2020
February
19
Wednesday

Monitor Daily Podcast

February 19, 2020
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Mark Sappenfield
Senior global correspondent

Our stories today examine the potential Taliban peace deal, President Trump’s pardons, Russia’s capitalist ploy, odd happenings in the night sky, and expanding opportunity in Brooklyn. But first, a look at an anniversary.

Today is a Day of Remembrance for Japanese Americans. On Feb. 19, 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt decided to move Japanese immigrants to internment camps, and the date marks a time to consider the lessons of that legacy.

This week, California will formally apologize for its role. This follows the federal government’s own apology in 1988, along with $20,000 in reparations to everyone who had been interned.

But the importance of that apology – and California’s – goes back to the spirit of the first Remembrance Day in 1978. For decades, the Japanese community had rarely spoken of their internment, ashamed and afraid. But on that first Remembrance Day in Seattle, “parents opened up to their kids and told them about what happened to them during the war, many of them for the first time,” according to Densho, a blog about the internments.

That is why the apologies matter, Japanese Americans say. Speaking out cannot change the past, but it can shape the future.

“There is a saying in Japanese culture, ‘kodomo no tame ni,’ which means, ‘for the sake of the children,’” John Tateishi, one of the original activists, told WFDD. “It’s the legacy we’re handing down to them and to the nation to say that, ‘You can make this mistake, but you also have to correct it – and by correcting it, hopefully not repeat it again.’”


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Today’s stories

And why we wrote them

Rahmat Gul/AP
Afghan President Ashraf Ghani, center, leaves the Afghan Independent Election Commission after a ceremony to receive the official certificate of his winning a 2nd term as president, in Kabul, Afghanistan, Wednesday, Feb. 19, 2020.

Difference-maker

Ann Hermes/Staff
Isaiah Jordan (left) learns silk-screen printing from Peter McGouran, production manager in Reconnect Brooklyn's shop.

The Monitor's View

Reuters
A man walks over a bridge by the construction of Ethiopia's Great Renaissance Dam in Guba Woreda, in 2013.

A Christian Science Perspective

About this feature

A message of love

Alexander Kuznetsov/Reuters
An aurora is seen in the sky in Kilpisjarvi, Finland, Feb. 18, 2020.
( The illustrations in today’s Monitor Daily are by Jacob Turcotte and Karen Norris. )

A look ahead

Thank you for joining us today. Tomorrow, we’ll offer a portrait of a scientist with a fascinating lens on the world. She's studying cave slime to help us understand what life might look like elsewhere in our solar system.

More issues

2020
February
19
Wednesday
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