WILMER JOELA five-day workshop organized by the Pacific Media Institute on democracy, elections and media started last Friday with an opening ceremony attended by diplomats and more than 40 journalists and public information officers from across the Pacific at the College of the Marshall Islands. Editor of the Marshall Islands and PMI co-founder Giff Johnson […]
GIFF JOHNSON The first demonstration in Majuro in many years happened Monday at the Kili-Bikini-Ejit Town Hall in Uliga. All demonstrations in the Marshall Islands, a country whose people are noted for “speaking under the waves,” are unprecedented in some ways. They are also relatively few and far between. Hospital staff demonstrated and then went […]
GIFF JOHNSON A small but active group of students at a university in Japan are putting — and keeping — the Pacific islands on the map. Majuro’s Kelly Lorennij is an active member of the group known as Oceania Students Association at Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University. The Journal spoke with Kelly and three of the […]
GIFF JOHNSON The Micronesian Games were postponed last week, the second time in two years for the regional sports competition to be delayed. As the July 22 opening of the Micronesian Games began to loom large — the daily countdown sign in Delap had ticked down into the 120s — it became increasingly clear in […]
GIFF JOHNSON From the opening of the ECC gym in Delap in 1997 to its closure in 2011 due to roof damage, I spent a remarkable amount of time inside it. Playing basketball, coaching teams, refereeing games, running training clinics for coaches and referees, managing sports events. If it had to do with basketball at […]
WILMER JOEL The long-anticipated Miss Marshall Islands (MMI) pageant has finally arrived to the delight of thousands of Marshallese people. The second of its kind since 2019, it is the talk of the town and the trend on social media. The 20 contestants are operating on a tight schedule for eight days with two days […]
Student members of the College of the Marshall Islands Nuclear Club were featured on Power 103.5FM’s “prime time” interview last week, promoting a large exhibition they prepared that is on display at the CMI library. The display features advocate for nuclear victims and community health pioneer the late Darlene Keju-Johnson. The CMI student group was […]
GIFF JOHNSON The Marshall Islands is facing hard times — prices of food, fuel and other goods have skyrocketed, while worker salaries have remained stagnant. This was a message delivered repeatedly by President David Kabua during his address to the nation at Monday’s Nitijela opening. Kabua said Covid, climate change and the war in Ukraine […]
GIFF JOHNSON About 8,000 Americans participated in the cleanup of Enewetak Atoll. An additional untold number of Marshallese and people of other nationalities were also involved in the cleanup that ran from January 1, 1977 to April 15, 1980 — after which, the people of Enewetak were allowed to return home to live on the […]
GIFF JOHNSON From the time American administrators of the US Trust Territory government started keeping copra tonnage statistics in 1951, it took 20 years for copra production to break the 7,000-ton mark in one year. That was 1970, when the “stars aligned” with copra making and shipping combining to produce the first-ever banner year for […]
