🔎Picks of the Week — August 7
Beirut Blast, Vatican Women, Hiroshima Nagasaki 75th Anniversary, South China Morning Post, Malaria Parasite, Mexican Junk Food
Hello! Happy Friday and welcome to another Picks of the Week. Today we’ll travel the world for an update on Tuesday’s explosion in Lebanon, introduce ourselves to the first women appointed to senior positions in the Vatican, take a look at the 75th anniversary of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombs, the influence and importance of the South China Morning Post in Hong Kong, more bad news in the disease world, and positive news in Mexico pertaining to junk food. Okay, let’s get to it… ✊
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Beirut Blast Update
We’ll start this week with an update on the heartbreaking explosion that consumed Lebanon’s capital of Beirut. The 137 death toll is expected to rise with many still missing, as is the number of injured which currently stands at around 5,000. What was initially thought to be a terrorist attack linked to the U.N.-backed trial of four Hezbollah suspects has turned out to be negligence, according to initial investigations. Anti-government protests have since broken out across the city, likely also fuelled by anger over the country’s deteriorating economy amid a record surge of Covid-19 cases.
French president Emmanuel Macron was the first foreign leader to visit Beirut and promised to deliver aid and some ‘home truths’ to the Lebanese government. Macron, who is facing growing political unrest of his own back in France, acted swiftly to assert his presence in the former French protectorate. A petition for Lebanon to “be placed under a French mandate for the next 10 years” had already received 60,000 signatures by late Thursday, according to The Guardian. Yet his critics accused Macron of “neo-colonialist grandstanding”.
Vatican Women
Moving across the Mediterranean now as Pope Francis finally delivered the biggest step in fulfilling his commitment to place more women in leadership roles. The Vatican’s 15-member Council for the Economy, set up in 2014 to manage various administrative and financial tasks, will now feature six women, two each from the UK, Germany and Spain. The Holy See has struggled with a soaring budget deficit in recent years, reaching around €83 million in 2018 on a budget of €300 million, according to The Wall Street Journal, and that’s not even accounting for the Covid-19 recession that’s on the horizon.
The six female appointees are: Charlotte Kreuter-Kirchhof, of Germany; Eva Castillo Sanz, of Spain; Leslie Jane Ferrar, of Great Britain; Marija Kolak, of Germany; María Concepción Osákar Garaicoechea, of Spain; and Ruth Maria Kelly, of Great Britain. The committee was previously comprised of all males.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki 75th Anniversary
This week marks the 75th anniversary of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombings, dropped on the Japanese cities that effectively ended World War II. The bombs were the first nuclear weapons used in war and the only times atomic bombs have been used. Many Japanese still feel the bombings were unjustified — around 140,000 people died in Hiroshima and around 74,000 in Nagasaki — while in the U.S. the bombs are thought to have shortened the war and saved thousands of other lives. In 2009, Barack Obama became the first sitting president to visit Hiroshima, though he stopped short of an apology.
South China Morning Post
Moving to Hong Kong next with an excellent feature by my favourite news outlet The Atlantic, on the importance and influence of the South China Morning Post. The largest English-language newspaper in Hong Kong is caught between competing agendas inside its own newsroom, with reporters and editors battling over how to frame various stories pertaining to Hong Kong’s push for autonomy amid China’s new security law. The law makes it easier to punish protestors and reduces the city’s freedom, and has left many at the SCMP not knowing what journalistic activity constitutes a crime.
Parasite
As Covid-19 continues to light up the world, scientists in Rwanda have delivered more bad news, this time in the fight against malaria. A new study published in Nature shows that for the first time some parasites are resistant to artemisinin, a front line drug used to treat the disease. The scientists warned the new development "would pose a major public health threat" in Africa, where the disease is most prominent. Children under the age of five are most vulnerable to the disease, and accounted for two thirds of the roughly 405,000 global deaths in 2018.
Source: WHO 👇
Mexican Junk Food
As usual, we’ll end with some positive news as the Mexican state of Oaxaca has banned the sale of junk food and sugary drinks to children. Oaxaca is the first to introduce such a measure in a state that has one of the world’s highest rates of childhood obesity. Around 73 percent of the Mexican population is overweight, an increase from about 20 percent in 1996, according to the OECD. And according to the BBC, “The passing of the law was greeted with applause from lawmakers inside the state Congress, but outside shop owners and street sellers were protesting against it.” Any reasonable person will see this as great news for the future, but the Mexican government must now ensure these shop owners and street sellers are also taken care of in the short-term, especially as Covid-19 has stripped many from their livelihoods.
See you next week 👋
