President’s Statement on Beginning Review and Declassification of 9/11 Documents, made Friday, is HERE.
For news stories Saturday on the order, click HERE.
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Cancer Rates of 9/11 First Responders: National Public Radio’s “Morning Edition” program today began what cohost Steve Inskeep said would be a week of reports on the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks. In the first, titled “A Study Says First Responders Survive Cancers at Higher Rates,” A. Martínez interviews NPR correspondent Allison Aubrey. Listen HERE.
In part of it, Elizabeth Cascio of the New York City Fire Department recalls the experience on Sept. 11 of “walking through six to 10 inches of concrete sand and literally the entire dust cloud that was in every direction. We were literally engulfed by it.” Some, including Cascio, were on the scene for weeks.
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A Special Times Look at TV 9/11 Specials: Today’s New York Times carries a piece by its chief television critic, James Poniewozik, titled “What Needs to Be Said About 9/11: TV should treat it as serious history, not just pay it homage.”
The wrap-up might well have been subtitled “. . . And What Doesn’t Need to Be Said,” which would match what the Times has left out of its coverage for the last 20 years, thus enabling other news organizations to do the same.
“Focusing on the emotion and heroism of one day,” Poniewozik notes, “avoids getting snared in everything that came after. It sticks to what we can all agree on.”
The specials are or will be on the History Channel, Discovery, CNN, Netflix, PBS, and HBO. Most are, indeed, studies in avoidance.
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He Helped Guide Payments to 9/11 Families: Today’s Springfield Republican salutes Attorney Kenneth R. Feinberg, who oversaw more than 900 hearings for the distribution of compensation payments to families of victims of the 9/11 attacks. In all, about 1,600 hearings were held and a total of $7.1 billion in federal funds was distributed from 2001 to 2003.
Reporter Ron Chimelis’s story is headlined “‘A patriotic undertaking’: UMass alum took charge of 9/11 compensation fund.” Subscribers to the newspaper and mass live.com can read the account HERE. It explains why the payments were unequal: They were based on rough percentages of the unequal financial losses families suffered.
Feinberg’s experience is described in much greater detail in his 2005 book What Is a Life Worth? A movie, “Worth,” starring Michael Keaton as the Compensation Fund special master, opened Friday in a limited number of theaters and on Netflix.
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9/11 and Covid-19 Were Killers for Lower Manhattan Businesses: Yestrday’s New York Times carried a report headlined “Where Towers Stood, Rebirth Grinds to a Halt,” by Matthew Haag and Patrick McGeehan. The page 1 story describes the financial toll suffered by restaurants, stores, hotels and other businesses in the district, beginning on Sept. 11, 2001, years of slow recovery for some of them, and a second crisis delivered by Covid-19 in early 2020.
— Mark Channing Miller