Author: Reporter

Memorial Day is a U.S. holiday that is supposed to be about mourning the nation’s fallen service members, but it has come to anchor the unofficial start of summer and a long weekend of travel and discounts on anything from mattresses to lawn mowers. Iraq War veteran Edmundo Eugenio Martinez Jr. said the day has lost so much meaning that many Americans “conflate and mix up Veterans Day, Memorial Day, Armed Forces Day, July Fourth.” Social media posts pay tribute to “everyone” who has served, when Memorial Day is about those who died. For him, it is about honoring...

In 2020, after a summer of protests rocked U.S. cities, the words “Black Lives Matter” went from the rallying cry of racial justice demonstrators to words lining the very roads along which they marched. After the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery, towns and cities nationwide commissioned artists to paint BLM street murals in solidarity with the reckoning on police brutality and racism prompted by the unprecedented, multiracial mass rallies. Five years on, many of the murals are still maintained by activists and community groups, while wear and tear, construction and vandalism spelled the end of...

Eunju Kim, who escaped starvation in North Korea in 1999, was sent back from China and fled a second time, told the United Nations on May 20 that the country’s leader must be held accountable for gross human rights violations. Gyuri Kang, whose family faced persecution for her grandmother’s religious beliefs, fled the North during the COVID-19 pandemic. She told the General Assembly that three of her friends were executed — two for watching South Korean TV dramas. At the high-level meeting of the 193-member world body, the two women, both now living in South Korea, described the plight...