SEALDs, short for Students Emergency Action for Liberal Democracy, was a student activist organization in Japan that provided an important spark to the large-scale protests against then-Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s 2015 “Legislation for Peace and Security” (i.e. the Abe War Law), deemed by the vast majority of Japan’s legal scholars in the field to be unconstitutional.
As many as eleven people around the world are dying of hunger and malnutrition every minute—outpacing Covid deaths—according to a report published Friday by the international charity Oxfam.
US Senator Bernie Sanders was among those welcoming the White House announcement that the United States will limit its role in the Saudi-led war on Yemen by ending support for “offensive operations,” with the Vermont Independent calling the development “a tribute to the work of so many activists over the years.”
In order to achieve a lasting peace in Afghanistan, the United States needs to keep waging its longest-ever war there. That’s the conclusion of a report published Wednesday by the Afghanistan Study Group.
Long-simmering fears of a military-led subversion of Myanmar’s recent steps toward democracy became reality this week as the nation’s armed forces arrested civilian leader Aung San Suu Kyi and announced a one-year state of emergency that transfers power to Min Aung Hlaing, the Southeast Asian country’s top general.
Many Democrats in the US Congress and others hailed reports that the Biden administration is imposing a temporary freeze on arms sales to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, pending a review of billions of dollars worth of weapons deals with the repressive regimes approved during the presidency of Donald Trump.
“I need to be blunt: the world is on the brink of a catastrophic moral failure—and the price of this failure will be paid with lives and livelihoods in the world’s poorest countries.”
Top United Nations officials have called on nearly two hundred member nations—including the world’s wealthiest and most powerful—to help raise tens of billions of dollars in aid for poor countries facing pandemic, ongoing war, and encroaching famine in what will be a “humanitarian crisis year” in 2021.
Human rights defenders this week urged Bangladesh to stop its relocation of Rohingya refugees to a flood-prone island in the Bay of Bengal, warning of “grave concerns about independent human rights monitoring.”
A first-of-its-kind international report shows how wealthy countries are the primary drivers of tax revenue loss each year—contributing to US$427 billion in losses to public funding annually.
