JD Vance's Catholicism and some pieces worth your time on Lebanon, Afghanistan and the UK

Hello,

JD Vance’s journey from Christian evangelical to Catholic has been charted in this piece in The New York Times. In 2019, Vance was baptised and receive his first communion in a Dominican Order chapel in Cincinnati.

His conversion has been credited, in part, to two Dominican priests who both trained as lawyers and clerked with Diarmuid Fionntain O'Scannlain, a senior United States circuit judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.

The Portland-based conservative judge, who once ran for elected office as a Republican, is the son of Irish parents who both have strong links to the early 20th century Republican movement against British rule of Ireland.

Born in Sligo, O'Scannlain’s father was a member of the Irish Republican Brotherhood and was arrested in Manchester while buying guns from a German agent (not clear exactly when but around 1916 it seems). He was brought back to prison in Dublin, and managed to escape with his cellmate to Derry city up in northern Ireland where the two were hidden in an attic. It was while in-hiding that O'Scannlain’s father met his future wife, the daughter of the IRA chief for Derry.

O’Scannlain’s parents emigrated to New York where he was born and grew up speaking only Irish until he was 5-years-old. He describes in this interview for NYU getting lost in Queens as a child where his family lives and how the policeman couldn’t understand him as he was speaking Irish - “It turns out that the policeman who rescued me was Officer O’Flannigan, a good Irish-American himself, who was not able to detect that I was speaking the Irish language.”

I have some American pieces coming out over the next couple of weeks that I’ve been working on that I’ll be sharing here covering everything from AI teddy bears to the best Irish bar in the world.

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Some of my recent pieces (if anyone can’t access due to a paywall email me and I’ll send on an email with the piece):

1. Google and Meta struck secret ads deal to target teenagers, The Financial Times

2. Irish man serving on Ukrainian frontline missing, presumed dead, The Irish Times

3. Three years on: ‘I am impatiently waiting for the Taliban to be destroyed, I want to return to my homeland’, The Irish Times

4. With Eyes on Gaza, Israel Ramps Up Jerusalem Settlements, Inkstick Media

   

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Some pieces worth your time this week:

1. Hezbollah Fighters’ Stories as Told by Their Mothers by Dalal Mawad in New Lines (No paywall) - Amid the war brewing in Lebanon, they recall their sons and discuss 'martyrdom'

2. David Cameron sat on advice that there was breach of law in Gaza, officials say by Patrick Wintour and Kiran Stacey in The Guardian - The former foreign secretary is said to have been advised on the risk of UK complicity

3. ‘Dangerous and un-American’: new recording of JD Vance’s dark vision of women and immigration by Jason Wilson in The Guardian - Trump’s running mate rants against feminism, immigrants and Ilhan Omar in a newly unearthed podcast from 2021