1. Uyghur survivor of China’s detention camps testifies to their brutality
This system of rape was commonplace, as the police “were always taking girls out of the cells like this” and “did whatever they wanted.”
“Sometimes they brought some of the women back near the point of death,” she said. “Some of the women disappeared.”
“I saw some of them bleed to death with my own eyes. Some of them even lost their minds in the camp,” said Ziyawudun.
2. Theresa Bonopartis: No, Life Doesn’t Go ‘Back To Normal’ After An Abortion
As someone coerced into an abortion as a teen, I know all too well the repercussions of abortion.
After an abortion, life does not go “back to normal.” You either live in denial, or become pro-life. I know for sure God does not love abortion, but despite this woman mocking God and being so intent on glorifying abortion, He loves her.
3.
A Cuban woman cries: My children, my husband! The Cuban communist police thugs shot her husband and dragged him away. Watch if you can.https://t.co/IJPX8mUXnF
— Grazie P Christie MD (@GChristiemd) July 14, 2021
4. Mary Eberstadt: Might Trauma Affect Gender Identity?
Thomas Page McBee’s memoir Man Alive: A True Story of Violence, Forgiveness, and Becoming a Man, tells a terrifying story. It recounts years of sexual assault at the hands of the author’s own father, beginning when McBee was four. The author writes: “It is still hard to capture the salty terror of the worst of it, the freeze, the split: how I lost a body, or how I conflated the two ways my body was lost to me.”
These are searing, terrible words. And they suggest a clear logical leap from hating what is done to one’s body, to rejecting that body.
5. Catholic school from American Midwest opening in Iraq
The new high school, which will enroll some 40 students at first, will be based at the Mar Qardakh International School, a K-12 school Archbishop Warda started a few years ago.
6. Kelly Jane Torrance: US media shamefully justified a string of Canadian church burnings
As Assembly of First Nations national chief Perry Bellegarde declared, “While it is not new to find graves at former residential schools in Canada, it’s always crushing to have that chapter’s wounds exposed.”
Yet the US press treated the news as if Canada had been hiding genocidal death camps.
Church critics used that framing to justify, and even encourage, the rash of arsons. “Burn it all down,” tweeted the head of the BC Civil Liberties Association and the chair of the Newfoundland Canadian Bar Association Branch. “It’s very dangerous to conflate the string of church fires with violence against mosques,” activist Nora Loreto said, insisting they weren’t “hate crimes” — in other words, the Catholic Church had it coming.
7. Catholic priest beaten, arrested amid Cuba protests
Priests, religious sisters and lay people scheduled a peaceful demonstration from 8:00 a.m. July 12 before the police station to demand the freedom of Father Álvarez.
8. Fr. Raymond de Souza: Activist priest’s death exposes India’s brutal treatment of political prisoners
Father Swamy died on July 5, while incarcerated pending terrorism charges. He was 84, and was only transferred by court order to hospital in May when he got infected with COVID-19 in prison. He spent his final weeks in hospital, still a prisoner.
9. Russia’s mysterious campaign against Jehovah’s Witnesses
The estimated 175,000 adherents in Russia are now equated with members of dangerous terrorist organizations. The community has been subjected to hundreds of raids and arrests by Russian security forces and, in some places, alleged torture. Across Russia, hundreds have been charged as “extremists,” and dozens have been jailed in a campaign that human rights groups have struggled to explain.
10. Charles Camosy: Assisted suicide poses a grave threat to the elderly and disabled
You can start with seemingly ironclad safeguards, such as “six months to live” or “hopeless and unbearable suffering” — but soon enough, legalizing physician-assisted suicide opens the door to killing children who are too young to consent, victims of sexual abuse and even those who are simply “tired of life.”
11. Biden administration weakens some proposed safety rules for public housing, alarming advocates
The agency also loosened requirements for fans and windows in bathrooms — critical to preventing mold — and ground fault circuit interrupters for outlets near water, which are proven to reduce the risk of electrocution but are not always required by local authorities in older housing. HUD’s proposed rules now allow for “alternate means of dehumidification” for bathrooms and “outlet protection methods that include, but are not limited to” GFCI protection. (It’s not clear what other protection methods the HUD rule refers to.)
HUD denied weakening protections for residents and said providing safe and sanitary housing is a top priority for the Biden administration.
12. City Journal: Why Cops Are Quitting
Officers I spoke with who had left their old departments all offered the same explanation: since last year’s explosive protests, they no longer feel that they have the support of the public or of civilian officials. As one now-retired NYPD officer put it: “One day, the good guys became the bad guys and the bad guys became the good guys.”
Seattle has a proud history of protest—and riot, one former officer who left the SPD for a suburb told me. But this time was different: “It was people blowing up police cars. It was people throwing gasoline on to police headquarters and seeing if they could light the headquarters. It was people cementing my coworkers into a precinct and seeing if they could light the precinct on fire.”
13. Iran plotted to kidnap dissident journalist and author from her Brooklyn home: feds
Prosecutors allege a disturbing plot by the Iranian government aimed to grab activist Masih Alinejad and lock her up in an Iranian prison. Their plans included spying on her home for months and researching the best route to the Brooklyn waterfront — where they hoped to shove her in a military-style speedboat headed for Venezuela.
14. Melissa Braunstein: Israel tests the Olympics’ commitment to nondiscrimination — again
Iranian athletes won’t be quizzed about their government executing wrestler Navid Afkari or killing Iranian civilian protesters. Chinese athletes won’t be grilled about the Uyghur genocide or slave labor. But, like Clara Basiana, some will presumably vilify Israeli athletes for Israeli government policies they dislike or for personifying a nation they detest. What remains to be seen is whether the IOC will respond to such violations of its mission this year.
15. Interview with rector of Haitian cathedral: ‘God, where are you?’ – Haiti after a president’s assassination
It’s kind of beautiful to see that even people who seemed like they hated this guy’s guts respond to say: ‘Oh, no, heck no, this is not acceptable.’ And so that’s a hopeful sign, in its own way.
It’s funny, some who were interviewed were asked what they think, and one guy was like: ‘I hated his guts, but the fact that foreigners are going to come onto our soil to kill our president — Heck no, that is not going to be taken lightly. You don’t get to do that.’
16. An unlikely saint: Jacques Fesch was a murderer; now he’s up for beatification
Jacques was held in solitary confinement at La Sante Prison in Paris. When the prison chaplain first approached the condemned man, Jacques sent him away. But the chaplain kept trying, and the two eventually became close. During this time, an old friend of Jacques’ was ordained a priest. He began to visit him. The third cog in Jacques’ wheel of conversion was his attorney. His name was Baudet, and he was a devout Catholic.
17. Mark Tooley: History & Democratic Piety
18. Janice Dean: Gov. Cuomo’s scandals and the memorial he really ought to consider
The latest headline that got my attention said:
“Cuomo delays COVID essential workers memorial in Battery Park in fierce opposition.”
And I thought to myself: maybe someone should propose a memorial for the over 15,000 seniors that died in New York nursing homes? Just to remind people that we still don’t have the answers or any accountability from our governor about what should be one of the biggest stories of the coronavirus pandemic.
19. China’s Relentless Persecution of Tibet Must End Now
Today, the Chinese Communist Party, under the leadership of Xi Jinping, professes a deep commitment to identifying and caring for the reincarnation of His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama. But how can we possibly believe that the CCP intends to take care of the future of Tibetan Buddhism? There is no doubt as to what the Chinese regime’s actual goal is: total control of the Tibetan people, who revere His Holiness.
20.
“… in one memorable photo, she seems to casually brush aside a bayonet-tipped rifle …” Really, a photo that belongs in the American treasury. https://t.co/pZmxuJAuvV
— Jay Nordlinger (@jaynordlinger) July 19, 2021