7 things Americans can be grateful for on Thanksgiving

Despite being a tough year in some ways, there have also been numerous points of progress.

2. ISIS lost territory, revenue, and Twitter accounts

AP
In this Monday, Oct. 10, 2016 photo, villagers welcome soldiers of the Iraqi army after the defeat of the Islamic State group extremists from villages outside Ramadi, 70 miles (115 kilometers) west of Baghdad, Iraq.

In 2016, the population of the so-called Islamic State has shrunk from 10 million to around 6 million and its territory shrank by 16 percent. Out of 10 major cities ISIS once controlled, it currently retains only five. Territory losses this year include the Iraqi cities of Abu Ghraib, Fallujah, and Ramadi. US-backed coalitions are currently waging offensives on Mosul, Iraq, and Raqqa, Syria, the group’s self-declared capital.

Due to the loss of oil fields and hydroelectric dams in its conceded territory, ISIS’s revenue was down 26 percent as of June 2016. And according to the Wilson Center in Washington, ISIS was forced to cut its fighters’ salaries by around 50 percent in early 2016.

Additionally, Twitter has recently identified and shut down 125,000 ISIS-related accounts.

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Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

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