2023
July
18
Tuesday

Monitor Daily Podcast

July 18, 2023
Loading the player...

Has Ukraine expressed sufficient gratitude to the American people for all the support they have provided since Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022?

The question has lingered since the NATO summit in Lithuania last week, when a nettled White House official burst out, “The American people do deserve a degree of gratitude.” National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan was responding to Ukrainian criticism of NATO’s refusal to admit the Eastern European nation.

The comment took me to the Ukraine reporting trip I had just wrapped up – and in particular to one bountiful meal offered by a farmer and his wife.

During the trip, I’d occasionally received a “Thank you to America!” when people learned where I was from. One soldier in the embattled Donetsk region expressed his gratitude for a particularly effective American rocket launcher by simply exclaiming “HIMARS!” – accompanied by a thumbs-up.

But it was dinner at the farm of Serhii and Tetiana Khoroschiak in the southern Mykolaiv region that showed me just how grateful Ukrainians are to “the American people.”

I had met the Khoroschiaks on a reporting trip last year, interviewing them for a story on Ukraine’s role as a global breadbasket. They had even invited me and the Monitor’s Ukrainian reporting assistant, Oleksandr Naselenko, to their son’s wedding lunch.

This year Oleksandr had called ahead to say we’d be passing through. Could we stop by to say hello? The dinner invitation was instant.

When we arrived, the table was spread with a half-dozen kinds of fish, various meats, numerous salads, and potato dishes. The conversation was warm, even loudly humorous.

I do recall at one point hearing a specific “thank you” to America for everything it is doing for Ukraine. But it wasn’t really necessary. The meal, the warmth, and the hearty hugs said it all.


You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.

Today’s stories

And why we wrote them

Alexander Ermochenko/Reuters
A farmer uses a combine to harvest wheat near Luhansk, in Russian-controlled Ukraine, July 18, 2023.

The Kremlin’s decision to pull out of a deal to allow Ukrainian grain to get to the global market isn’t simply a matter of spite. While the agreement helped Kyiv and grain buyers, it hasn’t aided Russia, Moscow says.

The Explainer

Republicans allege that U.S. President Joe Biden’s son received preferential treatment from a politicized Department of Justice. Democrats say the GOP investigation is blatantly political.

Matthias Schrader/AP
Hundreds of people packed the pews to attend a church service in Nuremberg, Germany, June 9, 2023, that was generated almost entirely by artificial intelligence and led by avatars on a large screen above the altar.

If a chatbot prays, does God listen? With religious attendance at record lows, faith communities are turning to new technologies to attract members. That’s raising questions about where to draw the line between artificial intelligence and the divine.

Threads, the most rapidly downloaded internet app, calls itself a “friendly” social media space, but like Twitter, it faces questions about how to handle misinformation and censorship claims. 

Essay

Linda Bleck

Some things have to be learned the hard way. A lifetime of small slips weighs the words that should have been spoken against those better left unsaid. 


The Monitor's View

AP
Chinese have flocked to tourist sites since the end of pandemic lockdowns. Here visitors enjoy a day at the West Lake scenic area in Hangzhou, Zhejiang.

With China’s economy in trouble – a fifth of young people are jobless – official censors are working overtime to suppress online reporting of bad news. In addition, public skepticism about official data is rising. Yet the ruling Communist Party has another problem. When a mass of Chinese people creates an economic success story on their own, the party tries to take credit, while the truth about such freedom is hard to repress.

A startling event this year in China was the rush of millions of young people to the industrial city of Zibo after the lifting of COVID-19 lockdowns. Social media had spread word of Zibo’s hospitality and outdoor barbecue stalls. Videos on Douyin, the local version of TikTok, showed customers delighting in eating kebabs outdoors. In March alone, 4.8 million people showed up in a city of 4.7 million.

The “barbecue craze” was a “social-media phenomenon unlike anything China has seen before,” declared The Economist in May. Other cities inquired on how to copy Zibo’s success.

The party claimed it had sparked the tourist rush. Yet many online commentators noted the spontaneous nature of people traveling to Zibo. One respected blogger who writes about the economy, Wu Xiaobo, said the mass pilgrimage was “fulfilling ... common people’s imagination of a free market: high-quality and affordable commodities, a hearty consumption experience, a market environment that is childlike and honest, and a humble and friendly ‘small government.”

Zibo’s officials got out of the way of the craze more than they guided it. People were “participating in a small experiment of democratization,” wrote Mr. Wu. “This is an extremely humble goal, but it is so precious in today’s China.”

He added, “You can never underestimate the silence and ‘voting with your feet’ of the people. Today, when people’s wisdom has been developed, no slogan or declaration is worth a free barbecue. People don’t need sentimental ‘fatherly love’, but only long for equality. People’s recognition of power has always been based on the common value of ‘people do not deceive themselves’.”

For that commentary and other “harmful information” about China’s economy, Mr. Wu’s writings were banned June 26 by the Weibo social media platform. Given his prominence – he had some 5 million followers – the ban only adds to concerns that Beijing has returned to an old habit of distorting economic data as well as heavily controlling the media narrative about the economy.

Government statisticians are highly respected in China, but “it’s not their job to ... just straight-up report data,” says Anne Stevenson-Yang, managing principal of J Capital Research. “Their job is to target a particular number and see whether the data can be twisted a little bit to meet that number.”

The Zibo barbecue craze, now largely over in the heat of summer, may linger in the memory of Chinese people. Their wisdom, honesty, and longing for equality, as Mr. Wu noted, were on display in the city. In fact, he concluded, the phenomenon “is the whole reality of China in 2023.”


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.

Our innate unity with God brings security, hope, and peace – and God has boundless ways to communicate this to us, even if we don’t seem to be seeing it.


Viewfinder

Fernando Llano/AP
Crew members of the Mexican tuna boat Maria Delia pose for photos on July 18, 2023, after they docked in Manzanillo, Mexico, with Bella, the dog of Australian Timothy Lyndsay Shaddock, both of whom they rescued from an incapacitated catamaran in the Pacific Ocean. Mr. Shaddock and Bella were rescued some 1,200 miles from land after being adrift for three months. Mr. Shaddock, who said he and Bella survived on raw fish and rainwater, described the ordeal as "very difficult" but also said he just needed rest and good food and was in generally good health.
( The illustrations in today’s Monitor Daily are by Karen Norris. )

A look ahead

Thank you for joining us today. Tomorrow, we’ll have two stories on wildland firefighting – a deeper look at how it brings some families together and a photo essay from smokejumper training. 

More issues

2023
July
18
Tuesday

Give us your feedback

We want to hear, did we miss an angle we should have covered? Should we come back to this topic? Or just give us a rating for this story. We want to hear from you.