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In recent years, the philanthropic world has increasingly recognized that investing in women and girls is essential for humanity to progress. Governments including Sweden, Canada, France, and Wales have adopted feminist approaches to their international development agendas, while some billionaires like Melinda French Gates—who recently announced $1 billion in spending on women and families over the next two years—have put their support behind organizations working on urgent issues such as reproductive rights in the U.

WNBA star Brittney Griner was famously sentenced to nine years in a Russian prison in Aug. 2022 for carrying cannabis oil. The Texas-born athlete was initially detained in February 2022 and spent 10 months in Russian custody before being released in a U. S.-Russia prisoner swap in December 2022. Speaking out on Thursday, Griner said she was “emotional” and overjoyed to hear about the release of U.

U. S. tech giant Apple Inc. pulled an advertisement set in Thailand after a backlash from lawmakers, influencers and citizens, and calls for a boycott over the short film’s portrayal of the Southeast Asian nation that they deemed offensive. The 10-minute Apple film titled “The Underdogs: OOO (Out Of Office),” the fifth installment in the comedic series that follows a group of co-workers as they navigate workplace assignments and solve issues with Apple products and features, was online for about two weeks.

The gloves are off in Taiwan, where government officials and citizens alike are furiously denouncing J. K. Rowling, after the Harry Potter author weighed in on the culture war overshadowing Olympic boxing. Local politicians and journalists are taking jabs at Rowling, some Harry Potter fans have vowed to boycott her products, and social media users have defended Lin Yu Ting, the 28-year-old Chinese Taipei women’s boxer who has found herself at the center of a raging debate about biology and sports. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] Read More: What to Know About the Gender Fight in Olympic Boxing As boxing events kicked off at the Olympics in Paris this week, the eligibility of Taiwan’s Lin as well as Algeria’s Imane Khelif has been questioned by critics claiming that they are men pretending to be women for competitive advantage.

When, on May 20, Cho Jung-tai finally took his post as Premier of Taiwan, the veteran lawmaker was eager to start enacting an ambitious legislative agenda—including combating online fraud, raising the minimum wage, and green-lighting some 140 infrastructure projects. But just over a week later the island’s legislature passed amendments that enhanced its scrutiny powers over the government to a level that critics deemed a brazen attempt to hobble the new administration of Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) President Lai Ching-te.

China’s plan to introduce a nationwide digital identification system has been met with criticism of government overreach in a country that already closely monitors and censors speech. Some legal experts and users in the world’s largest internet market have openly doubted the efforts’ stated goal of protecting privacy after authorities published the proposal last week.