2023
September
05
Tuesday

Monitor Daily Podcast

September 05, 2023
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Mark Sappenfield
Senior global correspondent

It seems that North Korean leader Kim Jong Un might be jumping on his armored train this month to visit President Vladimir Putin in Russia. That’s the news from The New York Times.

The reclusive Mr. Kim almost never leaves his country, but the inducement could be considerable. Russia is burning through its stocks of artillery in Ukraine. North Korea can help.

Putting aside the sanctions against North Korea that would prohibit such trade, a deal makes sense for both sides. Russia needs military materiel, and North Korea needs food, oil, and money. Russian officials went so far as to suggest recently that North Korea could take part in joint military drills with Russia and China. That’s more than a handshake and slap on the back.

But is this a new “axis of evil”? By fueling the Ukraine war, does North Korea get the technology and know-how to build a nuclear weapon – or at least accelerate its program?

On one hand, a robust relationship could significantly undermine international sanctions, giving North Korea money it would otherwise not have. Yet Russia has long been wary of North Korea’s nuclear ambitions, supporting the last round of international sanctions in 2017. While North Korea will have significant leverage, there will almost certainly be a limit to how far Russia will go.

“North Korea is an enormous nuisance,” the Monitor’s Paris-based international editor and former Moscow bureau chief, Peter Ford, tells me. “Rogue nuclear states are as unwelcome there as they are here. Supporting that isn’t in anybody’s interests.”


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Today’s stories

And why we wrote them

A deeper look

What’s the most compassionate way to treat those experiencing addiction? Having decriminalized drugs, Oregon is trying to figure that out. 

Biden, McConnell, Feinstein, Trump: The number of top politicians in the United States who are of advanced age is leading to scrutiny over the role that age should play in political life.

Camilla Forte/The Hechinger Report
Ivory McCormick (center) attends a math conference July 12, 2023, in Chicago. The Atlanta teacher says her school’s math specialist helped change the way she feels about teaching the subject.

How might students benefit from having teachers who are more confident about their own math skills? One Chicago grad school is working to support educators – helping them feel capable, and to see even young children as mathematicians. This story is part of The Math Problem series, the latest project from the newsrooms of the Education Reporting Collaborative. 

Book review

Ben Bailey-Smith
Zadie Smith is the author of "The Fraud."

Amid rising concerns about disinformation and bias, Zadie Smith’s colorful and historical characters shed light on the roots of our biases. 

Letter From

Moab, Utah
Courtesy of Moab Music Festival/Richard Bowditch
Percussionist Pius Cheung performs at the Moab Music Festival on the Colorado River in Utah, Aug. 27, 2023.

The Colorado River is often viewed as a place of crisis. One Utah festival showcases the artistic creativity the river can inspire.  


The Monitor's View

As its Muslim population has grown in recent decades, Europe has sought to defend its core democratic principles – such as freedom of speech and religious liberty – while embracing its expanding cultural diversity. That challenge is once more vividly on display.

On Friday, the Danish government introduced a bill in parliament to ban public desecration of religious objects. The measure follows summer protests that involved burning the Quran, Islam’s most sacred text. A similar action provoked street clashes on Sunday in Sweden. In France, meanwhile, hundreds of schoolgirls were sent home on the first day of fall classes today for wearing abayas, a form of Muslim clothing banned last month under the country’s code of secularism.

These incidents have underscored the difficulty that Europe’s democratic societies and most deeply religious communities face in adapting to one another. But they may also be revealing that preserving liberal norms while accommodating new observances may in fact be mutually reinforcing.

Scores of Quran burnings in Sweden and Denmark in recent months, for example, have borne different messages. Some burnings were done by right-wing groups protesting what they see as an erosion of Western values. Others were carried out by immigrants from Iraq and Iran to highlight persecution in their home countries.

These acts have sharpened debate about so-called anti-blasphemy laws. The Danish proposal to make burning scriptural texts a crime sparked criticism from newspapers across Europe worried about free speech. Yet at least two recent opinion polls show that as far-right rhetoric against immigrants has become more inflammatory, support for protecting the Quran has grown among Swedish citizens. The government has pledged to draft a bill like Denmark’s by next summer.

In a July summit on hate crimes, Volker Türk, the United Nations high commissioner for human rights, noted that acts of desecration are often “manufactured to express contempt and inflame anger; to drive wedges between people; and to provoke, transforming differences of perspective into hatred and, perhaps, violence.”

The Quran burnings have, in fact, inflamed protests and drawn official condemnation in a swath of Muslim countries. But their greater effect may rest on the conscience of ordinary people – in their quiet defense of dignity and respect.

In July, a Swede of Syrian descent applied for a permit to burn a Torah outside the Israeli Embassy in Stockholm. On the day, however, he arrived with a Quran instead. “I want to show that we have to respect each other, we live in the same society,” Ahmad Alush said. “If I burn the Torah, another the Bible, another the Quran, there will be war here.” At a Quran burning a few weeks later, Husam El Gomati, a Libyan entrepreneur living in Sweden, walked among protesters while handing out chocolates. Kindness is stronger than hatred, he said.

Individual responses like those reflect broader unifying responses. An organization founded by a Swedish imam and rabbi works to build trust by jointly defusing discrimination against their distinct communities.

The debates in Europe over balancing the protection of rights and individual dignity are gaining new resonance at a time when people in many Muslim societies are seeking similar transformations, and discussions may hold useful lessons.

“To oppose anti-Muslim bigotry, we need also to oppose restrictions on blasphemy,” wrote Kenan Malik, a British columnist, in response to Denmark’s new legislation. “In defending free speech, we must also stand against bigotry whenever it reveals itself. To do one but not the other is not to be serious about either.”


A Christian Science Perspective

About this feature

Our individual efforts to learn more about life as stemming from divine Spirit, rather than from matter, pave the way for healing and inspiration that ripple outward.


Viewfinder

Sunday Alamba/AP
People sing as they ride on a new light-rail service in Lagos, Nigeria, Sept. 4, 2023. The Blue Line Rail metro currently has a 13-kilometer reach (about 8 miles). Officials say it is part of a larger effort to help make Lagos, said to have the worst traffic in the world, a fully interconnected city. The Blue Line Rail, built by China Civil Engineering Construction Corp., will extend to 27 kilometers (17 miles) in Phase 2 of construction, which will begin later this year.
( The illustrations in today’s Monitor Daily are by Karen Norris. )

A look ahead

Thank you for spending part of your day with the Monitor. We invite you to explore further with a story we posted only on our website. Japan’s Great Kanto earthquake, which occurred 100 years ago this month, is well known for its devastating damage and death toll that topped 105,000 people. Less well known is a massacre that followed: More than 6,600 Korean immigrants were slaughtered by military and vigilante groups amid xenophobic rumors that they were poisoning wells and starting riots. This past weekend, hundreds of people gathered on a riverbank in Tokyo to pay tribute to them and raise awareness of anti-Korean discrimination, then and now. You can read Monitor contributor Takehiko Kambayashi’s story here

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2023
September
05
Tuesday
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