2018
August
10
Friday

Monitor Daily Podcast

August 10, 2018
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Clayton Collins
Director of Editorial Innovation

In August in the US Northeast, a middle-aged suburbanite’s fancy turns to tomatoes.

We don’t all need to become experts in microfarming and food preservation. But there’s a deepening awareness that local food is good stuff. A Gallup poll this week showed that a majority of Americans now actively seek it.

That’s not to ignore the stubborn (though eroding) reality of “food deserts” served mostly with processed and plastic-wrapped items. But urban farmers markets and urban farms abound. Many accept SNAP payments. Important elements of the farm bill now moving through Congress address local-food policy.

Big-scale farming, of course, is still about soil-depleting monoculture and sourcing the crops that end up mostly in that processed food. (Or caught in trade-war limbo, as with the 70,000 tons of soybeans now wandering the sea aboard one cargo ship.) But movement is occurring there, too.

In an otherwise sobering report, the food policy site Civil Eats notes that more Iowa farmers are adding oats and other small grains to their rotations. In Indiana, soil-protecting cover crops have become the third most planted crop. Sure, local markets are small. “People just aren't going to gamble with land valued at $2,000 per acre,” economics writer Laurent Belsie reminds me.

But local markets will grow as farm-to-institution efforts grow, feeding schools, hospitals, universities, company cafeterias, and eldercare facilities – sun-warmed local produce finding outlets to match its appeal.

Now to our five stories for your Friday, including a look at Canada’s efforts to find its global role, at Charlottesville’s struggle to find social harmony, at Buddhism’s surprising strength in Siberia, and at scientists’ work to do a little PR for a deep-ocean predator.


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Today’s stories

And why we wrote them

Canada is trying to fill the human rights leadership gap that the Trump administration has left on the world stage. But it is finding that without US backing, taking the high road comes with a cost.

Charlottesville: Lives changed

One year after
Jessica Mendoza/Christian Science Monitor
A shop's wares are put to clever use in a sign displaying civic pride outside Fitzgerald’s Tires in Charlottesville, Va. The city is still grappling with the fallout from last year’s protests, which exposed divides along issues of class and race in this quiet college town and across the nation.

Reconciliation is a process, not a switch to be thrown. But Charlottesville, like the nation, shows that exposing the roots of a divide is a painful but healthy starting point.

Siberian crossroads

Valeriy Melnikov/Sputnik/AP
Pilgrims visit a temple at Ivolginsky Datsan in Buryatia, Russia. In a major shift from Soviet times, almost 40 temple complexes now exist in this region alone, as native Mongol-speaking Buryats rediscover their ancestral beliefs.

This piece, the second of five parts from a region that’s seldom heard from, shows how a diversity of faiths can flourish over time after a yoke is lifted.

Karen Norris/Staff
Hassan Ammar/AP
Masked workers remove dirt and dry leaves in a cannabis field in the village of Yammoune in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley. The aim of increased cultivation is to generate needed revenue for a national economy. But the move is garnering mixed reactions.

This isn’t the usual tussle over legalizing cannabis. The story in Lebanon touches on questions of poverty, economic development, and the political future of a region where the powerful Islamist group Hezbollah draws recruits.

If you were 12 when “Jaws” was released in 1975, you probably had short-term trouble even immersing in a pool. Scientists have been working ever since to demystify sharks. Understanding can take a bite out of fear. 

SOURCE:

International Union for Conservation of Nature

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Jacob Turcotte/Staff

The Monitor's View

Reuters
Jose Luis Castillo (L, front row), father of Esmeralda Castillo who went missing in 2009, talks to Mexico's President-elect Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (2nd L, upper row) and Chihuahua State Governor Javier Corral (L, upper row), during the First Pacification and Reconciliation Forum, kicked off by Lopez Obrador and aimed at promoting peace in the country, in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico August 7. The writing on the banner Castillo is wearing reads "Don't forget me, I'm missing."

Elected as Mexico’s next president by a wide margin on July 1, Andrés Manuel López Obrador does not take office until Dec. 1. Yet with the homicide rate at a record high, AMLO, as he is known, is not wasting time. In August, he launched a countrywide listening tour aimed at developing a “national reconciliation pact.”

His boldest suggestions include the idea that government should forgive perpetrators who confess their violent acts and commit to not repeat them. It’s part of a broad effort to reform institutions and create new options for youth, including those already seduced by crime.

“You cannot confront violence with violence,” said the president-elect at one “peace forum,” adding, “I respect the people who say don’t forgive or forget. I say, forgive, but don’t forget.”

Offers of official forgiveness have become a common tool in several countries caught up in mass violence, such as Colombia’s war with Marxist rebels, or countries coming out of a long conflict, such as post-apartheid South Africa. AMLO stresses the need for citizens – of every country – to help create the conditions for peace and ensure that the tragedies of recent years are ended and not repeated.

Improving public security, providing justice, and restoring social peace are at the top of his “to do” list. The president-elect hopes the public listening sessions over the next two months will start a healing process. It may also fuel the corrections needed in a country where his election reflected a deep loss of public confidence in the government’s ability to handle violence and corruption.

Since 2014, violent homicides in Mexico have risen steadily. Last year, they reached the highest totals ever recorded (more than 29,000 killed). And over the past decade, more than 35,000 people have vanished, presumably victims of criminal or corrupt officials.

Rising crime has overwhelmed and undermined law enforcement and justice institutions. In the past three years, crime has spread more widely around Mexico. No longer dominated by large drug cartels, crime became “democratized” to smaller, local gangs carrying out a variety of criminal activities, including stealing gasoline from pipelines. Simultaneously, Mexico’s justice system continued to produce very few convictions, despite efforts at reform. Law enforcement institutions are perceived as corrupt and ineffective. According to a 2017 poll, some 76 percent of Mexicans feel unsafe.

During the election campaign, AMLO was vague about how he would deal with these challenges, at one point mentioning “amnesty,” which set off alarm bells about dealing with drug capos and brutal killers. Now he hopes to develop specific proposals with the help of the discussion sessions. He is inviting a full debate that includes all points of view and options, from amnesty and drug decriminalization to ensuring that the guilty are prosecuted.

His advisers stress the importance of supporting victims, including funds to help them and perhaps establishing truth commissions to uncover past wrongs. They suggest radical restructuring the current security model, which mainly relies on police and military forces, to one that improves police capacities and gradually withdraws the armed forces from crime fighting. AMLO also seeks to strengthen justice institutions and cut off cartel finances. 

In addition, he proposes more educational and employment opportunities for youths, notably those embedded in low-level criminal activities such as being a gang lookout. The idea is to reinsert them into society, educating rather than punishing them.

None of this will be easy. It will take new laws, new funds, wise policy choices, and a persistent effort to forge new social attitudes. But, with some 65 percent of Mexicans currently expecting security and other improvements under his presidency, AMLO has a good foundation on which to build. It is an effort worthy of support.


A Christian Science Perspective

About this feature

Each weekday, the Monitor includes one clearly labeled religious article offering spiritual insight on contemporary issues, including the news. The publication – in its various forms – is produced for anyone who cares about the progress of the human endeavor around the world and seeks news reported with compassion, intelligence, and an essentially constructive lens. For many, that caring has religious roots. For many, it does not. The Monitor has always embraced both audiences. The Monitor is owned by a church – The First Church of Christ, Scientist, in Boston – whose founder was concerned with both the state of the world and the quality of available news.

Today’s contributor learned to love herself when she took seriously the idea that God was loving her.


A message of love

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff/File
Girls wash their hands at a water pump outside Speena Adi school in Kabul, Afghanistan, in 2012. Personal cleanliness is often put forward as a virtue and a part of living a devout life. And simple personal hygiene – washing hair, hands, feet, laundry – has been a human activity since the earliest civilizations. Ancient Romans cleaned themselves with soap made from animal fat. Babylonians and Egyptians frayed the end of twigs into toothbrushes as early as 3500 BC. Washing clothes in rivers remains a practice across much of the developing world. Alone or in the company of others, indoors or in nature, in luxurious or rudimentary fashion, washing up is a common purification process. To be clean is to feel refreshed, renewed, and above all to feel good. To see more images from around the world, click the blue button below.
( The illustrations in today’s Monitor Daily are by Jacob Turcotte. )

A look ahead

Have a great weekend. On Monday we’ll have a report from Zimbabwe, where the growth of mobile money is taking the edge off the country’s latest cash crisis. 

More issues

2018
August
10
Friday

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