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BBC

The Latest: Suez Starts To Move, Myanmar Escalates, French Bread Status

Holi celebrations in Agartala, India.
Holi celebrations in Agartala, India.

Welcome to Monday, where the grounded vessel in the Suez is starting to budge, the conflict in Myanmar escalates and the French seek long overdue special status for their daily bread. Meanwhile, Kayhan-London has a disturbing report on child marriage in Iran.

• Myanmar coup violence escalates: Additional deaths are reported today as protesters returned to the streets to challenge the military junta in Myanmar after scores of people were killed this weekend as the post-coup conflict appears to be escalating. Security forces have opened fire at funerals for victims of earlier crackdowns, as international officials accusing the regime of war crimes.

• Ever Given partially freed: Engineers have "partially refloated" the massive container ship blocking traffic through the Suez Canal, though work is still required to reopen the passage.

• Study blames animal transmission for COVID: A joint WHO-China study on the origins of COVID-19 says that transmission of the virus from bats to humans through another animal is the most likely scenario and that a lab leak is "extremely unlikely."

• Dozens killed in Mozambique terror attack: Five days since Islamist militants assaulted the town of Palma, "dozens' are confirmed dead and many other unaccounted for in the remote Mozambique town that is the site of natural gas project led by French energy giant Total.

• Trial begins for cop who killed George Floyd: The trial begins of Derek Chauvin, the white American policeman accused of killing George Floyd. The incident sparked protests in the US and across the world against police brutality and racism. Chauvin, 45, is one of four officers involved to stand trial.

• Australian cabinet reshuffle: Australia's Prime Minister Scott Morrison reshuffles his cabinet to promote women lawmakers and demotes two ministers amid allegations of sexual abuse and misogyny in parliament.

• France nominates the baguette for UNESCO status: Worldcrunch's Paris-based crew was shocked to learn our best-in-the-world daily bread wasn't already considered intangible cultural heritage.


Colombian daily El Espectador features a picture of rescue operations underway in Neira, in western Colombia, where 11 workers have been trapped in a gold mine for more than 50 hours.

Child marriage in Iran: Is 13 too young? Some are even younger

The Islamic Republic allows girls as young as 13 to marry legally. On top of that, a lack of enforcement means that elementary school age children may be forced into marriage as well, reports daily Kayhan-London:

The laws of the Islamic Republic of Iran require marriage parties to register with a notary and provide valid identity papers (with photos) proving their age. It appears, however, that the law is not being respected nor enforced. Social platform users have used #No2IR (short for "no to the Islamic Republic") to denounce the regime's position on underage marriage — both legal (by allowing girls as young as 13 to marry) and de facto (by turning a blind eye to cases involving even younger children) — as simply horrendous.

According to figures from the Iran Statistics Center, in the three-month period from March 20, 2020, more than 7,000 girls aged 10 to 14 years were married, with one girl aged less than 10 also registered as married. The same body found that the mothers of 346 children born in that period were not yet 15 years old, with mothers aged 15 to 19 giving birth to some 16,000 babies. Additionally, it counted 131 divorces involving a wife aged less than 14 years, and 2,650 divorcées aged 15 to 19 years.

The country's vice-president for women and family affairs, Ma'sumeh Ebtekar, says underage marriage figures "are not that high" and that Iran has a "strong" reactive system to block such situations. For years now, a bill to raise the legal marriage age to 18 has been circulating between the presidency, parliament and the Guardian Council. The latter body ensures legislation does not contravene the constitution or religious laws.

➡️ Read more on Worldcrunch.com


How the poisoning of a Spanish bear led to a major drug bust

A major bust last week of a Colombian-led narcotics ring deep in the Spanish Pyrenees led to the arrest of 12 people, the seizure of two kilograms of cocaine and the discovery of the laboratory where the drug was processed. Police say the successful operation was all thanks to a dead bear.

Pro and anti-bear associations in Spain all remember the death of Cachou the Bear, whose body had been found last April at the bottom of a ravine in the eastern region of Catalonia. Known to be responsible for several attacks on livestock, the brown bear had many enemies among the locals, and murder was quickly suspected. The theory was confirmed when the autopsy revealed that it had been poisoned with ethylene glycol, a toxic antifreeze used in car coolants.

An investigation was open, which included secret wiretapping of half a dozen people suspected in the death. Hoping to record conversations about the killing of the bear, the investigators instead stumbled on to even more juicy discussions about cocaine purchases and a laboratory where cocaine paste imported from Colombia was processed into ready-to-use doses. Among the suspects arrested last week is a mayor of the region.

"It is as if the animal, in gratitude for the effort (of investigators) responded to them with the alleged organization of drug traffickers," an official source told La Vanguardia.

And what about justice for Cachou? The primary suspect, a forest ranger of the Aran Valley, had been arrested back in November. Still, like with the battle against international drug traffickers, that investigation continues.

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

-64%

We've known since the early days of the pandemic that a healthy lifestyle can help mitigate the effects of the coronavirus, a study from the University of Navarra in Spain draws for the first time a direct link between the Mediterranean diet (high in vegetables, fruits, cereals, fish, and unsaturated fats like olive oil) and COVID-19 contagion risks, which it says the diet may reduce by an impressive 64%.

We've lost a strong, virtuous woman. A matriarch who held together the Obama family.

Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta offers condolences after the passing of Sarah Hussein Onyango Obama (affectionately known as "Mama Sarah), the step-grandmother of former U.S. President Barack Obama, who died on Monday at age 99 in Kisumu.

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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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EL ESPECTADOR
The oldest newspaper in Colombia, El Espectador was founded in 1887. The national daily newspaper has historically taken a firm stance against drug trafficking and in defense of freedom of the press. In 1986, the director of El Espectador was assassinated by gunmen hired by Pablo Escobar. The majority share-holder of the paper is Julio Mario Santo Domingo, a Colombian businessman named by Forbes magazine as one of the wealthiest men in the world in 2011.
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KAYHAN-LONDON
Kayhan is a Persian-language, London-based spinoff of the conservative daily of the same name headquartered in Tehran. It was founded in 1984 by Mostafa Mesbahzadeh, the owner of the Iranian paper. Unlike its Tehran sister paper, considered "the most conservative Iranian newspaper," the London-based version is mostly run by exiled journalists and is very critical of the Iranian regime.
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LA VANGUARDIA
La Vanguardia is a leading daily based in Barcelona, published in both Spanish and Catalan. It was founded in 1881.
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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
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Future

AI Is Good For Education — And Bad For Teachers Who Teach Like Machines

Despite fears of AI upending the education and the teaching profession, artificial education will be an extremely valuable tool to free up teachers from rote exercises to focus on the uniquely humanistic part of learning.

Journalism teacher and his students in University of Barcelona.

Journalism students at the Blanquerna University of Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain.

© Sergi Reboredo via ZUMA press
Julián de Zubiría Samper

-Analysis-

BOGOTÁ - Early in 2023, Microsoft tycoon Bill Gates included teaching among the professions most threatened by Artificial Intelligence (AI), arguing that a robot could, in principle, instruct as well as any school-teacher. While Gates is an undoubted expert in his field, one wonders how much he knows about teaching.

As an avowed believer in using technology to improve student results, Gates has argued for teachers to use more tech in classrooms, and to cut class sizes. But schools and countries that have followed his advice, pumping money into technology at school, or students who completed secondary schooling with the backing of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation have not attained the superlative results expected of the Gates recipe.

Thankfully, he had enough sense to add some nuance to his views, instead suggesting changes to teacher training that he believes could improve school results.

I agree with his view that AI can be a big and positive contributor to schooling. Certainly, technological changes prompt unease and today, something tremendous must be afoot if a leading AI developer, Geoffrey Hinton, has warned of its threat to people and society.

But this isn't the first innovation to upset people. Over 2,000 years ago, the philosopher Socrates wondered, in the Platonic dialogue Phaedrus, whether reading and writing wouldn't curb people's ability to reflect and remember. Writing might lead them to despise memory, he observed. In the 18th and 19th centuries, English craftsmen feared the machines of the Industrial Revolution would destroy their professions, producing lesser-quality items faster, and cheaper.

Their fears were not entirely unfounded, but it did not happen quite as they predicted. Many jobs disappeared, but others emerged and the majority of jobs evolved. Machines caused a fundamental restructuring of labor at the time, and today, AI will likely do the same with the modern workplace.

Many predicted that television, computers and online teaching would replace teachers, which has yet to happen. In recent decades, teachers have banned students from using calculators to do sums, insisting on teaching arithmetic the old way. It is the same dry and mechanical approach to teaching which now wants to keep AI out of the classroom.

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