Category Archives: Jail & Incarceration

2800 Kids Separated from Families At Border Are Reunited

 

[NOTE: Good Work, but a thousand kids still not reunited with family is a thousand too many.]

WASHINGTON (AP) — A Biden administration task force designed to reunite children separated from their families during President Trumps presidency has reconnected nearly 700 children with their families, officials said Thursday.

President Joe Biden issued an executive order on his first day in office to reunite families that were split up under the Trump administration’s widely condemned practice of forcibly separating parents and children at the U.S.Mexico border to discourage illegal immigration. Thursday marked the twoyear anniversary of the task force.
Continue reading 2800 Kids Separated from Families At Border Are Reunited

Danger! Buying Abortion Pills Online Is NOT Yet Secure or Safe!

ProPublica: Danger! Websites Selling Abortion Pills Are Sharing Sensitive Data With Google — Which Can Share It With Anti-Abortion Prosecutors

ProPublica — January 18, 2023

Online pharmacies that sell abortion pills are sharing sensitive data with Google and other third parties, which may allow law enforcement to prosecute those who use the medications to end their pregnancies, a ProPublica analysis has found.

Continue reading Danger! Buying Abortion Pills Online Is NOT Yet Secure or Safe!

Fani Willis vs Trump: Will the “Pit Bull” take on the “Big Dog”?

[NOTE: Quakers aren’t supposed to gamble. But if I was going to break the rule, I’d lay money on the proposition that among all the various agencies and investigators digging into Donald Trump’s efforts to overthrow the 2020 election, the first actual indictments will come from Atlanta and DA Fani Willis.

Why? The answers are in a long, riveting profile in today’s Washington Post,
 excerpted below.

And as long as I was, in vintage Quaker argot “walking disorderly,” I’d place another bet that Trump himself has read this 
profile (or had it read to him), and that the experience has already ruined his whole day. Maybe the entire week. 
Continue reading Fani Willis vs Trump: Will the “Pit Bull” take on the “Big Dog”?

LGBTQ persons live in fear and often at great risk in many Muslim societies

[NOTE: A few safe places, amid many areas of official persecution and grave risk; that’s the sum of this sketch of legal, social and religious issues facing LGBTQ persons in most Muslim societies. This Associated Press report is unsettling and may for some be traumatic; readers are advised.]

AP News: Across vast Muslim world, LGBTQ people remain marginalized
Dec. 6, 2022

By DAVID CRARY, MARIAM FAM and EDNA TARIGAN
The Associated Press

YOGYAKARTA, Indonesia (AP) — On the outskirts of Yogyakarta, an Indonesian city that’s home to many universities, is a small boarding school with a mission that seems out of place in a nation with more Muslim citizens than any other. Its students are transgender women. Continue reading LGBTQ persons live in fear and often at great risk in many Muslim societies

Renegade Quaker Theology: My Breaking Point – Summer 2011

 September 7, 2011: Cheering for God in the Reagan Library

In my last paid job, at a Quaker peace project next to an enormous military base during the height (or better, the depths) of the Iraq-Afghan wars, I spent a lot of time looking for spiritual resources for that work, and the life that went with the job. For a long time it seemed pretty hard to find any. I read a lot of academic theology and other “spiritual” works. With a few notable exceptions (to be dealt with in future posts), for a long time it seemed pretty hard to find more than an occasional nugget; too much was weak tea or thin gruel.

But then, in early September 2011, after watching a televised Republican presidential candidates’ debate, hosted by the Ronald Reagan Library in California, I abruptly realized that in fact I had found some, and they had crystallized into convictions.

Continue reading Renegade Quaker Theology: My Breaking Point – Summer 2011