2017
July
14
Friday

Monitor Daily Podcast

July 14, 2017
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Clayton Collins
Director of Editorial Innovation

Today at the Capitol, a couple of lawmakers are playing outsize roles in the debate over health-care legislation that will profoundly affect millions of lives. In Paris, a couple of presidents met.

Zoom out. Way out. Let’s go off-world.

An interesting sub-story around the newsmaking flight of the Juno spacecraft – now delivering spectacular views from above gaseous Jupiter’s cloud deck – is the outsize role of ordinary people.

The scientific stakes are high. Humanity last took a close look at Jupiter a generation ago (Galileo). Before that, fully two generations ago (Voyager). This time around, a relatively low-budget device called the JunoCam – added to the mission simply for “public outreach” – is being directed by telescope-armed citizen scientists suggesting points of interest to observe, and then helping to process the images that Juno beams home in a way that, as Scientific American reports, “leaves professionals spellbound.” (To judge for yourself, check out our Viewfinder gallery below.)

“[T]he overarching takeaway from these new images,” a planetary scientist tells the magazine, “is how relatively blinkered most of our earlier views have been.” Power, in part, to the people.

Now to our five stories for today. 


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Today’s stories

And why we wrote them

Scott Peterson/The Christian Science Monitor/Getty Images
Men join tens of thousands of other Turks waving national flags and 'justice' banners at an opposition rally July 9 that caps a 25-day, 280-mile protest march from Ankara to Istanbul, Turkey. The rally-goers were protesting social conditions a year after a coup attempt brought a state of emergency and led to the increasingly authoritarian rule of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.

In Turkey, a long-running "strongman" saga in a strategic corner of the world is really becoming a case study in how opposition seldom works without unity, reports Scott Peterson from Istanbul. 

Alex Brandon/AP
Education Secretary Betsy DeVos speaks with the media after a series of listening sessions about campus sexual violence, Thursday, July 13, in Washington. Though keeping an eye on federal involvement, groups are working at the state and campus level to refine rules around sexual crimes.

Battle lines were renewed this week over such hot-button Title IX-related issues as the definition of campus rape. But as Stacy Teicher Khadaroo reports, the conversation left out some important work, with momentum that transcends federal politics. 

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff
Veteran female firefighters teach young women how to wield a firehose during the Camp Bailout Program July 14 in Ashland, Mass. The free program was started by Lt. Lyn Moraghan (c.), with the Ashland Fire Department, to encourage young women ages 14 to 19 to become more involved in the fire department and emergency medical services, either as a career or as volunteers – and, in the process, to build their confidence and self-esteem.

While 95 percent of firefighters are men, nearly a third of new firefighters hired since 2009 have been women. Will equal access to career paths – and a broadening shift in thought on career associations – lead toward equal pay?

It’s not that they've reduced coverage of US politics to the level of "spectacle." But journalists from around the world – and their audiences back home – are finding the current US administration to be a depiction of "American" in high relief.

We’ve long read about the remarkable cognitive abilities of these birds. (Turns out they like sledding, too; see the video embedded in this story.) Eoin O’Carroll explains why scientists now are looking even more closely at what ravens can teach them.


The Monitor's View

AP Photo
Deltan Dallagnol, coordinator of the Car Wash task force, gives an interview in Curitiba, Brazil.

President Barack Obama once called him “the most popular politician on earth.” But on July 12, former Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva was sentenced to almost a decade in prison for corruption and money laundering. Known widely as Lula, he is the biggest fish caught so far in a graft probe that has spread across dozens of countries and snared dozens of politicians. The current Brazilian president, Michel Temer, also faces corruption allegations while his predecessor, Dilma Rousseff, was impeached last year under a cloud of suspicion over a massive kickback scheme involving the state-owned oil company Petrobras.

Yet even as the world notes Lula’s downfall, it should also learn why Brazilians have come to demand honesty in their leaders – and in their daily interactions with government. What is perhaps the world’s largest anti-corruption investigation carries lessons for other nations that assume they are trapped in a culture of impunity as Brazil once was.

“In Brazil there is a consciousness about this problem as there never was before,” said federal prosecutor Deltan Dallagnol in an April talk at Harvard Law School, his alma mater. “Society gave us a lot of support.”

The key idea now more widely supported in Brazil is that of equality before the law, even for someone who was once immensely popular and powerful as Lula. “No matter how important you are, no one is above the law,” said Judge Sérgio Moro in handing down his verdict against the former president, who held office from 2003 to 2011.

Brazil restored its democracy only about a quarter century ago, but the system has been flawed by too many political parties relying on too much money for campaigns and in winning votes in Congress. As political scandals have grown, so too has a small cadre of idealistic and well-paid civil servants as well as a popular movement that has steadily pushed legislation and emboldened the justice system.

Yet it is not enough to simply prosecute powerful people, said Mr. Dallagnol. Society, he says, has “provided a shield.”

Justice officials, for example, have created comic books and board games with anti-corruption themes for children. They have also opened up public records about how politicians spend money. For the first time, prosecutors set up a website to expose pending criminal cases. A popular drive to pass anti-corruption proposals drew more than 2 million signatures. And more than 15,000 people in law enforcement took newly designed courses in how to combat corruption and money laundering.

In 2013, as people became aware of overspending for the 2014 World Cup soccer games in Brazil, anti-corruptions protests began to escalate. Also, prosecutors got a big break in a case known as Operation Car Wash, which exposed huge payoffs to politicians by contractors for Petrobras. The new attitude among Brazilians was essential. “We are pretty aware that without public support that this case is not going anywhere,” says Dallagnol. One poll in January found that Brazilians support the investigations of political figures “to the end, regardless of the outcome.”

Many reforms are still needed and prosecutors fear ruling politicians can still thwart their work. “It’s not enough to take out rotten apples from a basket. You need to change the conditions which make those apples to get rotten,” says Dallagnol.

Yet the momentum toward transparency and accountability seems assured – especially when the mightiest of politicians can fall before the public’s heightened demand for equality before the law. 


A Christian Science Perspective

About this feature

When we’re faced with aggressive words or actions − or when we hear about them in the news − it can be tempting to respond in kind. But knee-jerk reactions aren’t what impel reformation where it’s needed. Contributor Susanne van Eyl shares how a Bible story about taking the higher road instead of giving in to fury has encouraged her. As the creation of God, divine Truth, we’re all capable of resisting vengeful thoughts. Even in the heat of the moment, pausing to consider how to de-escalate an explosive situation can reveal a path forward that promotes progress.


A message of love

Courtesy of Gerald Eichstädt /Seán Doran/NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS
Three of the white oval storms known as the 'String of Pearls' are visible near the top of this enhanced-color image of Jupiter’s bands of clouds captured on May 19 by the Juno spacecraft. Each of the alternating light and dark atmospheric bands in this image is wider than Earth, and each rages around Jupiter at hundreds of miles per hour. The lighter areas are regions where gas is rising, and the darker bands are regions where gas is sinking.
( The illustrations in today’s Monitor Daily are by Jacob Turcotte. )

A look ahead

Thanks, as always, for reading (or listening) today. Have a great weekend, and drop by again on Monday. We’ll have a story on a new reform-minded breed of prosecutor taking office across the United States. And one on Europe’s growing taste for celebratory light shows. Until then. 

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2017
July
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Friday
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