I'm Brian Lerer. This is my daily politics podcast from WNYC Studios. It's Monday, November 15th.

I don't know if you saw this story over the weekend. It was a marginal story in the U.S., bigger in the U.K.

As the NBC News headline reported it, Richard Ratcliffe, husband of woman detained in Iran,

ends 21-day hunger strike. Why was this dad with a seven-year-old at home, seven-year-old at

home, and a wife in another country detained on a hunger strike.

Well, the story says Ratcliffe was pressuring the British government to secure the release of

his wife, UK charity worker Nazanin Zaghari Ratcliffe, who has been detained in Iran since

2016 on charges of plotting to overthrow the Iranian government.

Now, human rights groups say it's a trumped up charge, like others against dual UK-Iran citizens,

meant to bring ransom or political leverage.

And apparently, she just got sentenced to another year just for taking part in a protest in the UK outside the Iranian embassy back in 2009.

So her husband in the UK began the hunger strike that he ended on Saturday. He said he gave it up

because he wanted to end it with his head held high, not in an ambulance. He had begun to get

worrisome pains in his feet.

He said after not eating for three weeks, and he said their daughter, 8.7, needs him alive.

So there was that from over the weekend. And maybe you heard the story last week about five young climate activists who ended their hunger strike outside the White House

after President Biden at the COP 26 Climate Summit promised to significantly cut greenhouse gas emissions in the United States by 2030.

Fasts, or I should say, when that strike was a week old in late October, one of the five, Caduce Germa, 26, a climate activist and organizer,

told CNN that a doctor who had been monitoring the strikers sent him to the emergency room for nausea,

dizziness, and blurred vision.

CNN showed German as fellow strikers using wheelchairs to keep them steady.

Another member of the group, Abby Leedy, just 20 years old from Philadelphia,

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