Take the Hammer Away: News Items of Note

As usual, I should be doing other things besides wandering around the internet. But before I stop and attend to the smaller dramas of my own life, here are just a few interesting things going on that you probably already know about.

Mali is in crisis. Five presidents from around West Africa are in Bamako trying to bring about a resolution to growing political unrest. Here is a brief summary:

The visit on Thursday by the presidents of Ghana, Ivory Coast, Niger, Nigeria and Senegal comes days after a mediation mission by the West African regional bloc ECOWAS failed to break the deadlock. The foreign leaders are expected to meet Malian President Ibrahim Boubacar Keita and key figures of the opposition coalition behind the protests, known as the June 5 Movement. “It will be difficult to rebuff presidents who come to help bring back peace and stability to your country,” said researcher Demba Moussa Dembele, president of the Dakar-based African Forum on Alternatives. “The government and the opposition would likely avoid being blamed if the mission were to fail,” Dembele said. Mobilised by influential Muslim leader Ibrahim Dicko, tens of thousands of opposition protesters have in recent weeks poured onto the streets of Bamako to demand Keita’s resignation.

Of course, for useful information about Dicko, you have to keep clicking and then scroll down quite far to find out that 

Dicko’s influence unnerves some in Mali, which is 95% Muslim but has a secular constitution, and France where some commentators have likened him to Iran’s late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. He studied in Mauritania and Saudi Arabia in the 1970s, where he embraced conservative Salafist ideas. As head of Mali’s influential High Islamic Council in 2009, he led successful protests against a family code that would have thrown out a requirement that women obey their husbands. His efforts to mediate with Islamist militant groups have also drawn suspicion.  Mohamed Kimbiri, a member of the High Islamic Council, said Dicko was not challenging state secularism but wanted a less rigid version. “Today, he alone can command the Malian ship,” Kimbiri told Reuters. “The politicians have disqualified themselves, and the Malian public is now really in favour of the religious leaders.”

I must say, it is discouraging to go looking for international news and find every single new purveyor main headline blazing with something or other American, either how badly we’re doing with covid, or how badly we’re coping with all night rioting and demonstrations. That’s just my own complaint. There are a lot of interesting and terrible things going on around the world. It would be nice if we could know about some of them. That said, I’ll just be hypocritical and make sure and mark this moment–the glorious cancellation of Margaret Sanger:

But your history book may not have mentioned the darker side of Sanger, like her views on eugenics, a discredited belief in improving the human race through selective breeding. Eugenics practices targeted the disabled, people of color, and poor people. Sanger died in 1966. On Tuesday, Planned Parenthood of Greater New York (PPGNY) announced that it would be removing Sanger’s name from their Manhattan Health Center.

The French Interior Ministry recorded 996 anti-Christian acts in 2019 — an average of 2.7 per day. The true figure may be higher, as it is thought that officials do not count fires of undetermined cause at churches across the country. On July 4, for example, fire devastated the Parish of St. Paul in Corbeil-Essonnes. Investigators concluded that the blaze resulted from a gas leak caused by squatters, but locals questioned the official explanation. “Over the past two years, French government officials have started to talk about it more publicly, perhaps because the visibility of such attacks is now so great. Both President Emmanuel Macron and his new Prime Minister, Jean Castex, have, for instance, spoken clearly and forcibly about the recent attack on the cathedral in Nantes,” he said. While the number of officially recorded anti-Christian incidents has remained steady over the past two years (1,063 in 2018 and 1,052 in 2019), it has risen by 285% between 2008 and 2019, according to Ellen Fantini.