2024
May
03
Friday

Monitor Daily Podcast

May 03, 2024
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Mark Sappenfield
Senior global correspondent

Like many of you, I have been reading Ghada Abdulfattah’s searing accounts from Gaza. But there’s something about hearing her voice that drives it home in a different way. 

Her “Why We Wrote This” podcast today is a lament, yes, for the Gaza she once knew. But it is also an act of defiance, a demand that humanity be seen and prevail.


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Today’s stories

And why we wrote them

Bonnie Cash/Reuters
Art supplies and posters lie outside a student encampment at George Washington University in Washington, April 28, 2024.

Universities are starting to make deals with student groups that advocate divestment from Israel-linked corporations. Yet the current activism differs from the 1980s model of divestment from South Africa.

Today’s news briefs

• Haiti prime minister switch: The majority of Haiti’s transitional council, which nominated an interim prime minister earlier this week, has walked back the decision, exposing internal tension within the group.
• U.K. elections: Britain’s governing Conservative Party is facing heavy losses as local election results pour in, strengthening expectations that the Labour Party is headed for power in an upcoming general election.
• Hamas peace talks: Hamas says it is sending a delegation to Egypt as soon as possible to continue talks in the latest sign of progress in the fragile cease-fire process.
• Severing ties with Israel: Turkey announces it is suspending all imports and exports to Israel; Colombia becomes the latest Latin American country to announce it will break diplomatic relations with Israel.
• Denmark abortion decision: Denmark’s government says it is relaxing its restrictions on abortion for the first time in 50 years to make it legal for women to terminate pregnancies up to the 18th week.

Read these news briefs.

Ohad Zwigenberg/AP
Two weeks after Iran launched hundreds of drones and missiles at Israel, ultra-Orthodox Jews inspect remains of what is believed to be an Iranian missile near the city of Arad, in southern Israel, April 28, 2024. Fragments of intercepted missiles have been discovered at several locations.

Iran’s attack on Israel, and the Israeli strike that preceded it, raised fears that the war in Gaza was poised to erupt into a regional conflict. Keeping sworn enemies from war requires delicate signaling and calculated deterrent acts.

Declining trust in the news media isn’t just about how polarization affects journalists and the public. It’s also about navigating a tsunami of digital content. Do people have room for news in their lives? How do they judge quality?

Anupam Nath/AP/File
An Indian laborer watches election trends on a phone in Guwahati, India. The country has the largest number of WhatsApp and YouTube users in the world, and misinformation about India’s election is surging online as millions head to the polls.

Indian society is scrambling to respond to an uptick of political deepfakes during critical elections. Its efforts could help build a roadmap on how democracies balance the good and the bad of artificial intelligence.

Podcast

Jacob Turcotte/Staff

A woman of Gaza on what Gaza’s women face

With courage and calmness, our reporter in Gaza has delivered a vital perspective on a war that’s now six months in. As a woman, she has been especially attuned to the conflict’s strain on mothers, daughters, and sisters. She joins our podcast with a full read of a recent story. 

Writer’s Read: What Gaza’s Women Endure

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The Monitor's View

AP
Scott Artis, executive director of the Golden State Salmon Association, speaks in San Francisco on April 11 about a state decision to cancel the California salmon fishing season for a second year in a row.

Earlier this week, the state of California stuck a shovel in the third of four hydroelectric dams being demolished on the Klamath River, which wends its way through Northern California from Oregon to the Pacific.

Removing those structures is the first step in the most ambitious experiment in nature restoration in American history. The goal is to save wild salmon, a once-abundant resource that anchored the region’s economy and shaped its Indigenous societies. “It’s going to be a very, very, very healing experience to be able to see the salmon come back,” Kenneth Brink, vice chair of the Karuk Tribe, told the Los Angeles Times in April. “It’s like a new beginning.”

Yet more than fisheries may be renewed. The project marks another example of rethinking humanity’s relationship with nature at a turning point in global environmental welfare. Restoring nature requires people “to make decisions about where and how to heal. To repair and to care. To make amends for the damage we have done, while learning from nature even as we intervene in it,” wrote Laura Martin, an environmental historian at Williams College in her book “Wild by Design: The Rise of Ecological Restoration.”

“Restoration is, by definition, active: it is an attempt to intervene in the fate of a species or an entire ecosystem,” she added. Or as Mr. Brink put it, restoration focuses on healing.

Off the coast where the Klamath meets the sea, for example, scientists and professional fishers are working together to restore kelp forests damaged by the warming of sea waters due to climate change. Elsewhere, marine biologists are cultivating and seeding more temperature-resistant corals to restore reefs.

The Klamath River project has been decades in coming. Five dams were built during the 20th century to harness hydropower and irrigate farms. Those dams flooded tribal lands. Over time, water quality and marine health declined. Prolonged periods of drought, likely exacerbated by climate change, turned the river and tributaries to trickles. Last month, California banned salmon fishing for a second consecutive year as annual spawning runs have collapsed.

Now, where humans once harnessed the river to produce power, they are releasing the river’s power to flush a century of stored sediment. Hatcheries are reintroducing salmon fry to restore natural runs. California is restoring tribal rights to once-flooded lands. Farmers and Indigenous communities are restoring spawning grounds and forging new water-sharing agreements.

If dams uniquely symbolize a restless human quest to use the natural world, their removal indicates a rebalancing of relationships – with nature and between peoples. “I suggest that we conceive of restoration as an optimistic collaboration with nonhuman species, a practice of co-designing the wild with them,” Dr. Martin wrote. “But we still have the responsibility to collaborate with one another, too.”

On the Klamath, restoring the river started with restoring unity and good will.


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.

Nick Brundle Photography/Moment/Getty Images

Praying to better know God and His creation as spiritual and intact equips us to treat each other and our planet with love and care.


Viewfinder

Tatyana Makeyeva/Reuters
Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, who has been held in Russia for over a year on charges of espionage, speaks with his lawyers while standing behind a glass wall of an enclosure for defendants before a court hearing in Moscow, April 23. World Press Freedom Day was established in 1993 to assert the importance of a robust press and to advocate for journalists. In a statement, U.S. President Joe Biden remarked, “On World Press Freedom Day, we honor the bravery and sacrifice of journalists and media workers around the world risking everything in pursuit of truth. This is especially resonant today; 2023 was one of the deadliest years for journalists in recent memory. One reason for that is the war in Gaza, where far too many journalists, the vast majority of them Palestinian, have been killed. Additionally, over 300 journalists were imprisoned around the world last year – the highest number in decades. In Russia, American journalists Evan Gershkovich and Alsu Kurmasheva have been imprisoned in connection with their work for the Wall Street Journal and for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. And Austin Tice is still being held hostage in Syria after nearly twelve years.”
( The illustrations in today’s Monitor Daily are by Karen Norris. )

A look ahead

Thank you for joining us this week. We wish you a wonderful weekend, wherever you are. Some of the stories we’re following for next week include Dallas’ new plan for policing high-crime neighborhoods, Israelis’ views of a potential Rafah offensive, and how professional care for sick people and older adults in Nigeria is lifting a burden off women’s shoulders.  

More issues

2024
May
03
Friday

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