by Lowell
Here are a few national and Virginia news headlines, political and otherwise, for Tuesday, August 17.
- Global water crisis will intensify with climate breakdown, says report (“Flooding, droughts and wildfires will worsen as global heating disrupts the planet’s water cycle”)
- Big Oil should help pay for the climate mess it created
- To Save Earth’s Climate, Map the Oceans
- Haiti mourners tell of church collapse horror during quake
- Joe Biden Defends Afghanistan Withdrawal: ‘There Was Never A Good Time’
- Biden’s Right That It’s Time for Us to Leave Afghanistan
- Inside Reach 871, A US C-17 Packed With 640 Afghans Trying to Escape the Taliban
- Biden gave the best possible defense of his Afghanistan withdrawal
- Eerie tension settles over Kabul as Taliban patrols the streets and U.S. reasserts control at the airport following chaotic scenes
- Female mayor in Afghanistan says she’s waiting for Taliban to ‘come … and kill me’
- After Taliban triumph, Biden faces even greater test in preventing extremist resurgence in Afghanistan
- Beltway reporting of Afghanistan withdrawal a disservice to Americans
- Billions spent on Afghan army ultimately benefited Taliban
- Afghans who helped the U.S. and its allies left in limbo as evacuation turns chaotic
- Kabul airport: footage appears to show Afghans falling from plane after takeoff
- You Can Help Afghan Refugees Get Resettled in the DC Area
- Biden says the ‘buck stops with me’ — while pinning blame on Trump and many Afghans
- US reaches deal with Taliban on evacuations: report
- GOP Removes Page Praising Donald Trump’s ‘Historic’ Peace Deal With Taliban
- The Taliban’s Return Is Catastrophic for Women (“As a photojournalist covering Afghanistan for two decades, I’ve seen how hard the country’s women have fought for their freedom, and how much they have gained. Now they stand to lose everything.”)
- Biden Was Right (“The president made a difficult but necessary choice.”)
- Taliban Announces ‘Amnesty,’ Urges Women to Join Government
- European Leaders Point Fingers at the U.S. After Fall of Kabul
- Mad Kabul Scramble Is ‘Exactly the Scenario We Feared’
- The Taliban leaders in line to become de facto rulers of Afghanistan
- Comparisons between Afghanistan and Saigon are deeply flawed
- Last images from the Afghan war capture a 20-year failure to acknowledge how badly the conflict was going
- Taliban Consolidate Control in Kabul (“Representative arrives for political talks; group issues amnesty for Afghan officials; Biden stands by U.S. withdrawal”)
- Trump Hopes No One Remembers He Pushed For a Full Afghanistan Withdrawal in June
- What’s happening in Afghanistan can’t be reduced to images with historic parallels. When will we learn to see things in real time?
- China will tread carefully in navigating the Taliban’s return (“Analysis: Difficult to predict how China will deal with its volatile neighbour, but Uyghur issue could prove contentious”)
- The Memo: Biden gambles he can plow through Afghan crisis
- Lay off Joe Biden: He didn’t “lose” Afghanistan — we are finally leaving it alone (“We spent 20 messed-up years in Afghanistan flexing our muscles and money, and now we are making a messy exit”)
- What Does the Fall of Saigon Really Have to Teach Us About Afghanistan? (“The comparisons may have less to do with history than a right-wing fixation.”)
- Here’s What Taliban Leadership Looks Like In 2021
- 8 Paradoxes That Sum Up America’s 20-Year Mission In Afghanistan
- Taliban’s Afghanistan takeover raises big questions for U.S. security chiefs
- Trapped by Taliban takeover, Afghans who helped the U.S. fear they’ve been abandoned
- Race to Evacuate Continues in Afghanistan (“Taliban Vow No Reprisal Killings, but Afghans Are Desperate to Escape”)
- In the Afghanistan debacle, so many errors and so little candor
- The Taliban Are Back. Now Will They Restrain or Support Al Qaeda?
- 6 Political Takeaways For President Biden From The Chaotic Afghanistan Withdrawal (“The disorganization and confusion of President Biden’s full U.S. withdrawal of Afghanistan have put him in a political hole.”)
- Biden Could Still Be Proved Right in Afghanistan
- ‘We are on fire’: Five U.S. states set new records for Covid cases as hospitalizations rise
- Delta Surge Drives Home Painful Truth: Covid Isn’t Going Away
- U.S. to Advise Boosters for Most Americans 8 Months After Vaccination
- To Mandate Or Not? Employers Get Urgent About Vaccinations
- First-ever water shortage declared on the Colorado River, triggering water cuts for some states in the West (THIS is the climate crisis.)
- The Bad Economics of Fossil Fuel Defenders (“Like pandemic policy, where the G.O.P. has effectively allied itself with the coronavirus, climate policy has become a front in the culture war; there’s a sense on the right that real men disdain renewable energy and love burning fossil fuels. Look at the dishonest attempts to blame wind farms for Texas blackouts actually caused by freezing pipelines.”)
- Residential solar pricing down 6.3%, hints of greater drops coming
- Biden administration to review federal coal leasing, appeal injunction for oil leasing pause
- September unemployment cliff looms for 7 million Americans
- Democrats in Congress Need to Cut to the Chase With a Deal on Everything (“It’s time to pass Biden’s agenda, before it’s too late”)
- Why the plea to Congress on voting rights is so urgent (“There is only one way to preserve democracy.”)
- Home Prices Are Now Higher Than The Peak Of The 2000s ‘Housing Bubble.’ What Gives?
- Is It Time to Break Up Big Ag? (“Renewed attention to antitrust has been focussed on Big Tech, but concentration in agriculture may be an underlying source of rural America’s pro-Trump political backlash.”)
- Republican Views On Immigration Are Shifting Even Further To The Right Under Biden (Disgusting.)
- Progressives eye shift in strategy after high-profile losses (Stop nominating people who are nutty and who say nasty things all the time about Democrats?)
- Multiple people seeking to run state elections are connected to QAnon
- Why no one really knows how bad Facebook’s vaccine misinformation problem is (“Some researchers say that Facebook isn’t being transparent enough about Covid-19 content on its platform.”)
- Mainstream media need to stop treating Bush administration officials like Afghanistan experts (“If you are going to interview them, then ask about the mistakes that doomed the war in the early 2000s”)
- As Afghanistan falls, Fox turns to Bush and Trump vets to blame Biden
- Ron DeSantis May Have Already Delivered the House to Republicans in 2022 (“By stacking the Florida Supreme Court with ultraconservatives, the governor paved the way for an extreme new GOP gerrymander.”)
- Suit: Changing prisoner count weakens rural, GOP districts (“The legal challenge was filed Friday in Virginia’s state Supreme Court. Petitioners include state Sen. Travis Hackworth, who represents a reliably Republican district that stretches from the Virginia-Kentucky border to Radford. Hackworth’s district includes five state correctional facilities, according to the lawsuit. Others who are suing include county representatives in western counties such as Buchanan and Tazewell.”)
- Warner wants answers about ‘worst-case scenario’ in Afghanistan
- Md., Va. governors ‘ready and willing’ to take in more Afghan refugees
- VA Members of Congress React to Taliban Takeover of Afghanistan
- Glenn Youngkin is in Favor of Prolonging the Pandemic, Putting Families and Children At Risk (“Youngkin has already made clear he intends to model himself after Ron DeSantis — whose reckless, anti-COVID safety “leadership” has been a disaster for Floridians.”)
- Monday (8/16) Virginia Data on COVID-19: With Delta Now Dominant, Hospitalizations (1,127) at Highest Level Since Mid-March, 10-Day New Cases (+19,063) Highest Since Late February(!)
- Sears speaks out against government relief spending after accepting two PPP loans for her business (Classic Trumpublican hypocrisy)
- Video: VA Redistricting Commission Discusses Options for Official “Receipt” of U.S. Census Data, When the Clock Starts Ticking; Votes Overwhelmingly For 8/26 (New VA House and Senate maps will be due by October 10.)
- Tensions rise as Va. Redistricting Commission begins map-drawing sprint (Fiasco, as predicted.)
- Virginia Redistricting Committee Settles on New Timeline
- National Republican group launches TV ad campaign aimed at flipping Virginia House seats (And almost every word in it is fearmongering, demagoguery and/or false.)
- Did Virginia lawmakers hand Northam a $1 billion blank check? (Nope; false comment by Suetterlein.)
- Editorial: Five lessons for Southwest Virginia from the census results
- Concerns Over Distribution of Funds for School HVAC Upgrades Heating Up
- Opinion: Virginia women may be the key voters in November (It’s a Mark Rozell column, so of course it contains at least one howler/wild false equivalency – in this case, “Though Virginia will be a first test of how malignant Trump’s legacy remains now that he is out of the White House, it will also be a barometer of whether Cuomo’s fall, brought on by his alleged sexual harassment of female subordinates, weakens women’s support for Democrats generally.” There is literally ZERO chance that “Cuomo’s fall” will “weaken women’s support for Democrats generally.” For starters, Democrats all called for Cuomo to resign…which he’s doing, to be replaced by a *woman*.)
- Department of Defense helps restore the Chesapeake Bay, investing $128 million in cleanup efforts
- Editorial: Making most of settlement (“Virginia could collect up to $530 million from a lawsuit against opioid manufacturers, which would allow the commonwealth to battle addiction and abuse.”)
- Rodney Willett column: Maximize opportunities to address Virginia’s behavioral health crisis
- As Virginia EV sales slowly climb, auto dealers still haven’t given up on rebates (“The fight over incentives isn’t over”)
- Centra To Require COVID-19 Vaccine For Employees, New River Health Dist. Rolling Out Boosters
- Virginia is looking at 21st-century solutions to help people prove they’re vaccinated (“The Virginia Department of Health is working on support for QR-code based tracking systems that prove a person’s vaccination status. The technology could be ready in two or three weeks.”)
- Demand for third shot rising with COVID cases in the New River Valley
- Roanoke’s mayor backs off push for city mandate, but implores people to get vaccine
- Tropical Storm Fred on course for heavy rain in Roanoke area
- D.C.-area forecast: Muggy, cloudy, and occasionally stormy conditions continue
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