As lawmakers consider how to prevent future violence in the vein of January’s attack on the US Capitol, the debate has largely turned on one point: whether the US should create a new criminal law penalizing acts of domestic terrorism. There are existing federal laws that criminalize domestic terrorism. The Patriot Act, which was enacted in the wake of 9/11, defined domestic terrorism as criminal acts that are “dangerous to human life” and are “intended to intimidate or coerce a civilian population or to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion” or “to affect the conduct of a government by mass destruction, assassination or kidnapping.” Experts say…

If the first meeting between the Biden administration and Chinese officials last week underscored anything, it’s that the US and China are unlikely to be friendly in the years to come. The two sides’ views of how the world should run are diametrically opposed — and competition more than cooperation will guide how Washington and Beijing interact for a long time. US Secretary of State Tony Blinken told his Chinese counterparts at the meeting in Anchorage, Alaska, that the Biden administration wouldn’t accept an international system that runs on Beijing’s concept of power, which he described as “a world in which might makes right and winners take all.” That, the…

North Korea tested its first missiles since President Joe Biden took office, launching two short-range projectiles last weekend off the country’s west coast and into the adjoining Yellow Sea. But you won’t find the Biden administration threatening “fire and fury” any time soon. In fact, two senior US officials waved off suggestions that the test was a big deal or that it was meant as a direct challenge to the new US president. “We’ve been in administrations where the North Koreans have really tested with provocative actions: nuclear tests, long-range systems,” one of the officials told journalists about two hours after the Washington Post first reported on the launches. “I…

A massive container ship stuck sideways in Egypt’s Suez Canal has been blocking one of the world’s busiest waterways for over 24 hours, disrupting global trade and launching a tidal wave of memes on social media. On Tuesday morning local time, the Ever Given, a 1,312-foot-long container ship capable of carrying more than 220,000 tons, was traveling from China to the Netherlands through the canal when Egyptian authorities say a dust storm brought low visibility and heavy winds that caused the ship to run aground. With the bow of the ship touching the eastern wall of the canal and the stern against the western wall, the vessel completely blocked the…

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 harmlessly in the Sea of Japan, outside Japan’s exclusive economic zone, which is considered an extension of the country’s sovereignty out into the waters. This test was far more provocative than North Korea’s test of…

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 tribes found in parts of Canada and the US, and comes from what she describes as “a little village called East Lake, Minnesota.” When I spoke to her, her hunger strike was on day 33.…

“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 Department of Defense occupies roughly 30 percent of its land — a share that’s only growing. Most recently, the Pentagon decided to relocate roughly 5,000 Marines from Japan to Guam as part of a larger…

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 population vaccinated. In November, the American pharmaceutical giant Pfizer and the German biotech firm BioNTech reported the results of the phase 3 trial of their Covid-19 vaccine, which found it to be more than 90…

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 years, an effort to spur other countries to contribute more money. The announcement came during President Joe Biden’s attendance at the Group of Seven (G7) meeting of the world’s biggest economies, where the pandemic is…

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 to regulate its business — not just in Australia, but all over the world. Now that we’ve had a few days to see how it’s played out, it seems like the general consensus from media…