By Joost Gerretschen While UCR students were learning how to contribute to the energy transition and the mitigation of the ongoing climate breakdown, a denial campaign led by a Dutch foundation leaked. DeSmogBlog, a UK NGO that reports on fossil fuel public relations efforts, came upon on a self-proclaimed “European Declaration” which will feature three…
Do You Want to Earn Money for Participating in Democracy?
by Margje Camps I am not going to lie to you, this slogan sounds very appealing and more than a bit deceiving at the same time. Yet I must ensure you, this job advertisement could very well exist. In the last few weeks, a central theme in newspapers, television programmes, and on the internet has…
The Hanoi Summit
by Jedidja van Boven On the 27thand 28thof February, the DPRK–USA Hanoi Summit Vietnam took place in the Vietnamese capital. Commonly known as the Hanoi Summit, the thoroughly documented meeting between Kim Jong-Un and Donald Trump marks the second meeting in which the denuclearization of North Korea was on the agenda. Whereas the 2018 meeting…
Drag Queen Fairytales: A Media Phenomenon
by Jedidja van Boven Promoting reading through story time hour and introducing more inclusive programming in American public schools- how to combine the two? The answer is the phenomenon known as Drag Queen Story Hour, an initiative launched in San Francisco in 2015. It invites drag performers to read children’s books in local libraries and…
Navigating the Brexit-fog: An Insider’s Experience
by Jedidja van Boven & Charlotte Daemen Now that British Prime Minister Theresa May is working on a revised deal while attempting to make last-minute changes, Brexit has faded slightly from the spotlight in current world news. A new deal on various Brexit options needs to be finished by the end of the month as…
#Pelosiclap: White-clad Women and the Shutdown
By Jedidja van Boven A Polar Vortex bringing a cold so extreme that it has claimed 21 lives, the crumbling of the benchmark INF treaty on missiles with Russia, and new aspiring presidential candidates left and right… With all these dramatic headlines coming our way from the United States, it’s easy to brush over the…
The Brainless Soldier
By Amée Zoutberg Looking back on 2018, I feel that one of my greatest lessons learnt came about a month after receiving my UCR diploma. Which was great. Really. I painfully discovered that in three years of sacrifice and voluntary enslavement to the academic system (for that sweet, sweet 3.5 GPA), I had in no way…
California: Camp Fire and Cannery Row
by Jedidja van Boven The end of 2018 is fast approaching, and it feels like every year gets more intense, with crazier headlines, angrier politicians, and biggerhashtags. 2018, too, was already a record year in many ways- and not always in the good sense of the word. For example: a record total surface area burnt…
The Craziest Lawsuits EVER Filed (You Won’t Believe No. 3!)
by Jedidja van Boven The field of law seems to be dealing with some sort of image problem. It’s usually depicted as a stuffy, boring discipline where old people in ill-fitting blazers discuss fraud and tax evasion. Sometimes, however, exceptions pop up in the international news scene. There have been weird lawsuits all over the…
Pittsburgh and the Polish Sun
by Jedidja van Boven The American daily newspapers were still being flooded with stories on migrant caravans and Saudi journalists when a new report came in on 27 October: The Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, had been the site of a hate crime that cost 11 lives. Classified as the worst anti-Semitic attack…
Cold Cases: The Law of Winter and The 1974 Disappearances
by Jedidja van Boven The Bellingshausen station, a Russian outpost on King George Island, Antarctica, doesn’t exactly make headlines often. However, when researcher Sergey Savitsky, stationed at the isolated facility, was charged with attempted murder of a colleague last week, the media started paying attention to the most remote location where crime reports could possibly…
When Donald Trump and Kim Kardashian Collide
By Judith Brouwer I will admit that I am a sucker for bad reality TV. However, if I ever imagined an episode starring Donald Trump and Kim Kardashian, I would have thought that it would be a vastly different arrangement than them discussing prison reform in the Oval Office. Tracing back Trump’s road to the…
The Silent Crisis Across Indian Country: The Murdered and Missing Indigenous Women
By Roos Saat Disclaimer: First Nations is the official term used to refer to Indigenous people from Canada, while Native American refers to Indigenous people from the United States. The first time I noticed the small poster on a bathroom door at a gas station a few kilometers outside of Vancouver, I didn’t think much…
‘’Amoral and Idiotic’’: Republican Heroism or Strategic Ploy?
by Jedidja van Boven In the words of a former White House official: it’s open season on the president. A sudden op-ed letter, written by an anonymous senior administration official working for the Trump administration, was published by the New York Times last Wednesday in a frantic government-press clash that is “unprecedented’’, as stated by…
Feminism, Femininity, and Francization: the #BalanceTonPorc Controversy
by Jedidja van Boven When world-famous tennis player Serena Williams was forbidden to wear her black ‘catsuit’, designed to prevent blood clots after her pregnancy, to the French Open in 2019, online comments were quick to defend Williams against tennis federation president Bernard Giudicelli, who argued that “one must respect the game”. Some people were…
Do Aliens Even Matter in this Economy?
By Dana Zoutman This February, Elon Musk launched a super rocket to send a Tesla car into orbit around Mars. Bowie’s “Space Oddity” will be playing throughout its journey [1]. When someone on Twitter asked him why he was planning to undertake this seemingly useless mission, his response was simply that he loved “the thought…
Zondag met Lubach
Comedy, journalism, or social activism? By Heleen Heijungs Last Sunday night, Dutch comedian Arjen Lubach launched a campaign against Facebook, urging users to deactivate their accounts [1]. Over 29,000 Facebook users have said they will participate in the event, with another 73,000 indicating they are ‘interested’. In a similar call for action in October 2017,…
A Good Time for Optimism about North Korea?
By Eric Zhang In late January, the world’s attention was drawn towards what was deemed by many as a possible turn of events in Korean politics. Mr. Kim Jong-un has for the first time addressed Moon Jae-in as the president of South Korea in his 2018 New Year speech, and proposed a senior-level talk about…
Everything you need to know about the meeting between Trump and Xi
By Eric Zhang On 6 November, Donald Trump went on the first state visit to China of his presidency, and it is considered the most important stop in both strategic and economic terms in his visit to five Asian countries. Let us take a look at what the most pressing and pertinent topics were in…
The Politics of Passion – the Catalonian Referendum
By Eric Zhang This October has not been a peaceful month for Catalonia and Spain. On October 1st, Catalonia held a referendum as to whether it should become an independent country. The majority of the vote supported independence, but the turnout rate for this referendum was only 43%. The Spanish king addressed the nation two…