By Christopher Tan (PZ ’21) Hong Kong summers are unforgiving. Crowds of people clog narrow streets alongside buses and trams. Dense heat, amplified by the region’s notorious humidity, is trapped between canyons of skyscrapers, leaving citizens to seek respite in tiny apartments. If the sun is not out, typhoons and heavy rain showers batter the territory, swaying buildings and flooding...
By Savannah Green (CMC ’20) The topic of citizenship in the United Kingdom and throughout Europe has been consistently discussed since the beginning of Brexit talks. Though the UK’s exit from the European Union is still not finalized, many EU citizens living in the UK (and vice versa) are worried about their status post-Brexit. EU citizenship brings a multitude of perks, including seamless...
By Katya Pollock (PO’21) In March 2019, the U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces announced that they had secured the last ISIS stronghold in Syria, the small town of Baghouz at the eastern border of the country. In the nearly five years since ISIS’s leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, first declared the creation of an Islamic caliphate, the group has controlled a territory as large as Great...
By Savannah Green (CMC ’20) One of President Trump’s major economic issues has been the US’s increasing trade war with China. In 2017, the US carried out an in-depth investigation into Chinese hacking, following reports that the Chinese government was targeting key US industries as a way of gaining new technology. In response to the investigation’s findings, the US government imposed...
By Calla Li (PO ’22) American universities across the country have long regarded international students as a means of not just increasing campus diversity, but increasing revenue too, as international students receive (on average) far less financial aid than their American peers. In the 2017-2018 school year alone, 1.1 million international students representing over 100 countries were...
By Christopher Tan (PZ ’21) “When China awakes, the world will tremble,” Napoleon once famously said. This statement has never rung truer as China faces an economic slowdown after 30 years of unprecedented growth, with global markets anxious about the trickle-down effects of the country’s sluggish economy. With official numbers from the last quarter of 2018 reporting a growth rate of 6.4...
By Katya Pollock (PO ’21) On March 8th, Finland’s center-right coalition government, led by Prime Minister Juha Sipilä, resigned after failing to pass a promised reform of healthcare programs. A dramatic rise in the population’s old-age dependency ratio and recession-level labor force participation rates have tightened financial pressure on the country’s healthcare, pension, child-care, and...
By Rafael Santa Maria (PO ’20) The Philippines officially left the International Criminal Court (ICC) two weeks ago, on March 17, thus ending the country’s participation in the Netherlands-based international tribunal. This comes a year after the Philippine government filed a notice of withdrawal to the UN, and it makes the island nation only the second country to leave, following Burundi’s exit...
By Savannah Green (CMC ’20) Over the past few weeks, several countries have come to the support of human rights lawyer Nasrin Sotoudeh, who was arrested in Iran in June of 2018 for representing women accused of removing their hijabs in public. When Sotoudeh was arrested by Iranian authorities, she was given no explanation and was detained for eight months while awaiting her sentencing. On...
By Ciara Chow (PO ’22) On Friday, March 15, fifty people were killed in a mass shooting (now designated as a terrorist attack) in Christchurch, New Zealand. The gunman opened fire in two mosques. The Christchurch attack is the largest in New Zealand history with a death toll almost four times higher than the country’s previous largest shooting thirty years ago, which killed thirteen...
