vacuum in the country. Three men are currently vying for power: acting Prime Minister Claude Joseph; Prime Minister-designate Ariel Henry, who was set to take office the day Moïse was murdered but hadn’t yet been sworn in; and Senate President Joseph…