2018
December
14
Friday

Monitor Daily Podcast

December 14, 2018
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Clayton Collins
Director of Editorial Innovation

As good information spreads, so does its power to do good.

That quality modifier is important. It requires a belief that professional journalists deserve plaudits like this week’s Person of the Year nod, for those who’ve been killed or imprisoned, from Time magazine.

It requires a belief that work guided by fairness deserves protection from those who would squelch it to hold power. The Committee to Protect Journalists reports that the number of journalists jailed worldwide – more than 250 in each of the past three years – is the highest since it began tracking the number in 1990.

Also making news: word that half the world’s population is now internet-connected. Add-ons in African countries drove the total gains by one reckoning, soaring from 2.1 percent connected in 2005 to more than 24 percent in 2018.

That’s significant. Even as big players wrestle for the reins of social media, employing some deeply questionable means, new voices are coursing through it. Real danger lurks where those voices pass disinformation. Authoritarians can hijack narratives.

But some voices are credentialed. And some share a thirst for justice. Just one example: In a new roundup of emerging trends, the journalism-watcher Nieman Lab features a forecast from Joel Konopo, managing partner of the Botswana-based INK Centre for Investigative Journalism.

“I believe 2019 is the year that a majority of young disenfranchised Africans and digital influencers will use the power of hashtag movements to demand greater responsibility from their leaders,” Mr. Konopo wrote. “This will be hard to ignore.”

Now to our five stories for your Friday, from the power of compromise and cooperation to a therapeutic new use for art. 


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Today’s stories

And why we wrote them

Darryl Dyck/The Canadian Press/AP
Supporters gather outside British Columbia’s Supreme Court in Vancouver on Dec. 11, the third day of a bail hearing for Meng Wanzhou, the chief financial officer of Huawei Technologies.

Newer rivalries can really test alliances in flux. Canada’s current standoff with China is important for Ottawa – in large part for what it says about Canada’s relations with its southern neighbor.

Delegates at the UN climate talks are tasked with uniting some 200 nations behind a single set of rules. The process has been somewhat unwieldy. But it has also shone a light on the power of compromise.

A letter from

Capitol Hill

To watch these senators from the press gallery is to be reminded of their genuine interest in serving their constituents – and of the challenge of politics today, our congressional correspondent writes.

Dina Kraft
Current and expectant parents attend BabyLand, a recent event held in Tel Aviv that offered discounted products for babies and young children. Israel has the highest per capita rate of population growth in the developed world.

Israel is not the only developed county to subsidize parenthood, so why is its birthrate an outlier? The centrality of the family is one reason, as are tribalism, nationalism, and history.

SOURCE:

International Monetary Fund, World Economic Outlook Database, October 2018

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Karen Norris/Staff
Sara Miller Llana/The Christian Science Monitor
Robert Kertesz, a Montreal retiree, participates in the Art Hive, a drop-in workshop at the city’s Museum of Fine Arts, which has expanded programs that address wellness via art.

Can sending patients to view art be a therapeutic tool? An experiment in Montreal is testing new ways of thinking about treatment and healing.


The Monitor's View

 In democracies, leaders are often reminded, outside regular elections, about the source of their authority and how that responsibility is to be exercised. Take these events just in recent days:

In the United States, Democrats in the House limited Nancy Pelosi’s next tenure as speaker to four years.

In France, after the “yellow vest” protests, President Emmanuel Macron had to endure a no-confidence vote in Parliament (he won).

In a much-divided Britain, Prime Minister Theresa May’s ruling party took a vote on her future leadership (she won). 

Such public trials help rein in personal power. They force alternative ideas to the fore. They compel citizens to reassess the principles behind their choices at the ballot box. They highlight the values of stable democracy, such as equality, individual rights, and accountability.

Little of that happens under authoritarian regimes, especially if a leader claims absolute power and tries to build a cult of idolatry masked as ideology. In Russia, Vladimir Putin is getting close to this point. He has few checks on power and portrays himself as an ideal, muscular patriot. China, in contrast, may already be at such a point.

Last spring President Xi Jinping achieved life tenure as “supreme leader,” or the personification of power. He has launched a campaign depicting himself as an icon of virtue who must be seen in heroic and paternalistic images. His ideas are required reading. A new song extols him with the title “To Follow You is to Follow the Sun.”

Only a few intellectuals or human rights activists in China have challenged this personality cult. Mostly they warn that rulers who practice “totalitarian politics” must rule mainly by fear. Most of these critics are easily silenced by various means.

For Mr. Xi, the greatest threat comes from large religious groups, such as Muslims in China’s Xinjiang region or Buddhists in Tibet. They regard secular power as necessary but lesser to the power of faith and perhaps subservient to it.

The fastest growing religious group in China is the Protestants. One of the most prominent Protestants is Wang Yi, a former human rights lawyer who is pastor of an independent Christian church, Early Rain, in Chengdu in Sichuan province. On Dec. 8, he posted a 7,300-word “meditation” on Xi’s crackdown on religious groups and the Caesar-like worship of the Communist Party chief.

He did not call for Xi’s ouster. Rather, he wrote that treating a leader like an emperor is incompatible with “all those who uphold freedom of the mind and thought.”

The next day, Mr. Wang and about 100 people in his church were detained. He and his wife are charged with “inciting to subvert state power.”Just before the roundup, the church issued a statement: “Lord, help us to have the Christian’s conscience and courage to resist this ‘Orwellian nonsense’ with more positive Gospel action and higher praise. Without love, there is no courage.”

In the US, Britain, France, and other democracies, dramatic challenges to a leader receive much of the world’s attention. They serve as reminders that, while secular and certainly personal power is not eternal, the ideas that sustain it, like freedom and equality, are.

China sees few reminders of this sort. Yet when they happen, they deserve notice. Wang and his wife face up to 15 years in prison. But as much as any election or party challenge in a democracy, they have now pointed to the right source of authority in the governance of China. It lies not in person.


A Christian Science Perspective

About this feature

When plans to tackle a Christmas to-do list were interrupted, today’s contributor felt the grace of Christ replace frustration with joy, and an opportunity to help friends in need benefited all involved.


A message of love

Ann Hermes/Staff
An electric fence separates local tourists from a wild elephant near Sri Lanka’s Udawalawe National Park. Found primarily in India, Indonesia, and Sri Lanka, Asian elephants are under greater threat than their African counterparts, which are poached for their ivory. The chief threat to Asian elephants is habitat loss. Attracted by crops, elephants venture into populated areas. Farmers seeking to protect their lands use guns and firecrackers and mount night watches that sometimes lead to fatal encounters. The government has moved to confine elephants to national parks, but the efforts haven’t been as effective as hoped. The best solutions, some suggest, may be local ones. “The only mechanisms I have faith in are small-scale electric fences, encircling homesteads or small cultivation plots without impeding elephant movement and foraging in a major way,” says Manori Gunawardena of the Born Free Foundation. “These are largely community-based and managed.” (For more images, click the blue button below.) – Ann Hermes, staff
( The illustrations in today’s Monitor Daily are by Karen Norris. )

A look ahead

Have a good weekend. On Monday our migration series, On the Move, shifts to Tanzania. Its solution to asylum-seeker debates: Give everyone citizenship overnight. Ryan Lenora Brown checks in. 

More issues

2018
December
14
Friday
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