1.
Scenes from the first United flight of evacuees:https://t.co/dgMdnuWZFm pic.twitter.com/LWHYML8t7O
— Elaine Godfrey (@elainejgodfrey) August 29, 2021
2. Josh Rogin: The U.S. government left its own journalists behind in Afghanistan
The RFE/RL journalists and their families made several independent trips to the airport, often spending long days and nights waiting just outside the gates, but never managed to get inside, RFE/RL President Jamie Fly told me during an interview. And now, they are stranded.
“You would have expected that the United States government, which helped create the space for journalism and civil society in Afghanistan over the last 20 years, would have tried to do more over the last several weeks to assist journalists who made a decision that it was best for them to leave the country,” Fly said. “But they consistently failed to do that.”
3. Crux: What comes next for the 5,000 Afghans evacuated to Italy?
At the moment, Forti said the main entity offering emergency support to Italy’s Afghan refugees is the Italian government, which he said is currently evaluating whether to allow direct involvement of other institutions, including those run by the Catholic Church, “given the great solidarity and willingness that is coming from individuals and associations.”
Forti said the Italian Ministry of the Interior is exploring ways to enhance its welcome system in light of the emergency arrival of so many, because while some things can be made up as they go along, “precise rules and uniform paths to integration are needed throughout the national territory.”
4.
Throughout the U.S., in conservative and liberal strongholds, American vets and others are joining together to push for settlement of our Afghan allies fleeing the Taliban. Here’s Arizona: https://t.co/o7RdcghmLE h/t @anoorani
— David Beard (@dabeard) August 31, 2021
The VA is starting a new awareness campaign for the month of September, which is Suicide Prevention Month.
The campaign urges veterans to reach out, hear others’ stories, be prepared, find resources, and spread the word in an effort to “act now” so they can “prevent Veteran suicide later.”
6. Naomi Schaefer Riley: Foster Kids Need Their Own Advocates
A new document released by a group called Family Integrity and Justice Works, whose founders include recent employees of the federal Children’s Bureau, recommends turning “child advocates” into “family advocates.” And the leaders of the UpEnd Movement, which seeks to abolish foster care entirely, say that CASAs should reflect on how they are “contributing to … the oversurveiling of families.” Instead, their role should be “getting kids to be with their families whenever possible.”
…
But if you spend any time in family court, it is obvious that the voice of the family is being heard. For years, the mandate of child welfare agencies has been family preservation and family reunification at (almost) all costs. What’s missing from the proceedings is the voice of the child, who is often too young to know what his or her best interests are or too traumatized to be able to explain them.
7. Crux: Congo parliamentarians condemn political violence aimed at Catholic Church
“We, national deputies, members of the Caucus of Catholic Parliamentarians have followed with indignation the acts of barbarism that have occurred in the diocese of Mbuji-Mayi where objects and places of worship have been desecrated in churches,” they said.
They also condemned the attacks in the capital Kinshasa, “where manipulated uncivil youths virulently attacked the residence of His Eminence Fridolin Cardinal Ambongo.”
8.
1 September 1939 | A Polish Jewish boy, Meilech Raich, was born in Trzebinia.
In 1943 he was deported to #Auschwitz from ghetto in Chrzanów. He was murdered in a gas chamber. pic.twitter.com/FuBCwR5O2J
— Auschwitz Memorial (@AuschwitzMuseum) September 1, 2021
9. Reuters: As Afghanistan adjusts to Taliban rule, music goes silent
Already, colourful signs outside beauty parlours have been painted over, jeans have been replaced by traditional dress and radio stations have replaced their normal menu of Hindi and Persian pop and call-in shows with sombre patriotic music.
“It’s not that the Taliban ordered us to change anything, we have altered the programming for now as we don’t want Taliban to force us to close down,” said Khalid Sediqqi, a producer at a private radio station in the central city of Ghazni.
“Also no one in this country is in the mood for entertainment, we are all in a state of shock,” he said. “I am not even sure if anyone is tuning to radio anymore.”
…
“I fear the Taliban may target me if was seen wearing jeans or western shirts or a suit,” said Mustafa Ali Rahman, a former tax official in Lagman province. “One just doesn’t know what they can do to punish us.”
10. Robert Barron: Harvard jumped the shark with atheist ‘chaplain’
What does bother me is the complete and abject surrender on the part of the presumably religious leaders at Harvard who chose this man. If a professed atheist counts as a chaplain — which is to say, a leader of religious services in a chapel — then “religion” has quite obviously come to mean nothing at all.
11. Anne Applebaum: The New Puritans
We have courts, juries, judges, and witnesses precisely so that the state can learn whether a crime has been committed before it administers punishment. We have a presumption of innocence for the accused. We have a right to self-defense. We have a statute of limitations.
By contrast, the modern online public sphere, a place of rapid conclusions, rigid ideological prisms, and arguments of 280 characters, favors neither nuance nor ambiguity. Yet the values of that online sphere have come to dominate many American cultural institutions: universities, newspapers, foundations, museums. Heeding public demands for rapid retribution, they sometimes impose the equivalent of lifetime scarlet letters on people who have not been accused of anything remotely resembling a crime. Instead of courts, they use secretive bureaucracies. Instead of hearing evidence and witnesses, they make judgments behind closed doors.
12. John Stonestreet: Aghan Female Paralympian Narrowly Escapes Taliban
13. Jenet Erickson: Women Want to Work From Home
Rather than entrenching inequality, the pandemic presents the possibility of an entirely new work-family world—one in which both mother and father share child care while they both work flexible schedules from home. Parents got a taste of it, and they want more. In fact, “flexible work + shared child care” was the top choice for the best child care arrangement for parents in the IFS/Wheatley survey. Among mothers who work full-time, more than 40 percent identified this as the best arrangement. And though many families with a stay-at-home parent are doing what they think is best, some of them desire to be working. But like most other parents, they don’t want to send their kids to day care when they do so. They want to work flexible hours and share child care with their spouse.
14. Mobile center offers pregnancy tests, resources to East Texans
“[The] mobile unit allows us to go into places where maybe certain communities haven’t yet been able to have a brick and mortar location,” Living Alternatives Executive Director Steve Roquemore said.
“There’s a scripture in the Bible that talks about Jesus, if he had 100 sheep, that a good shepherd would leave the 99 to go find the one,” Roquemore said. “And so we feel like this is the way to go find the one person who feels alone, lost, and abandoned and say ‘hey were here for you, and we’d like to stand with you.’”
15. Haley Stewart: The Killers’ Maturing Voice Speaks for the Times with ‘Pressure Machine’
When our religious hopes are strangely intertwined with promises of the American dream, we are faced with a painful sense of betrayal. Pressure Machine wrestles with these problems in good faith, and the result is a brilliant and thought-provoking story that gets to the heart of small-town America.