Month: April 2022

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…

“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…

President Joe Biden all but said during his first formal press conference on Thursday that the United States would likely extend its 20-year military campaign in Afghanistan for at least a few more months beyond the May 1 withdrawal deadline set by the Trump administration’s agreement with the Taliban. That’s his prerogative, of course. But…

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 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 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…

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…

The Arctic is now open for business year-round after a large commercial ship sailed the Northern Sea Route from Jiangsu, China, to a Russian gas plant on the Arctic coast, for the first time ever during the month of February, when winter temperatures normally make the icy waterway impassable. The tanker, owned by Russian maritime…

Hong Kong transformed in a year. Starting in June 2019, the city convulsed with protests over a controversial extradition bill. That expanded into a pro-democracy movement that sought to push back against China’s efforts to further erode the city-state’s already tenuous autonomy, and the freedoms that went with it. By June 2020, the power of…

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…