2017
September
29
Friday

Monitor Daily Podcast

September 29, 2017
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Clayton Collins
Director of Editorial Innovation

On Thursday, my colleague Yvonne Zipp laid out some ways to help the residents of Puerto Rico.

Besides facing food and water shortages – which could be alleviated by the White House’s move to waive a law limiting shipping to US ports by foreign vessels – some 3.4 million Puerto Ricans remain without electricity.

The island’s power grid was notoriously fragile even before Maria took it out. Some experts are already calling for the burying of power lines in advance of next season’s storms. Some recommend heavy investment in microgrids.

How hard is it to “build back better”?

In 2014, after a typhoon raked the Philippines, the Monitor’s Peter Ford went to Tacloban to size up the prospects of doing that there. I asked him last night for a quick follow-up.

“I talked to Prof. Pauline Eadie of Nottingham University, who has studied Tacloban since the Haiyan typhoon,” Peter said. “She says they have ‘not built back better, they have built back the same’ and, in some cases, worse.”

Utility hookups have been slow because of political squabbling. Water, for example, is controlled by a neighboring municipality under the control of a rival political party. There have been gross inefficiencies. “NGOs did not coordinate,” Peter’s source told him, “so there is a surplus of fishing boats now. They all handed them out whether needed or not.”

In Puerto Rico, success might be less about grand infrastructure projects – Google “Tren Urbano” for one that some suggest helped the island go bankrupt – than about an approach that is equitable, one that includes local input and vision.

Now to our five stories for your Friday, ones that show compromise, understanding, and respect in action.


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Today’s stories

And why we wrote them

Juan Ignacio Llana Ugalde/The Christian Science Monitor
Helena Gartzia, a former politician for a pro-independence party in the Bilbao city council, says she has wanted independence for her homeland in Spain’s Basque Country for her entire life. So it is with anticipation – and some envy – that she looks to Catalonia, a Spanish region that is holding an independence referendum expected Sunday, Oct. 1.

The Redirect

Change the conversation
David Goldman/AP
Atlanta Police Officers Michael Costello (left) and Jacob Fletcher walk into a neighborhood looking for clues in a 2014 murder case as part of a “tactical neighborhood canvass” in March 2016. The department’s homicide unit routinely organizes such canvasses looking for clues in recent cases or in older ones that remain unsolved.
SOURCE:

FBI, Gallup

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Jacob Turcotte and Story Hinckley/Staff

On Film

Good Deed Entertainment
Some 65,000 frames were hand-painted for the Van Gogh biopic 'Loving Vincent.'

The Monitor's View

AP Photo
Cornell Tech's new campus for high-tech innovation opened in September on Roosevelt Island in New York City. Backers hope the new graduate school will cement New York's status as a center of high-tech innovation.

A Christian Science Perspective

About this feature

A message of love

Changiz M. Varzi
German, Austrian, Italian, and Danish engineers began the construction of Iran’s northern railway in 1927. It took 11 years to complete. Every morning, old diesel trains begin an eight-hour trip from the capital, Tehran. They cross the Alborz, the highest mountain range in the Middle East, and arrive on the shore of the Caspian Sea. They pass through landscapes that vary from stretches of desert to frozen peaks, and from the ancient Caspian Hyrcanian forests to rice paddies in Mazandaran province, a hot spot during the summer for domestic tourists. (Click the button below for a gallery of images from contributor Changiz M. Varzi in Iran.)
( The illustrations in today’s Monitor Daily are by Jacob Turcotte. )

A look ahead

Thanks for joining us today. Come back Monday. At the start of the US Supreme Court’s new term, we’ll be looking at how President Trump’s shaping of the judiciary will begin to be felt on issues from the travel ban and religious freedom to partisan gerrymandering and public-sector unions. 

More issues

2017
September
29
Friday
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