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 pipeline project that is being built in Minnesota. Aubid is Anishinaabe, a term that refers to a group of Native…
North Korea’s second missile test in a week is increasing the pressure on President Joe Biden to respond, inching the nuclear-armed state further up the administration’s long list of global challenges to address. Officials in the US, South Korea, and Japan announced that North Korea had launched two short-range ballistic missiles at around 7 am local time Thursday (Wednesday evening in America). The missiles flew nearly 40 miles high and traveled around 280 miles, landing…
“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 to growing militarization. Known as Guåhan to its residents, Guam has been a US territory since 1898, and today, the…
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 months to go before the games are scheduled to take place, Japan’s government is racing against time to get its…
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 World Health Organization and the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI). Another $2 billion will follow over the next two…
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 Australian news sites. It also may be a preview of how the platform will respond to the almost-certain future attempts…
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 saw the country’s civilian leaders detained and ended the country’s decade-long experiment with quasi-democratic governance. Since then, mass demonstrations have…
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 Trump’s Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP), which became known as the “Remain in Mexico” program. It is one of many interlocking…
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 our lunch” for months, promising his plan would “put us in a position to win the global competition with China…
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 sovereignty and its territorial integrity and its people.” There’s just one problem: The line between “offensive” and “defensive” support is…