2023
September
12
Tuesday

Monitor Daily Podcast

September 12, 2023
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“Look at Deon on the stage (far right of screen)!”

In an emoji-and-exclamation-point-laden exchange among Monitor colleagues last week, correspondent Sara Miller Llana shared the image of young Namibian delegate Deon Shekuza on center stage at the Africa Climate Summit in Nairobi, Kenya. Sara and photographer Melanie Stetson Freeman had interviewed him only weeks earlier in Namibia, and we were all excited about the recognition of someone who tenaciously, without immediate reward, chips away at barriers to progress.

Sara, Melanie, writer Stephanie Hanes, photographer Alfredo Sosa, and senior editor Clara Germani are preparing a global series – launching in November – about the generation born into the climate crisis and now driving transformation, innovation, and progress.

In this season of climate conferences, it’s powerful to hear about the work of young people effecting change in extraordinarily diverse ways. They aren’t generally well known. They often don’t tell their stories the way an American reporter may anticipate – which can demand extraordinary patience to allow a story to emerge.

That’s what happened in Namibia. Sara’s first interview with Deon sprawled, leaving her with doubts.

“Then, the next day,” she says, “I listened to my recording and realized he was teaching me a lesson – that you can’t get all the answers at once or get everything right away. It’s a metaphor for his work: It’s the long game. He’s going somewhere big, but it’s not linear, in his outlook.”

Trust grew. Deon showed Sara and Melanie the one-room home he shares with his mother. They saw the power in his seemingly modest steps: helping random young people on the street, explaining green hydrogen to a group of kids in a poor neighborhood. (They listened intently and took notes.) He put everything ahead of his own well-being, Sara says, with “a generosity of time that we don’t know in North America.”

Our reporters’ work will take you to the Arctic, the Caribbean, Europe, and South Asia. We hope you’ll enjoy starting the journey with us soon.


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Today's stories

And why we wrote them

The Explainer

Is Google using its clout to maintain a monopoly over internet search? An antitrust lawsuit has big implications for competition in the tech industry.

J. Scott Applewhite/AP
Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, shown speaking in the U.S. Capitol on Sept. 12, 2023, is directing three House committee chairs to open a formal impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden.

Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s announced impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden is widely seen as an effort to placate the right wing. But it could complicate budget negotiations as the government is set to run out of money on Sept. 30.

Courts are weighing whether the government’s effort to suppress social media posts it defined as “misinformation” unfairly silenced dissenting views, to the detriment of scientific debate. 

Rebecca Blackwell/AP/File
A protester carries a sign demanding the right to abortion on International Women's Day in Mexico in 2019. The Supreme Court decriminalized abortion last week.

Belying its macho image, Mexico is a Latin American leader in political gender parity. Both leading candidates in next year’s elections are women: Coming up – Señora Presidenta.

Gene J. Puskar/AP
Margie Howells teaches a fifth grade class at Wheeling Country Day School in West Virginia, Sept. 5, 2023. Ms. Howells says that reading math research helped her become more explicit about things that she assumed students understood, like the fact that the horizontal line in a fraction means the same thing as a division sign.

While the “science of reading” movement has taken off, a comparable approach for math is still in its infancy. Some researchers and teachers are exploring ideas that they hope will lead more students to being comfortable with numbers. This story is part of The Math Problem, the latest project from the newsrooms of the Education Reporting Collaborative. 

Alfredo Sosa/Staff
Brianna Group (center), counts baby oysters with the help of Kimberly Arlen (right) and Kelsey Meyer at the University of New Hampshire’s Jackson Estuarine Laboratory, Aug. 9, 2023, in Durham, New Hampshire.

A partnership between conservationists and oyster farmers is expanding after a promising start. The project helps rebuild wild oyster reefs and provides reliable income to farmers. 


The Monitor's View

With its rich history of cultural expressions, Iran is not poor in creating new forms of dissent. One of the latest is girls roller-skating through the streets of Tehran without wearing the mandatory head covering, or hijab. Videos of these hair-in-the-wind skaters have been shared widely on social media. One in particular contains this description: “We’re injecting joy into society, sir.”

Another new type of microdemonstration is girls dancing in public to songs by ABBA or to street musicians. Compared with the mass street protests against laws that constrain Iranian women, the hair-swaying movements of the girls affirm a different freedom through action.

From Rumi’s poetry to classic Iranian art to wedding feasts, “joy is a part of our culture,” writes Tara Grammy, an Iranian Canadian, in Harper’s Bazaar. “Fear is the agent used by the regime to control the masses,” she adds, but maintaining joy has been a means of survival for Iranians.

The Persian word for demonstration, tazahorat, means “to show what is true.” By being the change they seek, young women in Iran may be shifting the way they challenge an Islamic regime that sees enforcement of hijab as essential to its existence. “I am telling you that the removal of the hijab will definitely come to an end,” said President Ebrahim Raisi in August.

In recent weeks, the regime has stepped up enforcement of hijab-wearing for women, in anticipation of renewed mass protests for a key anniversary. On Sept. 16 a year ago, a young woman named Mahsa Amini died in police custody after being detained for wearing a hijab “improperly,” sparking months of protests.

After more than 500 killings and at least 20,000 arrests, the protests have been largely suppressed. Now Iranians are exploring positive ways to display what they want. The regime knows that the number of women who practice civil disobedience every day has increased, says Masih Alinejad, an Iranian American journalist. People across Iran will celebrate a revolution ignited by the killing of Ms. Amini. “Maybe you don’t see people in the streets, but revolutions have different phases,” Ms. Alinejad says.   

For now, one phase may be girls dipping in Iran’s deep culture of joy.


A Christian Science Perspective

About this feature

Each weekday, the Monitor includes one clearly labeled religious article offering spiritual insight on contemporary issues, including the news. The publication – in its various forms – is produced for anyone who cares about the progress of the human endeavor around the world and seeks news reported with compassion, intelligence, and an essentially constructive lens. For many, that caring has religious roots. For many, it does not. The Monitor has always embraced both audiences. The Monitor is owned by a church – The First Church of Christ, Scientist, in Boston – whose founder was concerned with both the state of the world and the quality of available news.

Recognizing God, Spirit, as the infinite source of good for all His children helps us experience a deeper, more lasting joy – even when circumstances don’t seem to be going our way.


Viewfinder

Susana Vera/Reuters
Fatima Amiri (left) gestures to Hamza Triki to ask for his help as they sort through donated aid to be sent to Morocco following a deadly earthquake in the North African country, in Madrid, Sept. 12, 2023.
( The illustrations in today’s Monitor Daily are by Karen Norris. )

A look ahead

Thank you for joining us today. Please come back tomorrow for the highlights from our Monitor Breakfast with United States Education Secretary Miguel Cardona.  

More issues

2023
September
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