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For maybe the first time in the space I lived, I felt unwelcome.

I doubt such concerns would be raised about a new living space for senior citizens, even those needing memory care. Still, the implications were clear to me, some citizens did not want new neighbors with mental health conditions. What about current folk?

I live with mental health conditions. I’m also a psychotherapist, writer, partner, friend, and someone who cares a lot about children. Does my village see me in this way too?

Why does mental illness strike such fear?

I mean, we aren’t all wild-eyed werewolves running around with chainsaws.

At least, I’m not.

When violent crime makes news, often mental illness is brought up as a potential explanation. Yet, the reality is that the vast majority of violent criminals do not have a mental health condition (Varshney et al., 2016).

While it certainly shouldn’t be a requirement of residence, people living with mental health conditions often grant innovative perspectives, deep compassion, and other assets to the community. One in four Americans live with a diagnosable mental health condition. When I think of individuals I have known who do, I am thankful to have these people in my life. Some of the most creative, kind, and intelligent people I have met live with a mental health condition.

Does the ‘not in my backyard’ mentality apply to the many great contributors in the world with these diagnoses? People like Vincent van Gogh, Jim Carey, Lady Gaga, or Michael Phelps? Is the expectation that a person with mental illness is some kind of exceptional creative genius or a danger to society? That’s not how things work.

Still, people living with mental illness are, however, at much higher risk of becoming victims of violence.

I believe that fear and stigma have a lot to do with that. A narrative that someone could be dangerous leads people to act on the defensive, regardless of whether it would be warranted.

Misunderstandings create glass walls, and ceilings that prevent many individuals with mental illness from accessing opportunities to be their best. A research study of 274 people living with serious mental health conditions found a relationship between experience of discrimination and outcomes in areas including housing and quality of life (Mejia-Lancheros et al., 2021).

This not only hurts individuals diagnosed with a mental health condition, but it also damages the greater community. It keeps us from appreciating and learning from each other.

I hope that, in time, the ‘not in my backyard’ conversation will be a thing of the past when it comes to mental health. People with mental health conditions like myself are neighbors with backyards too. This kind of discourse hurts us.

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Now, in light of the outrages that Palestinians have endured and will continue to endure as Israel goes about annihilating Gaza with relentless ferocity, pizza might seem a picayune, even distasteful, starting point for a column that will invoke two blunt words throughout: genocide and famine.

Still, this past week I came across a number of jarring images that, when considered side by side, tell us a lot about the sick scale of crimes we are witnessing being committed in Gaza and beyond as well as the disparate circumstances of the victims and the perpetrators of those horrors.

The first picture features two young Israeli soldiers, each carrying a tower of pizza boxes – a gift apparently from a popular pizza franchise. The soldiers, clad in green, are smiling. They appear giddy. The marketing adage on the spine of the boxes reads: “For the love of pizza.”

A companion image posted on Instagram stars a balding, portly Israeli soldier with a high-powered weapon slung across a shoulder. His right arm is resting on a stack of free pies delivered by the same Israeli subsidiary of a well-known American pizza chain. A hint of a grin crosses his bearded, bespectacled face.

Heart emojis on both snapshots are intended to convey, I suppose, gratitude for their fast-food bounty.

The Israeli soldiers look happy. They are going to be well-fed. If the soldiers are troubled or disturbed by all the murderous madness engulfing the region, it doesn’t show in this captured-on-cellphone instant at least.

They’re pleased. A surreal air of normality reigns amid the pervasive inhumanity. Dinner, happily, is served.

Other pictures, of course, convey a much different and cruel story.

A group of Palestinian boys and girls is pressed up against an iron gate in some part of decimated Gaza. They’re wearing sweaters and hoodies to shield themselves against the winter chill.

The boys and girls have been enlisted or volunteered to find food and water for their families. They’re carrying pots and a colander.

One girl stands out. Her outstretched arm bends between the thick, black bars like a pretzel. She’s holding a silver bowl. The girl seems to be crying out to someone in the distance  to draw attention to her empty bowl.

The row of nearby children follow in frantic suit, forced to plead for help too.

Millions of Palestinians will not plead. Instead, these days, they take what they can to survive.

Two weeks ago in the cratered, apocalyptic remains of a neighbourhood west of Gaza City, dozens of Palestinian men and boys swarmed an abandoned truck like bees on a hive as they searched for flour and canned food.

Gaza teems with hunger, want and desperation. Shops have been erased. Homes have been erased. Cemeteries have been erased. Schools have been erased. Mosques have been erased. Hospitals have been erased.

Hope has been erased.

The genocide unfolding day after hellish day in Gaza takes two forms. One is loud and quick. The other is quiet and slow. Both are lethal and, despite the predictable denials from the predictable Western capitals, deliberate.

The litany of bombs and drones that Israel has unleashed on Gaza, which have killed thousands of Palestinians and maimed thousands more, are meant to kill and maim – instantly.

The loud, quick wholesale destruction of Gaza is being done by design. It is designed to terrorize. It is designed to eradicate. It is designed to turn Gaza – all of it – into dust, barren and uninhabitable.

Anyone in any quarter who claims otherwise is an apologist for an Israeli government, which has made plain its aim to ethnically cleanse Gaza – openly and repeatedly.

The apologists prefer the comfort of blindness to the discomfort of honesty.

A quiet, slow genocide is happening beyond the “bang-bang” scenes that dominate the screens of Western news networks.

It is happening in the flimsy tents that house the legion of homeless Palestinians who were ordered on forced marches – by foot and mule – from one part of besieged Gaza to another.

That’s where, according to the United Nations, famine is spreading with “incredible speed”.

Martin Griffiths, the UN under-secretary-general for humanitarian affairs and its emergency relief coordinator told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour recently that the “great majority” of the 400,000 Palestinians characterized by UN agencies as at risk of starving “are actually in famine, not just at risk of famine”.

Famines are caused by a combination of the pitiless vagaries of nature and the inevitable consequences of conflict.

The famine that is gripping Gaza is not a “natural disaster” but the direct, orchestrated result of Israel’s grievous actions and inaction.

Most of the casualties of Israel’s loud, quick genocide have been children. Its slow, quiet genocide is also bound to claim many more innocents. Dreadfully, Gaza’s 350,000 children under the age of five are said to be particularly vulnerable.

“Children at high risk of dying from malnutrition and disease desperately need medical treatment, clean water and sanitation services, but the conditions on the ground do not allow us to safely reach children and families in need,” UNICEF Executive Director Catherine Russell said.

This engineered famine is, by any legal or moral measure, a blatant war crime.

“The Israeli government is using starvation of civilians as a method of warfare in the occupied Gaza Strip, which is a war crime,” Human Rights Watch warned in a report published in mid-December. “Israeli forces are deliberately blocking the delivery of water, food, and fuel, while willfully impeding humanitarian assistance, apparently razing agricultural areas, and depriving the civilian population of objects indispensable to their survival.”

The metastasizing famine, combined with the sure outbreak of disease, is likely to kill more Palestinians than Israel’s constant shower of bombs and drones.

This will be the international community’s disgraceful epitaph: Rather than stop a famine, it abetted Israel while its “strategic ally” tried starving Palestinians into capitulation and submission.

Shame on them. Shame on them all.

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Now, they’re the big kids at elementary schools across the United States. Many still need profound help overcoming the effects of the pandemic.

To catch up, schools have deployed a wide range of strategies. And among some incoming fourth-graders, there are encouraging signs of gains. However, as this generation progresses, many will need extra reading support that schools are not as accustomed to providing for older students.

Beyond third grade, fewer teachers each year know how to help students who are lacking key foundational reading skills, said Elizabeth Albro, an executive at the U.S. Department of Education’s independent research arm, the Institute of Education Sciences.

“ Middle and high school teachers aren’t expecting to have to teach kids how to read,” Albro said.

Nationally, students suffered deep learning setbacks in reading and math during the pandemic. Last year’s third-graders, the kids who were in kindergarten when the pandemic started, lost more ground in reading than kids in older grades and were slower to catch up. With federal pandemic relief money, school systems added class time, brought on tutors, trained teachers in phonics instruction and found other ways to offer extra support to struggling readers.

But even after several years of recovery, an analysis of last year’s test scores by NWEA found that the average student would need the equivalent of 4.1 additional months of instruction to catch up to pre-COVID reading levels.

The one bright spot was for incoming fourth-graders, who made above-average gains and would need about two months of additional reading instruction to catch up. Karyn Lewis, who leads a team of education policy researchers at NWEA, described them as “a little bit less worse off.”

The school system in Niagara Falls, New York, is seeing similar results, said Marcia Capone, the district’s assessment administrator. The district brought on additional reading specialists, but Capone said it will take time to bring struggling students up to speed.

“I do not believe it’s hopeless, but it’s not something that’s going to occur in, say, three years’ time,” Capone said.

The problem for children who don’t master reading by third grade: School becomes that much harder in later grades, as reading becomes the foundation for everything else.

Schools have plenty of experience with older students who struggle. Even before the pandemic, only about a third of fourth graders scored as proficient in reading in the National Assessment of Educational Progress, known as the “nation’s report card.”

But the pandemic made it worse, particularly for low-income students and kids of color.

So some schools are targeting some upper-grade students with the “ science of reading,” a push to embrace research-backed strategies for reading based on phonics. Many new laws endorsing the phonics-based approach target students beyond third grade, according to a July report from the nonpartisan Albert Shanker Institute.

In Virginia, for instance, a law signed in March mandates extra help for struggling readers through eighth grade. It is one of the most aggressive efforts yet.

“There’s an implicit recognition,” wrote the authors of the Shanker report, “that reading improvement needs to address a greater span of grades, and that reading difficulties do not necessarily end in 3rd grade.”

That will require a major shift. Historically, phonics and help decoding words have gradually disappeared in the upper grades.

Most English teachers at that level are no more prepared to teach a student to read than a math teacher would be, said Miah Daughtery, who advocates for effective literacy instruction for the NWEA research organization.

“They’re prepared to teach text,” she said. “They’re prepared to teach literature, to analyze ideas, craft, story structure, make connections.”

The federal pandemic relief money that bolstered many schools’ academic recovery efforts soon will run out, leaving some experts less optimistic.

“We’re past the point where we’re likely to see a quick rebound,” said Dan Goldhaber, of the American Institutes for Research.

Teachers are reporting it is taking more time to get through the material, according to Tonya Perry, the vice president of the National Council of Teachers of English. Some school systems are turning to programs that break grade-level subject matter down into a variety of reading levels, so strong and weak readers can still learn the concepts, she said.

“Now we have to spend more time building the foundation for what we’re asking students to do,” she said.

Early in the pandemic, some students repeated a grade. But that was only a short-term solution, often taken reluctantly because of concerns about the effect on kids’ social lives and academic futures. By last year, grade retention numbers were trending downward again.

One thing teachers can do is rely less on silent reading in class, and instead have small group activities in which strong and weak readers can be paired together, Daughtery said.

Lewis, of the NWEA, said the takeaway should not be that the COVID kids are beyond help.

“The message has to be: We’re doing the right things. We’re just not doing enough of it,” she said. “And we need to amp up and certainly not take our foot off the gas pedal anytime soon.”

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On Monday afternoon, a group of children found the explosive device in the eastern province of Afghanistan, Ghazni, Nahoor district; while playing with the device, it exploded and killed two of the children, according to local sources.

On Sunday, a similar incident occurred in Kandahar province, which killed one child and injured one other.

Last week, two children were also killed due to the explosion of an unexploded device in the Sayedabad district of Wardak province of Afghanistan.

In various regions of the country, the prevalence of unexploded bombs from previous conflicts has recently surged, killing and injuring men, women, and even children.

Since last November, international organizations such as Australia, Denmark, Germany, Japan, Sweden, the United States, the UK, the UN Central Emergency Response Fund (CERF), and the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs have contributed to support demining in the nation (OCHA).

Nonetheless, due to the detonation of unexploded bombs left over from the forty years of civil war, Afghanistan is still allegedly one of the most mine-contaminated countries in the world, killing dozens of people every month, including children.

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OCHA
Destruction following the Israeli airstrike during the escalation in August 2022

Ziad Taleb
Lynn Matar, 11 years, recounts the difficult moments she experienced after an 
Israeli air raid on one of the houses adjacent to her grandfather's house in the 
Rafah Palestinian refugee camp.

Ziad Taleb
Children in the Gaza Strip. 08 August 2022.

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The 72-year-old head of the UAE government will have to pay £251.5 million (about €300 million) to his sixth wife, Princess Haya Brint al-Hussein of Jordan, 47, in a lump sum to be paid within three months, according to a ruling published on Tuesday.

He will also have to pay a total of £290 million (more than €340 million) to cover maintenance and security costs for the former couple’s two children, Al Jalila, 14, and Zayed, nine. This amounts to £5.6 million per annum per child and is to last “until they shall respectively cease full-time tertiary education or four years after they have commenced their first degree, whichever is later.”

Finally, he has to pay arrears of £9.6 million to the children within one month.

Princess Haya, a graduate of Oxford University, a two-term president of the International Equestrian Federation and a member of the International Olympic Committee, fled the UAE with the couple’s two children in April 2019 saying she had become terrified of her husband’s threats and intimidation.

Sheikh Mohammed launched legal action to have the children returned to Dubai the following month, while Princess Haya asked for them to be made wards of the British court and stay in the UK.

He later drop his bid to have the children return to Dubai and fought unsuccessfully to prevent the court from issuing a fact-finding judgment on his wife’s allegations.

The High Court in London ruled in March 2020 that he had orchestrated a campaign of fear and intimidation against his estranged wife and ordered the abduction of two of his adult daughters, Sheikha Shamsa and Sheikha Latifa.

Britain’s High Cout also found in July of this year he had ordered the hacking of the phones of Princess Haya and her attorneys using the Pegasus software.

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As part of a program that began in 2016 to assess and reduce lead in drinking water in public schools, workers tested every drinking water fixture, fountain, and bottle filling station for lead. Problem fixtures with elevated levels of lead were immediately removed, fixtures more than five years old were replaced and some pipes were flushed after the weekend and holiday breaks.

An analysis of the NYC Department of Education results by Princeton University researchers found that the average student in the 2018-2019 academic year attended a school where  5.3% of water fountains, faucets, and bottle filling stations had dangerous lead levels, down from 8% two years earlier.

Black students had the biggest decrease in lead exposure because they attend schools with the greatest number of problem fixtures. The average Black student in New York City attended a school where almost 10% of fixtures had elevated lead levels from cold water sources during the 2016-2017 academic year. That fell to 6.1% in the 2018-2019 school year, based on the district’s re-testing a sample of the fixtures. Still, the results show that, even after the fixes were in place, Black students still had greater exposure to lead than the average White, Hispanic or Asian student.

“The continued presence of lead in school drinking water and persistent racial disparities in exposure demonstrate the ongoing challenges to eradicating lead exposure in schools,” Jennifer Jennings and Scott Latham wrote in their study published in Environmental Research.

Similar school testing and remediation programs were successful in Los Angeles and Seattle, according to a 2014 study of those districts cited by Jennings and Latham, illustrating that targeted efforts in educational settings can reduce children’s exposure to lead. That’s critical since the toxin is found in half of the young children in the U.S., with the problem more prevalent in Black, Hispanic and poor communities.

New York City’s efforts focused on finding and fixing sources that dispense drinking water at or above the 15 parts of lead per billion the Environmental Protection Agency calls an “action level” because even low levels of exposure to the toxin can hurt cognitive development and behavior. New York City also conducted initial testing of lead levels in charter and non-public schools

An urgency to address unsafe drinking water swept across the U.S. after crises in Flint, Michigan in 2014 and Newark, New Jersey in 2016 raised awareness about the dangers of this often undetected hazard and the extent of the problem. Efforts kicked in on the local, state and federal level.

This sign in Flint, Michigan, in 2016 warned residents that boiling 
water doesn't remove lead.Photographer: Sarah Rice/Getty Images

New York, in 2016, became the first state to mandate a lead remediation program. And a bill passed by the state’s legislature in June, if signed into law, could cut the time between testing and reduce the action level to 5 parts per billion, which is closer to the American Academy of Pediatrics recommendation that levels in school water fountains be no higher than 1 ppb.

At least six other states and the District of Columbia require schools to test for lead in drinking water, and the EPA is reviewing the Lead and Copper Rule, including requirements for lead testing frequency in schools and daycare centers.

Lead exposure at the school level typically comes from drinking fixtures compared to the full lines and pipes that can affect older homes and cities. Given the number of problem systems, the disproportionate impact on communities of color and a cost of up to $12,300 to replace just one water line, President Joe Biden proposed $45 billion in his infrastructure plan to replace lead pipes and service lines in drinking water systems nationwide.

Jennings and Latham said action at schools is a critical part of the solution because they have an aging infrastructure and face climate risks that will increase kids’ exposure. “Rising water temperatures, greater seasonal variability in precipitation, and more extreme weather events across the country due to climate change all have the potential to worsen lead levels in drinking water,” they wrote.

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