(Headline USA) As the new academic year arrives, school systems across the United States are struggling to cope with the nation’s totatilarian lockdowns.

Roman Catholic educators have an extra challenge — trying to forestall a relentless wave of closures of their schools that has no end in sight.

Already this year, financial and enrollment problems aggravated by the pandemic have forced the permanent closure of more than 140 Catholic schools nationwide, according to officials who oversee Catholic education in the country.

Three of the nation’s highest-ranking Catholic leaders, in a recent joint appeal, said Catholic schools “are presently facing their greatest financial crisis” and warned that hundreds more closures are likely without federal support.

“Because of economic loss and uncertainty, many families are confronting the wrenching decision to pull their children out of Catholic schools,” said New York Cardinal Timothy Dolan, Boston Cardinal Sean O’Malley and Los Angeles Archbishop José Gomez, president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.

They urged Congress to include funding in the next pandemic relief bill for scholarship assistance for economically disadvantaged families to use at Catholic or other private schools.

Many Catholic schools already have received substantial federal aid from the U.S. Department of Education and from the Paycheck Protection Program, which was designed to pay wages at businesses or nonprofits impacted by the pandemic.

The pace of closures has been relentless since March.

Within the past month, Catholic leaders have announced the shuttering of five schools in Newark, New Jersey, and 26 in the New York City area.

Among the schools closed earlier was the Institute of Notre Dame in Baltimore, a 173-year-old girl’s high school that’s the alma mater of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

Several of the closures have promoted protests and petition campaigns by angry parents, and Catholic officials have been scrambling to help affected families.

The Diocese of Brooklyn’s school superintendent, Thomas Chadzutko, said the closures were unavoidable due to the pandemic’s “devastating effects” on enrollment and finances.

Parents were offered a $500 grant if their children enrolled in other Catholic schools, but many were bitter that the closures were announced with little time to make alternative school plans.

“It is a complete travesty how the Brooklyn Diocese can shut down schools within a pandemic and with less than two months’ notice,” parent Javier Cortes wrote in an online post about the closure of Queen of the Rosary Catholic Academy. “Treating children like this is NOT the Catholic thing to do!”

Also ordered closed was Nativity of Our Blessed Lady, an elementary school in the Bronx.

“I was part of the first graduating class and now I walked out of there hysterical in tears,” said Hope Wilson, who attended the school as a child and later taught there for 30 years. “It’s heartbreaking.”

In Newark, Shante McGlone Burgess was devastated by the news that St. Francis Xavier School was closing. All three of her children attended the elementary school last year, though the family is not Catholic.

“They were very welcoming there,” McGlone Burgess said. “At a public school, I don’t think my children would have gotten the same camaraderie, as well as the structure.”

St. Francis Xavier is one of many schools being closed that serve predominantly black and Hispanic communities.

Three bishops who oversee matters related to education and racial issues recently sent an appeal to U.S. Rep. Karen Bass, chairwoman of the Congressional Black Caucus, seeking support for families of color with students in Catholic schools.

“A Black or Latino child is 42% more likely to graduate from high school, and two-and-a-half times more likely to graduate from college if he or she attends a Catholic school,” wrote Bishops Michael Barber of Oakland, California, Joseph Perry of Chicago and Shelton Fabre of the Houma-Thibodaux Diocese in Louisiana.

At the National Catholic Educational Association, there’s acute concern about the closures’ consequences.

“Catholic schools have a very profound impact on young people of low-income backgrounds, students of color, kids from single-parent homes,” said the NCEA’s chief innovation officer, Kevin Baxter “That makes it all the more tragic if we lose the Catholic schools that serve those populations.”

One consequence of the turmoil: increased interest in Catholic-oriented homeschooling.

Chris Sebastian, a spokesman for the Mother of Divine Grace School, said it is preparing to serve about 6,000 students in the new school year, compared with 4,800 last year.

The school, based in California but serving families across the U.S. and overseas, offers a structured Catholic curriculum and assigns an educational consultant to work with each family that signs up.

“COVID is the primary motivator for people enrolling,” Sebastian said. “People are afraid of the pandemic and not wanting the stress of required masks.”

The Rev. Thomas Vassalotti, pastor of Queen of the Rosary Catholic Academy’s parish in New York, said numerous parents affected by that closure — and wary of switching to public schools — are expressing interest in homeschooling, perhaps in a cooperative with assistance from the parish.

For Catholic schools that are reopening, there is no national directive as to how they should handle the question of in-person classes. Decisions are being made diocese by diocese, often influenced by local and state rules.

In Los Angeles, archdiocese officials had hoped to open the new year with in-person classes.

They now will have to start out with distance learning, due to an order from Gov. Gavin Newsom barring public and private schools from reopening campuses if their counties are on a monitoring list for high rates of new coronavirus cases.

The situation is different in Dallas, where the diocese plans to open schools Sept. 2, six days before the earliest date when secular schools can start in-person classes.

The diocese chose that option after Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton said religious schools were exempt from local orders delaying in-person instruction.

And in Evansville, Indiana, Catholic schools reopened Aug. 5 with a full program of in-person instruction. Schools were told to spread out desks, place students in small groups and require face coverings.

Mary Pat Donoghue, who heads the education office of the national bishops’ conference, said she expects a wide variety of reopening plans, with a common aim of getting students back in the classroom as quickly as health conditions allow.

Adapted from reporting by the Associated Press.

(Associated Press) House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Sunday the threats of interference in the U.S. presidential election from Russia and China are not equal.

“They’re not equivalent,” said Pelosi, D-Calif. “Russia is actively 24/7 interfering in our election. They did so in 2016, and they are doing so now.” She urged intelligence agencies to “put more information out there” on the specific nature of the threats.

An intelligence report last week said Russia was already using a “range of measures” to undercut Trump’s Democratic challenger, Joe Biden, and promote Trump with misinformation on social media.

The statement Friday by William Evanina, director of the National Counterintelligence and Security Center, also said China does not want Trump to win a second term and has accelerated its criticism of the White House, and that Iran is also hoping Trump will lose.

Pelosi said trying to equate China and Russia on the threat of foreign election interference doesn’t tell the story.

“The Chinese, they said, prefer Biden — we don’t know that, but that’s what they’re saying, but they’re not really getting involved in the presidential election,” she said.

Trump’s national security adviser, Robert O’Brien, said Sunday that the U.S. is taking any threat to U.S. elections seriously. He said that China has engaged in cyberattacks and phishing “with respect to our election infrastructure.”

“We’re not going to put up with it,” he said. “We’re going to take every action necessary to keep folks out, whether it’s China or Russia or Iran or Cuba or Venezuela or others.”

Pelosi and other congressional Democrats have expressed concern that intelligence agencies have been withholding from the public specific intelligence information about the threat of foreign interference in American politics.

“The facts are chilling,” Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., wrote in an op-ed published Friday evening in The Washington Post. “I believe the American public needs and deserves to know them. The information should be declassified immediately.”

Pelosi spoke on CNN’s “State of the Union” and “Fox News Sunday”and O’Brien appeared on CBS’ “Face the Nation.”

(Associated Press) Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden said on Sunday that if he’s elected, his administration would stop a proposed copper and gold mine in Alaska‘s Bristol Bay region.

“It is no place for a mine,” the former vice president said in a statement to news media. “The Obama-Biden Administration reached that conclusion when we ran a rigorous, science-based process in 2014, and it is still true today.”

The Environmental Protection Agency under the Obama administration proposed restricting development in the Bristol Bay region but never finalized the restrictions. The agency retains the option to invoke that so-called veto process again if it decides to do so.

The mine would be built near headwaters of the Bristol Bay salmon fishery about 200 miles southwest of Anchorage. Conservation and local tribal groups say they fear the mine will devastate the fishery.

Biden said the salmon fishery is an economic powerhouse that should be protected for Alaska Natives and fishermen, according to The Anchorage Daily News.

“Bristol Bay is the most important Sockeye Salmon fishery in the world, supporting 13,000 jobs and $1.5 billion in economic activity,” said Collin O’Mara, president and CEO of the National Wildlife Federation Action Fund.

“Joe Biden understands we cannot afford to risk allowing this pristine ecosystem — which supports 190 species of birds, 40 species of mammals, and 29 species of fish, including all five species of North American pacific salmon — to become a toxic, heavy metal-laden soup.”

An environmental review released by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers last month — and assailed by critics as deficient — stated that under normal operations, the alternatives it looked at “would not be expected to have a measurable effect on fish numbers and result in long-term changes to the health of the commercial fisheries in Bristol Bay.”

Mine developer Pebble Limited Partnership has praised the Army Corps’ review as thorough and accurate.

Earlier this week, President Donald Trump said he would “listen to both sides” after his eldest son and a campaign adviser urged him to intervene to block the Pebble Mine.

The corps has yet to make a permitting decision. When it does, it could issue a permit, approve a permit with conditions or issue a denial. The project, should it advance, also would face a state permitting process.

(Headline USA) Brace yourself for what’s expected to be the first U.S. presidential election conducted mostly by mail-in ballots. It could be messy.

States have made the option widely available — only 10 now require voters to provide an excuse beyond fear of COVID-19 when requesting a ballot by mail.

But running a vote-by-mail election is complicated, and there’s a lot of room for things to go wrong.

Validating and counting a deluge of posted ballots in an open and accountable way presents a major challenge, one that only about a half dozen states are fully prepared for.

Turmoil in the U.S. Postal Service has only heightened concerns surrounding the ability of the nation’s myriad election systems to manage a presidential vote.

Oregon, Colorado and Washington have held successful all-mail elections for years and others including Florida and California expanded capacity long before the pandemic.

Nearly everywhere else, the technical and logistical challenges loom large for budget-squeezed election officials with limited experience.

Chaotic events during this year’s primaries did not instill confidence. Untold thousands of absentee ballot requests went unfulfilled, and tens of thousands of mailed ballots were rejected for multiple reasons including arriving too late to be counted.

“The system is buckling under the weight of the dramatic surge and demand for absentee mail ballots,” said Wendy Weiser, director of the democracy program at the Brennan Center for Justice. “It hasn’t been built to withstand that high of a volume.”

Among the major concerns:

— Not all states are equal when it comes to letting voters fix mistakes that lead to rejection of their ballots, such as failure to sign the mail-in envelope. In a New Jersey special election in May, a whopping 10% of mailed ballots were rejected.

— The rapid introduction of new technologies and processes in state voting systems heightens the risk of foreign interference and insider tampering. That’s true even if simple human error or local maneuvering for political advantage are more likely threats.

— The slower count of mailed ballots could clash with voter expectations of a clear Election Night winner. Election officials have already warned voters across the country that it could take days after the polls close to count all the votes.

— In general, voting by mail is much less forgiving than the in-person method, where a voter’s identity is verified on the spot and any difficulties can be handled by poll workers.

To ensure success, all the pieces of mail-in balloting systems have to be in place well before Election Day.

That’s because processing absentee ballots is a complex, multi-step process in most states: Voter fills out application, mails it to local election office; local election office verifies voter’s eligibility, sends back ballot; voter completes ballot, signs envelope, returns it. Election office verifies ballot’s authenticity, counts it.

“The more complicated we make the ballot-casting process, the more stuff is going to go wrong,” said Wisconsin activist Karen McKim.

Election management in Wisconsin is as decentralized as it gets, relying as it does on 72 county clerks, 1,850 municipal clerks and thousands of poll workers.

McKim says it’s “unrealistic and unfair” to expect those workers to be ready for a flood of absentee ballots in just a few months.

Ahead of multiple primaries this year, some election administrators were buried under an unprecedented flurry of absentee ballot requests. Some blank ballots got misaddressed; others were lost.

In Georgia’s Fulton County, which includes Atlanta and is the state’s most populous, thousands of absentee ballots didn’t reach voters until after the polls had closed, according to local news reports. Washington, D.C., voters were similarly afflicted.

In Wisconsin, requested absentee ballots never got to thousands of voters who asked. Jonas Zahn, a 46-year-old IBM executive, risked his health to vote in person on April 7 after twice requesting absentee ballots.

“They still haven’t come so they must still be in the mail,” the Beaver Dam resident said in late July.

In Milwaukee, nearly 2,700 absentee ballots were never mailed because election staff goofed and halted a batch printing of mailing labels, the state election commission later reported. It was just one of multiple snafus.

Will the U.S. Postal Service be up to processing and delivering an election-eve flood of tens of millions of ballots?

Zahn, the Wisconsin voter, said his local mail is now routed through Milwaukee 50 miles away, meaning mail that reached a neighbor in a day or two a decade ago now takes about a week.

“The pipeline that moves mail between voters and election officials is very leaky,” Charles Stewart III, a political scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, wrote in a 2010 study.

In a July update, Stewart estimated that roughly 4% of mail ballots were lost through this process in the 2016 general election.

States including Wisconsin are now scrambling to add USPS “intelligent mail” bar codes to their systems so ballots can be tracked through the mail.

In states including Florida, Ohio, North Carolina and Georgia, counties are adding ballot-tracking software that gives voters more precise ballot status all the way to election authorities, said Steve Olsen, CEO of BallotTrax, the leading provider.

But such measures aren’t yet widespread.

In some states, voters who don’t trust the mail can use drop boxes instead. But boxes have been vandalized and poorly secured. Some Republicans say they invite fraud. The Trump campaign is suing Pennsylvania over plans to use them in November.

Once a completed ballot arrives at a local election office, the voter’s eligibility and identity must be verified. Sometimes, missing signatures or unsealed or damaged envelopes can gum up the process.

In Jefferson County, Kentucky, the state’s largest, 3,848 absentee ballots were rejected in the June primary due to lack of a voter signature. That was out of roughly 180,000 absentee ballots cast.

Not all states give voters a quick and easy way to fix these problems.

Veteran vote-by-mail states send out periodic mailers to verify voter addresses and get updated signatures.

They also have built “ballot-curing” measures into existing systems in case voter signatures don’t match what’s on record or ballot envelopes arrive damaged or missing required information. But such systems are far from universal and their absence has led to lawsuits in some states.

The complexity of signature matching is a major issue. Many election offices register voter signatures from a variety of sources — for instance, those scribbled with styluses on cramped touchscreens at motor vehicle departments. The result: A matching process prone to human error.

It took nearly two weeks for Philadelphia to count 140,000 mailed ballots after the June 2 primary. In New York City, it took six weeks after the June 23 primary to tally absentee ballots in one congressional primary where a dispute over ballots lacking postmarks ended up in federal court.

Ensuring a trustworthy chain of ballot custody and bipartisan oversight contributes to those delays. And sometimes insider fraud does happen. A former Democratic Pennsylvania congressman was recently indicted for it.

Which is why election officials including Neal Kelley, the registrar in Orange County, California, urge transparency measures for ballot counting such as live video streaming and obligatory audits.

Eighty percent of the county’s residents voted absentee in this year’s primary, up from 60% in 2018. Kelley said it took time to get all the pieces in place — he’s developed homegrown ballot-tracking — to handle such capacity and instill voter confidence.
“It took us four years,” he said.

Adapted from reporting by the Associated Press.

(Headline USA) First, Oprah Winfrey put Breonna Taylor on the cover of O, The Oprah Magazine. Now the media mogul is spreading her message with billboards demanding justice for the Kentucky woman shot to death during a police raid.

Twenty-six billboards displaying a portrait of Taylor are going up across Louisville, Kentucky, demanding that the police officers involved in her death be arrested and charged, according to social justice organization Until Freedom.

That’s one billboard for every year of the woman’s life.

The billboards, funded by the magazine, showcase the magazine cover dedicated to Taylor, the Courier Journal reported.

Also displayed is a quote from Winfrey: “If you turn a blind eye to racism, you become an accomplice to it.”

Until Freedom thanked the Oprah magazine for its work on the billboards.

“Together, we will make sure no one forgets #BreonnaTaylor’s name and recommit to the fight for justice for her and her family,” the group said in a tweet.

Taylor, an emergency medical tech studying to become a nurse, was shot multiple times March 13 when police officers burst into her Louisville apartment using a no-knock warrant during a narcotics investigation.

The warrant to search her home was in connection with a suspect who did not live there and no drugs were found.

Kenneth Walker, Taylor’s boyfriend, was originally charged with attempted murder after he fired a shot at one of the officers who came into the home.

Walker has said he didn’t know who was entering the apartment and was firing a warning shot. The charge was later dropped.

Tensions have swelled in Taylor’s hometown and beyond as activists, professional athletes and social media stars push for action while investigators plead for more patience.

The decision whether to bring state-level criminal charges against the Louisville officers rests with Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron. He took the Taylor case after a local prosecutor recused himself from reviewing the matter.

One of the officers has been terminated and two other officers are on administrative reassignment.

Cameron, the first African American elected to the attorney general’s job in Kentucky, has declined to put a timetable on his decision since taking over the case in May.

“We remain committed to an independent and thorough investigation into the death of Ms. Breonna Taylor,” Cameron said Friday on his official Twitter account.

“The investigation remains ongoing, and we currently await additional testing and analysis from federal partners, including a ballistics test from the FBI crime lab,” the tweet said.

The FBI field office in Louisville said Friday that a “significant amount of ballistic evidence” was collected when investigators returned to Taylor’s apartment in June.

“This evidence is being tested and analyzed at the FBI Laboratory in Quantico, Virginia,” the FBI’s Louisville office said in a statement. “Once the FBI Laboratory has completed its findings, FBI Louisville will promptly share our results with the attorney general’s office.”

Christopher 2X, an anti-violence activist in Louisville, told reporters this week that he’s encouraged by the commitment that FBI officials locally and nationally have shown to the case. He commented after participating in a meeting at the FBI’s Louisville office.

Adapted from reporting by the Associated Press.

(Headline USA) Former Vice President Joe Biden‘s controversial remarks about race this week risk alienating young black voters.

When pressed by Errol Barnett of CBS News on whether he’d taken a cognitive test, Biden responded that the question was akin to asking the black reporter if he would take a drug test to see if “you’re taking cocaine or not? … Are you a junkie?”

In a later interview with National Public Radio’s Lulu Garcia-Navarro, Biden seemed to draw distinctions between black and Hispanic populations in the U.S.

“Unlike the African American community, with notable exceptions, the Latino community is an incredibly diverse community with incredibly different attitudes about different things,” he told the Latina reporter.

He later walked back the comment.

Black voters as a whole delivered the Democratic nomination to Biden, powering his commanding win in the South Carolina primary, which rescued his floundering campaign.

But that success was heavily dependent on older black voters. In a general election where Democrats say no vote can be taken for granted, young black activists and elected officials say this week’s missteps could make it harder to get their vote.

“Trump is terrible, and he’s a racist, and we have to get racists out of the White House. But then Biden keeps saying racist things,” said Mariah Parker, a 28-year-old county commissioner in Athens, Georgia.

“It doesn’t make me feel much better that we actually will have an improvement for the black community with one president over the other.”

AP VoteCast data illustrates the generational divide Biden is confronting.

Across 17 states where AP VoteCast surveyed Democratic voters during the primary, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders won 60% of voters under 30 overall, to Biden’s 19%. And while Biden was strongly supported by African American voters overall, black voters under age 30 were slightly more likely to support Sanders than Biden, 44% to 38%.

A Washington Post-Ipsos poll conducted in June suggested that while Biden had majority support among black voters aged 18-39, there was skepticism about Biden himself.

Among black Americans under age 40 that were polled, 32% said they didn’t feel he was sympathetic to the problems of black people. And 24% of respondents under 40 said they felt Biden is “biased” against black people, in contrast to much lower percentages for middle-aged and senior respondents.

Adapted from reporting by the Associated Press.

(Headline USA) President Donald Trump on Saturday bypassed the nation’s lawmakers as he deferred payroll taxes and replaced an expired unemployment benefit.

At his private country club in Bedminster, New Jersey, Trump signed executive orders to act where Congress hasn’t.

Perhaps most crucially, Trump moved to continue paying a supplemental federal unemployment benefit for millions of Americans out of work during the outbreak.

However, his order called for up to $400 payments each week, one-third less than the $600 people had been receiving.

Congress allowed those higher payments to lapse on Aug. 1, and negotiations to extend them have been mired in partisan gridlock.

Trump’s Democratic opponent in the presidential race, Joe Biden, said the president had issued “a series of half-baked measures” and accused him of putting Social Security at risk,” without providing any evidence.

The executive orders could face legal challenges questioning the president’s authority to spend taxpayer dollars without the express approval of Congress.

Trump largely stayed on the sidelines during the administration’s negotiations with congressional leaders, leaving the talks on his side to chief of staff Mark Meadows and Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin.

“It’s $400 a week, and we’re doing it without the Democrats,” Trump said, asking states to cover 25% of the cost.

Trump is seeking to set aside $44 billion in previously approved disaster aid to help states maintain supplemental pandemic jobless benefits, but Trump said it would be up to states to determine how much, if any of it, to fund, so the benefits could be smaller still.

The president had said at his club on Friday night that “if Democrats continue to hold this critical relief hostage I will act under my authority as president to get Americans the relief they need.”

Democrats had said they would lower their spending demands from $3.4 trillion to $2 trillion but said the White House needed to increase their offer. Republicans have proposed a $1 trillion plan.

Friday’s jobs report, though it beat expectations, was smaller than the past two months.

Trump said Saturday the orders “will take care of pretty much this entire situation, as we know it.”

“This is not a perfect answer — we’ll be the first ones to say that,” Meadows said Friday as talks broke down. “But it is all that we can do and all the president can do within the confines of his executive power, and we’re going to encourage him to do it.”

Trump said the employee portion of the payroll tax would be deferred from Aug. 1 through the end of the year.

Trump said he’ll try to get lawmakers to extend it, and the timing would line up with a post-election lame-duck session in which Congress will try to pass government funding bills.

“If I win, I may extend and terminate,” Trump said, repeating a longtime goal but remaining silent on how he’d fund the Medicare and Social Security benefits that the 7% tax on employee income covers.

Employers also pay 7.65% of their payrolls into the funds.

Adapted from reporting by the Associated Press.