UK-France Summit, 3 Years of the COVID-19 Pandemic, Foreign Films at the Oscars, and More

MCMAHON:
In the coming week, a UK-French summit takes place in Paris, the world marks the third anniversary of the declared start of the COVID-19 pandemic, and foreign films get a spotlight at the U.S. Academy Awards. It's March 9th, 2023 and time for The World Next Week.

I'm Bob McMahon.

ROBBINS:
And I'm Carla Anne Robbins.

Well Bob, hi. Let's start in France. What a nice place to start.

MCMAHON:
I'd love to start in France. I'd love starting in France.

ROBBINS:
Okay, we can retire now. So tomorrow, Friday, the UK's still relatively new Prime Minister Rishi Sunak will meet with French President Emmanuel Macron. So Sunak is coming in on the high of a maybe UK-EU Northern Ireland deal, but Macron is having a much tougher time with more than a million marchers in the street this week, protesting his plan to raise the retirement age from sixty-two to sixty-four. So what are these guys going to be talking about?

MCMAHON:
Well, I think one very big issue is the illegal migration aspect, or let's say the migration aspect and their determination about whether it's legal or not because some of these migrants are claiming asylum and so forth. But there's been a great deal of discussion. I mean, we should note this is the first summit between a French president and a UK prime minister in five years, these two leaders actually met on the sidelines of the latest COP meeting in Egypt. But-

ROBBINS:
Climate change, yeah.

MCMAHON:
In terms of formal summitry, first one in five years, which in itself speaks volumes. I mean we sometimes talk cynically about the "Three Amigos" meetings in the U.S. in our hemisphere, but at least they're having them on a regular basis. So these two countries need to talk more at the leadership level they are. And migration issue is a big one. They had an agreement reached just in November about deploying extra personnel to both detect and prevent migrant boat crossings, partly because it was getting increasingly unwieldy to deal with the number. There's something like 45,000 people crossed over last year to seek asylum. As well a number of people are dying in these crossings. They're getting especially treacherous. So I think you're going to hear more about a new deal in which the two countries try to deter migrants from crossing the channel in particular and what the two countries are doing to share resources and to coordinate on that issue.

And another big one as you refer to, which is the so-called Windsor Framework on dealing with the new phase in which goods will be transiting Great Britain to Northern Ireland, while the various vestiges of Brexit continue to be ironed out, there's going to be under that deal, which still has to be sorted out, including needing sign on from the local actors in Northern Ireland. It's basically streamlines a lot of the paperwork and customs checks on what's called the so-called Green Lane where something like 90 percent of goods consumed in Northern Ireland will not have to follow the EU single market rules. In return for this streamlining and some seen as concessions to the UK, Rishi Sunak has promised he's going to abandon what was proposed in legislation in the UK, which was to unilaterally scrap this protocol at any time. So that was something the EU had looked for. And there was also basically a bit of bon ami going on. There's also going to be a visit of the new Monarch of England, Charles III, who's going to be coming to France at the end of this month. So you're seeing lots more contacts, some more positive signaling between the two countries, which have a lot to deal with even while Brexit has created this wedge between them.

ROBBINS:
So can we talk a little bit about what the small boats deal, this immigration deal? There are EU officials who are saying that what Rishi Sunak has been proposing, which is nobody comes in, who comes in illegally is going to be granted asylum. Sounds a little bit like what the Biden administration's talking about, or they're going to get sent back to Rwanda or some other place like this. This seems pretty internationally illegal and pretty cruel. Is Macron willing to go along with this and I'm not surprised if a Tory government's talking that way, but is Macron talking that way too? I mean Macron is a conservative, but it's still, it's pretty disturbing stuff and the EU seems to be raising concerns about it.

MCMAHON:
Yeah, I mean I think it's running up against both countries commitments to sort of an ironclad part of international humanitarian law that they've signed onto, which is the right of asylum and people who are fleeing truly scary circumstances and their ability to apply legally for asylum. And it's something that is being dealt with really across the breadth of Europe, frankly. And just to get to the point where they can cross the channel, these migrants are dealing with all sorts of difficult situations. The source countries are the ones that we've come accustomed to hearing about. It's in Northern Africa, it's in the Middle East, it's as far away as Afghanistan. And so people who have scrounged together whatever money they could to get to this point, then trying to make the final rough passage because even the thought of sort of limbo for months and months in UK is more appealing than the alternatives for them.

But I think what it comes down to is this balancing, the attempt to try to balance, by both countries, humane treatment with the ability to try to control numbers. And so this is where you have the French trying to control the amount of people who are basically creating these kind of makeshift camps on their northern coastal areas and just not allow that or really control the staging areas but also control the flows up to that point. It's going to involve a great deal of cooperation in some ways from the UK perspective, it's a little bit like what the U.S. has asked Mexico to do in some areas in terms of controlling the flows of people up to the border. So then that it relieves that pressure a little bit. There's obviously very, very different dynamics going on here and different numbers too. It's lower numbers, although it's still getting to be higher levels of migrants or would be migrants.

And so it's a tough situation for both countries to kind of reconcile. I do think there's going to be, no matter what they do, they're facing reprisals either on the side of migrant activists or on people who see their countries being overwhelmed by migrants. And so the bottom line is I think you're going to see them talking to each other and coordinating in ways that maybe we haven't seen certainly under Boris Johnson's leadership of the UK. And as you said, one of the options that the UK is pursuing is sending asylum seekers to Rwanda under a deal with Rwanda. I'm not sure what numbers that's eventually going to reach and how long that's really going to be carried out or sustainable, but it shows the level of concern about this and just the numbers. As I mentioned, 45,000 people arrived in UK in 2022, which is up 60 percent from the previous year, Carla.

And so it's one of the many issues that they have to talk about. But I think it's really front and center. While they also also talk about issues of common cause, you'll probably hear Ukraine raised in terms of how both countries can support Ukraine and their obviously membership in NATO is going to be a sign of solidarity. But I will be watching for the signaling from this summit. And as you say the backdrop is France dealing with really strong protests out of concern over this new plan for raising the retirement age. And the UK has its own protests by the way, and things have not been great in the UK economy and the teeth of the Brexit agreement requirements is really starting to take hold. So lots to talk about. Important to talk about between these two neighbors though, Carla.

ROBBINS:
So I know we want to move on, but what do you think about the relations between these two people? I still remember after the French, I think rightly went nuts after the Brits and the Americans had the secret deal to sell nuclear submarines to the Australians, something which is actually moving forward and went behind the French back and the French lost a very expensive $37 billion deal to sell diesel submarines to Australia. When the French went nuts to Boris Johnson told France to say, I just, I'm bringing this up cause I love saying it, "Prenez un grip about this and donnez-moi un break, I'm saying this actually my French is better than that, but-

MCMAHON:
You've never said donnez-moi un break, in your life?

ROBBINS:
Donnez-moi un break. I mean it's so Boris Johnson, I mean these guys going to get along better, they actually have quite a lot in common. I mean they're both money guys.

MCMAHON:
Yeah, they're both in roughly the same age bracket, are no stranger to sort of the finance field and having wealth and I think represent a generation. And so I think there's a sense that they're going to be whatever sort of franglish they speak or whether they either one lapses into their language. Macron's English is quite good. I don't know what Sunak's French is like, but one imagines they will be speaking a little bit more of a common tongue than certainly than Johnson and Macron were.

ROBBINS:
So Bob, moving on to another very difficult battle this weekend marks the third anniversary of the announced, as you said, start of the COVID-19 pandemic and people are still getting sick. My husband and I thought we had dodged it and then we came down with COVID a few months ago. But with many people vaccinated, life in many countries, it does feel like it's getting back to some form of normal. Even the final holdouts, China and Hong Kong are lifting their pandemic restrictions. So what have we learned from the past three years and are we any better prepared for the next pandemic? Because I fear another one is going to come.

MCMAHON:
Yeah, it's kind of a grim reckoning right now I think on many different fronts with COVID, with the exception of the fact of what you started out with, which is it absolutely has lifted, it's seeming it's very much going to be occurring within the flu cycle, a virulent form of the flu perhaps, but something more normalized and yet you're still hearing people getting it and when they get it, they're like, "Wow, I was walloped for three days." It's like a supercharged version of the flu for many people. There are people though who throughout have been more vulnerable to it, have had comorbidities and other vulnerabilities that it has really thrown them for a loop whether or not it created a situation in which they were very seriously ill or even died. Let's go through the numbers a little bit. It's worth reflecting Carla, 6.87 million deaths as of the first week in March attributed to COVID. 759 million confirmed cases of COVID-19.

And then in response, there was an incredible historic attempt to develop vaccines to counter it. And it's worth saying these, especially the mRNA technology vaccines were extremely effective and of about 70 percent of the world got at least one dose of a vaccine, mRNA and others. However, among the many areas of concern, there's still places that haven't seen any vaccines. There's still underdeveloped countries that have been left out, that were not folded into a global effort as had been intended and are still trying to get access to the mRNA technology. We're seeing some effort in eastern Africa to create a hub for developing that. And that seems to be encountering some success, but we're not seeing any sort of a galvanizing response that is inspiring a lot of confidence that the next pandemic is going to create some sort of united front. To the contrary, I mean, just today's front page of today's Washington Post for example, talked about how because of the backlash against the public health policies in the early phases of COVID in the U.S., you know have a number of states, especially Republican led ones where they have taken away powers of authorities to do things like set mask mandates or vaccine mandates for that matter, or to shut down certain public areas or whatever. That's going to make it harder the next time around to respond to something that might be spreading just as quickly.

And also, let's note for the lethality of COVID and it's obviously very lethal, it could have been something quite worse and it makes you wonder how people would respond if a pandemic that was more lethal, that had a higher fatality rate, for example, and a higher infection rate. What would the response have been then? So the other thing that's going on just this week is an attempt in the U.S. Congress to kind of dig into the COVID origin story and sort of shed new light on it, especially the theory about whether this was a lab leak. There was the resurfacing recently of both FBI and Department of Energy probes that seemed to indicate that the lab leak theory was maybe more valid than people had realized.

ROBBINS:
Of course, the energy department said at a low level of confidence.

MCMAHON:
Yes, and it's worth noting that there is all sorts of caveats and qualifiers when you hear these types of responses. But the testimony this week, for example, the former head of the CDC, Robert Redfield, was one of the witnesses who spoke in the house select subcommittee on the pandemic. And he said that it was his belief that the virus likely originated in Chinese, for the reasons he said primarily on the biology of the virus itself. And then he also said that senior health officials in the U.S. government does suppress debate about the origins of COVID-19. So there you have the combination of a likely source and then the coverup, and that's creating a whole sort of set of concerns. There are also a number of experts, highly respected experts who say no, it's still pretty valid to consider the animal origin and the so-called wet markets that were in Wuhan that perhaps a bat is the origin or a pangolin and that that's worth investigating more.

It's hard to really drill down. One of the reasons it's been hard is that the Chinese have not been cooperative. They swept through the wet market soon after the pandemic became known and sort of wiped away at any trace of the animals there that could have been studied and sort of certified. As well as not sharing information about the lab as well. So you're left with these theories and again, you have very reputable people who've subscribed to both of those theories. There's others as well. You'd need to understand these pandemics as a way of trying to arm yourself against the next one. And again, this doesn't inspire confidence. The WHO itself has been under a lot of fire. It's been trying to galvanize efforts towards a global pandemic treaty. But again, you're seeing the recriminations there and you see stronger nations that don't necessarily want to share information about their practices. So we got a long way to go and we got a lot of culture wars to fight in the meantime. So it's a grim anniversary even as we sit here, unmasked, although remote, but sitting here, unmasked.

ROBBINS:
Unmasked, unmasked on Zoom.

MCMAHON:
Going about our business, the world has been altered and one hopes that the lessons learned will take hold in some fashion. I would just say as a final point, one of the reasons there was a backlash was that there was a consideration not just from Libertarians but others, that the move to lockdown was too Draconian, especially as it related to schools, that other efforts could have been taken that would've retained public schooling without sticking children in rooms to access classrooms through Zoom. Studies have shown a number of schools, students, especially in the U.S. and especially in sort of the middle school grades, have been affected adversely by being taken out of the classroom for such a prolonged period. And so I think that's something that's worth studying and worth coming around and sort of coming up with some sort of common policy on it. It's just disturbing the way countries, especially the U.S. have continued to debate this.

ROBBINS:
Well, I really think that a lot of this has to do with certainly inside the United States with the broader polarization and this, we don't trust science, we don't trust experts. And two things I think going on. One is there's lots of stuff we didn't know in the beginning of this. We didn't know whether masks worked. We didn't know how to deal with the question, were we supposed to shut down borders? Were we not supposed to shut down borders? The default position for the WHO always is you don't shut down travel. And then it seemed so lots of people were traveling and carrying this around. So there is a learning process that goes on here and what a surprise, that's what science is like.

But now you have, and this is part of the House hearings is I hope that they're trying to get to the bottom of it. But what I've been listening to is that there's a lot of, "Let's blame Fauci. Fauci told us we didn't have to have masks, then Fauci told us we did have to have masks." And then there's this great conspiracy theory that Fauci was covering up the origins because he's in some way, which is just not true, is in some way involved with this. Not to mention the notion that Bill Gates is really behind it. I mean this has played into a huge, huge conspiracy theory, which doesn't mean that maybe the lab leak thing may be true. We don't know, but the chances of having a rational conversation is pretty low at this point and that's not great for science and it's not great for preparing us for the next pandemic.

And then you add on top of that, the fact that the Chinese shut down completely and the WHO, which is supposed to raise the alarm, has absolutely no power to compel countries to ante up information, give access to the wet market, give access to the lab, or even give access to the genome. They're asked to do an enormous amount and they have absolutely no power like all international institutions. And that is where we are right now. We may have learned lessons about making vaccines. We may have learned lessons that masks are better than not masks, but our politics, this has become so politicized, not just in the United States but in a lot of other countries that I really despair about this.

MCMAHON:
And you mentioned as part of that, Carla, Bill Gates, I've seen some reports and some of the money that the Gates Foundation has been providing to public health exceed what the WHO has been able to just because they've been underfunded for years. And it should be noted, there has been concern about the politicization of the WHO. So it really needs to be funded better. It doesn't mean sending bushels of money its way, but really targeting money and finding a common way of dealing with these. It is at the end of the day day, there is a scientific path to pursue. And while you're never going to get away from public debates about policy, whether it's health or otherwise, you can have a bit more of a technocratic agreement, I think, on certainly an area like this.

And we should note again back to the vaccines that making vaccines available and there were efforts and there were intergovernmental efforts to make more vaccines available. So it wasn't a total failure and they saved lives, they've saved millions of lives and vaccines have been known to save millions of lives across the board. That is another casualty I worry about from this whole debate, which is the anti-vax movement has transcended just COVID and what harms COVID vaccines might have caused into standard vaccines that thought we had got passed. So whether it's measles or polio or other things. There needs to be pushback against that. And the what's known as the infodemic needs to be really addressed as well.

ROBBINS:
Sigh.

MCMAHON:
Well Carla, let's move on to a potentially brighter subject. This Sunday millions will tune in to watch the 95th Academy Awards known better as the Oscars and millions more, I suspect, will be tuning into The World Next Week for our annual coverage of the foreign film nominees. We like to take a look at the Academy Awards every year through the prism of foreign films and the Oscars for all the criticism that sometimes accrues actually have really become a lens for viewing world culture, I think. And this year seems to be no exception, great deal of interesting foreign films as well as foreign actors and foreign filmmakers involved in other films. But Carla, can you tell me what are the foreign films that we should be looking at?

ROBBINS:
We wanted to be upbeat here and my two favorites are neither light topics, admittedly. So among the international feature films All Quiet on the Western Front and Argentina, 1985. So the biggest buzz is about All Quiet on the Western Front, which has been nominated not only in the best international feature films category, but it's also in the best picture category. So it's in two. And I spend a lot of time talking about World War I with my students, trying to convey the horror of poison gas, of bayonets against machine guns and you this incredibly grim brutality of trench warfare. And so when my daughter suggested last weekend that we watch it, even though I knew I had to do homework for you, Bob, I wasn't sure I really wanted to spend my Sunday evening that way, but I did. And the movie is visually incredibly beautiful and it is an really incredibly compelling study of what war does to individuals. There are no heroes, no really named actors in this. And the only real villain is one general who won't stop the fighting even as the armistices approaches.

And you see the war mainly through the experiences of one young, really young man who goes to the war on a lark and becomes alternately he's terrified by the fighting as any of us would be, and quite savage when you add to that the ticking clock and the movie takes place in the days and hours before the war ends, which shows even more the pointlessness and waste of human lives. This is a really compelling movie. And Bob, did you ever read All Quiet on the Western Front?

MCMAHON:
I was just going to say Carla, I did. It was one of the first books I was assigned in school on World War I. I had come to it with very little knowledge and it really gripped me at the time. Obviously I read it in a translated version, but extremely effective, powerful. It's sort of grim that book came out just four or five years before the Nazis took over Germany and got it involved in a even more grueling, grinding war.

But incredibly powerful and the fact that it came from a losing side in the war, but the perspective is something that we should all share and should resonate today as we're looking at the grinding eastern front of Ukraine and what's going on there, where young men and women are being thrown into the fray and it's kind of a war of attrition as well. While there's other aspects that make this highly different, it still brings you up close and that you're absolutely right. It's the one foreign film nominee that I have seen as well, Carla, and it's incredibly well done.

I would also commend if people want to dive into that period, a movie of older vintage but still really effective is Paths of Glory by Stanley Kubrick, Kirk Douglas in it, because they both deal with the same set of themes. That one, the villains are both basically the French officers who are sending their forces in, knowing that it's just futile. In this case, as you say, the one villain that emerges is the German officer who's looking for a last sort of grasp of glory. And it's very powerful. But Carla, anything else? Any other messages from this year's nominees?

ROBBINS:
One other thing that I wanted to say about All Quiet on the Western Front before we go onto that, which is that it was made, this is a German language one, it's the first time the Germans have done it, but it was made in Hollywood in 1930, the year after the book came out. And the book was written by a World War I veteran, a German, Erich Maria Remarque. 1930 Hollywood made it and it won both best director and best picture. And then as you said a few years later, the book was burned by the Nazis. So it is quite remarkable we now have a German version of it. 

And the handicapping on this, and this is the people who do this every year, approach it a lot like baseball stats, that no remake of a best picture winner has ever won before. It has no actors nominated, which is another drawback and only one foreign language film has ever won before, in 2020 for Parasite. That said, All Quiet does have nine nominations altogether. So let's watch this space.

My second choice is Argentina, 1985, which tells us the story of what is called the Juicio, the Trial of the Juntas, in which a civilian court in Argentina recently restored democracy, tried nine former military leaders for crimes committed during the dirty war. And I'm especially partial to this one because I spent several months in Argentina that year, while my husband who covered the dirty wars came back to write about the trials. And the star of this is the chief prosecutor, Julio Strassera, who's a very down to earth, very ordinary looking man, and the actor who played Strassera looks exactly like him, who does a heroic job. He wins convictions for five of the nine leaders.

And I covered the aftermath of all this. Argentina's one of the few countries in the world to actually bring their military dictators to account. Brazil's dictators have never put any of its military abusers on trial, but Argentina's also really struggled to make it stick. 1986, the year after this movie and the year after the trial it's Congress passed something called the Ley de Punto Final, which stopped the further prosecutions. And they've been, these guys were pardoned, they were put back on trial. This has been a real struggle for them, but this movie tells you a lot about it. And one other very cool thing is that Strassera's number two, Luis Moreno Ocampo goes on to be the first prosecutor of the International Criminal Court.

MCMAHON:
Fascinating. Well that's next on my list. I definitely want to see that one, Carla. It looks like a lot of the other nominees for foreign film are more sort of smaller, maybe small human interest type films, I guess you could say?

ROBBINS:
Yeah, there's one, Close from Belgium. It's about the friendship between two thirteen year old boys, it won second place in Cannes. And it has a whole sort of homophobic thing going on with it, but it's supposedly quite beautiful and sad. There's a story about a donkey, EO, going through Europe, seen through the donkey's eyes. This is not a Disney donkey. I am not watching that one. I do not watch anything that has the potential of hurting an animal, even though I just told you that I would watch a movie about trench warfare. Okay. And The Quiet Girl from Ireland, which is a film in Irish, and it's about a nine-year-old girl who's shipped off to relatives in the countryside who she doesn't know while her mother has another baby. And she is a very quiet girl. Not surprisingly, she finds more acceptance among this family. So all of those movies won awards everywhere else, so we will watch them.

MCMAHON:
Yeah, I've often discussed on this podcast what I appreciate about focusing on the foreign language entries are that aside from the big world topics that are sometimes covered, they're covered from another perspective or a non-U.S. perspective, a non-Hollywood perspective. So that's valuable. And again, another reason why both All Quiet on the West Front and Argentina, 1985 are going to be really important to watch. But also they are willing to take on these smaller what I call human interest type topics and just dig into them.

ROBBINS:
Or donkey interest.

MCMAHON:
Or donkey interest, as the case may be.

ROBBINS:
This that is a Polish film. Yes.

MCMAHON:
That's a Polish film. And just spend time with it and go with it and not seek to do anything else with it. Not to spin it in any other way, but just sort of lets you as the viewer just sort of take a snapshot of life. And I think that's important. I think it's important for us also, Carla, we'd be remiss if we didn't mention the best documentary Oscar nominees because it's almost like its own separate category of foreign films as well. And let's face it, a lot of the foreign films are also documentary style in some ways. But are there any in the best documentary front that you think we should look at or be aware of?

ROBBINS:
So there are three of note. Fire of Love, which uses archival footage, documents the lives of two French volcanologists, people who study volcanoes, Katia and Maurice Krafft, who die in the 1991 eruption of Mount Unzen in Japan.

There's one called House Made of Splinters, which was filmed at a children's shelter in eastern Ukraine in 2019 and 2020, before the war started, the first phase of this war started. With a focus on the effect on children's lives from the years of conflict, as well as the tolls of alcoholism and other problems. I will say I've been very, I'm being very personal today, I'm the mother of adopted child, I think I may stay away from this one.

But the one that intrigues me the most is Navalny. This is a documentary directed by a Canadian filmmaker and it is the study of Putin's most prominent opponent, this anti-corruption campaigner Alexei Navalny. In it, you see Navalny's, incredibly intelligent, incredibly charismatic, and he actually has a sense of humor and undeniable courage.

It starts with him, he's recovering from that chemical weapon attack, the Novichok attack. After being poisoned with this nerve nerve agent and deciding to return to Moscow where it is nearly certain he will be thrown in jail and he indeed is thrown in jail, and he's now looking at least a decade in a prison colony. The director clearly adores Navalny and as far as I can tell you, he only asks him one tough question about why he went and spoke at an ultra-right, anti-immigrant rally. But he loves him and he, Navalny is incredibly charismatic and incredibly good-looking. So he has great potential to be a leader. But I will say that I found Navalny very ... he's steely and people put their lives on the line this way to fight. Dictators have to have a will of steel. But I've met other leaders like that. I met Nelson Mandela, granted in his very later years, but I don't feel like there's a lot of potential for forgiveness in Navalny, watching this. And of course that may be too much to ask from the viewing of a documentary, but I didn't come away feeling like there was a great deal of human light coming out of Navalny.

MCMAHON:
Yeah, it's a tough place to be in as we speak. He's literally kind of wasting away in a really rough prison environment, a penal colony of sorts in Russia. He still is able to get out various bits of information through his-

ROBBINS:
Social media.

MCMAHON:
... his social media, through his community that indicates his circumstances. And I think the documentary indicates ways in which he's able to get under Putin's skin in various ways, including tracking down the people who were responsible for the Novichok poisoning in a clever way. So you're right, I mean steely almost beyond measure and it's hard to imagine that softening if he was ever in a leadership position. I do think it's kind of dubious, given the circumstances in Russia right now of Navalny or any of his followers getting to that position. But it's what Russia has become right now and I think it's useful to have Oscars that shed a light on this and maybe expand the audience and people to know what other Russians are like, at the very least.

Carla, we've talked our way into the audience figure, the week section, this is where our audiences on Instagram, come in and weigh in on some figures that we have teed up. This week our audience at CFR_org's Instagram story have chosen the figure 1,000 as in "1,000+ schoolgirls poisoned in Iran." Why is this significant, Carla?

ROBBINS:
So this is something that the Iranian government, after looking the other way, is acknowledging is happening. Although we don't know what's the cause of the problem or who is behind it. Iranian and state media is now reporting that since late November, around 1,000 girls have been poisoned in schools and hundreds have been hospitalized in ten cities across the country. And according to Iran's health minister, these girls are showing a variety of symptoms, weak muscles, nausea and tiredness. Students who've been interviewed described smelling a strange odor in classrooms. The chair of the parliament's education committee said that nitrogen gas was detected in some of these schools and you have to keep in mind that this is not Afghanistan. For all the repression of women and girls in Iran, education's never been denied to them. Parents are now pulling their daughters out of school, which is very disturbing. No one really knows what's going on.

Opponents of the government say that the government is systemically targeting youths and their protest, and this may be another thing that the government is doing. Iranian cabinet officials claim that these hospitalizations are due to stress and anxiety caused by state enemies. 

I have no idea what's going on here. Maybe there is some, somebody's driving this and maybe there is some hysteria going on. We just don't know. What we do know is that it may also be re-energizing anti-government protests. The anti-regime forces are out in the street, again, not in large numbers, but there are certainly chanting now, "Death to the child killing regime." and "Protect the safety of schools." And we also know that pro-regime forces have targeted young protestors and women. So this is an especially sensitive issue in Iran.

MCMAHON:
Yeah, I think that latter part is significant, especially since the catalyst for this recent months long period of protest was the killing of a woman over a hijab laws and the fact that many women have ditched their hijabs and are walking around in the streets, even in Tehran, without hair coverings. So maybe some sort of reprisal, but it's another test for the country. Their regime seems to have solved the previous one, but it is going to be another thing worth watching. Definitely.

And that's our look at the perilous world next week. Here's some other stories to keep an eye on European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen visits United States and fifty-six countries mark Commonwealth Day.

And before we roll the credits, we'd like to announce that our fellow CFR podcast, Why It Matters is launching its seventh season. If you're just stepping into the world of international relations or know someone who is, we recommend this podcast. This season Why It Matters host Gabrielle Sierra will be asking important questions about topics like how the world has become more dangerous for journalists, what in the world is going on in the Arctic, and how nuclear weapons are proliferating.

Please note that the new season starts March 15th on all platforms.

ROBBINS:
Please subscribe to the world next week on Apple Podcast, Google Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts, and leave us a review while you're at it. We really do appreciate the feedback. The publications mentioned in this episode, as well as the transcript of our conversation are listed on the podcast page for The World Next Week on cfr.org. Please note that opinions expressed on The World Next Week are solely those of the hosts, although we're not especially opinionated, or our guests not of CFR, which takes no institutional positions on matters of policy.

Today's program was produced by Ester Fang, with director of podcasting, Gabrielle Sierra. Special thanks to Sinet Adous and Rebecca Rottenberg for their research assistance. Our theme music is provided by Miguel Herrero and licensed under creative commons.

This is Carla Robbins saying so long and watch the Oscars.

MCMAHON:
And this is Bob McMahon saying goodbye and be careful out there.