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Twenty Things that Caught My Eye: Special Needs Kids, Lebanon & More (August 11, 2020)

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2. Washington Post Editorial Board: The world must not let China steamroll Hong Kong

 There can be no more illusions that China will keep its promise from the 1997 handover to allow “one-country, two-systems,” under which Hong Kong was assured that it could retain rule of law, free expression and the promise of full democracy. But the people of Hong Kong have shown, over and over again during the ordeal of recent years, that they cherish the values of a free people. The world must not abandon them or surrender to Beijing’s steamroller.

3. Christianity Today: 16 Beirut Ministries Respond to Lebanon Explosion 

4. HK diocese promotes ‘national identity’, security law in Catholic schools

 The new law criminalizes new categories of “secession,” “subversion,” “terrorism” and “collusion with foreign forces.” Anyone convicted under the law will receive a minimum of 10 years in prison, with the possibility of a life sentence. It was imposed on Hong Kong by the mainland legislature, bypassing Hong Kong’s own legislative process. As part of helping students understand the new law’s provisions, teachers are to “foster the correct values on [students’] national identity” and to respect Chinese national symbols including the flag and national anthem, the letter said.

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6. Why a Generation of Girls is Fleeing Womanhood

What will this “upgrade” to transgender cost a girl? Only her name; her natural voice, which will be permanently altered even if she one day gets off testosterone; her breasts, with their erogenous capacity and ability to breastfeed; and perhaps her ability to bear children at all. These are lifelong sacrifices, doled out on an “informed consent” basis to girls too young to legally get tattoos. Shrier poignantly writes, “No adolescent should pay this high a price for having been, briefly, a follower.”

7. Andrew Walker: Grace in the Garden

Common humanity is our warrant as Christians to enter the public square. Our concern for addressing social ills originates from our shared creation by God. Natural law dictates the content of our engagement.

8. Arthur Rizer & Lars Trautman: Why ‘Enforcing’ the Law Is Not The Same As Justice

One of the silver linings to emerge from the current parade of criminal justice tragedies is a renewed focus on how we can reimagine public safety and law enforcement in this country. In this new vision, “law enforcement” should call to mind a practice, not a profession. Only then are we likely to have a system of public safety that understands the law is there to serve people rather than the other way around.

9. Michael R. Strain: Closed Schools Are a National Emergency

It is not helpful to demand that schools simply reopen. Instead, public officials at all levels — from school districts to state capitals to the federal government — need to provide schools with the resources, tools and ideas necessary to address the legitimate health concerns of teachers and parents.

10.  Richard Engel: Kids with special needs are not OK right now. Neither are their parents.

 Other families, doctors and advocates for children with disabilities say the disruption caused by COVID is reverberating throughout the entire special needs community. Doctors tell me children with autism are among the most affected. Their disorder seems almost custom-built to kick into high gear when everything they know suddenly turns upside down.

11. Children with disabilities are regressing. How much is distance learning to blame?

The education of some 760,000 California children with disabilities has been inconsistent at best since campuses shut down in March. Parents’ worries have intensified as they see their children’s hard-fought advances diminishing — and fear that losses will be compounded with more distance learning ahead, said educators, parents and student advocates.

12.  New York Times: Dementia on the Retreat in the U.S. and Europe                                    

The risk for a person to develop dementia over a lifetime is now 13 percent lower than it was in 2010. Incidence rates at every age have steadily declined over the past quarter-century. If the trend continues, the paper’s authors note, there will be 15 million fewer people in Europe and the United States with dementia than there are now.

13. How foster care, adoption changed path of Tide’s top basketball recruiter

Hodgson credited his biological mother’s unselfishness and Larry and Rebecca’s “best recruiting job” for the adoption. “I don’t know if I ever would have went to high school, let alone college,” he said. “There was times that I sat back and thought, man, what if I would have never been taken from that home and been there until I was six or seven or eight. What would have happened to me? Where would I have been?”

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15. Asra Nomani: Woke War on America’s No. 1 High School: Push to ‘Segregate by Race and Income’

16. Baltimore Sun: Headlines told of a baby found in 1934 near Baltimore’s Penn Station. New DNA tests offer an answer to the mystery.

17. Apt Bible passage at Catholic Mass coincides with earthquake

Father Richard Sutter of St. Gabriel’s Catholic Church said the lector in the Sunday service had just reached the 19th chapter of 1 Kings, a Bible passage referring to the prophet Elijah, which said, “After the wind there was an earthquake — but the LORD was not in the earthquake.” It was then that parishioners felt the 5.1 magnitude earthquake centered near Sparta, the most powerful to hit the state in more than 100 years.

18. the pandemic which confines us in our house is…the hour of contemplative life which brings humanity and the Church back to God, to the essentials of faith, prayer and communion in the Spirit. 

19. 11-year-old Nigerian boy who went viral after being filmed dancing barefoot in the rain is awarded a scholarship to New York City’s American Ballet Theatre

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PLUS: How St. Clare of Assisi can help us make the most of today’s strange times

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/twenty-things-that-caught-my-eye-special-needs-kids-lebanon-more-august-11-2020/

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