2018
December
21
Friday

Monitor Daily Podcast

December 21, 2018
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Clayton Collins
Director of Editorial Innovation

A week of political fireworks in the US (we’re watching the government-shutdown saga) also featured the flares of some coldly ambitious tech.

Humanity might have seen the world’s first five-rocket-launch day – missions both national and private – had a bunch of them not fizzled. There was a fresh run by Uber at autonomous cars, and the temporary shutdown of London’s Gatwick Airport by drones of unknown origin.

Hands-on human innovation today extends even to the natural-sounding realm of islands. Most recently in the news because of the existential threat posed to them by rising seas, they’ve also popped up – in artificial form – as territorial markers (think China’s outposts in the South China Sea).

But it’s not all competitive human calculus.

In the Netherlands, a handful of built islets have emerged in a massive freshwater lake, part of a very Dutch effort that’s now paying environmental dividends according to a report from Agence France-Presse.

Construction involved silt, not just sand, and in only 2-1/2 years the islets have provided a foothold for nearly 130 plant types, their seeds borne in by the wind. Tens of thousands of swallows have also arrived. Most important, an “explosion” of life-sustaining plankton is reviving the once-dead lake.

 Says one ranger of the high-tech rewilding effort, “We had to intervene.”

Now to our five stories for today, including a look at the deployment of babies against bullies, and, as we enter the Northern Hemisphere’s longest night, a science writer’s celebration of cosmic darkness.


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Today’s stories

And why we wrote them

J. Scott Applewhite/AP
The US Capitol is framed by an early morning sky. Congress is confronting the threat of a partial government shutdown amid a dispute with President Trump over funding for a border wall.

Special Report

Difference-maker

Courtesy of Will Austin
Mary Gordon founded Roots of Empathy, a program that takes babies into classrooms and encourages the students to better relate to other people’s experiences.
Nils Ribi Photography/AP/File
The Milky Way glimmers in the night sky in the Sawtooth National Recreation Area, Idaho. The United States' first International Dark Sky Reserve in central Idaho offers night skies so pristine that interstellar dust clouds are visible in the Milky Way.
SOURCE:

NASA Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite

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Jacob Turcotte/Staff

The Monitor's View

Chris O'Meara/AP
Marshall quarterback Isaiah Green throws a pass against South Florida during the first half of the Gasparilla Bowl college football game Dec. 20 in Tampa, Fla.

A Christian Science Perspective

About this feature

A message of love

Jane Barlow/Reuters
People gathered for a service at a memorial garden in Lockerbie, Scotland, Dec. 21, on the morning of the 30th anniversary of the bombing of Pan Am flight 103. The plane exploded over the town, killing 259 passengers and crew – including 35 Syracuse University students studying abroad – and 11 people on the ground. The university names 35 “remembrance scholars” each year. Libya’s Muammar Qaddafi paid compensation to victims’ families in 2003.
( The illustrations in today’s Monitor Daily are by Karen Norris and Jacob Turcotte. )

A look ahead

Have a wonderful weekend. We’ll be back Monday with a look at a festival in the Israeli port city of Haifa that honors Christmas, Hanukkah, and Muslim traditions. The big December gathering is now in its 25th year.

We’ll also deliver a special audio offering: editors’ favorite holiday readings for Christmas Eve. We hope you’ll listen in.

More issues

2018
December
21
Friday
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