2018
October
05
Friday

Monitor Daily Podcast

October 05, 2018
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Clayton Collins
Director of Editorial Innovation

Privilege and power again ran through US news headlines in a week that happens to end exactly one year since the day #MeToo accelerated worldwide. They are high-stakes political stories. We’ll get to a couple of them today.

In the periphery we saw an American first lady begin a multination trip to Africa, a continent ignored (at best) by most US administrations. (One arguably underreported crisis there: Congo’s mounting, double-barreled struggle with conflict and Ebola.)

And today a pair of less conventionally powerful players jointly won the Nobel Peace Prize. Denis Mukwege is a Congolese doctor who has stood against rape and other abuses. Part of a broad, noble cohort of tireless physicians there, he is known as “the man who mends women.” Nadia Murad is a Yazidi rights campaigner who stared down ISIS. The two were cited for “their efforts to end the use of sexual violence as a weapon of war and armed conflict.”

Their stories are portraits in compassion.

Ms. Murad – the subject of a Monitor Weekly cover story last year – fought through fear and exhaustion to help other women of her tiny ethnic minority who had been held captive and raped, as she had been before escaping. Her work is heavy, but it buoys her. “Whenever I get a call from the camps in Iraq that … so-and-so’s daughter was liberated, I feel overwhelming joy again,” she told the Monitor’s Kristen Chick at the time.

In recognizing Dr. Mukwege, Berit Reiss-Andersen, chair of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, hit a note that goes to the universality of both winners’ work. “His basic principle,” she said, “is that ‘justice is everyone’s business.’ ”

Now to our five stories for your Friday, including a look at a key test of the power of bipartisan appeal and at how laser mapping technology is quietly changing how we see the world. 


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Today’s stories

And why we wrote them

Andrew Harnik/AP
Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh testifies before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Capitol Hill in Washington Sept. 27.
Jonathan Ernst/Reuters/File
A photo of President Trump’s late father, Fred Trump, sits behind him in the Oval Office at the White House in Washington. A New York Times report detailed the family’s alleged tax-avoidance moves over several decades.

Film

Erika Doss/Twentieth Century Fox
Actors (from l.) Russell Hornsby as Starr's father, Regina Hall as Starr's mother, Amandla Stenberg as protagonist Starr, and Common as Uncle Carlos in Twentieth Century Fox’s 'The Hate U Give'. The movie, based on the bestselling book by Angie Thomas, debuts in theaters on Oct. 5.

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A Christian Science Perspective

About this feature

A message of love

Ciro Fusco/ANSA/AP
An archeologist works behind a wall bearing frescos in a house discovered during excavation work in Pompeii, Italy, Oct. 5. Archaeologists digging near Porta Vesuvio in an unexplored part of Pompeii discovered a richly painted house with an area featuring intact frescos and a lararium, a Roman household shrine, that is one of the largest discovered in the city, buried when Mt. Vesuvius erupted in 79 AD.
( The illustrations in today’s Monitor Daily are by Karen Norris and Jacob Turcotte. )

A look ahead

Thanks again for being here. We won’t publish on Monday, a federal holiday, but watch for a note from a senior writer. On Tuesday we’ll look at how the Senate might begin to recover from the ugliness of the Kavanaugh hearings and at how US sanctions are exacerbating societal tensions in Iran. 

More issues

2018
October
05
Friday
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