Category: Health – Happiness

Taliban special forces bring abrupt end to women’s protest

Taliban special forces bring abrupt end to women’s protest

Kathy Gannon                   

Afghanistan Women Fighting On     1-6

KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — Taliban special forces in camouflage fired their weapons into the air Saturday, bringing an abrupt and frightening end to the latest protest march in the capital by Afghan women demanding equal rights from the new rulers.

Also on Saturday, the chief of Pakistan’s powerful intelligence agency, which has an outsized influence on the Taliban, made a surprise visit to Kabul.

Taliban fighters quickly captured most of Afghanistan last month and celebrated the departure of the last U.S. forces after 20 years of war. The insurgent group must now govern a war-ravaged country that is heavily reliant on international aid.

The women’s march — the second in as many days in Kabul — began peacefully. Demonstrators laid a wreath outside Afghanistan’s Defense Ministry to honor Afghan soldiers who died fighting the Taliban before marching on to the presidential palace.

“We are here to gain human rights in Afghanistan,” said 20-year-old protester Maryam Naiby. “I love my country. I will always be here.”

As the protesters’ shouts grew louder, several Taliban officials waded into the crowd to ask what they wanted to say.

Flanked by fellow demonstrators, Sudaba Kabiri, a 24-year-old university student, told her Taliban interlocutor that Islam’s Prophet gave women rights and they wanted theirs. The Taliban official promised women would be given their rights but the women, all in their early 20s, were skeptical.

As the demonstrators reached the presidential palace, a dozen Taliban special forces ran into the crowd, firing in the air and sending demonstrators fleeing. Kabiri, who spoke to The Associated Press, said they also fired tear gas.

The Taliban have promised an inclusive government and a more moderate form of Islamic rule than when they last ruled the country from 1996 to 2001. But many Afghans, especially women, are deeply skeptical and fear a roll back of rights gained over the last two decades.

For much of the past two weeks, Taliban officials have been holding meetings among themselves, amid reports of differences among them emerging. Early on Saturday, neighboring Pakistan’s powerful intelligence chief Gen. Faiez Hameed made a surprise visit to Kabul. It wasn’t immediately clear what he had to say to the Taliban leadership but the Pakistani intelligence service has a strong influence on the Taliban.

The Taliban leadership had its headquarters in Pakistan and were often said to be in direct contact with the powerful Inter-Services Intelligence agency. Although Pakistan routinely denied providing the Taliban military aid, the accusation was often made by the Afghan government and Washington.

Faiez’ visit comes as the world waits to see what kind of government the Taliban will eventually announce, seeking one that is inclusive and ensures protection of women’s rights and the country’s minorities.

The Taliban have promised a broad-based government and have held talks with former president Hamid Karzai and the former government’s negotiation chief Abdullah Abdullah. But the makeup of the new government is uncertain and it was unclear whether hard-line ideologues among the Taliban will win the day — and whether the rollbacks feared by the demonstrating women will occur.

Taliban members whitewashed murals Saturday that promoted health care, warned of the dangers of HIV and even paid homage to some of Afghanistan’s iconic foreign contributors, like anthropologist Nancy Dupree, who singlehandedly chronicled Afghanistan’s rich cultural legacy. It was a worrying sign of attempts to erase reminders of the past 20 years.

The murals were replaced with slogans congratulating Afghans on their victory.

A Taliban cultural commission spokesman, Ahmadullah Muttaqi, tweeted that the murals were painted over “because they are against our values. They were spoiling the minds of the mujahedeen and instead we wrote slogans that will be useful to everyone.”

Meanwhile, the young women demonstrators said they have had to defy worried families to press ahead with their protests, even sneaking out of their homes to take their demands for equal rights to the new rulers.

Farhat Popalzai, another 24-year-old university student, said she wanted to be the voice of Afghanistan’s voiceless women, those too afraid to come out on the street.

“I am the voice of the women who are unable to speak.” she said. “They think this is a man’s country but it is not, it is a woman’s country too.”

Popalzai and her fellow demonstrators are too young to remember the Taliban rule that ended in 2001 with the U.S.-led invasion. The say their fear is based on the stories they have heard of women not being allowed to go to school and work.

Naiby, the 20-year-old, has already operated a women’s organization and is a spokesperson for Afghanistan’s Paralympics. She reflected on the tens of thousands of Afghans who rushed to Kabul’s Hamid Karzai International Airport to escape Afghanistan after the Taliban overran the capital on Aug. 15.

“They were afraid,” but for her she said, the fight is in Afghanistan.

Climate change is not going to wait for America to get its act together

Climate change is not going to wait for America to get its act together

Ryan Cooper, National correspondent              
An hourglass.
An hourglass. Illustrated | iStock

 

There has been a recent change in verb tense with respect to climate change: What was once the future is now the present. Louisiana just got hammered by a hurricane that — in what is becoming a signature characteristic of a warming climate — strengthened very rapidly thanks to super-hot temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico, giving residents barely enough time to evacuate. The remnants of that hurricane then caused flooding all the way from Louisiana to Maine. Philadelphia saw the worst flooding since 1869. The National Weather Service issued the first flash flood warning for New York City in its history. At time of writing, at least 45 people were confirmed dead across the Northeast.

I find it hard to grapple with this reality. Following the science, I have been predicting this kind of thing for many years. But now that climate change is truly undeniably here, and highly unusual if not totally unprecedented weather disasters are hitting on a weekly basis, it is still somehow shocking. I suppose arid scientific predictions will always feel a lot different than one’s own city being heavily flooded. It’s a reaction that Americans — in particular Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.V.), who recently launched a broadside against Democrats’ $3.5 trillion reconciliation package, which contains a great deal of climate policy — need to get over soon.

It is tempting to read some kind of cosmic justice into these events. America spewed forth greenhouse gas emissions with reckless abandon for two centuries, 50 years of which were after the basics of climate science were well-understood and widely publicized, and now a vengeful nature is inflicting retribution.

The truth, of course, is even scarier. An angry nature god would imply that something powerful cared about humanity enough to punish us. In reality every human being could die tomorrow and the world would go on spinning without interruption in an inconceivable vast universe. It would be a drop of water in the Atlantic Ocean. In the colossal expanse of cosmic time, humanity’s entire lifespan is barely an eyeblink.

Our only significant accomplishment is how rapidly we are changing the climate, which is in the same league as a major asteroid strike or continent-scale volcanic eruptions. But even that is nothing new. Planet Earth has seen worse than us before and it’ll see worse after we are gone. Nobody is coming to teach us lessons about our hubris, and there is no appealing the laws of physics.

Some form of denial must be part of the reason why Manchin is now raising questions about the reconciliation bill, not to mention the giant corporate lobbying campaign that undoubtedly explains his sudden change of heart. The reconciliation bill would — in large part because Manchin himself insisted that it can’t raise the deficit — raise taxes on corporations, people making high incomes, and especially wealthy heirs. Obviously corporate interests and the oligarch class don’t want that, because no amount of money is ever enough for them.

Very few people are so evil that they can willfully consign their own society to catastrophe for the sake of avoiding a fairly modest tax increase. It’s just the common behavior of ultra-privileged humans: When faced with a situation requiring any sacrifice, they make up excuses why it shouldn’t have to happen. And they’ll keep denying they could be hit by disaster — like a wildly unusual tornado ripping up a wealthy New Jersey suburb — until the rising seas close over their heads.

That said, Manchin’s op-ed is still blatantly dishonest. He complains about inflation that is happening almost entirely because of temporary bottlenecks in a handful of industries. He complains about deficits that a.) are not a problem and b.) will not increase anyway because of the tax increases. He complains that “I can’t explain why my Democratic colleagues are rushing to spend $3.5 trillion,” regarding a bill that has been discussed in minute detail for months in negotiations that have revolved around him personally.

It’s obvious what is happening here. Manchin is throwing up chaff to try to trim down the bill, if not destroy it completely. It is a duplicitous public relations campaign to protect the bottom lines of his rich friends. It’s of a piece with ex-senators Heidi Heitkamp and Max Baucus’s maudlin lies that ending the stepped-up basis loophole — which allows ultra-wealthy people to collect inheritance tax-free — will exterminate America’s family farms and ranches.

More blinkered, self-defeating selfishness would be hard to imagine. As the dire flooding across the eastern U.S. showed this week, American infrastructure is already desperately in need of upgrades just to deal with the weather disasters happening now, let alone those that will happen if we continue to procrastinate.

And as Greg Sargent argues at The Washington Post, Manchin would not only core out most of Biden’s climate policy, but also risk blowing up global climate negotiations, which are set to resume soon. If the worst historical emitter can’t show that it is at least making some effort, other nations could easily conclude that doing their part would be pointless.

The wealthy aristocrats of Ancien Régime France behaved as Manchin and his rich friends are doing now — furiously preventing reforms that would preserve society because they would require the rich to make small sacrifices. Faced with this despicable betrayal of President Biden and the Democratic Party, it is therefore critical for the party left in the House and Senate to continue to demand that there be no bipartisan infrastructure bill unless reconciliation gets through as well. Even the climate policy in there is seriously inadequate compared to the scale of the problem — and this package is very likely the only reform that is getting passed until 2030 at the earliest.

If it’s blocked, Washington should consider what usually happens when political elites are unable to fix disintegrating conditions around them: revolution.

‘Human toll was tremendous’: Ida’s death count rises while 600,000 still lack power

‘Human toll was tremendous’: Ida’s death count rises while 600,000 still lack power

Barbara Goldberg                  

Remnants of Ida are seen in New York

 

NEW YORK (Reuters) – Hurricane Ida’s death toll continued to rise on Sunday, with many in the U.S. Northeast holding out hope for people missing in the floodwaters, while nearly 600,000 customers in Louisiana still lacked power a week after the storm made landfall.

Ida slammed into Louisiana on Aug. 29 as a powerful Category 4 hurricane with sustained winds of 150 miles per hour (240 kph). The latest death toll there rose to at least 13 people on Sunday.

The storm weakened as it moved north but still unleashed flash flooding on the East Coast that killed at least 50 more people, according to updated numbers on Sunday.

Ida’s record-breaking rainfall of 3.1 inches (7.8 cm) per hour on Wednesday, recorded in New York City’s Central Park, sent walls of water cascading through businesses, public transportation systems and 1,200 homes, causing more than $50 million in damage, New York Governor Kathy Hochul said.

“The human toll was tremendous,” said Hochul, recounting a trip to East Elmhurst in the New York City borough of Queens to assess the devastation.

“One woman wept in my arms, an 89-year-old woman. She had nothing left after living in that home for over 40 years,” Hochul said.

The governor previously secured an emergency disaster declaration from President Joe Biden and signed paperwork on Sunday to request related federal money to cover the costs of temporary housing as well as rebuilding homes, possibly in less flood-prone locations.

New York had 17 confirmed deaths, four in suburban Westchester County and the rest in New York City, where nearly all the victims were trapped in illegal basement apartments that are among the last remaining affordable options for low-income residents in the area, the governor’s spokesperson said.

In New Jersey, there were 27 confirmed storm deaths and four people still missing, said a spokesperson for Governor Phil Murphy.

Among the missing were two college students last seen in Passaic, New Jersey, on Wednesday as Ida’s historic deluge was reported to have swept them away in the raging Passaic River.

ROUND-THE-CLOCK OPERATIONS

Twelve boats searched the river on Sunday as part of round-the-clock operations, and rescue teams were anticipating specialized high-resolution sonar to aid their search on Tuesday and Wednesday, the Passaic fire department said.

A Mass was celebrated on Sunday at Seton Hall University in South Orange, New Jersey, for Nidhi Rana, a first-year commuter student from Passaic who was last seen with her friend Ayush Rana, a Montclair State University student, as the water rushed around his car.

“Join me in keeping Nidhi and Ayush in your prayers for their safe return,” Seton Hall President Joseph Nyre said in a letter to students.

Other storm deaths were reported in Connecticut with at least one dead, Pennsylvania with at least four dead and Maryland with at least one dead.

Louisiana Governor John Bel Edwards increased the number of storm deaths in his Gulf Coast state to 13.

At least four of those people died in Louisiana of carbon monoxide poisoning from power generators, officials said.

Amid stifling heat and humidity, more than 591,000 homes and businesses in the state lacked electricity as of Sunday, according to PowerOutage.com. Some 1.2 million had originally lost power.

Ida also paralyzed U.S. Gulf of Mexico oil production, and 88% of crude oil output and 83% of natural gas production remained suspended as of Sunday.

The Grand Classica, a cruise ship that will house 1,500 workers trying to restore power, departed from the Port of Palm Beach, Florida, on Saturday and is due to arrive in New Orleans on Tuesday under a charter agreement with Entergy Corp, the Bahamas Paradise Cruise Line said.

A massive oil slick has emerged near the oil hub of Port Fourchon, Louisiana, with satellite images showing a miles-long brownish-black slick spreading in the coastal waters. A private dive team was attempting to locate the source.

(Reporting by Barbara Goldberg in New York; Additional reporting by Andrea Shalal in Washington and Daniel Trotta in Carlsbad, Calif.; Editing by Sonya Hepinstall and Peter Cooney)

I Know Firsthand How Ugly a Wartime Evacuation Really Is

I Know Firsthand How Ugly a Wartime Evacuation Really Is

Elizabeth Shackelford               

 

Desperate crowds scrambling after planes on the verge of liftoff; sobbing mothers handing their babies over fences to soldiers; and finally, a gruesome terrorist attack that killed nearly 200 people, including 13 U.S. service members. It’s no surprise that the public thinks President Joe Biden botched the U.S. evacuation from Afghanistan, even as polling shows Americans still largely approve of the decision to withdraw.

But from my own personal experience running an evacuation in a war zone, I can attest that it was never going to look good. Ultimately, there was little the U.S. government or military could have done in recent weeks to significantly change the outcome on the ground. These evacuations are always ugly. There is no graceful way to flee a country at war.

I saw this firsthand in December 2013 in Juba, South Sudan. As the U.S. Embassy’s sole consular officer, I led a small interagency team to run evacuation operations at the airport after civil war erupted and violence consumed the capital city and much of the countryside.

The scale was far smaller than what our government just undertook in Kabul. Take the numbers from Afghanistan and knock off two zeroes, and you can approximate the scale in South Sudan. While the U.S. government evacuated about 120,000 people from Kabul, we evacuated around 1,200 from Juba. Even at this smaller scale though, it was an urgent operation, and about a half dozen of us ran 19 evacuation flights in 19 days during South Sudan’s civil war.

The risk profile in Juba differed significantly from Kabul too, but many realities on the ground were similar, and the U.S. government could do little in either case to change them much. Here’s why.

The hardest part of fleeing a war zone is reaching the exit — in these cases, the airport. Because the U.S. government didn’t control Kabul, it had few options to help, all of which put U.S. personnel at greater risk. In South Sudan, we faced this issue too. We fielded hundreds of calls from Americans and others too afraid to cross the city alone amid the violence. We had limited success moving small numbers to the airport, but we didn’t have the resources to do it safely on a large scale.

The challenge was even greater for those outside Juba. I spent days on the phone with Americans sheltering up country, their compounds under fire with battles just outside. As they ran out of food and water, I felt helpless, but we simply weren’t safely able to get them out then.

We learned just how risky those efforts could be when military and State Department colleagues attempted an evacuation flight into the town of Bor. It was aborted when the aircraft came under fire, leaving U.S. service members seriously wounded. Deciding when and how much to put our people at risk is perhaps the hardest question we faced.

Once people reached the airport, someone must decide who gets in. In South Sudan, we didn’t contend with crowds at the gate. The airport had no secure perimeter at all, so the only issue was who we put on planes.

In Kabul, U.S. officials had two decision points and far bigger crowds to deal with. The military decided who could enter the airport, and once inside, consular officers decided who could leave.

But Americans and our Afghan allies — those whose lives were at risk for work on America’s behalf — weren’t the only ones trying to flee in this case. Scores of people were trying to stream in. And without having any law enforcement authority, the U.S. military couldn’t impose greater control outside the gates. That decision point over who to let enter wasn’t only difficult but deadly. Expanding the perimeter would have only pushed the same problem out further.

For every person who made it to and into the airport, hundreds or thousands didn’t, and U.S. officials were responsible for each decision made.

These life-and-death calls were made by real people, about real people, with imperfect information, based on vague and, at times, contradictory guidance from Washington. Who counts as a family member? How do you prove that they are? How do you prioritize among hundreds when no one’s documents are complete? After all, many don’t grab their passport or other documentation when fleeing for their lives.

Answers to these questions are subjective and answering them at volume is hard. In Juba, we couldn’t investigate doubts or verify documents because we were always racing against a clock, usually the airport’s closure at dark. In Kabul, they faced these limitations and more.

I remember these decisions well. I told myself we had limited resources and seats to offer and could only help so many on any given day. But every decision I made to turn someone away still stung.

It’s reasonable to ask why so many people were still left to evacuate after Kabul fell. If more Americans and allies had left sooner, we would have had fewer to get out in the end. The U.S. government had control over one of these categories but not the other.

The government warned American citizens for years not to travel to Afghanistan and repeatedly urged Americans to leave for the past five months. For those who chose to wait, the U.S. government’s hands were tied. And many chose to wait.

I saw this in South Sudan, too. I had urged Americans to leave at their first opportunity, but many didn’t. Americans don’t live in places like South Sudan or Afghanistan casually. They are there for a reason — family, business opportunities or conflict-related work. Most want to be on the last flight out possible and hope things won’t take a turn for the worse. They all had good reasons, but we never know when the last flight out will be; it won’t likely be safe, and it has only so many seats.

Where we could and should have done far better is getting our Afghan allies out sooner. Ramping up evacuations a few weeks earlier might have helped, at least modestly, though there were also reasonable fears the move would destabilize the Afghan government (at the time, we didn’t know how quickly it would fall anyway).

But we never should have been in this situation when Kabul fell. The real culprit is the dysfunctional Special Immigrant Visa program which should have been fixed years ago. The SIV program provides U.S. visas to Afghans whose work for the U.S. government puts them at risk, but its 14-step process is rife with unnecessary, difficult bureaucratic steps. It can take up to three-and-a-half years to complete, and many applicants are unjustly denied. The Trump administration intentionally clogged the SIV program, but it had been broken for years. If this system had worked as intended, many thousands of Afghan allies would already be living in the United States today.

In the final weeks though, most of the challenges on the ground were inevitable. Some things could have gone better, but they also could have gone much worse.

What I hope Americans understand is that our military and civilian officers on the ground were charged with thousands of life-and-death decisions in dangerous circumstances, doing the best they could with limited information and resources. They deserve immense gratitude, but they will live with the weight of these choices forever, and with what their decisions meant for the ones they didn’t choose.

As COVID Surges, We’re Not in the Endgame, We’re Mired in Uncertainty

Mother Jones – Coronavirus Updates

As COVID Surges, We’re Not in the Endgame, We’re Mired in Uncertainty

“People are pretty burned out 18 months into this thing.”
Edwin Rios, Reporter               September 5, 2021

Medical staff move COVID-19 patient who died onto a gurney to hand off to a funeral home van, at the Willis-Knighton Medical Center in Shreveport, La., Wednesday, Aug. 18, 2021. Gerald Herbert/AP

Just three months ago, the United States averaged fewer than 25,000 COVID infections a day, with an average of 627 COVID deaths over a seven-day period. It was the end of May and it seemed as if the light at the end of the proverbial COVID tunnel was near just as the “hot vax summer” was about to begin.

Then, as more and more Americans became vaccinated, too many—to the tune of 47 percent of Americans as of Sunday—have refused. And among that group of people, the more transmissible Delta variant spread like wildfire. Now, at summer’s end, as the nation averages more than 160,000 infections per day, more than 100,000 daily hospitalizations, and more than 1,500 deaths, the highest rates since March, epidemiologists, public health officials, and, frankly, many Americans are asking: When will this end?

In places where vaccinations are low, the wave of infections has pushed hospitals to the brink of a crisis. In Mississippi, just 38 percent of residents are fully vaccinated, and the surge in cases and hospitalizations, particularly among children, have strained hospitals. At the University of Mississippi Medical Center, the state’s only level one trauma center, the emergency room and ICU are beyond capacity, with exhausted hospital workers treating patients in a “logjam” of beds scattered in the hallways and in triage rooms. During a recent news conference, Dr. LouAnn Woodward, the head of that medical center, said, “We, as a state, as a collective, have failed to respond in a unified way to a common threat.”

In Florida, where Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis has been aggressively antagonistic toward mask mandates and measures that would curtail COVID’s spread, the state is seeing its deadliest period in the pandemic, averaging 244 deaths per day, higher than its peak last summer. Just 44 percent of residents are vaccinated in nearby South Carolina where the state is averaging 5,400 new COVID cases per day, the highest infection rate in the country. Steve Benjamin, Democratic mayor of Columbia, the state’s capital, announced he planned essentially to defy the Republican governor’s ban of mask mandates by imposing a local state of emergency and order students to wear masks if COVID cases keep rising.

What’s more, the CDC recently found that unvaccinated people are 29 times more likely to be hospitalized from COVID than those who are vaccinated, further burdening hospital resources. Part of the issue, of course, is that only kids 12 years and older can currently get vaccinated, and the reopening of schools for in-person learning has amplified concerns over the spread among children, teachers, and their families. CDC research found that between mid-June and late August, COVID hospitalizations rose fivefold among children and teenagers.

But the story of unvaccinated versus vaccinated children could be considered a microcosm of the unfolding of the pandemic generally. Even though children under age 12 cannot be vaccinated, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, recently said that they likely won’t begin to be until “hopefully by the mid, late fall and early winter.” But for those who can get vaccinated, it’s clear that the shots work to curtail hospitalizations. The rate of COVID hospitalizations was 10 times higher among unvaccinated children compared to vaccinated ones. And tellingly, pediatric hospitalizations were roughly four times higher in states with the lowest vaccination rates than in those with the highest, further showing that vaccines curtail severe disease even among children.

What does this all mean? It means we’re in the midst of yet another period of uncertainty that’s likely to continue if we fail to vaccinate enough people and take actions such as mask mandates to curb the virus spread. A Washington Post/ABC News poll showed that 52 percent of Americans supported vaccine mandates from businesses and two-thirds of those polled supported school districts requiring mask wearing for students, teachers, and staff. Even so, that same poll found that even though they are more concerned than in June, more than 60 percent of unvaccinated Americans saw “low” to “no” risk of contracting COVID.

“People are pretty burned out 18 months into this thing,” Ezekiel Emanuel, professor of medical ethics and health policy at the University of Pennsylvania, told the Washington Post. “And the exhaustion has been made worse by the rapid seesaw we’re having—take your masks off, put them back on. It’s all very confusing, but we have to be honest: We don’t know when, we don’t know how. We don’t know.”

MSNBC’s Joy Reid Busts A Big Myth Republicans Tell Themselves About Their Party

MSNBC’s Joy Reid Busts A Big Myth Republicans Tell Themselves About Their Party

Lee Moran                    

 

MSNBC’s Joy Reid dedicated her “Absolute Worst” segment on Friday to explaining why the GOP is anything but the pro-life party, despite its claims.

“The ReidOut” anchor referenced Texas’ extreme new anti-abortion law, Republican opposition to COVID-19 mask mandates, GOP voter resistance to receiving the coronavirus vaccine, and the party’s anti-environment policies to make her point.

“You can’t call yourself a pro-life party if your policy goals are to allow the maximum number of people to die of COVID, including children, by banning mask mandates in businesses and schools and raising doubts about vaccines,” she said.

“You can’t call yourself the pro-life, pro-family party if your policy goals are to put bounties on pregnant women and to force teenage girls to give birth after getting pregnant as a result of incest and rape,” Reid added.

“The Republican Party is a lot of things; anti-democracy, anti-voting, anti-history, anti-facts, deeply opposed to anti-racism. What they are not is pro-life,” she concluded, saying it’s now “loudly and proudly the pro-death party.”

Watch Reid’s monologue here:

It’s Time to Put the Right-Wing Zombie Death Cult on Trial

It’s Time to Put the Right-Wing Zombie Death Cult on Trial

Wajahat Ali                        
Jena Ardell/Getty
Jena Ardell/Getty

 

What will the Biden Administration do to save our children from the disease-spreading, right-wing zombie death cult?

This week, we started to find out.

On Monday, the U.S. Department of Education opened civil-rights investigations into five states—Iowa, South Carolina, Utah, Oklahoma, and Tennessee—that are banning local school districts from imposing mask mandates. They are relying on two federal laws: the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, which protects students with a disability from discrimination and guarantees them a right to a free education, and Title II of the Americans With Disabilities Act, which prohibits disability discrimination by public education systems. The states could be found in violation of federal law if the investigation finds that “students with disabilities who are at heightened risk for severe illness from COVID-19 are prevented from safely returning to in-person education.”

The penalties include loss of federal funding—or the school can simply agree to change its policies, which in this case would be choosing life by requiring masking and vaccination for school employees.

These students with heightened risk of illness include my 5-year-old daughter Nusayba, a Stage 4 cancer survivor who is immuno-suppressed due to her liver transplant. I recently wrote about how we were desperately trying to get her into virtual school, along with her brother, Ibrahim, who just turned 7. Thankfully, they were both admitted, and now I’m at home doing tech support until 3:30 p.m., but at least I know they are safe.

Meanwhile, there’s already been one COVID case on the second day of school. And their school is far from the worst of it. Thanks to the GOP’s multi-pronged and coordinated attack on masks, social distancing, and vaccines at schools, Delta is still thriving and there have been massive outbreaks at schools across the country.

This isn’t a “both sides” problem. Of the 10 states with the most COVID-19 cases per capita, as of Wednesday, nine of them were led by Republican governors—surprise!—and voted for Trump in 2020, as The New York Times reported. Meanwhile, 16 Democratic states have statewide mask requirements for schools. Tennessee, one of the five states being sued, just set a new record for COVID hospitalizations, and previously moved to cut off all vaccine outreach to students and young adults.

Now, thousands of its school-aged kids have COVID-19 with no end in sight. Some school districts in the United States are even leaving it up to parents to decide if they will quarantine their exposed child or send the child to school to spread the disease to other unvaccinated children.

Meanwhile, conservative radio hosts and influencers who peddled anti-vax misinformation are winning Darwin Awards and dying weekly from the coronavirus.

However, this doesn’t stop the right-wing hate machine. Onward they persist with their nihilistic, counter-majoritarian death march.

Republicans, such as those in Texas, believe they have the freedom to infect their kid and your kids with coronavirus, but women shouldn’t have the freedom to control their own bodies. Other conservative activists believe “freedom” means harassing and threatening school boards, intimidating health care workers, and spreading the dangerous QAnon conspiracy theory, which is now a domestic terror threat. Among other things, some suggest that anyone who believes in vaccines and mask mandates in schools is actually a “demonic entity” and bears “the mark of the beast.” That’s what Melissa, an alleged nurse from Lee County, Florida, recently said at a school-board meeting where she said that Christians around America will “take them all out,” referring to anyone who opposed her pro-death initiatives to spread COVID-19.

<div class="inline-image__caption"><p>People protest the North Allegheny School District’s mask mandate.</p></div> <div class="inline-image__credit">Alexandra Wimley/AP</div>People protest the North Allegheny School District’s mask mandate. Alexandra Wimley/AP

You’d think she’s a kooky outlier, a walking punchline. But she’s an ordinary rank-and-file soldier in this death movement that is holding our children’s safety hostage to advance their culture war. They aren’t the “American Taliban” or “enforcing Sharia,” and we should stop using Islam and Muslims as the benchmark for extremism. They are agents of White Christian Supremacy hellbent on ensuring minority rule for white men by any violent means necessary.

Our kids are simply the bait and collateral damage.

Steve Lynch, a Republican running for Northampton County executive in Pennsylvania, is an anti-masker encouraging violence against school boards unwilling to submit to his anti-masking belligerence. On Aug. 29, he said, “You go in and you remove ’em. I’m going in there with 20 strong men… They can leave or be removed.”

In Buncombe County, North Carolina, anti-maskers tried to “overthrow” the school board, encouraged in part by Rep. Madison Cawthorn, who fought a tree and lost, and continued rehabilitating the imprisoned violent insurrectionists of Jan. 6 at a recent rally by referring to them as “political hostages.” He said he’s working on “busting them out,” and he also seemed to call for another riot, despite this past one effectively killing five people, including a police officer, and being followed by law-enforcement suicides. He urged the Macon County Republicans to “defend their children” from harmful vaccines.

One of my lovely fans emailed me this week to warn me that violence will “spill out into the streets” and “there [are] 100 million Americans waiting for the day. I don’t foresee any Army coming to the rescue of the voices such as yourself who spin a web of lies and hateful rhetoric.”

He used his full name and email address. There’s no need to hide in the shadows and wear the hoods when your elected officials and your God-King, Trump, openly incite potential violence and criminality.

<div class="inline-image__caption"><p>A teacher holds up a sign protesting Florida’s decision to open schools last summer.</p></div> <div class="inline-image__credit">Joe Burbank/Orlando Sentinel/Tribune News Service via Getty</div>A teacher holds up a sign protesting Florida’s decision to open schools last summer. Joe Burbank/Orlando Sentinel/Tribune News Service via Getty

They are deliberately using threats of violence to terrorize the majority and have us cede ground. It seems to be working, as school-board members are stepping down across the country, unwilling to tolerate the “toxic and impossible” environment.

We’re dealing with a potential criminal element, and might need to flex with more than the Education Department and broad vaccine mandates to save our kids. I asked former career federal prosecutor Glenn Kirschner if the Department of Justice could step in with a criminal investigation if there’s evidence that these GOP-led state governments are actually harming children.

“I happen to believe that, because education is primarily a local issue, that local and state prosecutorial authorities should be evaluating whether the state governors and governments are recklessly and criminally endangering our children,” Kirschner told me, holding Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis as “a prime example.”

He believes DeSantis’ mask bans in Florida school districts might give prosecutors enough evidence to initiate a criminal investigation. He cited the recent Florida judge who overturned the recent mask ban and sided with parents whose lawsuit alleges, in part, that the policy violates the state constitution that requires providing a “uniform, efficient, safe, secure and high quality system” of public schools.

“I cannot understand why our prosecutorial authorities—federal, state, and local—seem to have concluded that we shouldn’t try to hold elected politicians accountable for killing the citizenry,” Kirschner added.

It is still possible that the Department of Education is introducing the carrot before the Department of Justice unleashes the stick. From my eyes, these GOP leaders are helping to actively kill people and harm children with their pro-death policies. That should immediately warrant criminal investigations and liability for causing avoidable COVID deaths.

The rest of us, the majority, need to stand our ground against this belligerent minority for the sake of our children’s safety and public health.

We can’t “both sides” or seek a bipartisan solution with a pro-death movement. Enough.

A blazing inferno threatens my paradise on Earth: Lake Tahoe

A blazing inferno threatens my paradise on Earth: Lake Tahoe

Julia Scheeres                              
<span>Photograph: Jae C Hong/AP</span>
Photograph: Jae C Hong/AP

 

It’s not the Ritz-Carlton. The remote cabin my family has rented in South Lake Tahoe for the past 10 years is small, buggy, mouse-infested and surrounded by dirt. There’s no turndown service – there’s not even cellphone or internet service. Amenities include a river, beavers that emerge at sundown and an overwhelming sense of peace.

Now our little piece of paradise is threatened by the massive Caldor fire as the entire Tahoe region becomes the latest flashpoint in the global climate crisis. Years of drought and rising temperatures have created California’s worst fire season on record. The images are horrific: giant walls of flames descending mountain sides. Orange skies. Homes scorched to ash. The entire town of South Lake Tahoe, which includes 22,000 year-round residents and many more summer visitors, has been evacuated.

Lake Tahoe – a 22-mile (35km), sapphire-blue lake nested in an emerald-green forest and ringed by soaring granite mountains – has been a favorite vacation spot for generations of American families, among them my own.

Our daughters were just three and five when we first brought them to Tahoe. They are city girls, and I wanted them to experience nature first-hand as I had during my Indiana childhood. Our house was perched on the edge of a woods, and my brother and I would disappear into this interstitial space of freedom to look for box turtles or build forts. I’ve returned to the solace of nature throughout my adulthood, and I wanted to introduce my children to this wellspring as well.

The former fishing cabin, built in the 1920s along the Upper Truckee River, fit the bill. It was the perfect inexpensive vacation spot for our family – which is important when you’re a teacher and a writer living in the Bay Area. When we started renting it, it cost $80 a night.

The house is a place out of time, still furnished with the original Wedgewood stove and cooking utensils. Without the constant blare of the internet and social media, the days move slowly. Entertainment includes playing in the river, reading in a hammock, identifying flora using a field guide. We alternate between lazy beach days at Lake Tahoe and hiking days, following trails up mountains to snowpacks, flowering meadows or alpine lakes. Along the way, conversations happen. Connections happen.

It was on a beach day last year that we witnessed the arrival of what was – until then – California’s worst fire season on record. As we sat in an isolated cove at the south end of Lake Tahoe – our girls floating on their inflatable rafts in the famously clear water, my husband and I paging through magazines – I noticed what looked like a fog bank forming at the north end of the lake. Over the next hour it rolled toward us, growing taller and darker and obscuring the casinos in Stateline, Nevada, on the lake’s eastern side and billowing over the 9,000ft peaks on the western side. Then we caught a whiff of smoke. By the time we packed up our car, the world was sepia-toned.

The smoke was from the Loyalton fire, sparked by lightning in the Sierra backcountry – one of nearly 10,000 wildfires reported in California in 2020 which burned an unprecedented 4.2m acres. We cut our vacation short and drove home through a fire-ravaged landscape, at one point passing vegetation still burning in the highway’s median strip. Our relief at coming home to clean air was short-lived, however; a few weeks later we woke to an eerie, blood-orange sky and ash falling on the trampoline as the smoke from multiple conflagrations raging across the state converged over the Bay Area. Crickets chirped in the noon darkness; it felt like the end of the world.

This year, I didn’t hesitate to book the cabin again. I assumed 2020’s wildfires were an exception. I was wrong. On 4 July, lightning sparked a fire just 24 miles away from South Lake Tahoe and as nearby towns evacuated, I reluctantly cancelled our reservation and planned a last-minute road trip to southern California instead.

That fire, the Tamarack fire, is still burning today, two months later. But now there’s an even worse peril: the Caldor fire, which, for the first time in reported history, jumped over the high granite peaks of the Sierra Nevada and entered the Tahoe Basin.

Back home, smoke has once again reached the Bay Area, elevating pollution levels. I’ve retrieved our air purifiers from the garage. I’ve obsessively tracked the fire’s voracious progress online, anxiety burning my stomach as I find photos of familiar mountainsides and cabins devoured in orange flames. This year’s conflagrations have already burned more acreage than last year’s fires. On Wednesday, for the first time in history, the US Forest Service closed all national forests in the state to try to thwart more infernos.

As I scroll through the hundreds of photos we’ve taken in Tahoe over the past 10 years, my throat wells with sorrow. My phone’s screensaver is a clip of my daughters chatting as they hike down our favorite trail on a blue-sky day. I worry that those blue-sky days are numbered.

The thing I love most about the buggy little cabin – its off-the-grid, deep-forest isolation – is now a dangerous liability. Without cellphone service or internet, how will we know if a fire is racing in our direction? After an emotional discussion, my husband and I decided it’s just too risky to spend more summers there. I feel the loss viscerally, like Eve being cast out of Eden. Although it’s just a rental, the cabin is an integral part of our family history.

I’ve made one last reservation, for a weekend in mid-October, to say goodbye. At that time of year, the quaking aspens alongside the river normally turn a buttery yellow and I like to sit under them with my morning coffee, mesmerized by their cheery shimmer.

“Normal” is now a relative term, of course. I don’t know whether the 100-year-old cabin will still be standing next month, or if it, too, will be reduced to ash – a grim warning of an apocalyptic future.

  • Julia Scheeres is a writer and the COO of Sustainabar, which makes zero-waste beauty and cleaning products
  • This article was amended on 4 September 2021 to clarify that the writer rents the cabin and does not own it

How Lake Tahoe was spared devastation from the Caldor fire

How Lake Tahoe was spared devastation from the Caldor fire

Alex Wigglesworth                       
Lake Tahoe, CA. September 1, 2021: Mist from from snowmakers sprays water next to a chairlift as the Caldor fire approaches near the ski resort of Kirkwood Wednesday. (Wally Skalij/Los Angeles Times)
Snowmaking machines spray water as the Caldor fire neared the Kirkwood ski resort on Sept. 1. (Wally Skalij / Los Angeles Times)

 

Things looked grim for South Lake Tahoe as the Caldor fire barreled toward the treasured resort community this week.

The fire spotted over a granite ridge that officials had hoped would keep flames from spreading into the Tahoe Basin. Forecasters warned of gusty winds and bone-dry conditions that could push it further toward populated areas, raising fears of an urban conflagration. Tens of thousands of residents and visitors fled, gridlocking traffic along Highway 50.

But the danger appeared to have largely abated Saturday, as authorities said the fight against the 214,112-acre blaze seemed to have turned a corner. The fire is now 43% contained.

Crews made a stand in Christmas Valley and held the fire south of Meyers in the northern Sierra Nevada. No structures burned in South Lake Tahoe, and crews were also able to save homes in Christmas Valley and Meyers.

Firefighters had carved containment lines around more than a third of the blaze. They credited a combination of aggressive firefighting tactics, improved weather conditions and past efforts to prepare the landscape for wildfire.

“If we would have had the same weather and fire behavior continue for two more days, we would have had a real problem,” said Dominic Polito, a public information officer on the fire. “So there was a little bit of divine mercy.”

“It’s no longer burning miles upon miles in a single 12-hour period, and that just had to do with the change in weather,” he said.

Although it was too soon to say South Lake Tahoe was completely out of the woods, authorities were cautiously optimistic, said Capt. Parker Wilbourn, another public information officer on the fire.

There were still some areas of concern where crews were working to ensure flames would not slop over containment lines, including the Christmas Valley and Kirkwood areas, as well as portions of the Heavenly area, he said.

He ticked off the factors that played into the improved prognosis. Some of it was terrain: a portion of the fire’s northern flank reached granite around Pyramid Peak in the Desolation Wilderness, depriving it of fuel to burn, he said. Some of it was luck, as it always is.

Some of it, he said, was the weather: the winds were not quite as fierce as initially forecast and subsided further midweek.

“A decrease in wind, decrease in temperatures and increase in humidity have all played to our advantage over the past two to three days,” Wilbourn said. “We’ve used that time to bolster our containment lines and start putting crews directly on the front lines for a firefight.”

Officials also noted the return of an inversion layer that helps to keep the sun from heating vegetation and the fire from sending up a plume of heat and smoke, effectively putting a lid on its activity: “Because if the smoke can’t leave, it means the fire can’t breathe,” Polito said.

But ultimately, Wilbourn credited three key factors with helping to save South Lake Tahoe: extensive firefighting operations, residents maintaining defensible space around their homes and past forest management projects.

“They’ve had a forest clearing initiative for the last nine to 10 years that really cleared out that fuel load,” he said, crediting the U.S. Forest Service with completing both prescribed burns and vegetation thinning operations.

The Forest Service partnered with the Sierra Nevada Conservancy on a project that called for 8,800 acres to be burned in the Caples Creek drainage over 10 to 15 years starting in 2017. The project included the 3,435-acre Caples prescribed burn in 2019, which was declared a wildfire after winds picked up and it burned at a higher intensity than intended, requiring suppression resources to be called in.

Like many Western U.S. forests, the watershed once benefited from frequent, low-intensity fires caused by lightning and Indigenous burning practices, experts say. But after colonization and aggressive fire suppression tactics upended that cycle, with the imbalance compounded by drought and climate change, the forest there was infilled with smaller trees and understory vegetation that increased drought stress on larger trees, according to the Forest Service. These so-called ladder fuels can also carry fire up into the canopy, helping it burn hotter and spread more quickly.

By thinning tree density and reducing the amount of smaller trees and vegetation, authorities had hoped to lessen the intensity of future wildfires that moved through the area.

The Caldor fire served as the project’s first real test, and experts have been closely monitoring the outcome.

Wilbourn said it appears to have played a role in significantly slowing the fire’s spread in some areas, helping crews to catch it. He pointed on the perimeter map to a pocket of green in the southern finger of the fire that overlapped with part of that prescribed burn, as well as other treatments he said had been performed in the Kirkwood area.

“The reason it’s kind of fingering out is you’ll see where some of that forest mitigation has happened,” he said.

Susie Kocher, forestry and natural resources advisor at the University of California Cooperative Extension, agreed.

“If you look at any of the fire maps, there’s a big gap between Kirkwood and Tahoe,” said Kocher, who was forced to evacuate her Meyers, Calif., home Monday. “That’s Caples.”

She said that due in part to its allure, the Tahoe area has been more successful than many parts of the Sierra in attracting resources for such projects.

The Tahoe Fire and Fuels Team, a multiagency coalition formed after the damaging Angora fire in 2007, said it has performed 65,000 acres of fuel reduction work in the Tahoe Basin over the past 13 years. The group also helps neighborhoods prepare for fire.

In a recent community briefing, Rocky Oplinger, an incident commander, described how such work can assist firefighters. When the fire spotted above Meyers, it reached a fuels treatment that helped reduce flame lengths from 150 to 15 feet, enabling firefighters to mount a direct attack and protect homes, he said.

“It takes both fuels reduction and active suppression in an environment like this to help the community and the forest survive,” Kocher said.

There’s not yet word on the cause of the Caldor fire, which started Aug. 14 about four miles south of Grizzly Flats and eventually decimated the town. About 55,000 people had been forced from their homes as of Friday, but that number had dropped by Saturday as some were able to return, authorities said. The fire had destroyed 687 homes and 18 commercial properties, with damage assessments 75% complete, Wilbourn said.

Firefighters were able to save homes in Christmas Valley and Meyers using a combination of tactics Polito described as fairly typical. First, authorities estimated where the fire was likely to travel based on the weather and topography. Then, crews went out to those areas and prepared structures by removing log piles, lawn furniture and brush to give embers fewer opportunities to take hold.

Once the fire arrived, they did what’s called a “fire front following,” Polito said.

“It’s impossible to stop a big fire from coming through, but what we can do is position ourselves on the roads in vehicles and in what we call safety zones,” he said. “Then as the fire comes through and starts to ignite all the fuels, we will follow it from behind and put out the different fuels that are near the structures.”

They also lit backburns to eliminate fuel between the communities and the fire, he said.

Firefighters were further helped by the fact that residents evacuated quickly, allowing crews to focus on saving homes rather than people, Polito said.

“Because that fire came so fast, if people would have been dragging their feet and blocking the roads, we couldn’t have saved all those homes,” he said.

15 Miami-Dade Public School Staff Members Die Of COVID In Just 10 Days

15 Miami-Dade Public School Staff Members Die Of COVID In Just 10 Days

Mary Papenfuss                           

 

A 30-year teaching veteran was one of 15 Miami-Dade County public school staff members who died of COVID-19 in just 10 days as Florida continues to reel amid the continuing, overwhelming toll of an unfettered pandemic.

“It’s a tremendous loss,” said a school official, referring to the death of longtime teacher Abe Coleman, 55, earlier this week.

“The number of lives that he impacted are countless. So many young men had the benefit of him intervening in their lives and pointing them in the right direction,” Marcus Bright, who works with a local education program 5000 Role Models of Excellence, told NBC-6 TV.

Coleman taught at Holmes Elementary School in Miami’s Liberty City area, which is a primarily Black neighborhood with 42% of the population living below the poverty line.

Local education officials haven’t released the identities of the other teachers or staff members.

“The loss of any of our employees is one that is always profoundly felt as every member of this organization is considered a part of Miami-Dade County Public Schools family,” the district said in a statement. “We extend our hearts and prayers to the loved ones of those whose lives have recently been lost.”

Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, who has dismissed the importance of COVID-19 vaccinations and signed an executive order banning mask mandates at schools, issued no comment on the astounding death rate in the county schools system.

The state Health Department was sued earlier this week by the Florida Center for Government Accountability and Democratic state Rep. Carlos Guillermo Smith for not providing detailed, daily statistics about Florida’s surging COVID-19 cases in violation of the state’s open-records laws.

The suit argues that the DeSantis administration is deliberately manipulating COVID-19 data to make it appear the problem was not as dire as it actually is.

“The DeSantis administration has consistently refused to release COVID-related public records, which not only hurts our efforts to contain this deadly virus, it is also unlawful,” Smith said in a statement after the suit was filed.

“That’s why we’re suing them — to obtain the public records our constituents are entitled to under the Florida Constitution and to force the state to resume daily COVID dashboard reporting and avoid future litigation on this matter.”

Florida is in the grip of its deadliest wave of COVID-19 since the start of the pandemic. As of mid-August, the state was averaging 244 deaths a day, eclipsing the previous peak of 227 a year ago. The state reported 2,345 deaths and over 129,000 cases this week. Hospitals have had to rent refrigerated units to store bodies.

The number of people hospitalized with COVID-19, however, eased slightly over the past two weeks from 17,000 to 14,200.