Pope urges brothers working with youth to bring them hope Catholic Review of Baltimore
Day: April 22, 2024
Categories
Dignitas Infinita! – Where Peter Is
NEW YORK (NewsNation) — Former President Donald Trump‘s New York hush money trial is set to begin Monday with opening statements.
This comes after New York Judge Juan Merchan rejected Trump’s legal team’s last-ditch effort to delay the trial after claiming the jury selection process was unfairly rushed last week. The jury consists of seven men and five women with six alternates.
Trump trial opening statements
Lawyers from both sides will make their opening statements before prosecutors make their case against the former president. Prosecutors will need to convince the jury that the former president falsified business records with the intent to defraud and to commit or further another crime to prove he is guilty.
Trump faces 34 counts of falsifying business records related to a hush money payment his ex-fixer, Michael Cohen, made to adult film actress Stormy Daniels to cover up an alleged affair with Trump ahead of the 2016 election.
However, Trump has maintained his innocence and pleaded not guilty to all charges against him. He has since claimed the case against him is election interference.
The jury selection process took four days as lawyers for Trump, the prosecutors and Merchan narrowed down the prospective juror pool.
What to expect during Trump trial
The court will adjourn at 2 p.m. Monday and Tuesday due to Passover this week. The court will still meet for its four regularly scheduled trial dates this week on Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday.
Trump will also be battling a potential gag order related to the trial in court, calling it unfair.
It’s unclear who the prosecution plans to call first to testify. Prosecutors would only agree to reveal the names Monday over concerns Trump would attack the witnesses on social media.
Among those expected to testify during the trial is convicted felon Michael Cohen, Trump’s former personal attorney and so-called fixer; Stormy Daniels, Trump’s alleged mistress; and former National Inquirer publisher David Pecker, who allegedly helped orchestrate payments to Daniels.
Pecker has reportedly been granted immunity in exchange for his testimony for the prosecution.
Trump said he would testify if asked to do so.
The trial is expected to last anywhere from six to eight weeks.
The Hill contributed to this report.
Categories
VOA Newscasts
Nearly 60,000 residents in China’s Guangdong province have been evacuated from their homes after extreme weather caused floods to sweep through a number of cities in the low-lying Pearl River Delta.
On Monday, rescuers used boats to reach trapped residents, including the elderly, in China’s most populous province, a manufacturing hub home to 127 million people. Since Thursday, Guangdong has been hit with heavy, persistent rainfall and storms, giving way to floods earlier than the expected summer flooding season.
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Several major rivers have burst their banks, while waterways and reservoirs are overflowing. Authorities have said water levels are “dangerously high.” They also issued a warning on Monday morning that water levels in Guangdong could hit a “once in 100 years” high.
Among the cities most affected are the provincial capital Guangzhou, as well as Shaoguan and Heyuan. A 12-hour downpour on Saturday also hit the northern cities of Zhaoqing, Jiangmen, and Qingyuan. The damage to homes across the province has resulted in an estimated economic loss of around $19.4 million so far, Reuters reported.
At least three people have died as a result of the natural disaster, while 11 people are missing, BBC reported citing state media. Across the region, over 1 million households lost electricity over the weekend but 80% of households had their power restored by Sunday, according to the news outlet.
Guangdong officials have encouraged all localities to engage in emergency planning and allocate relief funds and resources to those who will need housing, water, and food. While rains eased on Monday, China’s meteorological experts anticipate that Guangdong’s heavy rains will continue until at least Tuesday. It is also expected to continue in coastal areas of neighboring Fujian, with “moderate to heavy” rains in other parts of the country, including Beijing, Tianjin, and Heibei.
In June 2022, Guangdong experienced its heaviest rainfall in six decades, giving rise to floods and landslides that affected almost half a million people.
“We’re worried the floods could be worse than two years ago,” Song Xiaowei, a factory worker in Qingyuan, a small city north of Guangzhou, told Reuters. “I’ve friends in Jintan town who have already removed their furniture. The village opposite that has been submerged to the first floor.”
Categories
The Parents Who Regret Having Children
No one regrets having a child, or so it’s said. I’ve heard this logic often, usually after I’m asked if I have children, then, when I say I don’t, if I plan to. I tend to evade the question, as I find that the truth—I have no plans to be a parent—is likely to invite swift dissent. I’ll be told I’ll change my mind, that I’m wrong, and that while I’ll regret not having a child, people don’t regret the obverse. Close family, acquaintances, and total strangers have said this for years; I let it slide, knowing that, at the very least, the last part is a fiction.
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It is, unsurprisingly, a challenge to get solid data on the number of parents who regret having children. In 1975, the popular advice columnist Ann Landers asked her readers if, given the chance to do it all over again, they’d have children. Seventy percent said they wouldn’t; this result, though, came from a group of self-selecting respondents. “The hurt, angry and disenchanted” are more inclined to write back than contented people, as Landers observed in a follow-up 1976 column. But in 2013, a Gallup poll asked Americans 45 and older how many kids they’d have if they could go back in time. Seven percent of the respondents with children said zero. And in 2023, a study estimated that up to 5% to 14% of parents in so-called developed countries, including the United States, regret their decision to have children.
These studies align with what I’ve found in my personal life: While most parents don’t regret having kids, some do. Perhaps in part because I’ve written publicly about choosing not to have children, I’ve had people, especially mothers, confide in me about parental regret, and frequently enough I’ve lost count.
Read More: Why So Many Women Are Waiting Longer to Have Kids
Most of the time—whether I hear it in passing, quickly, from a stranger at a literary event, or late at night from a beloved friend—this kind of revelation arises from a place of anguish. Some of these parents talk about feeling utterly alone, like villains past all imagining. Several have noted that, afraid of being judged, they decline to be candid with their own therapists. If asked what I think, I reply that, from what I’m hearing, they’re not alone. Not at all. I hope it helps; I’m told, at times, it does. It’s a physic to which I’ve devoted my life: asked why I write, I often respond that books, words have provided vital fellowship during spells of harsh isolation, when I thought that solitude and its attendant, life-torquing evils—shame, guilt, the pain of exile—might kill me.
Meanwhile, I’m so often advised that I’ll be a parent that, though I’m sure I won’t, I still prod at this ghost self, trying on its shape, asking what I’d do if I felt obliged to adopt this spectral, alternate life as mine. For here’s the next question people tend to broach if I indicate I don’t plan on having kids: what does my husband think? I find this odd, a little prying—do people think I didn’t discuss this topic with him, at length, long before we pledged to share a life?—but the question also rings the alarm bell of one of my own great fears. If I respond with the truth, that he feels exactly as I do, here’s the usual follow-up: but what if he changes his mind?
Read More: Why I Have Zero Regrets About My Childless Life
I have friends who long for kids, and I know the need to be potent, inarguable, as primal as my desire to go without. I’ve seen parent friends’ faces open with love as they watch their small children sing to living-room karaoke, the adults radiating joy as laughing tots carol and bop. Should my husband’s mind change, I can picture the rift that would open wide, dividing us. Either I’d deprive him of what he needs, or I’d give in, birthing a child I don’t want. Or, and this prospect is painful enough that it hurts to type the words, our lives would have to diverge. No bridge of compromise can quite traverse the rift: as King Solomon knew, there are no half-children.
This fear is so salient that I turned it into a pivotal tension in my upcoming novel, Exhibit: a celebrated photographer and her husband agreed they both don’t want children, but he wakes up one day realizing he does, and powerfully so. She’s certain she ought not be a parent; he’s pining for a child; they love each other very much. Short on joint paths forward, they have no idea what to do next.
Parental regret springs from a range of origins, not all having to do with privation of choice or means. In and before a post-Dobbs U.S., people have given birth against their will. The cost of raising a child runs high; for parents lacking funds and support, dire hardship can result. It’s a lack far too typical in the U.S., where there’s no federally mandated paid parental leave, and families are often priced out of childcare. But this regret isn’t a phenomenon limited to people in grave financial straits, nor to those forced into parenting. Other parents, all through the world, also wish they’d elected otherwise.
In recent months, as I waited for the publication of the novel I worked on for nine years, I kept returning to the plight I’d explored: I hadn’t yet finished wondering what I might do, how I’d live, if. And though I’d heard a range of chronicles of parental regret, as have other friends without kids, the stories were related one-on-one, in private. It’s a taboo subject, one made all the more difficult, punitive, by the ubiquitous belief that people who feel as they do either can’t or ought not exist.
Read More: Does Marriage Really Make People Happier? A Discussion
I’ve also thought about the isolating effect of silence, and what it can cost to live in hiding. I wanted to talk with parents who, if they could go back in time, might make different choices—and who’d also agree to be quoted. It was, again unsurprisingly, hard to find people willing to speak with me on the record about parental regret. I promised to alter the names of each parent I interviewed for this piece. Even so, people were skittish.
“I don’t think that everyone is made for children,” says Helen, a high school teacher in her 40s. And telling people that their purpose is to reproduce is destructive, she adds. It’s what she heard growing up: though Helen wanted to take Latin in high school, her mother forced her to enroll in home economics instead. “I don’t think I ever decided to have kids. I was pretty much just told that that’s what you do. That’s what girls are for,” Helen says.
As a result, Helen makes sure to tell her students that having children is an option, one that might not be right for them. She says the same thing to her kids, both girls. “I think that people need to know that just being themselves is enough,” she says.
Read More: Why You Should Think Before Telling Mothers ‘They’re Only Little Once’
At this point, half an hour into a phone call, Helen has cried, briefly, a couple of times. Now, I’m the one tearing up. I tell Helen I grew up in a predominantly Christian Korean American community. The primacy of having kids is built into the Korean language: I knew most Korean adults only as “the mother of x” or “the father of y.” I might have felt less strange if I’d had a Helen at my high school. While I didn’t quite, at any point, decide against being a parent—I didn’t have to, since I had no inkling of the urge in the first place—I also never heard it said that there might be an alternative.
“And if you thought there was any other way to live, there’s something wrong with you,” Helen says.
I ask what she’d do if she had more time to herself. “I would write. I would take walks,” she replies. “I enjoyed writing academic papers. I enjoyed writing them for my master’s.” It used to upset her when classes were too easy. Given the chance, she would think for hours without interruption. She’d take up further studies.
And if she could inhabit the person she was before she became a parent? “I would have stopped that pregnancy before it happened.” But that’s the part Helen’s never said to her daughters, who, after all, didn’t ask to be born. She’s hell-bent on raising them well, not taking out any regrets on the girls. “I love them. I just don’t love the choice I made.”
Each parent I talk to points out this dividing line: it’s possible to have strong, lasting regrets about a life choice while ferociously loving—and caring for—the fruit of that decision. Paul, a Canadian father of young boys, notes that though he could write a book on everything he resents having lost as a result of becoming a parent, he also would do anything for his kids. Paul’s boys are the loves of his life. Still, overall, fathering has been detrimental to his well-being.
“My body is constantly on standby, waiting for the next disaster,” Paul says. “As an introvert, I also deeply resent having no private time.” He’s fatigued and never at ease, finding all aspects of child-rearing to be stressful. It’s not a problem that would be resolved if he had more caretaking support. “I do have help with the kids from family, and I know if I asked for more help, I’d get it,” he tells me, but he often refuses help because he believes that, as a father, it’s his job to take on the brunt of tasks that attend parenting.
Instead, what Paul lacks, in terms of support, is people with whom he can be honest. “I don’t have anyone to talk to about parental regret,” he says. He wishes he had more spaces where parents aren’t publicly shamed for feeling trapped or stifled. And though he’d felt ambivalent about becoming a father, and it was his husband who first decided he wanted a child, he hasn’t let this initial split in longing drive them apart. With his husband, as with the other people in his life, he’s quiet about his regret: “As much as I might feel his desire to be a parent has led me to my decision, that decision was also my own.”
People have asked how I learned that not having kids might be an option. I live in San Francisco, where I’m hardly the only person with no kids—out of the major U.S. cities, San Francisco has the smallest percentage of children—but even so, for some people, having kids can feel so fated that they talk about not having imagined otherwise.
One friend who’s asked this question has told me she felt regret during the first years of her child’s life, but that, as her child got older, the rue left. For other parents, though, the regret proves lasting. Robin, who has adult offspring in their 40s, says that, to this day, if she could reverse time, she would “certainly not have a baby ever, not under any circumstances.” She notes that she’d had no notion of what being a parent can entail. Having grown up in an affluent, cheerful family, she was glad to have children with her husband, figuring that “it all just looked like a romantic, happy road.”
Instead, after electing to be a stay-at-home mother, Robin found herself in what she calls “the domestic gulag,” a life that consisted of being “a chauffeur and an arranger and an appointment setter and a social secretary and a party planner and a chef and a meal planner and a budgeter” and “an emergency nurse and a night nurse and a psychologist and a confidant.”
Robin also, like the other parents I spoke to, felt responsible for raising her children well, teaching them how to lead “good, honorable, happy” lives, striving to instill and model integrity and kindness. It was a daily, 20-year effort all the more crushing since, each morning, waking up, she’d recall the day’s to-do list and know that she didn’t want to do any of it.
Replying to my questions, Robin keeps having to pause to take phone calls from a nurse caring for her ill, elderly aunt. There’s no one else in Robin’s family who’ll fill the role, she says, so it’s up to her to look after her aunt’s well-being. I’m conscious that I’m telling you this because I’m alive to what at least some readers will think about Helen, Paul, and Robin: that the act of admitting to regret ipso facto convicts them as bad, unfit parents. As, that is, evil people. They know it, too, and are as afraid of being recognized as they are intent on telling people what they’re living through—hoping, with a fervor I recognize from my bygone life as an evangelical Christian, to prevent others’ misery.
Hoping to ease others’ solitude, too. Online forums aside, there are almost no spaces where a parent can discuss regret. Some of this is for good reason—no child should have to hear that they’re regretted—but what other human experience is there about which one will probably be judged a monster for having any regret at all?
One problem is that our culture wants just one kind of story about parenting, and it’s a story of “pure joy,” says Yael Goldstein-Love, a writer and psychotherapist in California whose clinical practice focuses on people who are adapting to parenthood. But, Goldstein-Love says, people often experience grief in the transition to being a parent, grief for the life they might have inhabited otherwise. “Part of what makes the grief unspeakable is that there’s always a strand of this regret,” she adds.
While Goldstein-Love hasn’t had patients bring it up, she also has friends who confide in her about parental regret. I mention the alacrity with which people can lunge to say that no parent feels regret, that it’s impossible. I ask if, perhaps, this type of remorse poses an existential threat, belying an ideal picture of what we might be to our own parents. Is this an aspect of why people can be so quick to refute the notion that regret can, and does, happen?
Absolutely, she replies: Most people want to believe that our parents felt nothing but delight about raising us. “They never regretted a moment. They never hated us. And that’s bullsh-t.” I ask Goldstein-Love what she’d tell parents who wish they had made another choice.
“To the extent that you can, and this is much easier said than done, try not to feel ashamed of this.” It’s tempting, she explains, to judge how we feel about life experiences, asking ourselves, “Does this make me a good person? Does this make me a bad person? Am I doing this right? Am I doing this wrong?”
But feelings aren’t inherently “truly ugly,” Goldstein-Love says. “They just are.” It’s what people make of their feelings that might be “ugly or not.” Some people don’t find joy in parenting, let alone pure joy, “and that’s also fine.” Regret is not itself a threat to a parent’s love for a child, and it can help to admit, even to oneself, that which might feel unspeakable. “I really would encourage people to realize that you are not alone in this feeling,” she says.
I think of the halting conversations I’ve been having with parents, and the difficulty with which people talk about regret. Few choices are less irreversible than deciding to be a parent: once the child is born, a person is here who didn’t previously exist. But I also wonder who’s being served well by a monolithic idea that no one regrets being a parent. Not these parents; not, as some of the people I’ve spoken with have pointed out, any kids who pick up on parental regret and think it can’t happen, except to them. If more people had the support to make reproductive choices based on their own desires and life situations, and if the monolith were spalled in favor of plural narratives that better reflect the complexities of human experience, what then?
I think of the people who have spoken to me about regret and isolation, including those I haven’t yet mentioned—a mother finishing nursing school in Mississippi, a mother of five in Nebraska, and all the privately confiding parents. One parent asks at the end of our conversation, “What have other parents said? Was it the same thing? Was it the same thing as me?”
Liberals and conservatives don’t agree on much, including when it comes to combating climate change. But there is one surprising behavior where partisans from both ends of the spectrum seem to have more common ground than previously thought: planting trees. Our new research suggests that finding climate actions with bipartisan support is already possible–even in a country as politically polarized as the United States.
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Planting trees matters; that’s why we measured it. As trees grow, they slow climate change by removing carbon dioxide from the air, storing it, and releasing oxygen into the atmosphere. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change suggested that 950 million hectares of new forests could help limit the increase in global average temperature to 1.5-degrees Celsius.
In a new global study, which will be published in a forthcoming issue of Nature Communications, we analyzed support for several climate change measures in 60 countries with a sample of over 51,000 people. Although we found clear evidence of polarization of climate change beliefs and policy support, conservatives and liberals were equally willing to make a real effort in a tree-planting task.
In fact, their efforts led us to plant 333,000 trees.
Of course, planting trees is not enough. Scientists concluded that policies geared towards phasing out fossil fuels are also critical to the climate solution landscape. And critics speculated that planting trees might reduce support for such climate mitigation tactics. They assume that engaging in one climate action automatically reduces effort towards another, due to limitations in attention, bandwidth, or resources. In our research however, we found no evidence for this assumption. If anything, we found the exact opposite pattern of results. People who planted more trees were, on average, also the most likely to support sustainable climate policy.
In fact, behaviors like planting trees might even help people identify with the cause and become an advocate for the environment. This underscores the need to act on areas where broad political support on climate action already exists and then build on that momentum.
Despite these grounds for optimism, there is still a long way to go. We found a persistent partisan gap on climate policy in many countries around the world–and especially in the U.S. To see if we could find a way to bridge this gap, we tested the effects of the 11 top psychological interventions (as determined by experts) designed to increase climate policy support across the political spectrum.
In the U.S, the best climate policy intervention was writing a letter to a future generation member, explaining one’s actions today to ensure a livable planet for that future adult. This intervention increased support for climate change mitigation policy by 10% across all American participants. This was also the top intervention for conservatives, increasing their support for climate policy by 13%!
However, different climate change messages resonate with different political audiences. For liberals, the top intervention was decreasing the psychological distance of climate change by presenting the climate consequences in one’s region (e.g., increased frequency and severity of wildfires and floods). This increased liberals’ climate policy support by 9%. One size doesn’t fit all.
For staunch partisans on either side of the aisle, the best intervention focused on highlighting the value of environmental purity and compliance with authority figures, like scientists or political and military leaders, as the reasons for taking climate action. This intervention increased climate policy support of strongly self-identified liberals by 8% and strongly self-identified conservatives by 21%. Thus, with the right messaging, people across the political spectrum can be mobilized to support climate policy.
These results are unique to the U.S, but our research suggests that different interventions might be more successful at bridging these divides in other nations. To explore the effects of our interventions in any of the countries where we conducted this experiment, we created an open access and user friendly web app, which can be accessed here.
The U.S. is deeply polarized along partisan lines when it comes to climate change beliefs and mitigation policy; however, our research suggests that not only are there climate solutions with broad agreement, but also effective strategies to increase conservatives’ climate policy support. Climate change advocates can close the partisan gap and spur the behaviors and policies necessary to reduce the risks posed by the changing climate.
Indeed, both sides of the political divide have been increasingly discussing and even proposing solutions to this existential threat, albeit from alternate angles. For instance, Republican lawmakers have suggested tackling the climate crisis by planting a trillion trees. On the other hand, Democratic legislators are proposing solutions supportive of clean energy development, for example through the Inflation Reduction Act, a landmark policy in the transition to renewables.
By building on some of these initial policies–like planting trees–while framing the other policies in more resonant ways, we might be able to build the necessary momentum to address climate change.
