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In The News

Putin’s New Doctrine, BoJo Bids Farewell, First COVID Inhaler

Putin’s New Doctrine, BoJo Bids Farewell, First COVID Inhaler

Ukrainian people wait in line for free lunch served by the Myrne Nebo charity in Kharkiv. The organization also delivers meals to Ukrainian soldiers on the frontlines of the war in the region.

Anne-Sophie Goninet, Laure Gautherin, Lisa Berdet, Chloé Touchard, Lila Paulou and Bertrand Hauger

👋 Ko na mauri!*

Welcome to Tuesday, where Vladimir Putin unveils a new “Russian World” foreign policy doctrine, Liz Truss officially takes over from Boris Johnson as UK Prime Minister, and Instagram gets slapped with a hefty fine. Meanwhile, Spain’s Agencia SINC looks at how the distorted and often negative portrayal of women in medicine is being challenged by the research community.

[*Gilbertese, Kiribati]

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This is our daily newsletter Worldcrunch Today, a rapid tour of the news of the day from the world's best journalism sources, regardless of language or geography.

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🌎  7 THINGS TO KNOW RIGHT NOW

• Putin unveils new “Russian World” foreign policy doctrine: Russian President Vladimir Putin approved a new foreign policy doctrine that is based around the concept of a “Russian World” that conservative ideologues use to justify intervention abroad.

• Trump investigation granted a “special master”: Former U.S. President Donald Trump’s request for a “special master” to review the materials seized by the FBI at his Mar-a-Lago home has been granted by a federal judge. District Judge Aileen Cannon, who was appointed by Trump in 2020, has ordered for a third-party attorney to be assigned on the case.

• One suspect found dead in Canada stabbings: Damien Sanderson, one of the two suspects in the Saskatchewan deadly mass stabbings, has been found dead by the police. His injuries are believed not to be self-inflicted. His brother Myles Sanderson is still on the run.

• BoJo resigns, enters Truss: After delivering a farewell speech in Downing Street during which he pledged support to his successor Liz Truss, Boris Johnson traveled to Balmoral in Scotland to tender his resignation to the Queen in a private meeting. Liz Truss subsequently met with the Queen and officially became the United Kingdom’s new Prime Minister.

• Convoy blast kills 35 in Burkina Faso: At least 35 civilians were killed and 37 wounded in an improvised explosive device blast targeting a convoy of supplies in Burkina Faso’s jihadist-ridden north. The convoy was escorted by the army and traveled to the capital Ouagadougou.

• Iran sentences two LGBT activists to death: A court in Urmia, Iran, has sentenced Zahra Seddiqi Hamedani, 31, and Elham Choubdar, 24, to death for "corruption on Earth." Human rights groups say they were accused of promoting homosexuality, making the first time a woman faces the death penalty in Iran for her sexual orientation.

China approves first inhaled COVID vaccine: China’s medicines regulator has approved the world’s first inhaled COVID-19 vaccine, CanSino Biologics’ Convidecia Air, for emergency use as a booster vaccine. This comes as several Chinese cities are still under lockdown as part of a strict zero-COVID policy.

🗞️  FRONT PAGE

China’s Jiefang Daily features rescue teams’ efforts in the wake of the 6.6 magnitude earthquake that hit the Sichuan province earlier this week. The quake — which killed 65 people, with 12 still missing — was felt by millions of people who were confined in their homes in Chengdu. President Xi Jinping ordered all efforts to be put towards minimizing casualties and saving lives: so far.


#️⃣  BY THE NUMBERS

€405 million

Ireland's Data Protection Commission (DPC) fined Instagram €405 million ($402 million) for a "major breach" in children's data on the platform. Irish regulators found that children had access to settings that could make their information public. Meta officials responded saying the settings were "old": "We disagree with how this fine was calculated and intend to appeal it" they said. Last year, the DPC fined Whatsapp €225 million for similar data protection issues.

📰  STORY OF THE DAY

Hysterical to hypersexual: Bogus female diseases have always held women down

Throughout history, women have been overdiagnosed with mainly psychiatric ailments and syndromes that have already been ruled out, from hysteria to nymphomania. This distorted portrait, which had its golden age in the 19th century, has been questioned in recent decades by the research community, reports Beatriz de Vera in Spain’s Agencia SINC.

♀️ The uterus has been blamed since ancient Egypt: then, it was said that the organ moved inside the woman's body causing all kinds of conditions. Later, more or less elaborate theories have followed that relate the uterus to diseases or unruly behavior of women. The word hysteria, disease of the uterus (hystera, in Greek), accompanied these diagnoses and had a new golden age in the 19th century. Although today hysteria has disappeared from diagnostic manuals, “the prejudice that women are weak, sensitive, that they put up with less, that they complain about small things, remains.

💊 And it's not a trivial concern. This prejudice, says María Teresa Ruiz Cantero, professor of Preventive Medicine and Public Health at the University of Alicante, is at the base of an important diagnostic error: that women are overdiagnosed with syndromes. “It is common that, when it is not very well known what is happening, the label "functional problem" is used. They stay in primary care wandering around and end up being prescribed painkillers, while the men are referred to a specialist, who provides curative treatment. This is very serious," she says.

🛑 “Today there are more women scientists, and they are changing the very way of doing science. Questions are being asked that have never been asked before,” says journalist Angela Saini in her book Inferior. “Things that were taken for granted are questioned, and old ideas give way to new ones. The distorted — often negative — portrayal of women in the past has been challenged in recent decades by researchers, who say it was wrong.”

➡️ Read more on Worldcrunch.com

📣 VERBATIM

It’s a shame that it took so long.

— European Council President Charles Michel and Belgium’s Prime Minister Alexander De Croo reacted and denounced the European Union’s late response to the energy crisis. In an interview, Michel added, “There is not a day to lose” while in a separate statement De Croo declared, “Decisive action [at the European level] in spring could have limited the contamination of the electricity market.”

✍️ Newsletter by Anne-Sophie Goninet, Laure Gautherin, Lisa Berdet, Chloé Touchard, Lila Paulou and Bertrand Hauger


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Migrant Lives

Albania, The Brutal Demographics Of A Neverending Exodus

Since the fall of communism in 1991, the small Balkan state has been slowly but inexorably emptying itself, at the pace of incessant waves of emigration. With an aging and declining population and a birth rate in free fall, it is facing all kinds of challenges.

Photograph of the city view of the Albanian village of Berat. An old man walks along the river, surrounded by trees.

City view of the Albanian village of Berat, May 23, 2022.

Florian Gaertner/ZUMA
Basile Dekonink

MEMALIAJ — It is 1 p.m. on a summer Saturday, and only the barking of a dog breaks the silence in the street of this small Albanian town. The sun illuminating Minatori Square doesn’t change a thing: there’s not a soul to be seen in this former mining town in Southern Albania. On the steps leading up to the cultural “palace," there is no one. Behind the drawn curtain of the old kepuce italiane ("Italian shoe") store, no one. In the red-brick buildings that threaten to crumble into ruin: no one.

“There’s nothing here anymore. No work, no money, no bread. Everyone left after the end of the dictatorship," says Stefan Arian, a 60-year-old man who speaks rusty Greek, sitting at the Café Qazimi, one of the few businesses still open. It’s hard to picture that, not so long ago, this abandoned town was one of Communist Albania’s great working-class centers. Built from scratch in 1946 to exploit the nearby coal mine, the city counted up to 12,000 inhabitants in its heyday. Barely more than 1,000 remain.

Memaliaj isn't the only one: Kukës, Zogaj, Përmet, Narta — there are dozens of such towns and villages in Albania. From North to South, the small Balkan state is criss-crossed by semi-ghost towns, with few or no inhabitants. It is the mark of a unique demographic phenomenon: since the fall of the communist regime 30 years ago, the country has been slowly but inexorably emptying itself through incessant waves of emigration.

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