RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/mexico-city-metro-system-overpass-collapses-killing-at-least-13-people-11620106656?mod=world_minor_pos1

MEXICO CITY—An elevated section of the Mexico City metro system collapsed and sent a subway car plunging toward a busy boulevard late Monday, killing at least 20 people and injuring about 70, officials said.

A crane was working to hold up one subway car left dangling on the collapsed section so that emergency workers could enter to check the car to see if anyone was still trapped. Mayor Claudia Sheinbaum said. She said 49 of the injured were hospitalized and seven were in serious condition and undergoing surgery.

Ms. Sheinbaum said a motorist had been pulled alive from a car that was trapped on the roadway below. Dozens of rescuers continued searching through wreckage from the collapsed, preformed concrete structure.

“There are unfortunately children among the dead,” Ms. Sheinbaum said, without specifying how many.

The overpass was more than 16 feet above the road in the southside borough of Tlahuac, but the train ran above a concrete median strip, which apparently lessened the casualties among motorists on the road below.

“A support beam gave way,” Ms. Sheinbaum said, adding that the beam collapsed just as the train passed over it.

Rescue efforts were briefly interrupted at midnight because the partially dangling train was very weak.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/i-grieve-for-my-native-india-11620078871?mod=opinion_lead_pos7

I’m an immigrant, happy and assimilated. I pay closer attention to America than I do to other parts of the world. This isn’t only because I live here. Settling in a country calls for integration that is meticulous, not just heartfelt. That doesn’t mean that I wall myself off from the world. Like many immigrants, I also pay near-obsessive attention to the land of my birth.

Previous immigrant generations needed to erase their old selves to become American. You were more American by being less Italian, or by letting the Greek or Serb in you dwindle. But America now demands less. I’ve never felt pressed to forget India, where I was born. Even if I’d wanted to, I wouldn’t be able, because of technology. An immigrant now can never let go of the country of his birth.

These days have been suffused with India. I’ve spent my waking hours reading and watching news, talking to people by telephone, taking in tweets and Facebook posts, all of which describe the enormity of India’s pandemic collapse. A decade ago, I spoke to Liberian immigrants who followed from afar that country’s battle with Ebola, and also to people from Haiti as they wrestled with the earthquake’s aftermath. They spoke to me of their impotence (at being unable to help), their guilt (being in America while relatives perished from precisely the sort of fate the immigrant moved here to avoid), and their gut-churning sense of distance from loved ones who’d been sickened or buried under rubble in Port-au-Prince.

I’m in close touch with my family. I speak daily to my mother, who is isolating at home in Delhi, and to my sister, who’s raising her Zoom-schooled sons in that city and doing her job as an elementary-school teacher. My brother works as an editor, putting out a publication whose reporters go out, masked and tireless, writing up the grim news they see. A part of that news was the death of his own wife’s father.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/democracies-abetted-irans-election-to-a-u-n-womens-rights-post/?utm_source=

The election of Iran, China, and other countries with delinquent human-rights records to the U.N.’s Commission on the Status of Women last month kicked off an international whodunnit.

According to the NGO U.N. Watch, at least five Western democracies eligible to vote on commission membership would have needed to support Tehran’s bid. Meanwhile, the U.S. government called the development “troubling” but declined to issue a sharper condemnation.

Human-rights advocates blame this ambiguous stance on the Biden administration’s efforts to reenter the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, as ongoing talks in Vienna get closer to producing an agreement to jumpstart the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. “The Biden administration has joined Canada and Europe in a most disciplined reticence to criticize the Islamic Republic’s mounting repression, in the hope that the lack of scrutiny will be seen by the regime as another concession to curb its nuclear program,” said Marian Memarsadeghi, a senior fellow at the Macdonald Laurier Institute.

The problems with Tehran’s participation in any international entity involving women’s equality should be self-evident. At a Monday morning U.N. Watch press conference that focused on Iran’s election to the commission, panelists, including Memarsadeghi and Shaparak Shajarizadeh, an activist who was jailed twice and assaulted for speaking out against Iran’s mandatory hijab law, pointed to Iran’s manifest hostility to women, including the fact that the age of marriage for girls is 13 and that domestic violence and marital rape are not criminally punishable. (Read more on this from Isaac Schorr.)