Today, we spend the hour walking through the first 100 days of the second Trump presidency. Kicking us off are Kira Lerner, an editor and reporter based in Washington, DC focused on voting rights, criminal justice, and civil rights issues. Kira is the Democracy Editor of the Guardian US, joining us along with Andrew Roth, a global affairs correspondent for the Guardian in Washington DC, whose writing on Trump’s first 100 days of foreign policy is titled, “From cornerstone of the west to unreliable ally.”
Then, the United States National Institute of Health is the world’s largest funder of biomedical research, but it has cut about half of the more than 1,200 grants that its umbrella agency, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services — now led by long-time vaccine skeptic Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — said it has terminated. The cuts have hit researchers in Universities across the nation hard. Joining us to discuss their research, the impact and the implications are Dr Nisha Acharya, a UCSF ophthalmology professor, who has been researching the effects of a shingles vaccine on shingles of the eye. Dr Acharya’s research funding has been cut to the tune of $1.8 million. We’re also joined by Dr Diana Foster, an Oakland-based UCSF researcher, whose work explores effects of state-level abortion bans on women. Her research was funded by a $2.5 million five year grant, that was cut after just 6 months of work.
Our Resistance in Residence Artist this week is Mexican-Palestinian-American filmmaker Colette Ghunim, whose upcoming film titled Traces of Home follows Colette’s journeys with her parents to find the ancestral houses they were forced to flee as children in Mexico and Palestine. What begins as a desire to connect to Colette’s cultural origins reveals an internal quest to heal her disconnect with her parents, and, ultimately, with herself.
Check out Colette Ghunim’s website: https://www.coletteghunim.com/
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