–A Texas law banning most abortions in the state took effect at midnight, but the Supreme Court has yet to act on an emergency appeal to put the law on hold.
If allowed to remain in force, the law would be the most dramatic restriction on abortion rights in the United States since the high court’s landmark Roe v. Wade decision legalized abortion across the country in 1973.
The Texas law, signed by Republican Gov. Greg Abbott in May, would prohibit abortions once a fetal heartbeat can be detected, usually around six weeks and before most women even know they’re pregnant.
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Abortion providers who are asking the Supreme Court to step in said the law would rule out 85% of abortions in Texas and force many clinics to close. Planned Parenthood is among the abortion providers that have stopped scheduling abortions beyond six weeks from conception.
At least 12 other states have enacted bans on abortion early in pregnancy, but all have been blocked from going into effect.
What makes the Texas law different is its unusual enforcement scheme. Rather than have officials responsible for enforcing the law, private citizens are authorized to sue abortion providers and anyone involved in facilitating abortions. Among other situations, that would include anyone who drives a woman to a clinic to get an abortion. Under the law, anyone who successfully sues another person would be entitled to at least $10,000.
Abortion opponents who wrote the law also made it difficult to challenge the law in court, in part because it’s hard to know whom to sue.
Texas has long had some of the nation’s toughest abortion restrictions, including a sweeping law passed in 2013 that the Supreme Court eventually struck down but not before more than half of the state’s 40-plus abortion clinics closed.
Lawmakers also are moving forward in an ongoing special session in Texas with proposed new restrictions on medication abortion, a method using pills that accounts for roughly 40% of abortions in the U.S.
Long lines that wrapped around the block formed at the few gas stations that had fuel and generator power to pump it. People cleared rotting food out of refrigerators. Neighbors shared generators and borrowed buckets of swimming pool water to bathe or to flush toilets.
“We have a lot of work ahead of us and no one is under the illusion that this is going to be a short process,” Gov. John Bel Edwards said as the cleanup and rebuilding began across the soggy region in the oppressive late-summer heat.
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New Orleans officials announced seven places around the city where people could get a meal and sit in air conditioning. The city was also using 70 transit buses as cooling sites and will have drive-thru food, water and ice distribution locations set up on Wednesday, Mayor LaToya Cantrell said. Edwards said state officials also were working to set up distribution locations in other areas.
Cantrell ordered a nighttime curfew Tuesday, calling it an effort to prevent crime after Hurricane Ida devastated the power system and left the city in darkness. Police Chief Shaun Ferguson said there had been some arrests for stealing.
Gerald Herbert–APThe remains of destroyed homes and businesses are seen in the aftermath of Hurricane Ida in Grand Isle, La., Tuesday, Aug. 31, 2021.
The mayor also said she expects the main power company Entergy to be able to provide some electricity to the city by Wednesday evening, but stressed that doesn’t mean a quick citywide restoration. Entergy was looking at two options to “begin powering critical infrastructure in the area such as hospitals, nursing homes and first responders,” the company said in a news release.
Cantrell acknowledged frustration in the days ahead.
“We know it’s hot. We know we do not have any power, and that continues to be a priority,” she told a news conference.
More than 1 million homes and businesses in Louisiana and Mississippi — including all of New Orleans — were left without power when Ida slammed the electric grid on Sunday with its 150 mph (240 kph) winds, toppling a major transmission tower and knocking out thousands of miles of lines and hundreds of substations.
An estimated 25,000-plus utility workers labored to restore electricity, but officials said it could take weeks.
With water treatment plants overwhelmed by floodwaters or crippled by power outages, some places were also facing shortages of drinking water. About 441,000 people in 17 parishes had no water, and an additional 319,000 were under boil-water advisories, federal officials said.
The number of deaths climbed to at least four in Louisiana and Mississippi, including two people killed Monday night when seven vehicles plunged into a 20-foot-deep (6-meter-deep) hole near Lucedale, Mississippi, where a highway had collapsed after torrential rains.
Among the crash victims was Kent Brown, a “well-liked,” 49-year-old father of two, his brother Keith Brown said in a telephone interview on Tuesday. Keith Brown said his brother was in construction but had been out of work for a while. He didn’t know where his brother was headed when the crash happened.
Edwards said he expects the death toll to rise.
In Slidell, crews searched for a 71-year-old man who was attacked by an alligator that tore off his arm as he walked through Ida’s floodwaters. His wife pulled him to the steps of the home and paddled away to get help, but when she returned, he was gone, authorities said.
On Grand Isle, the barrier island that bore the full force of Ida’s winds, Police Chief Scooter Resweber said he was “amazed that no one was killed or even seriously injured.”
About half of the properties on the island of about 1,400 people were heavily damaged or destroyed, and the main roadway was nearly completely covered in sand brought in from the tidal surge.
“I’ve ridden out other hurricanes: Hurricane Isaac, Katrina, Gustav, Ike. … This is the worst,” Resweber said.
In New Orleans, drivers lined up for roughly a quarter-mile, waiting to get into a Costco that was one of the few spots in the city with gasoline. At other gas stations, motorists occasionally pulled up to the pumps, saw the handles covered in plastic bags and drove off.
Renell Debose spent a week suffering in the New Orleans Superdome after 2005′s Hurricane Katrina, which killed 1,800 people and left the city nearly uninhabitable. She said she is willing to give it a few days without electricity, but no more than that.
“I love my city. I’m built for this. But I can’t make it without any air conditioning,” she said.
Michael Pinkrah used his dwindling fuel to find food. He cradled his 3-week-old son in the back seat of an SUV and his 2-year-old daughter played in the front seat as his wife stood in a long line in the sweltering heat to get into one of the few grocery stores open in the city.
Pinkrah said he and his wife thought about evacuating but couldn’t find a hotel room. They found out about the open store through social media. But even that link was tenuous.
“We can’t charge our electronic devices to keep in contact with people. And without that, all of the communication just fails,” he said.
In hard-hit Houma, the dismal reality of life without air conditioning, refrigeration or other more basic supplies began to sink in.
“Our desperate need right now is tarps, gasoline for generators, food, water,” pastor Chad Ducote said. He said a church group from Mississippi arrived with food and supplies, and neighbors came to his pool to scoop up buckets of water.
“The people down here are just doing what they can. They don’t have anything,” he said.
Adding to the misery was the steamy weather. A heat advisory was issued for New Orleans and the rest of the region, with forecasters saying the combination of high temperatures and humidity could make it feel like 105 degrees Fahrenheit (41 degrees Celsius) on Tuesday and 106 on Wednesday.
Cynthia Andrews couldn’t go back to her New Orleans home if she wanted to. She was in a wheelchair, tethered by a power cord to the generator system running the elevators and hallway lights at the Le Meridien hotel.
When the power went out Sunday, the machine that helps Andrews breathe after a lung collapse in 2018 stopped working. The hotel let her stay in the lobby, giving her a cot after she spent nearly a whole night in her wheelchair.
“It was so scary, but as long as this thing keeps running, I’ll be OK,” she said.
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Deslatte reported from Thibodaux, Louisiana. Associated Press writers Janet McConnaughey, Rebecca Santana and Stacey Plaisance in New Orleans; Jay Reeves in Houma, Louisiana; Alina Hartounian in Scottsdale, Arizona; Travis Loller in Nashville, Tennessee; Sudhin Thanawala in Atlanta; Jeff Martin in Marietta, Georgia; and Jeffrey Collins in Columbia, South Carolina, contributed to this report.
Soon after the last U.S. plane departed Kabul’sHamid Karzai International Airport in the prep-dawn hours of Aug. 31, marking the end of America’s longest war, a Taliban spokesman posted a video message hailing “the result of 20 years of our historic sacrifices.”
“We left a historic chapter behind,”saidMohammed Naeem, according to a translation by CBS News. “The coming chapter is important.”
While U.S. officials broadcast the immediate security threats to efforts to evacuate Americans and Afghan allies in the chaotic final days of the war, they have been tight-lipped about what dangers may lie ahead. President Joe Biden defended his decision to pull U.S. troops from the conflict in a defiant address to the nation on Tuesday, noting that the terrorist threat to the U.S. has“metastasized across the world well beyond Afghanistan.” But theviolent and harrowing withdrawal was a gift to terrorist groups looking to regroup there, experts say.
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The U.S. has left Afghanistan in the hands of the same Taliban militants it overthrew two decades ago, after the group provided safe haven to the al-Qaeda operatives who plotted the 9/11 attacks. Its leaders still maintainclose ties to al-Qaeda, and the nascent government being patched together in Kabul is unlikely to be able to contain the resurgence of competing terrorist groups in the region, including Islamic State in Khorasan Province. The group, known as ISKP or ISIS-K, has claimed responsibility for the Aug. 26 airport bombing that killed 13 U.S. service members and an estimated 170 Afghans.
“The vacuum created by the sudden end of the U.S.-led coalition in Afghanistan is going to be far larger than the Taliban can fill,” says Matthew Levitt, director of counterterrorism and intelligence at The Washington Institute for Near East Policy. While there won’t be many American or foreign targets left in the country, for terrorist groups and foreign fighters “it will be an attractive place to flock to as a safe haven, a place to regroup, a place to plot, a place where they can comfortably exist and make plans for the future.”
The Biden Administration has vowed to keep such threats at bay from “over the horizon,” by monitoring the situation and deploying drones out of U.S. bases in Qatar and other Gulf countries. “We will maintain the fight against terrorism in Afghanistan and other countries,” Biden said on Tuesday. “We just don’t need to fight a ground war to do it. To ISIS-K, we aren’t done with you yet.”
But the dismantling of military infrastructure and withdrawal of all U.S. personnel from the country will make that task more difficult, experts and intelligence officials say, with the U.S. military now largely cut off from the human sources on the ground that it has relied on for twenty years. “We’ve had really good eyes and ears on the ground in Afghanistan,” says Colin Clarke, a counterterrorism analyst with security consulting firm Soufan Group. “And we’re still going to have ears…we’re still going to have [signals intelligence] capabilities, but we won’t have eyes.”
But U.S. defense and intelligence officials warn that won’t be enough to stop Afghanistan from once again becoming a hub for emboldened, more technologically savvy terrorist groups seeking to recruit, train, and plot attacks at home and abroad. “The Administration is right that our capabilities are far superior to what they were 20 years ago,” Clarke says. “But technology has been a force multiplier for jihadi groups too. It’s not like it’s the U.S. in 2021 versus al-Qaeda in 2001.”
The members of al-Qaeda left in Afghanistan, who could number up to 600, according to U.N. Security Councilestimates, are now likely to have an opportunity to regroup and recruit, capitalizing on the perceived victory of jihad against the most powerful military in the world, analysts say. There have already been recent signs that the organization is ramping up its foreign propaganda operations: in June, al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula recently released its first English-language copy of its “Inspire” magazine in over four years. “Foreign terrorist organizations continue efforts to inspire U.S.-based individuals susceptible to violent extremist influences,” Department of Homeland Security officials said in abulletin releasedearlier this month.
“It’s a ‘rising tide lifts all boats’ situation,” says Clarke. “There’s going to be an influx of jihadi, some are going to go to [Al-Qaeda], and some are going to go to ISIS-K.”
This has been further complicated by the Taliban’s release of thousands of prisoners that had been in Afghan government custody, including many senior al-Qaeda operatives and members of ISIS-K, an offshoot of the original Islamic State group in Iraq and Syria. The group, whose leaders weretargetedby the U.S.-led coalition in the final years of the war, has re-emerged and is already using the Aug. 26 airport attack in their propaganda material to raise its profile and boost recruitment, intelligence analysts say. ISIS-K has denounced the takeover of the country by the Taliban, which does not conform with its more hard-line version of Islamic rule.
But defense officials and experts say it’s unlikely the Taliban, distracted by the task of governing an impoverished country of 38 million people, will be able to rein them in. ISIS-K carried out 77 attacks in Afghanistan during the first four months of this year, according to U.N. counterterrorism officials, a significant increasefrom 21in the same period in 2020. The U.N. security council warnedin Juneof the “alarming expansion” of the group in the region and beyond, especially Africa.
“A precipitous withdrawal could lead to a reconstitution of the terrorist threat to the U.S. homeland within eighteen months to three years,” a group of experts on Afghanistan, including retired Gen. Joseph Dunford, who served as the top commander in Afghanistan before he became the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 2015,warned in a reportin February.
Biden and his top national security advisers have insisted that the U.S. will conduct effective counter-terrorism measures against these groups the same way they do in other countries where the U.S. does not have a permanent military presence. But former defense officials and experts warn that the sprawling post-9/11 U.S. security apparatus, built to rely on the collection of intelligence in Afghanistan, will become significantly less effective without reliable human intelligence on the ground, proximity or even an embassy, which for now will be operating out of Doha, Qatar.
“There is an expiration date to many of the collection platforms that we’ve been relying on over the past 20 years,” says Levitt of the Washington Institute, referring to Afghan sources and operatives the U.S. has used. “The likelihood that many of those will be disappeared over the coming weeks and months is unfortunately a very real threat.”
Sequential Brands Group Inc., the parent company of brands including the Jessica Simpson fashion collection and Joe’s Jeans, filed for bankruptcy protection after the apparel industry was upended by changing consumer habits and the coronavirus pandemic.
The owner and licensor of brands such as Gaiam yoga filed its Chapter 11 petition in Wilmington, Delaware with plans to hold an auction as part of a deal with so-called Term B lenders. Sequential listed debts of $435 million and assets of $443 million in court papers. The company said it has arranged a $150 million loan to help fund its reorganization. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]
That loan and the rules for the proposed auction must be approved by the judge overseeing the case.
Sequential shares plunged as much as 62% to $4.59 after the filing, spurring a trading halt.
Retailers across the country have struggled with plunging revenues as Covid-19 precautions led to temporary shutdowns of physical stores and kept consumers at home. J. Crew Group Inc., Neiman Marcus Group LLC and J.C. Penney each filed for bankruptcy earlier in the pandemic.
Many retailers that carry Sequential’s brands were closed for part of last year, denting revenues. In late 2020, the company said it was considering a sale as part of a broad “exploration of strategic alternatives” in an effort to maximize shareholder value. The company unloaded its Heelys sneaker brand in April for $11 million.
In December, the Securities and Exchange Commission charged Sequential with violating antifraud, reporting, books and records and internal controls provisions of federal securities laws related to goodwill accounting in 2016 and 2017.
Among the biggest owners of the company is Martha Stewart Family Limited Partnership with nearly 11%, according to court documents.
The case is Sequential Brands Group, Inc. 21-11194, U.S. Bankruptcy Court, District of Delaware (Wilmington).
America’s longest war may have ended, but the accountability battles for President Joe Biden’s Administration are just beginning.
Questions about the Biden Administration’s chaotic exit from Afghanistan—which resulted in a gruesome terror attack that left 13 U.S. service members dead—are setting up the first big congressional oversight probe of the current White House.
The Biden Administration had been fielding questions from lawmakers on both sides of the aisle about the Afghanistan withdrawal since the August 31 deadline was set back in April. But the requests for documents and testimony ratcheted up after the Taliban took control of Kabul on August 14, and intensified further after the deadly suicide bombing at the Hamid Karzai airport on August 26.
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The push for accountability is coming from both political parties, but differences in approach between Democrats and Republicans are already setting the stage for a pitched partisan battle. For Democrats, the fight will reveal whether their loyalties lie with party or with truth, after they spent four years criticizing Republicans for not conducting rigorous oversight of President Donald Trump. For Republicans, this moment marks an opportunity to attack the Biden Administration after a series of decisions led to a speedy Taliban takeover that put both U.S. citizens and Afghans in danger. The congressional fight will be waged on both substance and process: Democrats control both chambers of Congress, so Republicans don’t have the power to issue subpoenas or call for testimony on their own.
In recent years, congressional oversight typically has involved “the President’s party basically protecting its quarterback and under-investigating its president, and over-investigating the other party,” says Tom Davis, a former Republican lawmaker who chaired the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform during the George W. Bush Administration. “This will be a real test.”
So far, Democrats have indicated they will investigate the Biden Administration. “We clearly want to do oversight,” says one Democratic source familiar with the House Foreign Relations Committee’s oversight strategy. “That alone is a radical departure from what we saw in the previous Administration.”
Rep. Gregory Meeks, a Democrat from New York who chairs the House Foreign Affairs Committee, asked on August 17 for Secretary of Defense Loyd Austin and Secretary of State Antony Blinken to testify about the Administration’s plans to evacuate Americans and Afghans who assisted them, and the counterterrorism plan going forward. Sen. Robert Menendez, a Democrat from New Jersey who chairs the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said in an August 17 statement that he was “disappointed that the Biden Administration clearly did not accurately assess the implications of a rapid U.S. withdrawal” and vowed to hold a hearing on U.S. policy in Afghanistan.
Democratic aides say that while they want to hear from Biden Administration officials, the oversight must also expand to include the United States’actions during the 20-year war.One topic of interest will likely be the peace agreement Trump signed with the Taliban last year to leave Afghanistan by May 2021. Menendez said that his oversight hearing on Afghanistan will focus onthe Trump Administration’s negotiations with Taliban along with the Biden Administration’s execution of the U.S. withdrawal. “It’s impossible to examine the collapse of a 20 year war in Afghanistan through the lens of the last 15 days,” says one senior Democratic aide on the Committee on Oversight and Reform.
Like the Democrats, Republicans are seeking answers about the withdrawal, the speedy collapse of the Afghan government and the future of the counterterrorism mission. But they want the oversight efforts to focus on the withdrawal itself, rather than probing actions over the past 20 years, according to two congressional aides. “We had been hearing on the ground repeatedly concerns that [the collapse of the Afghan government] was indeed going to happen,” says one senior Senate aide. “The fact that the State Department was completely unprepared for all of this highlights the fact that they either weren’t reading the intelligence, or they didn’t want to believe it.”
Republicans already are alleging that Democrats are being too relaxed about oversight of the Biden Administration. The 12 Republicans on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, for instance, sent a letter to Menendez on August 17 asking to call Blinken to testify before the committee, but say they have not heard back. “[Democrats] have said they are supportive of a hearing, but they have not secured a commitment from the administration for the hearing,” says the senior Senate aide. Menendez’s office did not respond to requests for comment.
Discrepancies have also emerged between the two parties over the processing of Special Immigrant Visas for the Afghans who assisted the United States during the war, which promises to be the next front in the oversight fight. Democrats have encouraged the Administration to increase the refugee cap to accommodate these Afghans, or take further action to accelerate resettlement. Some Republicans, on the other hand, are urging intensified vetting to ensure terrorists don’t try and slip into the country. On August 25th, Rep. James Comer of Kentucky, the ranking Republican on the Committee on Oversight and Reform, sent a letter to Blinken requesting a staff-level hearing on the Administration’s vetting efforts. “In the chaotic situation left in the wake of the Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan, we are particularly concerned that terrorists and others who wish to harm the United States may seek to infiltrate the country disguised as those who provided assistance to coalition forces in Afghanistan,” Comer wrote. According to a congressional aide, the State Department has not responded to Comer’s letter, but he did secure a commitment from the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) John F. Sopko to testify before the committee. SIGAR did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Amid all of these requests for answers, the partisan fighting will only intensify. Several congressionalRepublicans have already called for Biden’s impeachment, and others are calling for Blinken’s resignation. But some Republicans worry these calls will distract from the real oversight mission. “Certainly it’s polarizing,” says the senior Senate aide, “at a time when we’re just trying to get simple answers.”
“The baby boomers’ turn is over,” said Marine Lieutenant Colonel Stuart Scheller in a video this past Friday. “I demand accountability, at all levels. If we don’t get it, I’m bringing it.” His post, which quickly went viral, was in response to the previous day’s suicide bombing at Kabul International Airport, which killed 13 U.S. service members and over 150 Afghans. In his nearly five-minute-long post, Scheller laments the Biden Administration’s handling of our withdrawal from Afghanistan and calls out senior military leaders, including Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley, Commandant of the Marine Corps General David Berger, and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. “People are upset because their senior leaders let them down, and none of them are raising their hands and accepting accountability or saying, ‘We messed this up.’” But Scheller’s remarks go one step further than a simple demand for accountability. He goes onto quote Thomas Jefferson who said, “every generation needs a revolution.”
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When I finished watching the video, I wasn’t sure what to make of it. My first instinct was to categorize it as a rant. The Biden Administration has handled the evacuation of Afghanistan with an unprecedented degree of incompetence, so a rant—even if inappropriate when delivered by an active-duty officer—seemed understandable. However, after more thought, I concluded that what I had seen was something else: an act of self-immolation.
Before his swift relief by senior officers on Friday, Scheller held battalion command. The Marine Corps is very selective about which officers it grooms to become battalion commanders; the fact that Scheller held that job means he was—before this past week—well-regarded, a Marine with a future in the Corps. Furthermore, Scheller is seventeen years into a twenty-year career. At twenty years, he would have been eligible for retirement at half his base pay with other benefits, like healthcare for life. It took him exactly four minutes and forty-five seconds to throw that all away. Scheller is a husband and a father. Why did he do this?
Until the past two weeks, Afghanistan was not a place, or an issue, most American cared about. In 2018, 42 percent of the country couldn’t even say whether or not we were still at war there. Over the past two decades, the war in Afghanistan has been waged by an all-volunteer military and funded through deficit spending. Unlike other wars, there has been no draft and no war tax. It’s often been said that while America’s military has spent the past twenty years at war, America itself has been at the mall. This has led to a massive civilian-military divide.
This botched withdrawal, in which many active duty as well as retired members of our military are receiving hundreds of phone calls and texts daily from their Afghan allies and their families who are now left to fend for themselves against the Taliban, has only deepened this sense of alienation among many who’ve served. One only need to look back through history—from Caesar’s Rome to Napoleon’s France—to see clearly that when a republic couples a large standing military with dysfunctional domestic politics, democracy doesn’t last long.
Doug Mills—The New York Times/ReduxPresident Donald Trump, trailed by a group that includes Gen. Mark Milley, walks to St. John’s Church after security forces cleared Lafayette Square near the White House on June 1, 2020.
In the past eighteen months we have witnessed a politicization of the U.S. military with few precedents, from General Mark Milley marching across Lafayette Park in his fatigues with former President Donald Trump, to the Congressional testimony of senior officers—on everything from January 6th to right-wing extremism to critical race theory—becoming fodder for late-night cable news anchors who seek to position those in uniform on one side or another of the Democratic-Republican divide. Our military is, historically and ostensibly, an apolitical organization, but this has never meant military members do not have political views. Of course they do. But the military stays out of politics because it practices a code of omerta. Scheller’s video breaks that code.
The Marine Corps is a small community. As a lieutenant, Scheller served in 1st Battalion, 8th Marine Regiment (or “one eight” as we call it) a year after I did. I received his video from a friend, a lieutenant colonel who also served in 1/8. And one of the two infantry battalions guarding the North Gate at Kabul International Airport was 1/8, too; their current commander was a classmate of mine at Quantico. The all-volunteer military, the men and women who fought the post 9/11 wars, has become increasingly insulated from the broader American culture. The model of the citizen soldier that characterized the American military for generations has been replaced by a professional soldiering class, one that is increasingly closed, insular and subject to living in its own atomized reality—just like the rest of America does. This is dangerous.
It is particularly dangerous when military members feel misunderstood or even betrayed by the society they serve. Does everyone feel like Scheller? No, of course not. But after twenty years of war culminating in the botched evacuation of Kabul, I have heard his sense of betrayal echoed by many others.
So how we think about Scheller’s video matters. It’s important to understand that it was not so much a rant but an act of total self-immolation. And acts of self-immolation, if not heeded, have historically preceded catastrophic breakdowns in society. Remember Mohamed Bouazizi, the Tunisian fruit vendor? Or Thích Quảng Đức, the Vietnamese monk? One resulted in a rallying cry for the Arab Spring, and the other remains the iconic martyr of the Vietnam War. Read about them. You will notice that each burned for approximately four minutes and forty-five seconds.
Whether you know it as vacation season, hurricane season or wildfire season, August is a time when our natural surroundings can take on outsize importance in our daily lives. The same is true of this month’s best new TV shows, each of which conjures a vivid sense of place, from the brick edifices and manicured lawns of East Coast academia to the flat expanses of an Oklahoma reservation to desolate, gray beaches in France’s Nantes region. There are also two very different takes on a city that contains multitudes: New York. For more suggestions, here’s some of my favorite TV from July, June and the first half of 2021.
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The Chair(Netflix)
Netflix’s perceptive black comedy The Chair opens at what should be the proudest moment of Professor Ji-Yoon Kim’s career. She has just been named the first-ever female Chair of the English Department at venerable (and fictional) Pembroke University, where she’s also one of very few nonwhite faculty members. At a dire moment for the humanities, when a STEM major looks to many students like the only viable path to repaying their college loans, her colleagues have entrusted her to revitalize the increasingly underfunded, under-enrolled department.
Unfortunately for Ji-Yoon, played by the great Sandra Oh with her signature mix of intelligence, determination and nervous energy, that vote of confidence turns out to be a curse. [Read TIME’s full review.]
Laëtitia (HBO)
French filmmaker Jean-Xavier de Lestrade set the standard for the prestige true-crime documentary with The Staircase, a vérité-style series that debuted in 2004 and ultimately followed the legal ordeal of Michael Peterson, an American author charged with killing his wife, over the course of almost two decades. In Laëtitia, the director turns his camera on a crime that shook his home country in 2011: the murder of 18-year-old Laëtitia Parrais, who lived with her twin sister Jessica in foster care. As the details of this infuriating real-life tragedy reveal themselves, De Lestrade’s decision to dramatize rather than document the story starts to look not just inspired, but also sensitive to all that these young women endured.
The six-episode drama opens with a chilling discovery. Up early one morning, Jessica (Marie Colomb, in a superb, emotional performance) finds her sister’s scooter and shoe dumped in front of their foster parents’ home. Laëtitia (Raw star Sophie Breyer) is nowhere to be found. It would be the perfect setup for a whodunit, but De Lestrade and co-writer Antoine Lacomblez aren’t interested in squeezing suspense out of real people’s pain; the French public already knows how Parrais’ story ends anyway. Instead, by interweaving flashbacks to Laëtitia’s trajectory on the day she disappeared and the girls’ harrowing childhood—from a father jailed for raping their mother to their placement with the strict Patron family as preteens—into its account of the police investigation, the series captures how two vulnerable young women were failed over and over again by institutions that were supposedly designed to protect them. Particularly given the shared foster-care component, Laëtitia makes for compelling companion viewing to Netflix’s 2019 true-crime drama Unbelievable. But this is, in many senses, an even darker tale, one that suggests we’ll keep hearing stories like Parrais’ for as long as patriarchy persists.
NYC Epicenters 9/11➔2021½ (HBO)
Spike Lee‘s latest docuseries, an eight-hour dive into New York in the 21st century, has been in the news for the past few weeks following an announcement that the director was re-editing a final episode that reportedly gave credence to debunked 9/11 conspiracy theories. Yikes. Lee has since deleted the controversial section, and a significantly shorter version of the episode will air on Sept. 11. Especially for those who can’t stomach the patriotic pomp of most remembrances, it’s a moving tribute to those whose stories went untold, from families who lost loved ones to sanitation and construction who did the hard, humble work of excavating remains from Ground Zero while cops and firefighters were celebrated as superheroes.
If you can forgive Lee’s abiding contrarian streak, there’s a lot to love about the rest of his rambling ode to his city as well. New Yorkers of all stripes—politicians, celebs, activists, essential workers, first responders—sit for playful yet substantive interviews, creating a collage of Gotham-centric humanity. Lee’s combination of righteous inquisitiveness, gallows humor, authentic love for the city and eye for novel ways into events that have been dissected to death make him the perfect interlocutor for this particular story. While the second episode is loose to the point of unraveling, the filmmaker is at his best in a premiere focused on COVID-19 and BLM, and the third episode, which chronicles the rise and fall of the Twin Towers.
Only Murders in the Building (Hulu)
A mild, witty, middlebrow comedy that doesn’t try too hard to be virtuous or controversial or timely, Only Murders in the Building arrives in time to soothe our Delta-era, back-to-school-and-work anxieties. Created by Steve Martin and John Hoffman (Grace and Frankie), it casts Martin, his frequent collaborator Martin Short and a sparkling Selena Gomez as strangers living in a Dakota-like Upper West Side luxury building who become amateur sleuths when one of their neighbors is found dead in his apartment. It won’t expand your mind or change your life, but it might temporarily lower your blood pressure a few points. [Read the full review.]
Reservation Dogs (FX)
Depictions of Indigenous communities in American pop culture have, historically, often added insult to grievous injury. So it’s encouraging to see two TV series—Peacock’s Rutherford Falls and now Reservation Dogs, from FX on Hulu—co-created by, starring and centered on Indigenous Americans premiere within months of each other. Even better: Dogs is one of the year’s best new comedies. Helmed by filmmakers Sterlin Harjo and Taika Waititi, it follows a coed crew of teens on an Oklahoma reservation. Still mourning a friend who died a year earlier, the ad-hoc gang is saving to finance a move to California through various extralegal schemes whose immediate effect is to bring them into unwitting conflict with other local posses. Fans of Atlanta, On My Block or any series that mix absurd humor with gritty realism are sure to adore this smart, funny and groundbreaking show.
There must be few opinions more widely held, when it comes to the art of time management, than that procrastination is always and exclusively a bad thing. Naturally, history’s annoyingly over-productive types—the Benjamin Franklins of the world—have always disdained the tendency to procrastinate. But then so have most procrastinators themselves. The inner struggle to eradicate the trait has driven many a celebrated genius to desperate measures, as when Victor Hugo had his clothes locked away, so that he couldn’t wander the streets of Paris, and instead was obliged to keep writing The Hunchback of Notre Dame in a state of near-nudity.
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But there’s another way to think about procrastination—one that’s arguably more relevant than ever today when it comes to the challenge of managing our daily time. We live in a world of “infinite inputs”: there’s no meaningful limit to the number of emails you could receive or demands your boss could make; nor, for that matter, to the number of creative projects, business ventures or exotic vacations you might wish to pursue. And in this situation there’s a sense in which procrastination isn’t so much a bad thing as an unavoidable one. At any given moment, you’ll be procrastinating on almost everything; and by the end of your life, you’ll have gotten around to doing only a fraction of the things you hypothetically could have done.
So the goal, in the words of the contemporary American spiritual author Gregg Krech, isn’t to eradicate procrastination, but to become a better procrastinator, making the best choices about what projects and tasks to allow to languish, so as to free up time, energy and attention for what matters the most.
Traditional time management has long held out the implicit promise of “getting on top of everything”, of becoming the master of one’s time. The yearning for this feeling of control over the unfolding hours and days is an old one: back in 1908, in a short book entitled How to Live on 24 Hours a Day, the English journalist and novelist Arnold Bennett offered scheduling tips to “that innumerable band of souls who are haunted, more or less painfully, by the feeling that the years slip by, and slip by, and slip by, and they have not yet been able to get their lives into proper working order.”
Back then, it was still possible to believe that with the right methods and enough self-discipline, getting on top of it all might be feasible. But no more. The pace of technological change, and ratcheting economic competition, mean it’s worth our asking if it might be time to give up the fight—to wave goodbye to the prospect of ever mastering our time, precisely so that we can focus on actually getting down to work on a handful of things that really count.
One problem is that the technologies we use to try to make our lives more efficient or fulfilling systematically fail us, because they increase the size of the “everything” on which we’re trying to get on top. For example, Facebook is a great way of finding out about events you might like to attend—but it also inevitably means finding out about more interesting events than anyone ever possibly could attend, leading to the modern curse of FOMO (the fear of missing out) which diminishes the pleasure of attending any one event thanks to the vague worry that you might have been happier doing something else. Similarly, email is a pretty good tool for handling a large volume of messages – but then again, if it weren’t for email, you wouldn’t be receiving such a large volume of messages in the first place.
“Becoming a better procrastinator” needn’t mean eschewing such tools entirely. But it does mean dropping the inner quest to do it all, in favor of making better and more conscious choices about what to pursue or pass up.
One way to do this, as the creativity coach Jessica Abel explains, is to “pay yourself first” when it comes to time. It’s an old piece of wisdom, originating in personal finance: far better to put some money aside into savings as soon as you’re paid, rather than hoping there’ll be some left over once you’ve handled the costs of living. Likewise, if you try to find time for your most valuable activities by first dealing with all the other important-seeming demands you face—the emails and unpaid bills, the dishwasher that needs emptying—in the hope that there’ll be time left over at the end, you’re likely to be disappointed. So if a certain project really matters to you, the only way to be sure it will happen is to do some of it now, first, today, no matter how little, and no matter how many other things may be making entirely legitimate claims in your attention.
This is the same insight embodied in two venerable pieces of advice: to work on your most important project for the first hour of each day; and to protect your time by scheduling “meetings” with yourself, marking them in your calendar so that other commitments can’t intrude. Thinking in terms of “paying yourself first” transforms these one-off tips into a philosophy of life, at the core of which lies a simple insight: that if you plan to spend some of your approximately four thousand weeks on the planet doing what matters most to you, then at some point you’ve just got to start doing it.
In the end, though, learning to procrastinate better is less a matter of tips or techniques than a shift of perspective. It means coming to appreciate that not doing almost everything is an inevitability, and that the uncomfortable emotions triggered by such thoughts are just a matter of confronting what it means to be human. Because our time on earth is so limited, it’s absurd to try to spend it doing everything you’d dreamed of, or all you feel obliged to do. Just make it your goal to get better at deciding what to neglect.
Adapted from Oliver Burkeman’s new book Four Thousand Weeks, published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux
(NEW ORLEANS) — Rescuers in boats, helicopters and high-water trucks brought hundreds of people trapped by Hurricane Ida’s floodwaters to safety Monday and utility repair crews rushed in, after the furious storm swamped the Louisiana coast and ravaged the electrical grid in the stifling, late-summer heat.
Residents living amid the maze of rivers and bayous along the state’s Gulf Coast retreated desperately to their attics or roofs and posted their addresses on social media with instructions for search-and-rescue teams on where to find them.
More than 1 million homes and businesses in Louisiana and Mississippi — including all of New Orleans — were left without power as Ida, one of the most powerful hurricanes ever to hit the U.S. mainland, pushed through on Sunday.
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President Joe Biden met virtually on Monday with Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards and Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves along with mayors from cities and parishes most impacted by Hurricane Ida to receive an update on the storm’s impacts, and to discuss how the Federal Government can provide assistance.
Steve Helber–APFlooded streets and homes are shown in the Spring Meadow subdivision in LaPlace, La., after Hurricane Ida moved through Monday, Aug. 30, 2021. Hard-hit LaPlace is squeezed between the Mississippi River and Lake Pontchartrain.
“We are closely coordinating with State and local officials every step of the way,” Biden said.
The administration said more than 3,600 FEMA employees are deployed to Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas. FEMA staged more than 3.4 million meals, millions of liters of water, more than 35,700 tarps, and roughly 200 generators in the region in advance of the storm.
As the storm was downgraded to a tropical depression Monday afternoon and continued to make its way inland with torrential rain, it was blamed for at least two deaths — a motorist who drowned in New Orleans and a person hit by a falling tree outside Baton Rouge.
But with many roads impassable and cellphone service out in places, the full extent of its fury was still coming into focus. Christina Stephens, a spokesperson for Gov. John Bel Edwards, said that given the level of destruction, “We’re going to have many more confirmed fatalities.”
The governor’s office said damage to the power grid appeared “catastrophic” — dispiriting news for those without refrigeration or air conditioning during the dog days of summer, with highs forecast in the mid-80s to near 90 by midweek.
“There are certainly more questions than answers. I can’t tell you when the power is going to be restored. I can’t tell you when all the debris is going to be cleaned up and repairs made,” Edwards told a news conference. “But what I can tell you is we are going to work hard every day to deliver as much assistance as we can.”
Local, state and federal rescuers combined to save at least 671 people by Monday afternoon, Edwards said.
In hard-hit LaPlace, squeezed between the Mississippi River and Lake Pontchartrain, rescuers saved people from flooded homes in a near-constant operation.
Debbie Greco, her husband and son rode out the storm in LaPlace with Greco’s parents. Water reached a foot up the first-floor windows, then filled the first floor to 4 feet (1.2 meters) deep once the back door was opened. They retreated to the second floor, but then screaming winds collapsed the roof as waves broke in the front yard.
They were finally rescued by boat after waiting in the only dry spot, five people sharing the landing on the stairs.
“When I rebuild this I’m out of here. I’m done with Louisiana,” said Greco’s father, 85-year-old Fred Carmouche, a lifelong resident.
Elsewhere in LaPlace, people pulled pieces of chimneys, gutters and other parts of their homes to the curb and residents of a mobile home park waded through floodwaters.
The hurricane blew ashore on the 16th anniversary of Katrina, the 2005 storm that breached New Orleans’ levees, devastated the city and was blamed for 1,800 deaths.
This time, New Orleans appeared to escape the catastrophic flooding city officials had feared.
Stephanie Blaise returned to her home with her father in New Orleans’ Lower Ninth Ward after evacuating. The neighborhood suffered devastating flooding in Katrina, but only lost some shingles in Ida. However, with no idea when electricity would be restored, Blaise didn’t plan to stay long.
“We don’t need to go through that. I’m going to have to convince him to leave. We got to go somewhere. Can’t stay in this heat,” she said.
The city urged people who evacuated to stay away for at least a couple of days because of the lack of power and fuel. “There’s not a lot of reasons to come back,” said Collin Arnold, chief of emergency preparedness.
Also, 18 water systems serving about 255,000 customers in Louisiana were knocked out of service, the state Health Department said.
Four Louisiana hospitals were damaged and 39 medical facilities were operating on generator power, the Federal Emergency Management Agency said. Officials said they were evacuating scores of patients to other cities.
The governor’s office said over 2,200 evacuees were staying in 41 shelters, a number expected to rise as people were rescued or escaped flooded homes. The governor’s spokesperson said the state will work to move people to hotels as soon as possible so they can keep their distance from one another.
“This is a COVID nightmare,” Stephens said, adding: “We do anticipate that we could see some COVID spikes related to this.”
Preliminary measurements showed Slidell, Louisiana, got at least 15.7 inches of rain, while New Orleans received nearly 14 inches, forecasters said. Other parts of Louisiana and Mississippi, Alabama and Florida got 5 to 11 inches.
The Louisiana National Guard said it activated 4,900 Guard personnel and lined up 195 high-water vehicles, 73 rescue boats and 34 helicopters. Local and state agencies were adding hundreds more. Edwards said he decided not to tour hurricane damage by air Monday to add one more aircraft to the effort.
On Grand Isle, the 40 people who stayed on the barrier island through the brunt of the hurricane gave aircraft checking on them Monday a thumbs-up, Jefferson Parish Sheriff Joe Lopinto said.
The road to the island remained impassable and rescuers would try to reach them as soon as they are able, the sheriff said.
The hurricane twisted and collapsed a giant tower that carries key transmission lines over the Mississippi River to the New Orleans area, causing widespread outages, Entergy and local authorities said. The power company said more than 2,000 miles of transmission lines were out of service, along with 216 substations. The tower had survived Katrina.
The storm also flattened utility poles, toppled trees onto power lines and caused transformers to explode.
The governor said 25,000 utility workers were in the state to help restore electricity, with more on the way. “We’re going to push Entergy to restore power just as soon as they can,” Edwards said.
AT&T said its wireless network in Louisiana was reduced to 60% of normal but was coming back. Many people resorted to using walkie-talkies. The governor’s office staff had no working phones. The company sent a mobile tower to the state’s emergency preparedness office so it could get some service.
Charchar Chaffold left her home near LaPlace for Alabama after a tree fell on it Sunday. She frantically tried to get in touch via text message with five family members who stayed behind.
She last heard from them Sunday night. They were in the attic after water rushed into their home. “They told me they thought they was going to die. I told them they are not and called for help,” she said.
Ida’s 150 mph (230 kph) winds tied it for the fifth-strongest hurricane ever to hit the mainland. Its winds were down to 40 mph (64 kph) around midday Monday.
In Mississippi’s southwestern corner, entire neighborhoods were surrounded by floodwaters, and many roads were impassable. Several tornadoes were reported, including a suspected twister in Saraland, Alabama, that ripped part of the roof off a motel and flipped an 18-wheeler, injuring the driver, according to the National Weather Service.
Ida was expected to pick up speed Monday night before dumping rain on the Tennessee and Ohio River valleys Tuesday, the Appalachian mountain region Wednesday and the nation’s capital on Thursday.
Forecasters said flash flooding and mudslides were possible along Ida’s path before it blows out to sea over New England on Friday.
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Reeves reported from LaPlace, Louisiana. Associated Press writers Janet McConnaughey and Kevin McGill in New Orleans; Melinda Deslatte in Baton Rouge; Michael Biesecker in Washington; Sudhin Thanawala in Atlanta; and Jeffrey Collins in Columbia, South Carolina, contributed to this report.
(WASHINGTON) — The United States completed its withdrawal from Afghanistan late Monday, ending America’s longest war and closing a chapter in military history likely to be remembered for colossal failures, unfulfilled promises and a frantic final exit that cost the lives of more than 180 Afghans and 13 U.S. service members, some barely older than the war.
Hours ahead of President Joe Biden’s Tuesday deadline for shutting down a final airlift, and thus ending the U.S. war, Air Force transport planes carried a remaining contingent of troops from Kabul airport. Thousands of troops had spent a harrowing two weeks protecting the airlift of tens of thousands of Afghans, Americans and others seeking to escape a country once again ruled by Taliban militants.
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In announcing the completion of the evacuation and war effort. Gen. Frank McKenzie, head of U.S. Central Command, said the last planes took off from Kabul airport at 3:29 p.m. Washington time, or one minute before midnight in Kabul. He said a number of American citizens, likely numbering in “the very low hundreds,” were left behind, and that he believes they will still be able to leave the country.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken put the number of Americans left behind at under 200, “likely closer to 100,” and said the State Department would keep working to get them out. He praised the military-led evacuation as heroic and historic and said the U.S. diplomatic presence would shift to Doha, Qatar.
Biden said military commanders unanimously favored ending the airlift, not extending it. He said he asked Blinken to coordinate with international partners in holding the Taliban to their promise of safe passage for Americans and others who want to leave in the days ahead.
The airport had become a U.S.-controlled island, a last stand in a 20-year war that claimed more than 2,400 American lives.
The closing hours of the evacuation were marked by extraordinary drama. American troops faced the daunting task of getting final evacuees onto planes while also getting themselves and some of their equipment out, even as they monitored repeated threats — and at least two actual attacks — by the Islamic State group’s Afghanistan affiliate. A suicide bombing on Aug. 26 killed 13 American service members and some 169 Afghans.
The final pullout fulfilled Biden’s pledge to end what he called a “forever war” that began in response to the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, that killed nearly 3,000 people in New York, Washington and rural Pennsylvania. His decision, announced in April, reflected a national weariness of the Afghanistan conflict. Now he faces criticism at home and abroad, not so much for ending the war as for his handling of a final evacuation that unfolded in chaos and raised doubts about U.S. credibility.
The U.S. war effort at times seemed to grind on with no endgame in mind, little hope for victory and minimal care by Congress for the way tens of billions of dollars were spent for two decades. The human cost piled up — tens of thousands of Americans injured in addition to the dead.
More than 1,100 troops from coalition countries and more than 100,000 Afghan forces and civilians died, according to Brown University’s Costs of War project.
In Biden’s view the war could have ended 10 years ago with the U.S. killing of Osama bin Laden, whose al-Qaida extremist network planned and executed the 9/11 plot from an Afghanistan sanctuary. Al-Qaida has been vastly diminished, preventing it thus far from again attacking the United States.
Congressional committees, whose interest in the war waned over the years, are expected to hold public hearings on what went wrong in the final months of the U.S. withdrawal. Why, for example, did the administration not begin earlier the evacuation of American citizens as well as Afghans who had helped the U.S. war effort and felt vulnerable to retribution by the Taliban?
It was not supposed to end this way. The administration’s plan, after declaring its intention to withdraw all combat troops, was to keep the U.S. Embassy in Kabul open, protected by a force of about 650 U.S. troops, including a contingent that would secure the airport along with partner countries. Washington planned to give the now-defunct Afghan government billions more to prop up its army.
Biden now faces doubts about his plan to prevent al-Qaida from regenerating in Afghanistan and of suppressing threats posed by other extremist groups such as the Islamic State group’s Afghanistan affiliate. The Taliban are enemies of the Islamic State group but retain links to a diminished al-Qaida.
The final U.S. exit included the withdrawal of its diplomats, although the State Department has left open the possibility of resuming some level of diplomacy with the Taliban depending on how they conduct themselves in establishing a government and adhering to international pleas for the protection of human rights.
The speed with which the Taliban captured Kabul on Aug. 15 caught the Biden administration by surprise. It forced the U.S. to empty its embassy and frantically accelerate an evacuation effort that featured an extraordinary airlift executed mainly by the U.S. Air Force, with American ground forces protecting the airfield. The airlift began in such chaos that a number of Afghans died on the airfield, including at least one who attempted to cling to the airframe of a C-17 transport plane as it sped down the runway.
Speaking shortly after that attack, Biden stuck to his view that ending the war was the right move. He said it was past time for the United States to focus on threats emanating from elsewhere in the world.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, “it was time to end a 20-year war.”
The war’s start was an echo of a promise President George W. Bush made while standing atop of the rubble in New York City three days after hijacked airliners slammed into the twin towers of the World Trade Center.
“The people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon!” he declared through a bullhorn.
Less than a month later, on Oct. 7, Bush launched the war. The Taliban’s forces were overwhelmed and Kabul fell in a matter of weeks. A U.S.-installed government led by Hamid Karzai took over and bin Laden and his al-Qaida cohort escaped across the border into Pakistan.
The initial plan was to extinguish bin Laden’s al-Qaida, which had used Afghanistan as a staging base for its attack on the United States. The grander ambition was to fight a “Global War on Terrorism” based on the belief that military force could somehow defeat Islamic extremism. Afghanistan was but the first round of that fight. Bush chose to make Iraq the next, invading in 2003 and getting mired in an even deadlier conflict that made Afghanistan a secondary priority until Barack Obama assumed the White House in 2009 and later that year decided to escalate in Afghanistan.
Obama pushed U.S. troop levels to 100,000, but the war dragged on though bin Laden was killed in Pakistan in 2011.
When Donald Trump entered the White House in 2017 he wanted to withdraw from Afghanistan but was persuaded not only to stay but to add several thousand U.S. troops and escalate attacks on the Taliban. Two years later his administration was looking for a deal with the Taliban, and in February 2020 the two sides signed an agreement that called for a complete U.S. withdrawal by May 2021. In exchange, the Taliban made a number of promises including a pledge not to attack U.S. troops.
Biden weighed advice from members of his national security team who argued for retaining the 2,500 troops who were in Afghanistan by the time he took office in January. But in mid-April he announced his decision to fully withdraw.
The Taliban pushed an offensive that by early August toppled key cities, including provincial capitals. The Afghan army largely collapsed, sometimes surrendering rather than taking a final stand, and shortly after President Ashraf Ghani fled the capital, the Taliban rolled into Kabul and assumed control on Aug. 15.
Some parts of the country modernized during the U.S. war years, and life for many Afghans, especially women and girls, improved measurably. But Afghanistan remains a tragedy, poor, unstable and with many of its people fearing a return to the brutality the country endured when the Taliban ruled from 1996 to 2001.
The U.S. failures were numerous. It degraded but never defeated the Taliban and ultimately failed to build an Afghan military that could hold off the insurgents, despite $83 billion in U.S. spending to train and equip the army.
