Betraying our Afghan friends?

The Washington Post:

How the U.S. treats Afghans who helped us

by Annie Yu Kleiman

My 9-year-old daughter still remembers August 2021 as a “horrible time.”

After the fall of Kabul that month, my husband and I, both Air Force officers who had served in Afghanistan, found ourselves pulled into a complex, unofficial operation to help evacuate U.S. citizens and Afghan allies. 

There were endless sleepless nights spent frantically sending messages over Signal and compiling enormous spreadsheets of passenger manifests. We worked as if it were a matter of life and death — because it was.

Two years later, those long days are a memory for me. But for the hundreds of thousands of our allies still left behind, the horrors continue.

As of April 2023, about 152,000 Special Immigrant Visa (SIV) applicants remain trapped in Afghanistan. These people, who served side-by-side with U.S. forces during the long war, face years of danger, severe economic hardship and increasingly onerous restrictions — particularly on women and girls — while applying for their SIVs through a complicated, Kafkaesque process.

A daunting list of obstacles

To create a snapshot of the absurd gantlet our former friends and allies have to run, I gathered quotations from text messages and emails that they sent to my organization, No One Left Behind, seeking help. They have been edited for clarity, and names are being withheld for the writers’ safety.

Proof of employment. To start an SIV application, applicants must submit a slew of documents through the U.S. State Department’s website. 

This requires access to the internet — not a given when one is hiding from the Taliban. The required documents include proof of employment for the U.S. government for at least one year and a letter of recommendation from a former supervisor. 

But the companies often kept poor HR records, and former supervisors are difficult to reach — and may not even remember their former employees....

As the Earth burns...

Canada burns

The Idaho Statesman:

A sizzling month marked by record heat waves, major wildfires, melting sea ice and a burgeoning El Niño will go down in the books as the hottest July on record — at least until next year, federal officials said Monday.

The planet and its oceans roasted last month as global average temperatures soared 2.02 degrees above average, making July 2023 not only the hottest July ever, but very likely Earth's warmest month in at least 174 years of record keeping.

"Climatologically, July is the warmest month of the year," the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said in a monthly report released Monday. "As the warmest July on record, July 2023 was the warmest month on record for the globe."

Temperature data through July make it virtually certain that 2023 will rank among the five warmest years on record, with a nearly 50% probability that it will be the single warmest year on record, the agency said.

The announcement came as little surprise to millions of Americans who suffered through extreme heat conditions firsthand. 

The stubborn presence of a high-pressure heat dome over the American Southwest pushed temperatures in Phoenix to 110 degrees or hotter for a record 31 days straight.

More than 40 deaths were recorded in the county with hundreds more under investigation, and scores of people were hospitalized for heat-related illnesses and pavement burns....

Repugs and climate change:

....After a decade of disputing the existence of climate change, many leading Republicans are shifting their posture amid deadly heat waves, devastating drought and ferocious wildfires that have bludgeoned their districts and unnerved their constituents back home.

Members of Congress who long insisted that the climate is changing due to natural cycles have notably adjusted that view, with many now acknowledging the solid science that emissions from burning oil, gas and coal have raised Earth’s temperature.

But their growing acceptance of the reality of climate change has not translated into support for the one strategy that scientists said in a major United Nations report this week is imperative to avert an even more harrowing future: stop burning fossil fuels.

Instead, Republicans want to spend billions to prepare communities to cope with extreme weather, but are trying to block efforts by Democrats to cut the emissions that are fueling the disasters in the first place....