The Story – A Chemical Weapons Attack in Syria During the afternoon of April 4, news broke in North America of an apparent chemical agent attack in Idlib, Syria. Within hours, news agencies and social media streamed horrific videos of adults and children gasping for air and being rushed to hospitals for treatment, where they were…
The Story After the U.S. elections last November, many Canadians half-jokingly prepared for an influx of disaffected liberal Americans fleeing the new Trump regime. And while the Canadian immigration website crashed on the night of the election, it seems that few American political refugees have indeed crossed the border. Rather, Canada now faces a much more…
Editor´s Note: On October 3, 2016, the Colombian people shocked the international community by narrowly rejecting a peace accord with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). After more than 50 years of violence, most observers in Colombia and around the world expected that there would be widespread support for such an agreement, in order…
Happy New Year to PineTreeRepublic readers! As we enter 2017 and approach our second anniversary, it seems like a good moment to continue an emerging annual tradition: the top 10 list of our favourite news articles from the past year. If nothing else, the twists and turns of 2016 demonstrated the importance of high-quality journalism in order to…
Presidential primaries unlike any other. Renewed promise for action on climate change. A refugee crisis that nobody seems to have an answer for. Increasingly brazen acts of terrorism around the world. A vote that may forever change Europe’s course. Through the first half of 2016, the world seemed to spin at an increasingly dizzying pace of change…
The Story If there’s one common theme that underlines politics across the industrialized world in 2016, it is surely the rise of populist movements into the mainstream. Consider the following developments in Europe and North America over just the last month: In Spain, the far-left political coalition Podemos-Izquierda Unida has firmly supplanted the Socialist Party in voting…
A Cuban Conundrum On a sunny day in early February 2014, my partner and I stood at the end of a stone walkway at the entrance of Havana’s Castillo de los tres reyes magos del morro, or “El Morro” for short. We were on a two-week vacation in Cuba, and wrapping up a satisfying afternoon visit of the…
The Story Sometimes, global crises hit without warning. Natural disasters, such as the massive 2010 earthquake in Haiti, or the 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Japan, are still beyond our ability to predict with precision and accuracy (though the social and environmental problems that followed may have been more predictable). In other cases, we miss the…
The Story Three months after stepping into power, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his Liberal Party face one of their first major governance controversies, over their continued support of a controversial $15 billion (Cdn) arms deal to Saudi Arabia. The deal represents the largest contract to export manufactured goods in Canadian history, and will employ an…
At just over a week old, 2016 promises to be a powerful year for stories that will shape our world. We’ve already seen the simmering Cold War between Saudi Arabia and Iran ratchet up a couple levels, and a reminder of the instability North Korea brings to international relations with its test of a purported hydrogen bomb. Meanwhile,…
Pine Tree Republic 