2024
May
31
Friday

Monitor Daily Podcast

May 31, 2024
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Mark Sappenfield
Senior global correspondent

Perhaps the sanest advice Peter Grier received in his illustrious 45-year journey as a Monitor writer came, appropriately enough, from his wife. “This is crazy,” she said as he pulled an all-nighter to write our signature post-9/11 story. “You need to go to bed.”

Peter ignored the advice. Repeatedly. Whether it was all-nighters or unreasonably tight deadlines, Peter had a habit of making the very difficult look effortless. Today, with Peter on the cusp of retirement, Gail Russell Chaddock chats and laughs with him about one of the most portentous Monitor careers of recent decades – his own. 


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Today’s stories

And why we wrote them

With November elections just five months away, Donald Trump’s conviction Thursday will test voters’ tolerance for the former president’s actions, as well as public confidence in American justice.

Today’s news briefs

• Manchin leaves Democrats: Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia says he has registered as an independent, raising questions about his future political plans.
• New Caledonia under control: The French interior minister says French authorities in New Caledonia have regained full control of the Pacific territory’s capital after two weeks of unrest.
• Airstrikes on Houthis: Joint British-U.S. airstrikes targeting Yemen’s Houthi rebels kill at least 16 people and wound 42 others, according to the rebels.
• Free tax filing: The IRS will make permanent the free electronic tax return filing system that it experimented with this year.
• Spelling bee winner: Bruhat Soma, a 12-year-old from Tampa, Florida, is the champion of the 2024 Scripps National Spelling Bee after winning the competition’s second spell-off to date. His championship word was “abseil.”

Read these news briefs.

Valentyn Ogirenko/Reuters
Firefighters work at the site of the Kids and Youth Sport Riding School, which was heavily damaged by Russian missile strikes, in the village of Mala Danylivka, outside Kharkiv, Ukraine, May 30, 2024.

Throughout the war in Ukraine, a recurring theme has been Kyiv’s gratitude for U.S. military aid tinged with impatience over its timeliness. President Joe Biden’s decision to allow use of U.S. weapons against some targets in Russia fits the pattern.

Riley Robinson/Staff/File
A farm is flooded with water July 11, 2023, in Williston, Vermont. The flash flooding in central and southern Vermont led state lawmakers to passing the Climate Superfund legislation, which became a first-of-its-kind law May 30, 2024.

Increasingly costly incidents of extreme weather are taking a toll on state budgets. Flood-ravaged Vermont is trying to make carbon emitters pay, with a first-of-its-kind law that’s creative but legally controversial.

Podcast

From Cold War to 9/11 to ... beagles: Our senior scribe has made coverage a craft

Last week on our podcast, veteran Washington writer Peter Grier talked about trust and U.S. elections. In this week’s episode, on the cusp of retirement, he looks back at some moments from a remarkable career. 

A Writer’s Retrospective

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Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff
Punjabi pop star Diljit Dosanjh performs at sold-out BC Place Stadium to kick off his global Dil-Luminati tour, in Vancouver, British Columbia, April 27, 2024.

Music can make a community feel heard – not just literally, but figuratively, too. The rise of a “Punjabi wave” in international music is helping the Indian diaspora in Canada feel recognized in a new way.


The Monitor's View

Elizabeth Williams via AP
Donald Trump, far left, watches as a jury foreperson delivers guilty verdicts to Judge Juan Merchan in Manhattan Criminal Court, May 30.

Thursday’s guilty verdict against Donald Trump on 34 felony counts has raised concerns about a possible effect on democracy in the future: Will prosecutors aligned with one party now feel emboldened to indict elected leaders of another party? The performance of the jury in the Trump trial offers a calming insight.

Mr. Trump, who plans to appeal the verdict, and his supporters had claimed that he could not obtain a fair trial in New York because it is overwhelmingly liberal. The public actually knows little about the individual jurors. They were vetted by both sides during jury selection and asked whether they could weigh evidence dispassionately, particularly in a case involving such a well-known figure. 

A few hours into their deliberations, the jurors returned with three requests. They wanted headphones to better review recorded testimony. They asked for a rereading of transcripts of witness accounts of pivotal events. Their concern for factual accuracy was matched by a third, more revealing request.

New York state law does not allow judges to hand out the instructions they give juries for rendering verdicts. That guidance must be read from the bench. Judge Juan Merchan’s ran 55 pages. The jurors returned to hear again a specific passage. It read, “In deciding whether to draw an inference, you must look at and consider all the facts in the light of reason, common sense, and experience.”

Reason, notes Andrew Walker, an ethics professor at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, ties self-government to conscience and reconciliation. It rests on evidence, and favors listening and empathy over emotion and instinct. “To reason deeply,” he wrote in an essay for the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, “must mean there is an honest airing of differences and an honest willingness to hear the other’s side.”

An innate capacity for ordinary citizens to subordinate their own views to reason and place justice ahead of personal preference may be why a right to trial by jury was one of the few points that drew universal agreement in America’s founding constitutional debates. Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts summarized that consensus in observing that “the jury is adapted to the investigation of truth beyond any other system the world can produce.”

Fifty-three “free” or “partly free” countries have indicted past or present heads of state since 2000, according to a survey last year by Foreign Policy magazine. One common lesson is that countries with strong democratic institutions often emerge even stronger through those prosecutions. The exercise of equality before the law deepens civic trust.

In the first criminal trial of a former American president, 12 fairly selected jurors followed the facts and the law. In times of high political passion, they showed temperance of reason in the pursuit of truth. Democracy relies on the wisdom and impartiality of such everyday folks.


A Christian Science Perspective

About this feature

While a selfless deed done for another is always inspiring, a spiritual perspective shows us it doesn’t need to be out of the ordinary. 


Viewfinder

Valentyn Ogirenko/Reuters
Ukrainian prisoners of war enjoy their first moments of freedom after a prisoner swap with Russia, at an unknown location in Ukraine, May 31, 2024.
( The illustrations in today’s Monitor Daily are by Jacob Turcotte. )

A look ahead

Thank you for joining us today. We’ll send you off into your weekend with a bonus read. Boeing has had its share of bad press recently over safety issues on its commercial airliners. It’s hoping that the launch of its new Starliner spacecraft tomorrow will provide a reset. You can read the story here.  

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