2018
April
02
Monday

Monitor Daily Podcast

April 02, 2018
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Mark Sappenfield
Senior global correspondent

The Dow closed down 459 points Monday, showing how skittish investors are about President Trump’s attacks on Amazon as well as a potential trade war between the United States and China. And for good reason. Presidents usually don’t pick on individual companies, and trade wars aren’t generally good for business, hence the name.

Mr. Trump and the rest of the world have had some provocation for their anti-China moves. For years, many analysts agree, China has manipulated its currency, subsidized state-owned enterprises, and used various schemes to keep foreign companies out unless they hand over their technology. A free market requires rules. When a nation the size of China bends them, you can’t send it to its room. Options are limited.

Yet there’s also another vision of tariffs and trade wars – a protectionist view. The hope is that they can boost a domestic economy. In limited cases, that can be true. But the concept misses one of the most categorical points in the history of human progress. Our prosperity depends on each other. Not as Americans. As people.

Wealth is not finite. It grows. And it has grown fastest as the world’s capacity to connect and collaborate has grown. The answer to any economic stagnation is always, How can we work better together? The bigger the “we,” the greater the potential. That doesn’t mean governments have always managed that growth well or fairly. But, as investors know well, that also doesn’t mean closing a country’s front door.

Here are our five stories for today, including a question of conscience in Yemen, a one-word look into the Russian soul, and a group of South African grandmothers you really don't want to mess with. 


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Today’s stories

And why we wrote them

Abduljabbar Zeyad/Reuters
A ship unloads a cargo of wheat at the Red Sea port of Hodeida, Yemen, April 1. The port, controlled by Shiite Houthi rebels, is key to feeding the capital, Sanaa, and Houthi regions. Some 17.8 million Yemenis are considered 'food insecure.'

Patterns

Tracing global connections

Points of Progress

What's going right
Joe Duff/Operation Migration/AP/File
Endangered whooping cranes fly over Kentucky on their way to their wintering sites in Florida. Hunting and loss of habitat drove the iconic birds to the brink of extinction by the 1940s. Today, populations are more robust, but whooping cranes continue to face threats.

Finding vitality – and community – in a South African gym

Meet South Africa's "boxing grannies"


The Monitor's View

Korean Central News Agency/Korea News Service via AP
North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, right, talks to members of a South Korean artistic group, including popular girl band Red Velvet, after their performance in Pyongyang, North Korea, April 1. Kim clapped his hands as he, along with his wife and hundreds of other citizens, watched a rare performance Sunday by South Korean pop stars visiting Pyongyang, highlighting the thawing ties between the rivals after years of heightened tensions over the North's nuclear program. Independent journalists were not given access to cover the event depicted in this image distributed by the North Korean government.

A Christian Science Perspective

About this feature

A message of love

Timothy D. Easley/AP
Thousands of teachers from across Kentucky fill the state Capitol in Frankfort April 2 to rally for increased funding and to protest last-minute changes to their state-funded pension system. Thousands came to protest teacher pension changes, and schools were closed statewide in Oklahoma as thousands more educators rallied there for increased education funding. (Watch for Monitor coverage of the widespread teacher protests later this week.)
( The illustrations in today’s Monitor Daily are by Jacob Turcotte and Karen Norris. )

A look ahead

Thanks for joining us today. Tomorrow, we celebrate the 50th anniversary of “2001: A Space Odyssey” with a look at the inscrutable show-stealer, HAL 9000. Today, we continue to wonder: Will artificial intelligence help us go to Jupiter, or just shut us out of the air lock? 

More issues

2018
April
02
Monday
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