Most Muslims in Ukraine are Crimean Tatars who are Indigenous to Crimea, the peninsula in southern Ukraine that Russia invaded and annexed in 2014. It set off the war that ramped up with Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February of 2022.

Many Crimean Tatars fled the peninsula. Some left the country altogether. For those who stayed in Ukraine, this Ramadan, which ends this weekend, is their fourth in wartime. Many say the circumstances have only strengthened their faith.

Tamila Tasheva, a Crimean Tatar herself, and a member of Ukraine’s parliament, was in attendance at the recent Musafir meal.

She said that life has been challenging for her community since the conflict began.

“My parents and mostly my relatives and friends, they live under occupation, and honestly speaking, we don’t speak about politics because it’s dangerous,” Tasheva said. “They live in the territory [in] fear. If you speak something openly, you could [be arrested] by occupying authorities, that’s why mostly people sit silently.”

Tasheva is a strong advocate for Crimean Tatars, and for all Ukrainian Muslims who make up 1% of Ukraine’s roughly 40 million people.

Just a few days earlier, Tasheva helped organize an iftar event attended by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy who expressed his “respect and gratitude to the Ukrainian Muslim community.”

Although the notion of Native Americans in basketball hasn’t fully permeated the mainstream sports consciousness (basketball gyms on reservations are still among the most overlooked in the country by talent scouts), the NBA, Women’s National Basketball Association (WNBA) and other basketball entities have begun to acknowledge native hoopers and their rich legacy more fully.

Rez Ball, a LeBron James-produced film currently streaming on Netflix, is based on Canyon Dreams, an acclaimed book about a Navajo high school team in northern Arizona. The Toronto Raptors unveiled an alternate team logo designed by Native American artist Luke Swinson in honor of the franchise’s annual Indigenous Heritage Day; the illustration depicts two long haired, brown skinned hoopers flowing inside of a basketball silhouette, which doubles as an amber sunrise. And earlier this season, NBA superstar Kyrie Irving – whose family belongs to the Lakota tribe of the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation in North Dakota – went viral for meeting with a group of Native American fans after a Dallas Mavericks game. The eight-time All-Star also debuted Chief Hélà, his pair of indigenous-inspired sneakers, during the 2024 NBA Finals last June.

For Strom and others invested in the Native American basketball community, the sport offers a chance to celebrate Native American history, retain indigenous languages and provide an inviting, accessible space for intergenerational exchange.

Strom is the head coach of the women’s basketball team at Haskell Indian Nations University – the only Native American institution in the country that offers a sanctioned four-year athletic program for Native Americans, and which Strom compares to an HBCU equivalent for indigenous students. For that reason, it’s unlike any other campus in the nation.

More than any institutional accolades or professional achievements, though, the Native American spirit for basketball is most visible at the grassroots level, where significant assists are being made to carry forth a vibrant legacy. For basketballers in Indian Country, it’s a way to stay interconnected by passing generational knowledge on to the next player.

“Without language you lose culture; without culture you lose your people. Kids from this community, their great-great-great-grandparents spoke [indigenous] languages. So how do you count, pass, catch, run in that language?” says Mitch Thompson, co-founder of Bilingual Basketball and an assistant coach with the Seattle Storm.

The program is designed to support marginalized communities by providing free basketball camps that utilize bilingualism and sociolinguistics as part of their core mission to reclaim historically overlooked spaces through basketball.

You might say that the [Republican] party has already succumbed to a culture of misogyny and sexual predation. And in many ways, this is true. Donald Trump, an adjudicated rapist, is the leader of the party. His cabinet is lined with officials accused of the same or similar conduct.

But it’s important to stress the potential for a much darker generational shift in how the party approaches women’s issues. This requires focusing on the young men already in the party and those who will age into politics over the next decade, looking at their views and the media ecosystems in which they operate.

The popularity of Trump with Gen Z men and the success of influencers like Tate suggest a dark and ugly future for the American right. I have argued before that the increasing popularity of Trump and MAGA with young men is indicative of a shift in our politics. It’s one that moves Trumpism from an outlier to the normalized mainstream. It’s an idea that runs counter to the liberal common sense about what should work in a modern, plural society. But it is integral to the nature of authoritarian, anti-liberal politics and the reaction against contemporary progressivism.

There is no law of gravity that dictates a generation must be more open-minded and civilized than those that came before it. Young voters have been enthralled with extremism before. Many young Germans, for example, saw the Nazis as a forward-looking and exciting party. As Rampell notes, there’s real cause for concern that figures like Trump and Tate can harness the anomie and sense of dislocation among young men to press them with ways of building community around noxious but potent ideas of masculine virtue.

The latest Gallup polling shows Americans’ trust in mass media at a historic low, with just 31% expressing “a great deal” or “fair amount” of confidence that news organizations report “fully, accurately and fairly.” Even more alarming, 36% of Americans now say they have no trust at all in the media—a staggering increase from the 6% who felt that way in 1972 when Gallup first started tracking this metric.

While legacy outlets still maintain the prestige, the buildings, the brand recognition, and the access, they’ve lost something far more valuable: credibility with the public. The past few years have made this painfully obvious, as one journalistic failure after another has demonstrated that these institutions aren’t equipped to handle our current moment.

It’s not just the endless “Trump in a diner” profiles that treat fascist supporters as passive victims rather than people with agency, as Brynn Tannehill argued in The New Republic. It’s also the normalization of the absurd—like Peter Baker at the New York Times treating Trump’s unhinged ramblings about annexing Canada as a serious policy proposal worthy of electoral analysis.

Nature abhors a vacuum, and journalism is no different. As the legacy press continues its slow-motion collapse, independent journalists are increasingly doing the heavy lifting of holding power to account.

We see it in how independent outlets were the first to call out the GOP’s anti-trans moral panic for what it was. We see it in how newsletters like Popular Information track corporate political spending and hypocrisy in ways the business press won’t. We see it when former newspaper journalists and editors, freed from institutional constraints, launch newsletters that expose the corruption and cronyism the mainstream press normalizes.

When the New York Times was treating Trump’s Tesla stunt on the White House lawn like a car show instead of corruption, independent outlets were the ones pointing out that having a president use the people’s house to promote his billionaire donor’s private company is, in fact, a serious ethical breach.

As students returned to campuses last fall, they entered a new phase of the struggle for the liberation of Palestine. The encampments were gone, corporate media had turned away their cameras, but student organizing continued in new forms and upon a new and more repressive terrain. Indeed, university administrators had spent the summer months preparing a new arsenal of “security” policies and personnel intended to prevent the appearance of a second student intifada in the fall.

It is difficult to grasp the full extent of this new repressive apparatus at any given university, much less Canada-wide. In order to provide a fuller picture and support ongoing Palestine solidarity organizing, we investigated changes in “security” policy and personnel from June to December 2024 at 17 Canadian universities: Acadia University; University of Alberta; University of British Columbia; University of Calgary; Concordia University; Dalhousie University; University of Manitoba; McGill University; McMaster University; Memorial University; Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (NSCAD); Queen’s University; University of Toronto; Vancouver Island University; Western University; University of Winnipeg; and University of Waterloo. Our research relied on media reporting, social media posts, university websites, and information provided by students and/or faculty at these universities.

Our findings paint a portrait of repressive policies and practices but also include the administrative anxieties provoked by students who have dared to demonstrate what solidarity looks like and what universities could be – places of learning and liberation rather than institutions devoted to corporate donors and deadly imperialist interests. It shows how a longer history of political repression on university campuses, perhaps most evident in the late 1960s, has been reactivated through moments of conflict between universities’ support for imperialism and students’ commitment to anti-imperialism and international solidarity.

The Dutch environmental NGO Milieudefensie (Friends of the Earth Netherlands) formally filed a lawsuit today against ING, the largest bank in the Netherlands, challenging the bank’s climate policies. The lawsuit seeks to compel ING to align its financing activities with the goals of the Paris Climate Agreement. By taking this action, Milieudefensie hopes to set a precedent for holding financial institutions accountable for their role in financing fossil fuel companies and high-carbon sectors that exacerbate the global climate crisis.

“If we succeed, this will be a major breakthrough in achieving climate stabilization globally,” Donald Pols, director of Milieudefensie, said during a press briefing last week. He noted that ING, as one of the 30 largest banks in the world, has a substantial impact on the broader financial sector.

“Milieudefensie is demanding that ING halve its emissions by 2030 and stop financing companies that start new oil and gas projects,” Pols said.

The New Hampshire House of Representatives has approved bills to legalize marijuana, decriminalize the use and possession of psilocybin by adults and double the amount of medical cannabis that state-registered patients can purchase and possess.

On the morning of March 26, members voted in favor of HB 198, from Representative Jared Sullivan (D), which would allow adults 21 and older to possess up to 2 ounces of marijuana flower, 10 grams of concentrate and up to 2,000 milligrams of THC in other cannabis products.

Retail sales of marijuana products, along with home cultivation, would remain illegal. Consuming marijuana on public land would also be prohibited.

The morning is sunny and uncharacteristically mild for mid-March as we tramp through the crunchy remains of snow, which up until a few days earlier obscured the carpet of dead leaves and was crisscrossed with coyote tracks. We stop in front of a small tree with an odd contraption strapped to its trunk. It’s made of a section of white plastic pipe anchored to a piece of lumber by a long bolt that the pipe can rotate around like a propeller blade. The pipe is sealed on the bottom end with duct tape and filled with dog treats.

It’s a puzzle of sorts, one that Raymond designed to test the coyotes’ problem-solving abilities as part of her PhD work at the University of Alberta. To solve it, coyotes need to rotate the pipe with a nose or paw until the treats spill out. She peers into the top of the pipe. “No treats!” An animal has solved the puzzle. She unlocks a motion-triggered trail camera strapped to a nearby tree and begins scanning the videos on its small screen to see who figured it out. After about a minute, she sighs: “It was probably this squirrel.” Squirrels usually get the treats by chewing through the duct tape. Mice sometimes dive into the top of the pipe, eating the treats and then exiting via small holes near the bottom—which Raymond made, presciently, as rodent escape hatches. She returns every few days to restock the treats.

In winter 2024, Raymond deployed the pipe puzzles for four weeks at a time at 26 sites across Edmonton, and 14 more at Elk Island National Park, about 50 kilometers (30 miles) east of the city. By comparing the results from the two locations, Raymond hopes to understand if there are cognitive differences between urban coyotes and their counterparts living in more natural settings. During the first round of deployments, her cameras captured 461 videos of coyotes; 140 of those showed coyotes displaying interest in a puzzle or interacting with it in some way. The experiment is ongoing, but patterns are already emerging. “We’re finding that urban coyotes are a lot bolder,” she says. “They’re much quicker to approach puzzles. They are less fearful of them.”

In 13 of those 140 interactions, the coyotes successfully solved the puzzle. While that may sound unremarkable, Raymond wasn’t initially sure the notoriously wary canids would be willing to interact with the puzzles at all. Notably, each of the 13 instances took place in the city. “It seems that this willingness to approach and explore is critical,” says conservation behaviorist Colleen St. Clair, Raymond’s advisor at the University of Alberta. “You can’t get food from a novel source unless you’re willing to approach it.”

Raymond isn’t sure yet whether the park coyotes were unable to solve the puzzles, or if the animals were just too cautious to persist long enough. The results from this year’s puzzle deployments may answer that question, but there are already clues. Test locations in the city ranged from less developed places—like the middle of golf courses with a lot of forested cover—to areas with more roads, buildings, and people, such as the neighborhood pocket park or a thin, forested strip between industrial yards. Coyotes across the city showed similar willingness to investigate the puzzles. But, tellingly, the majority of coyotes who successfully solved puzzles did so in the most urbanized sites.

Traditionally, scientists have tried to determine what animals’ minds are capable of by devising laboratory experiments to test them in captivity. This approach has the benefit of control: Researchers can keep every aspect of the experiment consistent while testing their subject’s reaction to a single changing variable. But captivity has major, often negative, impacts on animals’ behavior, limiting the conclusions scientists can draw. And the studies provide little insight into how animals actually live their lives in the wild.

Researchers like Raymond, Thornton, and Stanton are helping pioneer a different approach: testing the cognition of wild animals on their own turf, in ways that reflect the real challenges of living in urban environments. As Stanton puts it: “How can we test them in the places that they live, with questions that matter?”

Getting to know the minds of the animals in our midst has several potential benefits. It could show us how to minimize conflict between humans and urban wildlife, and could also answer intriguing scientific questions about how animals think and use their cognitive abilities to adapt to rapidly changing environments. What scientists learn might even change the way we think about the animals sharing our space—and our relationships with them.

In the weeks leading up to Transgender Day of Visibility, book lovers are expected to raise hundreds of thousands of dollars for trans-led charities and organizations, while spreading the word about books written by and for trans and nonbinary people.

Until March 31, the 2025 Trans Rights Readathon will be in full swing. Participants read as many books as they want while raising money for trans-led groups of their choice. Each day, readers are encouraged to support transgender people by writing letters of support, sharing mutual aid fundraisers, signaling to their neighbors and colleagues that they are trans-friendly, or calling their elec ted representatives to alert them to the importance of trans rights in an increasingly hostile political climate.

In 2023, the readathon raised over $230,000 for organizations supporting trans people — through 2,669 participants reading across 43 countries. This year, those numbers are expected to grow, since the readathon is longer than it has been for the last two years. On social media, the Trans Rights Readathon account is sharing ample book recommendations to choose from — including dozens of novels written by trans Black, Latinx, and Asian authors, books that feature disabled characters, and books with romantic relationships between trans people.

This readathon aims to support Transgender Day of Visibility (TDOV), an annual celebration to recognize the contributions and lives of trans people, while raising awareness of the discrimination that they face.

As the readathon continues, here are a few book recommendations by independent booksellers and public libraries, as well as by the Trans Rights Readathon

(archive.is link)

Last fall, Everett, Washington, became the first city in the Western United States to pass a ballot measure recognizing the rights of a river’s watershed — that of the Snohomish River, which curves north and east around the city before emptying into Puget Sound. The municipal law protects the river’s “rights to exist, regenerate and flourish” and is designed to be a tool for residents seeking to prevent or repair harm to the river’s watershed.

“These ecosystems have inherent rights. We are just acknowledging them by giving them legal standing in a court of law,” said Abi Ludwig, co-founder of Standing for Washington, a political action committee that supported the initiative.

The law is the latest attempt in two decades of concerted efforts at the tribal, city and international level to codify a different legal relationship between people and their environment — one in which water, wildlife and land are not just resources to be used and abused by humans. In the U.S., several similar “rights of nature” laws have failed legal challenges, and Everett’s law could meet the same fate: In late January, a group of local developers and business owners filed suit against it. But according to Ludwig, the campaign learned from past experience, and the new ordinance is designed to survive. “Even though it’s this emergent strategy,” she added, “I think people are ready to embrace something new, and to try something new.”