2021
October
12
Tuesday

Monitor Daily Podcast

October 12, 2021
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Sara Miller Llana
Americas Bureau Chief

My colleague Fred Weir and I take you to a changing Arctic this week – the Northwest Passage of Canada and the Northern Sea Route of Russia. Fred visited Murmansk, a city of 300,000, and was struck by how much “Arctic Russia is like the rest of the country – urbanized, populated by Russians who have the same sorts of jobs, watch the same TV channels, and live in the same huge apartment blocs.”

His flight was an easy two hours from Moscow, and he is eager to return in wintertime to see the northern lights. I was farther north in Resolute Bay – too far north to see the northern lights, in fact – and I got there with the help of a U.S. Coast Guard C-130.

When I’m in a new place, the first thing I do is lace up and run to get my bearings. But the first thing we were told was not to leave our lodgings because of polar bears. Instead, we drove through. And I was struck by how much this Arctic town is nothing like the rest of Canada.

Resolute Bay was quiet on a recent dusk. Gorgeous chunks of ice decorated the coastline. There’s a skating rink – kids were playing shinny – and a post office, co-op for groceries (which only arrive in an annual resupply shipment), a wildlife bureau, and a nursing station. In front yards were snowmobiles and dog sleds. A polar bear skin hung outside one home; an Arctic fox scurried across the landscape. It has an edge-of-world feel.

This is Canada’s second-most northern community. It only exists because the government relocated Inuit families in 1953 to exert Arctic sovereignty – for which Canada apologized in 2010. Leaving town, a powerful statue by the late carver Simeonie Amagoalik stands as a monument to the “High Arctic exiles” of ResoluteSeventy years ago this community was forced into an unforgiving landscape. Now they stand at the frontlines of climate change. While a warming Arctic shifts geopolitical and commercial calculations – the subject of the Monitor’s two-parter – it will have the greatest bearing on the people who call the Arctic home.


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Today’s stories

And why we wrote them

A deeper look

Petty Officer 3rd Class Jonathan Lally/U.S. Coast Guard/File
The 420-foot U.S. Coast Guard cutter Healy breaks ice in the Bering Sea to assist the tanker Renda, approximately 165 miles from Nome, Alaska, Jan. 8, 2012.

With the melting Arctic opening up new opportunities and stirring old rivalries, the U.S. and Canada are trying a cooperative approach to tapping the thawing resources and trade routes. Part one of two.

Julie Carr Smyth/AP
Areeqe Hammad testifies at the first public hearing of the Ohio Redistricting Commission at Cleveland State University Aug. 23, 2021. A new voter-approved commission that was supposed to reduce partisanship in the process of political map-drawing has devolved into partisan finger-pointing.

New commissions, some made up of average citizens, are struggling to overcome partisanship as they redraw congressional and state legislative lines. Some say reformers need to rethink the whole process.

SOURCE:

The Brennan Center, All About Redistricting, and The National Conference of State Legislature

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Karen Norris/Staff
Jeff Chiu/AP/File
A computer with Facebook ad preferences pages in San Francisco on March 26, 2018. California passed a consumer data privacy law in 2018 that went into effect last year. Now, other states and Congress are considering legislation.

Ohio resident Amy Krebs knows firsthand about the damage that invasions of privacy can bring. Concerns from people like her are one reason there’s momentum in Congress for a possible federal law.

SOURCE:

The International Association of Privacy Professionals

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Jacob Turcotte/Staff

Books

Artie Limmer/Texas Tech University
Katharine Hayhoe is the author of "Saving Us: A Climate Scientist's Case for Hope and Healing in a Divided World."

Talking about climate change can be done out of a sense of respect, rather than judgment, says this climate scientist and author. Meeting others where they are can open closed channels of thought. 

Points of Progress

What's going right
Staff

Our progress roundup highlights a century of energy consumption. While it took decades for the harm done by leaded gas to be widely recognized, today many people are eager for the possibilities of power without fossil fuels.

Staff

The Monitor's View

Reuters
Workers walk by what is officially known as a vocational skills education center in China's Xinjiang region but what critics say is a factory relying on forced labor by the Uighur minority to make export goods.

A ruling last month by France’s Supreme Court has sent a strong signal to international corporations about a need to be more vigilant in their foreign operations. For the first time, the high court said a company could be charged with complicity in crimes against humanity. The decision marks a wider awakening in Europe to holding firms accountable for their global impact, from supporting terrorists to the worsening of climate change.

The decision was a blow to French cement maker Lafarge, which faces charges it indirectly gave millions of dollars to armed groups, including Islamic State, to keep open a subsidiary’s factory in Syria between 2012 and 2015. The court held that the company can be tried for charges of knowingly backing a terrorist group responsible for the killing of innocent people. The case has been returned to an investigative court for a final determination.

The judgment reflects an effort by the European Union and its member states to use new laws and regulations to influence the global struggle on human rights and environmental issues. France passed a Duty of Vigilance Law in 2017 while Germany is considering a Corporate Sanctions Act. This year, Germany adopted the Supply Chain Due Diligence Act, which will require large companies to prevent such dangers as child labor and environmental destruction at any point in a firm’s supply chain. The EU is studying whether to require member states to pass similar laws by 2022.

“Ten years ago, corporate criminal liability was routinely questioned and criticized,” writes Richard Cassin, founder of a blog on corruption. “Today, corporate accountability is breaking out all over. Let’s celebrate the sudden and encouraging acceptance of the idea that corporations can be guilty too.”

One reason corporations – and not individuals in a corporation – are being held responsible on human rights and climate damage is that often reparations are needed. If found guilty, for example, Lafarge might be required to make amends to Syrian families whose loved ones were killed by the financing of terrorists. When crimes are committed across borders, justice must be seen as universal. And so too must be making the victims of injustice whole again.


A Christian Science Perspective

About this feature

What really defines us? Looking beyond our physical attributes or circumstances and considering our nature as God’s children offer healing, empowering answers.


A message of love

Brian Snyder/Reuters
Badia Eskandar celebrates as she crosses the finish line of the 125th Boston Marathon on Oct. 11, 2021. The iconic race returned Monday after being canceled in 2020 for the first time in its history.

A look ahead

Thanks for joining us today. Come back tomorrow for Part 2 of our changing Arctic series, when Fred Weir takes us to Russia’s Northern Sea Route.

More issues

2021
October
12
Tuesday
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