Picks of the Week 🧐

Hello! Happy Friday and welcome to another edition of Inside The Newsroom! Lots to get into today as we jump around the world to the latest news in the U.S., the UK, Russia, Venezuela, Germany and Romania. If you missed the podcast this week with Ted Talker and expert on the weirdest artificial intelligence, Janelle Shane, you can check that out below. And keep your eyes peeled for the first of several election waves to be held this month, as we decipher what went down in Sri Lanka 🇱🇰, Serbia 🇷🇸, Kiribati 🇰🇮 and Malawi 🇲🇼. Until then, enjoy this week’s Picks of the Week! 🤓

P.S. Happy birthday to my mum Julie for tomorrow 🥳 😬

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SCOTUS Protects LGBTQ Rights

Let’s lead things off with some good news… The Supreme Court of the United States this week ruled that discrimination against gay and transgender people in the workplace is prohibited. The decision comes five years after the SCOTUS declared it legal for same-sex couples to marry in a 5-4 decision. Much has changed on the bench since then — Anthony Kennedy retired in 2018 and Antonin Scalia passed away in 2016 — and this latest landmark decision passed with a 6-3 vote, including approval by the Donald Trump-appointed Neil Gorsich and John Roberts, who was appointed by George W. Bush and dissented in the 2015 vote. Progress! And in another landmark decision this week, the SCOTUS ruled in favor of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals 5-4. More progress! ✊

Top row: Neil Gorsuch (Trump), Sonia Sotomayor (Obama), Elena Kagan (Obama), Brett Kavanaugh (Trump)

Bottom row: Stephen Breyer (Clinton), Clarence Thomas (George H. W. Bush), John Roberts (George W. Bush), Ruth Bader Ginsburg (Clinton), Samuel Alito (George W. Bush)

Credit: SCOTUS 👇

Marcus Rashford Forces Government U-Turn

More good news, this time in the UK, where Manchester United and England footballer Marcus Rashford led the fight against the government’s refusal to provide England’s poorest families with food vouchers for kids. One of many major U-turns in the past few months — Johnson said he’d axe fees for migrant healthcare workers but appears to not have done so — the PM agreed to provide £15-a-week vouchers over the summer that’ll feed around 1.3 million schoolchildren. But that didn’t stop Conservative MP Therese Coffey from eating a slice of delicious humble pie after she publicly mocked Rashford’s campaign just hours before the U-turn…

Dictators Gonna Dictate

Time for some darker news as President Vladimir Putin and President Nicolás Maduro both seek to consolidate their power in Russia and Venezuela, respectively. Maduro, who’s seen as an illegitimate president by a number of countries including the U.S. and the UK, this week stripped the license of First Justice, one of the country’s largest opposition parties. The move came just days after Maduro took away control of Democratic Action, another of South America’s largest and oldest parties. Meanwhile in Russia, the country will go to the polls on July 1 to decide whether Putin will remain as president until 2036. The original April 22 date was postponed because of the health and safety of his people, but as the country’s Covid-19 cases stand at more than half a million (and still rapidly rising), now is obviously the best time to think about the future. And to round off the president beat, Burundi’s former-outgoing-authoritarian-president Pierre Nkurunziza, who gave up power in May’s election, has died reportedly from Covid-19.

Credit: Kremlin

German Nightclubs

Continuing our journey around the world, we stop off next in Germany, where Covid-19 has sucked the life out of Berlin’s renowned nightclubs. According to The Wall Street Journal, a huge chunk of the €1.48 billion (£1.36/$1.68 billion) annual revenue tourists spend on clubbing will be lost, in addition to the other benefits to the local economy. While the German federal government has stumped up €25 billion (£23/$28.5 billion) in aid for businesses impacted by the pandemic, the chances of millions of sweaty clubbers returning to the scene anytime soon is extremely thin, and the party landscape in Germany might look a lot different for years to come.

Graphic: Roque Ruiz

Romanian Orphans

It’s been 30 years since former Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu’s horrific orphanage program, which saw tens of thousands of Romanian children treated in indescribable ways, simply because they were unwanted or in many cases, unaffordable in a communist regime. The children that survived are now adults, and Melissa Fay Greene beautifully depicts the lives of some of them for The Atlantic. Definitely worth the time to digest this one.

Summer Solstice

If you’re in the Northern Hemisphere, tomorrow will be the longest day of the year! But if you’re in the southern hemisphere, it’ll be the shortest. Sorry, south. But what actually is the summer solstice? Good question. Tomorrow will be one of two days every year — the other being in December — where the sun is at its furthest from Earth. The question is, will tomorrow be the start of summer for you, or the beginning of the end as we slope toward winter…

Smart

And I wanted to end today on some non-news. I came across a poem this week that feels extremely topical. It’s called Smart by Shel Silverstein, and though I can’t find exactly when it was written, I got a lot out of it. I’ll leave you to interpret it in whatever way you choose. See you next week folks.

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