2024
June
12
Wednesday

Monitor Daily Podcast

June 12, 2024
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Mark Sappenfield
Senior global correspondent

Every day, the Monitor has a budget – a list of stories we plan to publish. The top story on today’s budget starts with these words: “Former middle-class housewife turned combat zone commander ...” I was hooked. 

I don’t really want to talk about the article. I want you to read it. It is a remarkable portrait of the front lines in Ukraine, and a view of the world often the Monitor alone provides. It has drones and hardship, jokes, and code names – like Splash, Pikachu, and Mechanic. 

The code name for the housewife-turned-commander? Joy. This is not your ordinary war story.   


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Today’s stories

And why we wrote them

Dominique Soguel
Ananda shows a DIY drone that her team is testing ahead of an attack on Russian forces in Donetsk region, eastern Ukraine, in April 2024.

Today’s news briefs

Moises Castillo/AP
Guatemalan President Bernardo Arévalo waves as he walks from the National Palace to Congress to submit legislation to make it easier to remove the attorney general May 6, 2024, in Guatemala City.
Scott Peterson/Getty Images/The Christian Science Monitor
A statue of Mary and the baby Jesus remains by the wrecked front door of a home in the village of Alma el-Shaab, Lebanon, May 18, 2024. Christian-majority villages adjacent to the Lebanon-Israel border have suffered damage, caught in exchanges of fire between Hezbollah and Israel.

In Pictures

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff
An oryx stands on a dune in the distance in the Namib-Naukluft National Park. It is one of the largest national parks in Africa and sits in the Namib Desert, considered the world’s oldest desert.

The Monitor's View

Reuters
Children listen to a Palestinian medical student, Rahaf Nasser, playing music in Deir Al-Balah, Gaza Strip.

A Christian Science Perspective

About this feature

Viewfinder

Zoltan Balogh/MTI/AP
Students take part in a flash mob held on the 50th anniversary of the invention of the Rubik’s Cube, organized by the National Innovation Agency in St. Stephen's Square in downtown Budapest, Hungary, June 12. Hungarian professor, architect, and inventor Ernő Rubik invented the so-called Magic Cube in the spring of 1974. It originally served educational purposes, but the game later became popular worldwide.
( The illustrations in today’s Monitor Daily are by Karen Norris. )

A look ahead

Thank you for joining us today. Please come back tomorrow when Sarah Matusek visits Colorado’s most competitive swing district. Is President Joe Biden’s recent action on the southern border enough to move the needle for local voters, or too little too late?

More issues

2024
June
12
Wednesday
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