In an extraordinary escalation of his bid to claim Greenland, US President Donald Trump has threatened eight European countries – Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Great Britain, France and Germany and the Netherlands – with a 10% tariff on all goods coming into the United States from February 1 until he is able to buy the semi-autonomous Danish territory. That tariff will then increase to 25% on June 1. On the one hand, Greenland is potentially rich in raw materials and rare earth minerals, highly desirable for US tech giants who…
Posts published in “Opinion”
Amid global tensions involving Venezuela and Iran, there is hope that the scheduled meeting between US President Donald Trump and his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping in Beijing in April 2026 could arrest America’s aggressive and predatory policies. A possible Trump-Xi détente could also reduce risk-taking in the Taiwan Straits, and push China to take a different position on the Ukraine war. In 2025, Trump accepted an invitation from Xi to visit Beijing in April 2026. The call, as US media reported, was initiated by Xi. This was preceded by a…
WASHINGTON — The first year of President Donald Trump’s return to the White House was defined by clashes with the judiciary branch, as the president and his administration pushed forward with an aggressive immigration agenda. In the past year, the Trump administration has aimed to drastically change immigration policy in the United States, including by stripping millions of immigrants of their legal status and attempting to redefine the constitutional right of birthright citizenship. The moves have often run directly against the judiciary branch. Federal judges briefly stalled the Trump administration’splans to deploy…
King called for an aggressive federal effort to reverse racial inequality. Instead, we’re getting one to entrench it. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s words from his “Beyond Vietnam” speech still ring true. “When machines and computers, profit motives, and property rights are considered more important than people,” he warned, “the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.” Those words, delivered in 1967, still summarize today’s political moment. Instead of putting the lives of working Americans first, our leaders in Congress and the White House…
CARACAS, Venezuela. It was 1:58 a.m. on Jan. 3 when a thunderous roar made the windows of my apartment in downtown Caracas shake. Are the New Year’s celebrations still going on? Is a storm coming or is it an earthquake, I wondered. Despite multiple threats from the United States against Venezuela, I couldn’t believe that bombing was possible; not like this, not now. As people say in Venezuela, “It’s one thing to call on the devil, and another to see him actually arrive.” As the missiles began to fall one…
Several annual international climate reports released this week indicate that relentless human-caused warming continued in 2025, especially in the oceans and at the poles. For the third year in a row, Earth’s average temperature ran close to 1.5 degrees Celsius hotter than the climate that sustained human civilizations as the 20th century began, before fossil-fuel pollution started damaging the atmosphere. Avoiding more than that level of warming is also the key long-term temperature goal of the 2015 Paris Agreement. Research shows that warming by more than 1.5 degrees Celsius above the baseline…
Decades of water depletion, dam building, and repression of scientists and environmentalists have driven Iran toward ecological crises that are fueling the protests rocking the country. The anti‑government protests sweeping across Iran, from major cities to rural towns, are fueled by anger over economic collapse and political repression. But beneath the headlines of currency devaluations and street clashes lies a deeper, more permanent driver of dissent: ecological calamity. Decades of ignoring scientists, persecuting activists and greenlighting corrupt development schemes have triggered a water crisis so severe that President Masoud Pezeshkian…
One year after Donald Trump’s second inauguration, a pattern emerges. Across dozens of executive orders, agency memos, funding decisions and enforcement changes, the administration has weakened federal civil rights law and the foundations of the country’s racially inclusive democracy. From the start, the U.S. was not built to include everyone equally. The Constitution protected and promoted slavery. Most states limited voting to white men. Congress restricted naturalized citizenship to “free white persons.” These choices were not accidents. They shaped who could belong and who could exercise political power, and they…
That spending comes even as real estate values are dropping For Detroit homeowners over 65 who overwhelmingly live on fixed incomes, unexpected costs – increases in grocery prices, rising health care premiums or an emergency repair – heighten their risk of financial instability and can even lead to them falling into poverty. I am a policy researcher at Poverty Solutions at the University of Michigan. Our initiative uses action-based research, an approach that seeks to understand real-world problems and inform policy changes that could make life work better for people…
The U.S. Department of Education, for now, is backtracking on plans to garnish wages and seize tax refunds of student loan borrowers in default, the department announced Friday. Less than a month after the agency said it would begin garnishing wages by sending notices to roughly 1,000 borrowers in default the first full week of January, the department said that the temporary delay would allow it to implement “major student loan repayment reforms” under Republicans’ tax and spending cut bill that President Donald Trump signed into law in 2025. The delay…