What is the future of abortion in the Americas? We tackle that question–and where the U.S. fits into a changing reproductive health landscape–this week on World Affairs. We begin with a Mexican physician, who provided clandestine abortions in the country for over twenty years. Then, Ray is joined by Colombian attorney, Ximena Casas, to discuss the legal frameworks dictating abortion rights north and south of the U.S. border.

Guests:  

Gregory Berger, documentary filmmaker

Estela Kempis, Mexican physician

Ximena Casas, women’s rights researcher at Human Rights Watch

Host:

Ray Suarez

The recent mass shooting at a supermarket in Buffalo, New York left ten dead, three injured, and a city–and country–reeling. Within hours of the deadly attack, evidence emerged that the 18-year-old gunman’s crimes were racially motivated, explicitly targeting the area’s Black community.

Buffalo is the most recent in a string of high-profile acts of violence inspired by the “great replacement theory,” an extremist doctrine based on the unsubstantiated belief that non-white populations will “replace” and subjugate white majorities across the globe.

Once confined to the radical fringe, replacement theory has now entered mainstream conservative rhetoric, peddled by prominent right-wing figures like Tucker Carlson and J.D. Vance, and shared in online networks from El Paso to Christchurch. On this week’s episode, Ray Suarez sits down with Daniel Byman, a counterterrorism expert and author of Spreading Hate: The Global Rise of White Supremacist Terrorism, to discuss the roots of the global white power movement, how extremism spreads, and what the mainstreaming of violence as a political tactic means for targeted communities–and democracy–in the world today.

Guests:

Daniel Byman, Senior Fellow at Brookings Institution and professor at Georgetown University

Host(s):

Ray Suarez, co-host of World Affairs

When the Biden administration announced that the United States would accept up to 100,000 Ukrainian refugees, hundreds began to show up daily at the US-Mexico border. With a scarcity of appointments at US consulates in Europe, for those who could afford airfare, this circuitous route was their best option. “At the peak of it, there were over a thousand Ukrainian nationals,  enough to fill a shelter in Tijuana,” KPBS immigration reporter Gustavo Solis explained to Ray Suarez. “They would get picked up at the airport and volunteers would be ready. There was even a guy playing music for them – like a welcome party in Tijuana.” Then they would be processed the next day. As you might imagine, that streamlined process isn't the same for most other refugees seeking asylum in the United States. Depending on your country of origin, entering the US at the San Ysidro crossing between Tijuana and San Diego can be quite a bit more complicated...or even impossible.

Guest: Gustavo Solis, Investigative Border Reporter for KPBS

Host:  Ray Suarez, host of World Affairs

If you appreciate this episode and want to support the work we do, please consider making a donation to World Affairs. We cannot do this work without your help. Thank you.

After a thirty year civil war, Sri Lanka rebuilt its economy, with the help of foreign investment. But when the pandemic forced the small island nation to shut its borders, things began to unravel. Now, the war in Ukraine and skyrocketing food and fuel prices are pushing the country into deeper economic turmoil, political unrest, and violence.  

Today, Sri Lanka owes a staggering $50 billion to regional neighbors, like China, and international lending institutions, like the World Bank. And it isn’t the only country in this situation. Ray Suarez talks with Washington Post’s Gerry Shih, and Asanga Abeyagoonasekera, a Sri Lankan geopolitical analyst, to understand why–and how–nations like Sri Lanka accumulate foreign debt, what it means for everyday citizens …and why it can be so hard to pay back.

Guests: 

Gerry Shih, India bureau chief, Washington Post 

Asanga Abeyagoonasekera, senior fellow at the Millenium Project

Host: 

Ray Suarez, co-host of WorldAffairs

"At the end of the day, he believed it would be too great a gift to the regime—too great a gift to Putin—if he stayed away."

Daniel Roher is the award-winning director behind "Navalny," a film that documents Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny's journey from Germany to a Russian jail. Roher was given unprecedented access to Alexei Navalny while he was in Berlin recovering from an attempted assasination, searching for the Russian agents who tried to poison him, and eventually returning to Russia where he was inevitably imprisoned. 

"Navalny" offers an intimate portrait of the man intent on undoing Vladimir Putin and his ongoing search for justice. The film premiered at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival and is now streaming on HBO Max.

Guest:  

Daniel Roher, documentary filmmaker and director of "Navalny"

Host: 

Ray Suarez, co-host of WorldAffairs

For the last century, Finland has walked a diplomatic tightrope between East and West. A former Russian imperial holding and Soviet target, the independent nordic nation boasts a free market economy, EU membership, and regional defense partnerships. Yet, Finland has previously stopped short of formally joining NATO, the West’s major military alliance–maintaining a pragmatic policy of forced neutrality along its 800-mile border with Russia. That is, until Russia’s recent invasion of Ukraine.

How does a country survive the threat of Russian aggression? Ray Suarez talks with Henri Vanhanen, advisor to the Finnish National Coalition Party, about his country’s recent pivot toward NATO membership–both in parliament and the polls–and what it could mean for the future of international security. 

Featuring:

Henri Vanhanen, foreign policy and EU advisor for the Finland National Coalition Party

Ray Suarez, co-host of WorldAffairs

Finland 101, by Ray Suarez

Maybe you’ve noticed how often Finland comes up during the Ukraine coverage, and wondered why? Here’s a quick little history…a thousand pages in a few seconds.

For centuries, the Finns have had to thread their way, as a people, through the conflicts of other big powers in their part of the world. Ethnically and linguistically distinct…they’re not their Swedish neighbors to the west or their Russian neighbors to the east…but they had to fend off both to remain themselves.

For centuries Finland was fought for, or fought over, by Russians and Swedes. As the 20thcentury began, Finland was part of Czarist Russia…then the Czar abdicated and the Empire collapsed. The Finns flirted with Communism, and with monarchy, before becoming a republic with a new president in 1919.

Josef Stalin wanted Finland back for the USSR. The Soviets invaded, shortly after the Nazis bulldozed Poland in 1939. The Finns fought back ferociously. They inflicted heavy casualties. The Soviets eventually recognized Finland’s independence, signed a peace treaty, and permanently seized about a tenth of Finland’s territory, incorporating it into the USSR.

The Finns would remain independent, somewhat free of Soviet domination after the Second World War, but that freedom came at a cost. Finland gave up more territory, and population, and diplomatic freedom of movement. The country lived in a gray area between east and west during the Cold War. Its status even got a dismissive name…Finlandization, used to describe a forced neutrality, an expensive freedom. 

Finland had a market economy, democratically elected governments, freedom of speech, and growing prosperity….all the while staying aloof from the expanding European Union, and certainly NATO, the western military alliance.

When the Soviet Union collapsed, much as Czarist Russia did, Finland had an escape hatch… denounced its earlier treaties, joined the EU, adopted the Euro, but remained outside NATO, sharing an eight hundred mile border with the Russian Federation.

When the British government handed Hong Kong over to China in 1997, it was with China’s promise that Hong Kong’s relative autonomy would be preserved, under the framework known as “one country, two systems.” But in recent years, China has cracked down on the region’s freedoms, especially freedom of press. One example is the 2020 arrest of media mogul Jimmy Lai, founder of the pro-democracy newspaper Apple Daily, who helped catalyze an opposition movement. In 2021 Lai was arrested again, and sentenced to 13 months in jail for participating in a vigil marking the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre.

On this week’s episode of WorldAffairs, World Affairs CEO Philip Yun talks with Mark Clifford, who was the director of Apple Daily’s parent company at the time of Lai’s arrest. Clifford, a journalist, activist, and president of the Committee for Freedom in Hong Kong, has a new book, Today Hong Kong, Tomorrow the World: What China’s Crackdown Reveals About its Plans to End Freedom Everywhere.

Guests:  

Mark Clifford, president of the Committee for Freedom in Hong Kong, journalist, activist 

Host: 

Philip W. Yun, President and CEO, WorldAffairs

Since Russia invaded Ukraine, we are confronted daily with images of atrocities. But what constitutes proof of a war crime in the digital age? It’s a question a new generation of experts is answering. In December, the United Nations Human Rights Office teamed up with lawyers at UC Berkeley to release a new set of legal guidelines for gathering and verifying war crimes. The “Berkeley Protocol” establishes norms for authenticating open source and social media evidence of human rights violations, and it stands to usher in a new era for punishing those who commit these horrors. In the past, war crimes were proven with extensive witness testimony and conventional forensic evidence, often gathered slowly and well after the fact  by government agencies. Now, researchers can use an array of digital tools, including social media videos, satellite imagery, and geolocation, in real time. By codifying professional standards in the field, the Berkeley Protocol aims to shore up the admissibility of digital evidence in court and could change the future of prosecuting these heinous crimes.   

On this week’s episode of WorldAffairs, Ray Suarez talks with Alexa Koenig, executive director of the Human Rights Center and Investigations Lab at Berkeley Law, which has been at the forefront of this new legal frontier in human rights.

When President Biden calls Vladimir Putin a “war criminal” and says that Russia’s war in Ukraine amounts to “genocide,” what does it mean? Do such prounouncements place obligations on the United States? Does it threaten some sort of legal jeopardy for the Russian president? When an artilleryman a thousand yards away sends a projectile slamming into an apartment building full of civilians, is that a war crime? Is the soldier who released the shell more or less responsible than the politician a thousand miles away who ordered the assault on a city? Ray Suarez tackles these questions with a war-crimes prosecutor and a former student organizer who played a critical role in the downfall of Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic, who was the first sitting head of state indicted for war crimes.

Guests:  

Ivan Marovic, International Center on Nonviolent Conflict 

Alex Whiting, war-crimes prosecutor and visiting professor at Harvard Law School

Host: 

Ray Suarez, co-host WorldAffairs

If you appreciate this episode and want to support the work we do, please consider making a donation to World Affairs. We cannot do this work without your help. Thank you.

Even with the heat turned up on Russian oligarchs—and more recently, his own family—Vladimir Putin’s wealth remains one of the biggest mysteries for law enforcement, investigative journalists, and anti-corruption activists.

New York Times investigative journalist Mike McIntire explains to us what his reporting has uncovered about Putin’s strategy for avoiding sanctions, the Western advisors who shield his inner circle from financial scrutiny, and maybe, perhaps, where the Russian President is ultimately hiding his riches.

Guests:

Mike McIntire,  investigative reporter The New York Times

Host:  

Ray Suarez, co-host WorldAffairs

If you appreciate this episode and want to support the work we do, please consider making a donation to World Affairs. We cannot do this work without your help. Thank you.