The Apple Seed

Guest: Chuck Hoskin, Jr. Principal Chief of the Cherokee Nation The pandemic has been particularly devastating for Native American tribes that were already struggling economically and now have some of the highest infection rates in the country. Congress allocated $8 billion in aid for tribal governments, but that money has been stalled because of a dispute over whether some for-profit businesses that serve tribal villages in Alaska should receive any of the funds. On Tuesday, the US treasury Department said it will start distributing some of the pandemic relief money to tribes while a lawsuit over the Alaska Native corporations plays out.

Guest: Farina King, PhD, Citizen of Navajo Nation, Assistant Professor of History and Affiliate of Cherokee and Indigenous Studies, Northeastern State University, Oklahoma The Navajo Nation which includes portions of Utah, Arizona and New Mexico, has one of the highest rates of COVID-19 infection in the country.

Guest: Simone Policano, Actor, Film Producer, Co-Founder of Invisible Hands New York City has been under some of the strictest quarantine rules in the country, allowing people to leave their homes only for essentials like medicine, groceries and occasional exercise. But people at high risk for COVID-19 are urged not to leave home at all. Enter Invisible Hands – a brand new nonprofit that recruits volunteers to grocery shop for housebound people.

Guest: Bradley Rickard, Professor of Food and Agriculture Economics at Cornell University There’s a frustrating disconnect in America’s food system right now – food banks are struggling to meet demand, while farmers are forced to dump their produce and milk for lack of a place to sell it. The US Department of Agriculture is trying to get a program up and running to compensate farmers for their pandemic-related losses and purchase some of the excess food so it can be distributed to people in need. Why did it take the federal government to step in and bridge that gap?

Guest: Kharis Templeman, Advisor to the Newly-Launched Project on Taiwan in the Indo-Pacific at The Hoover Institution, Former Program Manager of the Taiwan Democracy and Security Project, Stanford University.  Taiwan is being admired for its quick and effective response to COVID-19. With a population of 23-million, the island has had only 439 cases of the disease and just six deaths. That’s pretty incredible – especially considering Taiwan’s proximity to mainland China. So, Taiwan is taking advantage of international admiration to boost its status on the global stage – even donating millions of masks to hard-hit countries and circulating the hashtag “TaiwanCanHelp.”But China is not happy about Taiwan’s “mask diplomacy.”

Guest: Anna Fifield, Beijing Bureau Chief, the Washington Post, Author of “The Great Successor Kim Jong Un is not dead. The North Korean dictator had recently missed an important national holiday and been absent from the public eye for several weeks, prompting rampant speculation that he’d died. But North Korean state media put those rumors to rest with video evidence of Kim Jong Un presiding over the opening of a fertilizer factory on Saturday. Rumors about North Korea’s leader fly easily, in part because the regime is so secretive. But also because there’s no clear successor in line to replace him.