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BBC

The Latest: Biden’s Vision, Navalny Appearance, 5,000-Year-Old Tombs

A mural depicting Russian Putin critic Alexei Navalny is being painted over less than 90 minutes after it was discovered on Wednesday in Saint Petersburg.
A mural depicting Russian Putin critic Alexei Navalny is being painted over less than 90 minutes after it was discovered on Wednesday in Saint Petersburg.

Welcome to Thursday, where Biden lays out his vision for America, Northern Ireland leader quits over Brexit and a Navalny mural appears in Saint Petersburg (as he appears gaunt in a remote court hearing). We also turn to Germany, where Die Welt sounds the alarm about the male infertility crisis afflicting the Western world.

• Biden's address to Congress: To mark 100 days in office, U.S. President Joe Biden gave his first address to the nation Wednesday night, unveiling huge investments for jobs, education and care plans, while addressing white supremacy and systemic racism.

• Two Myanmar air bases attacked: Attacks have been launched against two Myanmar air bases on Thursday, as blasts and rocket fires have been reported. No attackers have been identified yet.

• A gaunt Navalny makes first appearance since hunger strike: Kremlin critic Alexey Navalny appeared in court via video link for an appeals hearing, criticizing Russian President Vladimir Putin and his government in his first public appearance since he went on hunger strike.

• India maintains state elections despite COVID surge: Residents of the Indian state of West Bengal are voting in the last phase of elections amid a deadly second wave of coronavirus.

• Northern Ireland first minister resigns: Northern Ireland First Minister and majority party leader Arlene Foster has announced her resignation, following protests over post-Brexit borders.

• First step for China's new space station: China has launched a module of a new space station, amid hopes that Beijing will have the new station operational by 2022.

• 5,000-year-old tombs discovered in Egypt: Some 110 pre-Pharaonic tombs have been discovered in the Nile Delta by Egyptian archaeologists, shedding light on major transitional periods in ancient Egypt.


Italian daily Il Messaggero reports on the arrests in France of seven Italian leftist terrorists, who had been on the run for decades following their conviction in Italy. The issue had long poisoned relations between the two countries.

Male infertility: the hidden pandemic

Across the Western world, the number of men unable to have children without medical intervention is growing. Health specialists are raising the alarm and scientists are struggling to find the cause, while politicians are ignoring the issue, reports Benedikt Schwan in German daily Die Welt.

When a couple is having trouble conceiving, doctors traditionally assume the issue lies with the woman. However, it has been clear for some years now that the problem often actually lies with the man's fertility — or lack of. In 2017, Israeli epidemiologist Hagai Levine and his team brought together numerous studies carried out since the 1970s, which collected data on sperm count and health through so-called spermiograms. The results were shocking: Over the last four and a half decades, men's sperm count in Western countries has dropped by 52%.

The search for the cause of this dramatic drop is complicated. Levine speculates that for a long time now people in the West have been exposed to the chemical revolution: pesticides, plastics and other potentially harmful substances are everywhere. Sometimes problems begin in the womb, where the organs responsible for producing semen fail to develop properly. This has far-reaching consequences, not only in terms of fertility. Levine refers to studies that have shown infertile men are more likely to get cancer. But little is known about any direct connection between the two.

Men can be very affected when they discover that they have reduced fertility. "Many say that they don't feel like real men if they can't have children," says fertility therapist Petra Thorn. She often hears them say things like, "I'm worried that other people will question my masculinity and my sexual potency." Thorn is one of very few specialists in male infertility. She has a practice in Frankfurt and says men often find it difficult to come to terms with their infertility.

➡️ Read more on Worldcrunch.com


Mexican riot police training turns into a riot of its own

As Mexican National guardsmen were busy training to learn new methods to limit street violence, they began to, well, fight among themselves.

The National Guard, founded in 2019 as a better-trained, more disciplined gendarmerie corps to fight organized crime, confirmed that videos circulating of the sordid incident were real — and training in San Luis Potosí in northern Mexico, had "gotten out of control," Azteca television and La Jornada newspaper reported this week.

Footage of the session shows it began well enough, with one group of officers acting as rioters and others fending them off with plastic shields. At one point two colleagues appeared locked into a real fight, which led to some flying kicks — and it wasn't clear anymore if this was part of the training — and one officer going to the back of the defensive line to give his peers a piece of his mind.

The two groups then devolved into the kind of mêlée that they were being trained to defuse, with whistling and calls by female officers to call it off. The National Guard stated Internal Affairs would investigate the matter and vowed it would not tolerate any conduct "degrading the institution's image."

➡️ Keep up with all the planet's police reports and plot twists on Worldcrunch.com

267 gigatons

Over the last 20 years, glaciers have lost about 267 gigatons of ice per year, with the total loss accelerating by about 48 gigatons per year per decade, because of climate change and warmer air, a study published in Nature journal found. The meltwater now accounts for nearly one fifth of global sea-level rise. (A gigaton is equivalent to 1 billion tons or more than 6 million blue whales.)

We are working again. Dreaming again. Discovering again. Leading the world again.

— U.S. President Joe Biden said during his first address to the nation on Wednesday, to mark his first 100 days in office.

✍️ Newsletter by Anne-Sophie Goninet & Emma Flacard

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AL JAZEERA
Al Jazeera is a state-funded broadcaster in Doha, Qatar, owned by the Al Jazeera Media Network. Initially launched as an Arabic news and current-affairs satellite TV channel, Al Jazeera has since expanded into a network with several outlets, including the Internet and specialty television channels in multiple languages.
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REUTERS
Reuters is an international news agency headquartered in London, UK. It was founded in 1851 and is now a division of Thomson Reuters. It transmits news in English, French, Arabic, Spanish, German, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Japanese, Korean, Urdu, and Chinese.
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DEUTSCHE WELLE
German public international broadcaster
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IL MESSAGGERO
Founded in 1878 in Rome, Il Messaggero has long been the best-selling daily in the Italian capital. It is owned by the holding company of Roman construction magnate Francesco Caltagirone.
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LA JORNADA
One of Mexico City's leading daily newspapers, La Jornada ("The Day") was established in 1984 by Carlos Payán Velver. It is published in seven states of the Mexican Republic with local editions in Guerrero, Jalisco, Michoacán, Morelos, San Luis Potosí, Puebla and Veracruz (La Jornada de Oriente). The online version was launched in 1995 and the website is hosted by the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM).
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BBC
The BBC is the British public service broadcaster, and the world's oldest national broadcasting organization. It broadcasts in up to 28 different languages.
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THE GUARDIAN
Founded as a local Manchester newspaper in 1821, The Guardian has gone on to become one of the most influential dailies in Britain. The left-leaning newspaper is most recently known for its coverage of the Edward Snowden leaks.
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WORLDCRUNCH
Premium stories from Worldcrunch's own network of multi-lingual journalists in over 30 countries.
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DIE WELT
Die Welt ("The World") is a German daily founded in Hamburg in 1946, and currently owned by the Axel Springer AG company, Europe's largest publishing house. Now based in Berlin, Die Welt is sold in more than 130 countries. A Sunday edition called Welt am Sonntag has been published since 1948.

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Geopolitics

Why The Latin American Far Left Can't Stop Cozying Up To Iran's Regime

Among the Islamic Republic of Iran's very few diplomatic friends are too many from Latin America's left, who are always happy to milk their cash-rich allies for all they are worth.

Image of Bolivia's ambassador in Tehran, Romina Pérez Ramos.

Bolivia's ambassador in Tehran, Romina Pérez Ramos.

Bolivia's embassy in Tehran/Facebook
Bahram Farrokhi

-OpEd-

The Latin American Left has an incurable anti-Yankee fever. It is a sickness seen in the baffling support given by the socialist regimes of Cuba, Nicaragua, Venezuela or Bolivia to the Islamic Republic of Iran, which to many exemplifies clerical fascism. And all for a single, crass reason: together they hate the United States.

The Islamic Republic has so many of the traits the Left used to hate and fight in the 20th century: a religious (Islamic) vocation, medieval obscurantism, misogyny... Its kleptocratic economy has turned bog-standard class divisions into chasmic inequalities reminiscent of colonial times.

This support is, of course, cynical and in line with the mandates of realpolitik. The regional master in this regard is communist Cuba, which has peddled its anti-imperialist discourse for 60 years, even as it awaits another chance at détente with its ever wealthy neighbor.

I reflected on this on the back of recent remarks by Bolivia's ambassador in Tehran, the 64-year-old Romina Pérez Ramos. She must be the busiest diplomat in Tehran right now, and not a day goes by without her going, appearing or speaking somewhere, with all the publicity she can expect from the regime's media.

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