2018
April
03
Tuesday

Monitor Daily Podcast

April 03, 2018
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We don’t usually cover presidential tweet storms. But as a former Mexico City correspondent, I couldn’t resist sifting the facts from the fearmongering.

President Trump wants a border wall and has tweeted concern about “caravans” of migrants bound for the United States.

In reality, there’s only one caravan, with about 1,100 people, mostly from Honduras. This annual Easter event is part theatrical protest and part exodus. The destination of this year’s “Stations of the Cross” march isn’t the US border: It’s a migrant rights symposium in the central Mexico state of Puebla.

Yes, some members of the caravan are likely headed for the US. Some might try to enter illegally. But they could also legally apply for asylum in the US or Mexico: Gang-infested Honduras has one of the highest murder rates in the world.

Mexico’s enforcement of its southern border has tightened in recent years, as we’ve reported. But Mexico’s asylum policies were also relaxed in 2011. Last year, Mexico granted asylum to almost 10,000 people (mostly Central Americans), triple the number of the previous year.

Every nation seeks a balance between compassion and security, generosity and rule of law. But sowing fear about an Easter caravan seems more like windmill tilting than a serious effort at protecting the US border.

Now to our five selected stories, including a look at the ebb and flow of gun rights in Florida, how cities are adapting to counter flooding, and the enduring crosscurrents of ethics and technology in a 50-year-old movie.


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Today’s stories

And why we wrote them

Lucy Nicholson/Reuters
Reacquired Volkswagen and Audi diesel cars sit in a desert graveyard near Victorville, Calif., after an emissions scandal forced Volkswagen AG to spend more than $7.4 billion to buy back about 350,000 vehicles.
Turner Entertainment/AP
Astronaut David Bowman (Keir Dullea) peers through his space helmet as he shuts down the malevolent HAL 9000 computer in Stanley Kubrick's 1968 film, '2001: A Space Odyssey.'

The Monitor's View

Reuters
Women wait to fill their cooking gas cylinders outside a gas filling station amid a scarcity in cooking gas supplies in Sanaa, Yemen, March 4.

A Christian Science Perspective

About this feature

A message of love

Felix Marquez/AP
A girl stays awake as Central American migrants sleep at a sports club in Matias Romero, in Mexico's Oaxaca State, April 3. The caravan of Central American migrants was sidelined at a sports field with no means of reaching the border.
( The illustrations in today’s Monitor Daily are by Jacob Turcotte and Karen Norris. )

A look ahead

Thanks for joining us. Come back tomorrow: Fifty years after Martin Luther King Jr.’s death, we’ve interviewed African-Americans in the Deep South, many of whom are worried, hoping against hope that equality isn’t a promise forever over the next hill.

More issues

2018
April
03
Tuesday
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