Dear Reader,

This past weekend was the Asian American Journalists Association's annual convention. Instead of being in Minneapolis to celebrate our AAJA Awards Honorable Mention, I have been making the most of my circumstances to spend more time with my family in Hong Kong.

My aunt recently shared in our family WhatsApp group chat the end credits of a quarter-century-old episode of the Hong Kong documentary series Stories from Afar, which captured the daily lives of the Chinese diaspora where one would least expect to find them. Among the credits was my mom, a graphic artist for the series!

To give you a sense of how groundbreaking Stories from Afar was at the time, the very first episode in 1998 began in the ruins of Sarajevo, just two years removed from the longest siege of a capital city in modern warfare, still without running water.

And yet, the camera crew was still able to locate one Hongkonger: Ricky, who had moved to a battered apartment complex just a few months prior, here to make a quick buck.

At the turn of the century, Hong Kong was experiencing the beginnings of a remigration wave: some of the 600,000 people who had left the city a few years before its handover to China in 1997 were making their way back, some for economic opportunity, others because of homesickness. But still, everyone was on the move, and the show was determined to leave no member of the diaspora behind.

Narrated by Hong Kong’s “Master of Drama” Chung King-fai — whose accomplished career also included stops at Oklahoma Baptist and Yale — the first season of the fan-favorite series alone brought viewers from Rwanda to Prague, from Brazil to Lebanon. It was rare at the time for a single broadcaster to embrace human-interest stories on such an international scale; it is even rarer now, given how our world and our institutions have become more insular and jingoistic.

As I was rewatching the show on YouTube, I realized two things: By becoming an international newsroom leader, I am now carrying the legacy of my mom and her colleagues. At the same time, having spent eight years in the States alone, I have found myself becoming one of the many stories from afar.

A lot has changed since the series first aired: the TV station that produced it has since gone off air, Hong Kong was hit with another emigration wave, and even Chung himself passed away earlier in the month. But the message stands: there is more that unites us than divides us, no matter how far our circumstances and ambitions take us.

As The Xylom retraces the steps of the previous generation of cosmopolitan journalists in countries like Tanzania, Ukraine, and Kenya, I have vowed not to let down previous generations of immigrants and journalists who have sacrificed so much for us to imagine a better future. We are here to cover the world’s most pressing health and environmental disparities — the stakes, consequences, and solutions — and buckle up, the second half of the year is going to be a hell of a ride.

Best regards,
Alex Ip
Publisher and Editor

🔥 HOT OFF THE PRESSES

A Fentanyl Vaccine Is on the Horizon — If Trump Restores Funding for Its Clinical Trials

June 26th was the International Day Against Drug Abuse and Illicit Trafficking. Our intern Zoe Beketova spoke to Marco Pravetoni, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the University of Washington, who's leading a team to explore antibody- and vaccine-based approaches that prevent fentanyl overdoses. Read more here.

In Parliaments, TikTok and COP Summits, This Atlanta-Based Doomsday ‘Cult’ Spreads Climate Disinformation

Meet AllatRa, an Atlanta-headquartered, pro-Russia “religious cult” that believes humanity will go extinct by 2036. By associating itself with the European far-right, the “spiritual advisor to President Donald J. Trump”, and unsuspecting scientists, AllatRa operatives have been spreading climate disinformation in the EU Parliament, UN conferences, and TikTok.

This story is produced by openDemocracy and co-published by The Xylom. Read more here.

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🍑 A SOUTHERN FLAIR

• TEXAS — Texas agency to set rules for using treated fracking wastewater on farmland (Alejandra Martinez, The Texas Tribune)

  Julie Range, a policy manager with the watchdog organization Commission Shift, said the idea of finding other uses for the wastewater is appealing in principle, particularly in a drought-prone state facing growing water demands, “but the devil’s in the details.”
  
  “There’s just a huge soup of things in this water that makes it tricky to clean, to get rid of all of this messy stuff,” Range said. “You have to go through a lot of different treatment steps, and how clean you get this water will be determined by this rule.”

• NEW ORLEANS — New Orleans hospital destroyed by Katrina to be reborn as a science hub (Susan Svrluga, The Washington Post)

  The plan has forged an alliance among political leaders of different parties in Louisiana, a rarity in a deeply divided nation, and symbolizes a powerful commitment to the power of research at a time when federal research funding is dwindling nationally.

  “This is very important to the country,” Tulane President Michael A. Fitts said in an interview. "I think people will recognize that over the long run. We’re not making a one-year bet or a two-year bet; we’re making a 20-year bet on this.”

• MOUNT STORM, W.V. — Inside Trump administration's eight-figure bet on MAGA ally-led WV coal plant plan (Mike Tony, Charleston Gazette-Mail)

  “[T]his is a terrible deal for taxpayers,” said Sean O’Leary, senior researcher at the Ohio River Valley Institute, a nonprofit think tank that has pushed for more sustainable energy deployment in the region.

🗺️ WHAT ELSE WE'RE READING

• Prominent climate scientist argues it's time to ditch the 'myth of neutrality' (Amanda Buckiewicz, CBC News)

  “As a scientist, we often hear from other scientists saying, "Oh, you shouldn't really speak out about why what you do matters." But I'm a climate scientist. I study how climate change is affecting our lives today in the places where we live, how it's impacting our homes, our health, our kids and more. And I see our role as more akin to that of a physician, a physician of the planet, warning about how our actions are affecting our future.”

• GWOZA, Nigeria — War, hunger, and now aid cuts: Nigeria’s malnourished children surviving on hope (Taiwo Adebulu, The Cable)

  Tamuwa is a high-protein meal made from powdered milk, peanut paste, vegetable oil, sugar, and a mix of vitamins and minerals. The RUTF is a highly effective treatment for children suffering from severe acute malnutrition.

  “I’m here to see if they are giving out tamuwa to children. My child hasn’t been eating well for several days,” Hamsatu [Isa] said, with a mix of hope and uncertainty.

• ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — Staggering amounts of fentanyl hit streets as the DEA watched and took no action, records show (Jim Mustian & Joshua Goodman, AP News)

  “We poisoned our community to make cases,” DEA Special Agent David Howell told AP in a series of interviews in New Mexico. “Through our own willful blindness, we get to say, ‘We don’t really know what happened to the drugs.’ But we 100% got people killed.”

• Pakistan’s solar miracle – how the hell did they do it? (soft paywall) (Jan Rosenow, The New World)

  When the customers who can afford solar leave the grid, fewer kilowatt hours are consumed from the grid. But many of the high fixed costs remain. As a result, costs, including the capacity payments owed to idle power plants, get spread across a shrinking base of remaining customers. Their bills go up. That pushes more of them towards solar. Which shrinks the base again. This is the classic utility death spiral, and Pakistan is one of the clearest real-world examples of it now unfolding.

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