2021
August
16
Monday

Monitor Daily Podcast

August 16, 2021
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Clayton Collins
Director of Editorial Innovation

Humanity really seems to be on its heels.

Just months ago we were reading reports of the resilience of Afghan girls. “They want to push our generation into the dark,” a girl in Kabul told Thomson Reuters, vowing to keep studying after a Taliban attack. Yesterday her country fell into Taliban control.

This month we covered Haiti’s capacity for weathering the blows that seem disproportionally aimed its way, including a president’s assassination last month. Over the weekend the Caribbean nation was hit by an earthquake more powerful than the devastating temblor of 2010, but farther from its crowded capital. Now a tropical storm bears down.

Our journalists have reported from Haiti over the decades – in my case, more than 25 years ago – recording both the unrelenting hardship and the irrepressible heart. Haiti’s story, as we reported recently, is more textured than is often depicted, and about more than just victimhood.

Monitor journalists have regularly covered Afghanistan, too, looking for light and forging ties. They continue to support those who have supported us there over the past 20 years.

Canada has announced plans to resettle vulnerable Afghans. Other help will come. Strength will also emerge from within.

“What I can say about Afghans is that they are resilient, they are resourceful, and they will cope with the return of the Taliban and the sense of heartbreak at feeling abandoned” after the hope and progress that the U.S. presence brought, the Monitor’s Scott Peterson told me overnight as he was reporting today’s story.

Scott sees Afghanistan as being a different place than it was 20 years ago.

“Many more Afghans want much more than the Taliban can give them,” he says, “and this struggle will now likely play itself out for years to come – though now on Afghan terms.”


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Today’s stories

And why we wrote them

Rahmat Gul/AP
Taliban fighters stand guard in front of the Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul, Afghanistan, Aug. 16, 2021. Thousands of people packed into the Afghan capital's airport on Monday, rushing the tarmac and pushing onto planes in desperate attempts to flee after the Taliban overthrew the Western-backed government.

Patterns

Tracing global connections

A deeper look

Bridget Bennett/Reuters
Low water levels due to drought are seen in the Hoover Dam reservoir of Lake Mead near Las Vegas, Nevada, June 9, 2021. The light-colored “bathtub ring” alongside the reservoir shows where the water level has been dropping to levels not seen since the dam was built in the 1930s.

Television

Netflix
A production still from "Mama K's Team 4," which Netflix will premiere next year. The superhero cartoon follows a group of high school girls in a futuristic version of Lusaka, the Zambian capital.

Difference-maker

Courtesy of Hugh Warwick
Hugh Warwick, author and activist on hedgehogs, has collected over a million signatures calling for the British government to introduce legislation to require planners and construction companies to create “hedgehog highways” for safe travel between homes.

The Monitor's View

Reuters
A member of Taliban armed forces sits on an armored vehicle outside the airport in Kabul, Afghanistan, Aug.16.

A Christian Science Perspective

About this feature

A message of love

Joseph Odelyn/AP
Residents line up during food distribution at a camp for those displaced by the earthquake in Les Cayes, Haiti, Aug. 16, 2021, two days after a 7.2 magnitude earthquake struck the southwestern part of the nation. The U.S. and other countries as well as the United Nations and private organizations are providing humanitarian aid.
( The illustrations in today’s Monitor Daily are by Jacob Turcotte. )

A look ahead

Thanks for starting your week with us, and please come back tomorrow. We’re working on a story about how, for all the talk about looking forward, the next U.S. election cycle looks likely to find the “stolen” 2020 election a defining rearview issue for Republicans – and the former president’s litmus test for GOP candidates.

Also: Don’t miss this newly updated version of Scott Peterson and Hidayatullah Noorzai’s magazine cover story, “Under Taliban rule, Afghans warn of going ‘back to the darkness.’”

More issues

2021
August
16
Monday
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