4 Stories That Didn't Get Enough Attention Last Week

Let's learn more about what's going on in the world.

If you find yourself saying, “It’s the same news over and over,” you're not alone. It’s common to read the headlines of major newspapers or flip through the three cable news networks and notice only a handful of topics that are discussed in a number of ways (most of them designed to rankle you). Too often, these “top” or “breaking” stories overshadow some other pretty important world events. If we’re going to be well-read and highly knowledgeable about what’s going on around us, we need to know about those events as well.

Here are four recent stories that got some attention, but not as much as they deserved.

1. The Tonga volcano and tsunami disaster. Certainly you’ve heard about this by now, but allow The Guardian to reinforce how big a deal the natural disaster was: “On Saturday 15 January, at 5:10pm local time, the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai undersea volcano erupted in a blast 600 times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. It could be felt as far as away as New Zealand and Alaska. It prompted a tsunami.” Yikes. Because of its remote location and small population (just over 100,000), Tonga may only garner a blip of our attention. Yet we can’t overlook the magnitude of this incident, nor can we ignore the amazing power that Mother Nature holds over the world. (By the way, if you’d like to help the people of Tonga, consider a donation to this GoFundMe created by the Tongan Olympic flag-bearer, Pita Taufatofua.)

2. Human smuggling and death on the northern border. A Florida man has been accused of smuggling Indian nationals into the United States from Canada. He was found driving two undocumented Indians just south of the border in Minnesota. U.S. border patrol agents then found a group of other Indians who said they had crossed the border and had been walking in the United States for hours as they waited to be picked up. Not long after that, Canadian police found a man, a woman, a teenage boy and a baby frozen to death. They were with the other Indian nationals and had gotten separated as they tried to cross into the United States. They likely faced treacherous terrain and a wind chill hovering around -30F. With so much attention given to our southern border, it seems we have been ignoring the equally dangerous trek taken to enter the United States from the north and the people who try to make a living by taking advantage of desperate migrants.

3. Olympians told to leave their personal electronics at home. All athletes and visitors to the Beijing Winter Olympics must download the My2022 app for daily COVID monitoring and Olympic news. But a cybersecurity group warns that there is a censorship keywords list built into the app, which certainly makes it seems like the Chinese government is going to keep a close eye out for anyone saying anything derogatory about the country. For that reason — and several more cybersecurity concerns — U.S. athletes headed to Beijing for the Olympics are being advised to bring burner phones instead of their own smartphones and to create email accounts specifically for their time in China. Shouldn’t we be a little more concerned about this?

4. The Marathon Biden press conference. Once Trump left the White House, presidential press conferences were once again thought of as snoozers where a president takes a few pre-determined questions from a handful of pre-selected journalists and gives some witty but otherwise unexciting answers. But the most recent White House press conference featured almost two hours of Joe Biden taking questions from just about everyone in the press pool, including young journalists who seemed both shocked and overjoyed at the opportunity. The press conference was at turns entertaining, jaw-dropping and alarming. It is worthy of an entire article from The Critical Reader, and that will be forthcoming. In the meantime, if you’ve got a couple of hours to spare, you can watch the whole thing here.