Contributed

A young boy who contracted an extremely rare brain-eating amoeba while swimming in a Northern California lake has died. He was 7. Late last month, David Pruitt of Tehama County was brought to the emergency room and then transferred to UC Davis Medical Center, where he was put on life-support with severe brain swelling, according to a GoFundMe page set up in his honor.

More than one million children didn’t show up for school — virtual or in-person — last year, according to a new analysis from researchers at Stanford University and The New York Times. Elementary students were most likely to go unaccounted for, with kindergarten enrollment dropping by 9.3%. The biggest declines were in neighborhoods just above or below the poverty line. “Just as the pandemic lay bare vast disparities in health care and income, it also hardened inequities in education, setting back some of the most vulnerable students before they spent even one day in a classroom,” write reporters Dana Goldstein and Alicia Parlapiano.

The aforementioned article "Facing Afghan Chaos, Biden Defends Exit" and the letters to the editor shown below were first published in The New York Times on August 17th.

As the Taliban seized control of Afghanistan, the president of the United States went into hiding. Biden’s most recent disappearing act in a moment of crisis proved once again that he’s not leading the nation and that America is without a commander-in-chief. But his belated and disgraceful address to the Nation served to highlight the 3 D’s that define the modern Democratic Party — dishonesty, delusion, and danger.

President Biden offered a defiant defense on Monday of his decision to withdraw troops from Afghanistan, blaming the swift collapse of the Afghan government and chaotic scenes at the Kabul airport on the refusal of the country’s military to stand and fight in the face of the Taliban advance.