Global Headlines Express: What the World Talked About in the Past 24 Hours

Global Headlines is a new QDaily column for 2018, still in trial run. As ever, it is here to help you know more.

Updated 12:14 p.m.

The physicist Stephen Hawking has died at the age of 76. His family announced the news earlier on Wednesday at his home in Cambridge, England.

The Guardian carried this statement from Hawking's children:

"Our dear father passed away today. We are deeply saddened.

"He was a great scientist and an extraordinary man. His work and his legacy will live on for a long time to come.

"His courage and persistence, his brilliance and his humor inspired people across the world.

"He once said, 'It would not be much of a universe if it wasn't home to the people you love.' We will miss him forever."

What the Agenda Setters Are Talking About

National Geographic: For Decades, Our Coverage Was Racist. To Rise Above Our Past, We Must Acknowledge It.

The editors of the American magazine National Geographic had decided to build their April special issue around the theme of race. While preparing it, they realized the 130-year-old magazine might have a race problem of its own, so they asked John Edwin Mason, a professor of African history and the history of photography at the University of Virginia, to go through the archives and find out where this venerable publication had gone wrong in covering people of color at home and abroad.

What he found was dispiriting.

"For most of its history, the magazine's writing and its images reproduced a racial hierarchy, with white people at the top and yellow and black people at the bottom," Mason told the editors.

The magazine never mentioned Africans who lived in cities and had been well educated. Black people always appeared as static, primitive and technologically backward — usually unclothed, or made to look ignorant. A 1916 story about Australia ran a photo caption reading: "South Australian Blackfellows: These savages rank lowest in intelligence of all human beings." Such images lasted into the 1970s, and they shaped how National Geographic's readers, most of them middle-class white Americans, pictured black people.

When Mason handed in his findings, the editors did not push back. They gave the findings a prominent place in the magazine, under a headline that says exactly what it means: For Decades, Our Coverage Was Racist. To Rise Above Our Past, We Must Acknowledge It.

The piece was written by Susan Goldberg, the magazine's current editor-in-chief. "I am the tenth editor of National Geographic since its founding in 1888, and the first woman and the first Jewish person to hold the job," she said. "It hurts to share the shocking, discriminatory coverage of our past. But if we are going to write about race, I think we should look at ourselves before we look at anyone else."

So far the reaction on social media has been mostly favorable. Two American websites, Splinter and The Root, called the decision an encouraging "first step."

Newsmakers of the Past 24 Hours

Trump fires Secretary of State Tillerson.

On Tuesday, Trump announced on Twitter that he was removing Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and replacing him with CIA director Mike Pompeo. Gina Haspel, the agency's current deputy director, will be promoted to director, the first woman to run the CIA.

Tillerson found out only on Tuesday morning, when he checked Twitter on an aide's phone. Last Friday, though, White House chief of staff John F. Kelly had called him, asked him to cut his Africa trip short, and told him "you may get a tweet."

Since taking office, Tillerson had disagreed with Trump in public on a long list of issues, among them Saudi Arabia's break with Qatar and how the United States should answer Russian cyberattacks.

Trump's explanation to reporters at the White House: "We were not really thinking the same." A senior administration official said Trump had chosen this moment to replace Tillerson so he could build a new team before his May meeting with the North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, and for the many trade negotiations now under way.

On Tuesday afternoon Tillerson spoke at the State Department and said Trump had just phoned to tell him himself — more than three hours after the president tweeted the news to his 49 million followers. Tillerson said he would hand over every duty by the close of business that day and leave office formally on March 31. He urged the deputy secretary, the assistant secretaries and the policy team to keep working as usual and carry on with their jobs.

"I'll now return to private life, as a citizen, a proud American," he said. "It has been a true honor to serve my country." He gave no interviews and walked straight out of the briefing room.

What Else Happened in the World

The Trump administration plans tariffs on $60 billion of Chinese imports, aimed mainly at technology and telecommunications. China's trade surplus with the United States currently stands at $375 billion.

Google plans to offer free Wi-Fi hotspots in Mexico, setting up at least 56 of them through Google Station. Mexico is the first country in Latin America to get the service, and Google Station's third market after India and Indonesia.

A well-known Iranian scholar has been sentenced to 18 months in prison. Sadegh Zibakalam, a professor of political science at the University of Tehran, gave a telephone interview to the German broadcaster Deutsche Welle on January 1 this year. He was sentenced on Tuesday on charges that included "giving an interview to foreign media in Persian" and "plotting against the directives of the Islamic Republic and spreading false information."

The world's finance chiefs plan to use the G20 meeting to urge international standard-setting bodies to tighten regulation of crypto-assets, and to assess whether a multilateral response is needed. This year's G20 meeting of finance ministers and central bank governors runs in Buenos Aires from March 19 to 20.

The global art market recovered somewhat last year, and the top end grew fastest. The latest figures from UBS and Art Basel put total global art sales up 12% in 2017, at $63.8 billion — still short of the $68 billion record set in 2014. But among works that fetched more than $1 million at auction, sales rose 125% year on year.

Students at about 3,000 schools across the United States plan to walk out on Wednesday local time to mark one month since the Florida high school shooting. The February 14 attack at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland killed 17 people. The students want the marches to push new gun safety legislation, including a ban on the sale of assault rifles and high-capacity magazines and the introduction of comprehensive background checks.

Iran Air will open the job of pilot to women for the first time this year. The airline's chief executive, Farzaneh Sharafbafi, announced it on Sunday local time. She is herself the first woman to run Iran Air in its 74-year history.

Someone Said

"I am afraid that Facebook has now turned into a beast, and not what it was originally intended to be," said the UN investigator Yanghee Lee.

Lee and her colleagues went to Myanmar to find out whether violence against the Rohingya, a Muslim minority there, had escalated into genocide. They found that social media had played a central part, and that "in Myanmar, social media is Facebook, and Facebook is social media."

A local digital marketing agency reckons that 20% of Myanmar's population uses Facebook regularly. In a country run by the military, Facebook has also become the main place people get their information. Ultranationalists are skilled at using the platform to stir up hatred of the Rohingya, and the government has carried out a "cleansing" of the group; more than a thousand people have been killed or driven out of the country so far.

According to The Washington Post, the anti-Rohingya campaigning on Facebook comes from a number of accounts, the best known belonging to the ultranationalist monk Ashin Wirathu, along with accounts set up by the army and the government. Some Rohingya activists told reporters last year that what they themselves posted on social media was censored by the platform.

Robert Huish and Patrick Balazo, two researchers at Dalhousie University in Canada, described to qz.com how the hatred travels on Facebook:

Anti-Rohingya content includes plainly racist cartoons, faked images and made-up news reports. Shared widely, it makes hate speech ordinary and takes over how the public understands what is happening. People come to support violence against the Rohingya, then go back online to celebrate it.

Facebook says it has started to tackle its problems in Myanmar: it has published a local version of its community guidelines and hired more moderators to read posts and regularly delete hate speech, including Ashin Wirathu's own.

You Might Also Be Interested In

A research project on green agricultural development — planned by a team at China Agricultural University and carried out with 25 teaching and research institutions across the country, among them Hebei Agricultural University, Jilin Agricultural University and Northwest A&F University — has published its results in the journal Nature.

The study, Pursuing Sustainable Productivity with Millions of Smallholder Farmers, took 10 years and $54 million in funding. It drew in 1,152 researchers and 20.9 million farmers in 452 counties, and ran 13,123 field trials in China's main growing regions for its three staple grains — wheat, corn and rice — using a new method called "green high-yield, high-efficiency technology."

The method goes after a set of problems in intensive grain farming: heavy fertilizer use, high costs to resources and the environment, shrinking yield gains from each added dose, and poor nutrient uptake. It designs high-yielding plant populations that make efficient use of light and heat, drawing out the yield potential of the varieties themselves; and it meters water and fertilizer into the root zone, so a dense, high-yielding crop still uses resources efficiently. The aim is less pollution — a high yield above ground and efficient use of water and fertilizer below it.

The results: corn, rice and wheat grown this way averaged 20.6% higher yields than under local farmers' usual practice, while nitrogen fertilizer use fell 14.5% and the emissions intensity of reactive nitrogen and of greenhouse gases fell 34.8% and 27.0% respectively.

Over the past 10 years the project has saved farmers $12.2 billion.

On This Day

March 14, 1879: Albert Einstein is born.

March 14, 1883: Karl Marx dies.

March 14, 1997: Chongqing becomes a municipality directly under the central government.

March 14, 2004: The Second Session of the Tenth National People's Congress passes a constitutional amendment writing "the state respects and protects human rights" into the Constitution.

March 14, 2013: At the fourth plenary meeting of the First Session of the Twelfth National People's Congress, Xi Jinping is elected President of the People's Republic of China and chairman of the Central Military Commission.

Cover image from: Wikipedia