ANNAPOLIS, Md. (AP) — A Maryland board approved an emergency procurement of more than $1 million on Wednesday to pay for a stockpile of a widely used abortion pill due to uncertainty surrounding legal challenges against the drug’s use.
The Board of Public Works approved the funds to pay for 35,000 doses that would last several years, if necessary. The stockpile, acquired in April, includes 30,000 doses of mifepristone and 5,000 doses of misoprostol.
- Naomi Schaefer Riley: Children are dead because activists say it’s racist for ACS to act
When a child is found dead with bruises on her wrists and torso, the first question is always: Were there warning signs?
In the case of 6-year-old Jalayah Eason, the answer is undoubtedly yes.
It wasn’t just the upstairs neighbor who heard the child “screaming for her dear life” and yelling, “Stop, stop, stop!” Who told a reporter, “You could hear the thumps, bro.”
Nor was it the reports of her 8-year-old brother, who told a classmate that his mother was “whipping him, slapping him.”
Nor was it the school that reported long stretches of absences by the brother, that he was regularly picked up more than an hour late from school, that he wore the same clothes each day and smelled like urine.
When he proposed that the human papillomavirus caused cervical cancer, he was ridiculed. He persevered, and today a vaccine exists.
- Erica Sandberg in City Journal: High Hopes, Deep Despair: San Francisco will break your heart.
Perhaps no aspect of life in San Francisco is as tragic as its drug disaster. From January 2021 to November 2022, more than 1,225 people died of overdoses in the city. Opioids, cocaine, and methamphetamines are all sold in the open. Most of the dealers are part of a powerful cartel of Honduran nationals.
Fentanyl is particularly prolific and cheap. San Francisco’s toleration of the purchase and use of illegal drugs has lured addicts from around the country; all too often, they end up homeless and at death’s door.
The situation became so dire that Mayor London Breed declared a state of emergency in January 2022 and opened the Linkage Center in UN Plaza. The intention was to connect the city’s exploding drug-using population to addiction treatment and other critical services. Mothers who had lost children to the streets of San Francisco were hopeful. Finally, their kids would receive the support that they needed to get sober and healthy.
Almost immediately, the Linkage Center descended into a ramshackle, filthy, city-funded place to get high. Workers distributed drug-use supplies and administered naloxone when guests overdosed. Hundreds of dealers congregated outside, doing brisk business.
The Department of Public Health denied that the center was an unlawful drug-use site, until independent journalists went undercover to confirm it. I was among them, and I witnessed people shoot up and smoke fentanyl in a space created to connect them to recovery care.
In response, the mothers, who had organized into Mothers Against Drug Addiction and Deaths, staged a protest at the center. They were met by harm-reduction activists, who counterprotested. Not backing down, the women erected a billboard overlooking Union Square, bearing the message “Famous the world over for our brains, beauty and, now, dirt-cheap fentanyl,” set against the background of the Golden Gate Bridge.
Eleven months later, in December 2022, the center was shuttered. At a cost of $22 million, it had proved a humiliating failure for city officials. But the closure was a victory of sorts for the mothers who refused to accept substandard treatment for their children.
10. Melissa Langsam Braunstein: The real story of New York’s Yeshivas
In its initial article, the New York Times asserted Hasidic parents “feel they have little choice but to send their children to the[se] schools.” But what the New York Times paints as peer pressure, said Rabbi Yaakov Menken, managing director of the Coalition for Jewish Values, is actually a genuine commitment to religious education and a religious life.
As for the insinuation that families would otherwise be seeking an excuse to flee the yeshiva system, meet Moyshe Silk. He was assistant secretary for international markets at the Treasury Department after having already been a “senior partner at a global, elite law firm.” Silk, the first Hasid to serve as a senior presidential appointee, commuted to Washington during his three years in government “so my kids wouldn’t be uprooted from their school[s].” The Silks prioritized schooling because “educationally, we don’t think there’s better training for critical thinking and textual analysis. … Our kids grow up well rounded, highly productive, with good communal and family values, and filled with optimism.” Yeshivas are “the crown jewel of the community.”
A central claim of the New York Times’s attack on religious education is that these yeshiva graduates are left unprepared for life after high school. But the yeshivas’ moral education translates nicely into practical use. Penina G., a registered nurse, credits her yeshiva education for making college feel easy “because I was taught how to study properly.” Beyond the life lessons, “curiosity and creativity were encouraged in school.”
Malka, a graduate of a Bobov Hasidic yeshiva, described the experience of her husband, now a doctoral candidate in molecular biology, in similar terms. It turns out that imparting analytical habits of mind is no mere abstraction. “He found that he was always at the top of his class [post-yeshiva] because of the way he had been trained to think,” Malka said. “The advanced analytical skills, logic development, and the rigorous questioning all stood him in good stead.”
In other words, a yeshiva education teaches skills that are applicable for students who go outside the community for further education and the workforce.
Recent episodes of violence against the Catholic Church, including the murder of a priest and the attempted murder of an archbishop, once again bring to the fore the persecution of the faith in Mexico and the power of organized crime.
On May 22, Augustinian priest Javier García Villafañe was found shot to death in his car on the Cuitzeo-Huandacareo highway. The Michoacán state attorney general’s office stated that he “was killed by several gunshots.”
Days before, an 80-year-old assailant tried to stab to death the archbishop of Durango, Faustino Armendáriz, in the cathedral sacristy after Mass was finished. Fortunately, the prelate was barely injured in the failed attempt.
In addition, in recent weeks there have been various cases of desecration and sacrilege in different churches in the country.
- Wall Street Journal: Is Religion Good for Your Health?
Is religion a medicine for what ails us? If we’re talking about physical and mental health, the answer has been difficult to come by. Large-scale studies have consistently shown a strong association between being religious and good health. For example, a paper published by Mayo Clinic researchers in 2001 found that people who regularly attend religious services tend to have lower rates of mortality and hospital admissions in any given period, as well as better cardiovascular function. The increase in death rates among people who never attend religious services compared with those who attend several times a week is comparable to that associated with smoking a pack of cigarettes a day.
. . .
Using data from other large-scale, longitudinal studies, VanderWeele found that religiosity improves mental health. Attending services at least weekly or meditating regularly reduces feelings of depression and increases feelings of life satisfaction and purpose, even among adolescents. The health benefits are greater for those who attend services once a week or more than for those who only attend intermittently.
Ongoing surveys like these, as well as more targeted studies, show a strong link between religion and better physical and mental health. Of course, this doesn’t mean that religion should be prescribed as a medicine, either in addition to or in place of other established treatments. The choice to be spiritually active is a personal one, and religion is only one of many factors that affect health. Nonetheless, it’s time for health sciences to take religion seriously and consider what it offers the body and mind.
- Oklahoma bishops: Planned Catholic school to provide new options for underserved students
The St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School is set to open in the fall of 2024, providing innovative educational options for underserved populations, particularly for students in rural areas, including Hispanic and Native communities, and those across the state with special educational needs. It will be the first religious-based charter school in the United States.
The school will operate similarly to the handful of virtual school options already available in the state but will be founded in the Catholic intellectual tradition of excellence that has been part of the mission of the Catholic Church for centuries and the standard in education since the first Catholic school in the United States opened in the 1700s.
As Pope Francis reminded us, Catholic education is unique in combining innovative ways of uniting learning with best practices so that teachers can serve the whole person in a process of integral human development.
- Frederick Hess in Forbes: Do American Students Need More Time In School?
The point, rather, is that knowing how much time kids spend in school is more complicated than it may initially appear. More importantly, simply boosting the number of hours or days that kids sit in school may be the wrong goal. Before spending billions to lock kids up longer, we should ensure that schools are making use of the time they already have.
It can be tough to be sure how much time students spend learning, but it’s easier to know how much time they’re not. To see where all that OECD-estimated time really goes, researchers took a Massachusetts high school and started ticking off lost time from its 180-day academic calendar. There were seven early-release days for professional development, eight days for exams, another seven mornings set aside for the state test (all classes were paused though only tenth-graders took the exam), and so on.
Ultimately, the researchers found that total instructional time accounted for just 62 percent of the 1,076 hours estimated by OECD. In other words, 410 hours (or about 13 to 14 weeks) weren’t spent in class.
Then, of course, there’s the question of how much class time is actually devoted to learning. In 2021, in a far-too-unusual study of schools in Providence, Rhode Island, researchers Matt Kraft and Manuel Monti-Nussbaum documented just how many disruptions there are in a school day. A typical Providence classroom is interrupted over 2,000 times per year, with the interruptions consuming 10 to 20 days of instructional time.
Disruptions included intercom announcements, staff visits, and students entering (or re-entering) class. When it comes to tardiness, for instance, Kraft and Monti-Nussbaum note, “In many classrooms, locked doors required late and returning students to knock and a teacher or student to stop what they were doing and open the door.” More than half of the interruptions they observed led to spillover disruptions that amplified the impact. Meanwhile, administrators severely underestimated the frequency of these interruptions and the time they took.
Schools may need more time. But, in many places, an enormous amount of school time—potentially something approaching half the academic year—is not being used effectively.
20. Katrina Trinko: Judge Orders Women’s Spa Run By Christians to Allow Naked Men
Harvey Weinstein must be kicking himself now for not identifying as trans.
During the Kansas City Chiefs’ visit to the White House on Monday in celebration of their Super Bowl victory in February, the team’s kicker, Harrison Butker, made a statement in support of the unborn by wearing a custom-made necktie with a pro-life message.
Butker, known for being a devout Catholic, wore a tie that says “Vulnerari Praesidio,” a Latin phrase he says means “protect the most vulnerable.”
“I want to give the most vulnerable, the unborn, a voice at a place where every effort has been made to allow and normalize the tragic termination of their lives,” Butker said in a June 6 statement.
- From USA Today on a Gallup Poll: Americans less supportive of transgender athletes playing for teams of their choice, poll finds
25. Emily DeArdo on The Public Discourse: The Gift of Transplants:
When I was twenty-three, I received a double lung transplant due to cystic fibrosis (CF), a life-limiting genetic disease that causes the body’s mucus to be thicker than usual, clogging the linings of the lungs, the pancreas, and other parts of the body. When I was diagnosed in 1993 at age eleven, the average life expectancy of a CF patient was thirty-three years old. At eleven, thirty-three is old. At twenty-three, it’s not.
My death will most likely come from a side effect of one of the medications I’m on to keep my body from rejecting my transplanted lungs. This makes some recipients resentful or angry, as seen in a recent New York Times op-ed by Amy Silverstein. She and I received the gift of a healthier and longer life when we received our transplants. The medications that she’s decrying are the ones that have kept her—and me—alive. These years are an inexpressible gift.
St. Benedict tells his monks to keep death daily before their eyes. We need to do the same thing, not run away from it, thinking we can play hide and seek with death. We need to keep death daily before our eyes.
Be grateful. Direct yourself toward God. Spend out. Those are the places we might start, so that when this life is over, we can know that we spent our time here well. Remember you will die—and then get to living.”
26. Colorado mother of micro-preemie baby to run 147 miles after son beats the odds
Hauser family started nonprofit to help other families with long NICU stays
28. Rachel Lu: The ‘holy whodunits’ of G.K. Chesterton, Agatha Christie and Ralph McInerny
29. On The Plough: Princess of the Vatican: What happens when a Roman palazzo becomes a homeless shelter?
- Father Peter John Cameron, O.P.: The Way of the Eucharist
Also from Father Cameron: The mystery of the Trinity corresponds to our deepest human longings