2023 in the News
News 12 New Jersey
Former Navy SEALs paddle from Connecticut to Jersey City in remembrance of the 1st Responders and Victims
A group of former Navy SEALs honored victims of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks this weekend by paddling canoes from Connecticut to Jersey City.
Twenty members of the group called “Beyond The Teams” got into two large canoes in Stamford, Connecticut on Saturday and arrived in Jersey City on Sunday.
Their journey also served as a fundraiser, with the proceeds that will go toward helping formerly homeless veterans with the Jericho Project.
The fight to get American allies out of Afghanistan continues.
We are not Ordinary People
Article in the Atlantic by George Packer
There are few ways of escape from the Taliban’s Afghanistan. One of them crosses the mountainous eastern border with Pakistan in a town called Torkham. Last September, Safia Noori; her husband, Fakhruddin Elham; and their four-month-old daughter, Victoria, traveled to Torkham and joined a throng of Afghans waiting to be allowed across by Taliban guards. The day was hot; the baby was crying; the crowd pressed in. Noori and Elham, in their early 20s, were carrying just two small bags, one with the baby’s clothes, the other with their own. They had sold everything else, including the furniture and handmade curtains and bedspread that made up Noori’s wedding dowry, to buy passports. They hadn’t seen their parents since the fall of Afghanistan a year before. As former special-forces soldiers who had fought alongside Americans, and as a mixed couple—he is Tajik, she Hazara, a persecuted Shia minority—they were prime targets for revenge killing by Afghanistan’s new rulers. They had spent the past year in flight from town to town, safe house to safe house. At times, Noori later told me, she’d considered suicide, even after she knew that she was pregnant. Only the baby’s birth gave her the strength to keep going…