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from The Inlander
Media/News Company in Spokane, WA
Media/News Company in Spokane, WA
Despite its outdoor setting, and some hopeful optimism earlier this year that big, annual events slated for the last half of the year might go off without a pandemic-caused hitch, organizers of Pig Out in the Park announced this afternoon that the 2021 event won't be happening after all. The quickly spreading delta variant of COVID-19 is to blame. This year's run, set be the fair-style food fest's 41st iteration, was set for Sept. 1-6 at Riverfront Park. Each year, Pig Out hosts more than 50 food vendors, both local and not, along with adult beverage gardens and free, live music and entertainment offered each day. Pig Out in the Park was also canceled in 2020. Pig Out hopes to return in 2022 over its usual Labor Day Weekend slot, from Aug. 31 through Sept. 5.
President Joe Biden offered a defiant defense on Monday of his decision to withdraw troops from Afghanistan, returning to the White House from a weekend at Camp David amid chaotic scenes at the Kabul airport following the collapse of the Afghanistan government to the Taliban. Speaking to the American people from the ornate East Room, Biden stood by his decision to end the longest war in United States history and rejected criticism from allies and adversaries about the events of the weekend that left hundreds of Afghans desperately running after military planes as they ferried Americans to safety out of the country’s capital. “The choice I had to make as your president was either to follow through on the agreement to drawdown our forces,” Biden said, “or escalating the conflict and sending thousands more American troops back into combat and lurching into the third decade of conflict.” He added: “I stand squarely behind my decision.” Biden acknowledged the truth told by dramatic images over the past 72 hours: a frantic scramble to evacuate the U.S. Embassy in Kabul in the face of advancing Taliban fighters, which has drawn grim comparisons to the country’s defeated retreat from Saigon at the end of the Vietnam War.
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from The New Yorker
LEFT BIAS, HIGH, magazine in New YorkThe real challenge isn’t being right but knowing how wrong you might be.
from The Spokesman-Review
Newspaper in Spokane, Washington
A defiant President Joe Biden rejected blame Monday for chaotic scenes of Afghans clinging to U.S. military planes in Kabul in a desperate bid to flee their home country after the Taliban’s easy victory over an Afghan military that America and NATO allies had spent two decades trying to build.
A food assistance program used by more than 42 million needy Americans will substantially and permanently increase benefits starting next month, a record boost, just as the pandemic emergency expansion expires. The Biden administration on Monday announced it had approved the change that will boost the average food stamp benefits by more than 25% above pre-pandemic levels. The average monthly benefit that participants in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program received before the pandemic was $121 per person, per month. Starting Oct. 1, participants on average will receive an additional $36 per person, per month.
The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, an agency of the Interior Department, on Monday declared the first-ever water shortage from a river that serves 40 million people in the West, triggering cuts to some Arizona farmers next year amid a gripping drought. Water levels at the largest reservoir on the Colorado River – Lake Mead – have fallen to record lows. Along its perimeter, a white “bathtub ring” of minerals outlines where the high water line once stood, underscoring the acute water challenges for a region facing a growing population and a drought that is being worsened by hotter, drier weather brought on by climate change.
At just short of 20 years, the now-ending U.S. combat mission in Afghanistan was America’s longest war. Ordinary Americans tended to forget about it, and it received measurably less oversight from Congress than the Vietnam War did. But its death toll is in the many tens of thousands. And because the U.S. borrowed most of the money to pay for it, generations of Americans will be burdened by the cost of paying it off.
Cardinal Raymond Burke, one of the Catholic Church’s most outspoken conservatives and a vaccine skeptic, said he has COVID-19 and his staff said he is breathing through a ventilator. Burke tweeted Aug. 10 that he had caught the virus, was resting comfortably and was receiving excellent medical care.
Four presidents share responsibility for the missteps in Afghanistan that accumulated over two decades. But only President Joe Biden will be the face of the war’s chaotic, violent conclusion. The president fought that reality Monday as he spread blame for the Taliban’s swift and complete recapture of Afghanistan. He pointed to a previous agreement brokered by then-President Donald Trump, expressed frustration with Afghan President Ashraf Ghani and lamented the performance of Afghan national security forces. Republicans overwhelmingly criticized Biden and he found few vocal backers among fellow Democrats. The collapse of the Afghan government is the biggest foreign policy crisis of Biden’s young presidency, recalling setbacks for past presidents such as the withdrawal from Vietnam and the botched Bay of Pigs invasion in Cuba. The reverberations of the Taliban’s success were startling, endangering Afghan women and girls, posing new security threats and threatening to undercut global views of America’s reliability.
Across the nation’s deeply religious Bible Belt, a region beset by soaring infection rates from the fast-spreading delta variant of the virus, churches and pastors are both helping and hurting in the campaign to get people vaccinated against COVID-19. Some are hosting vaccination clinics and praying for more inoculations, while others are issuing fiery anti-vaccine sermons from their pulpits. Most are staying mum on the issue, something experts see as a missed opportunity in a swath of the country where church is the biggest spiritual and social influence for many communities.
Thousands of Afghans rushed into Kabul’s main airport Monday, some so desperate to escape the Taliban that they held onto a military jet as it took off and plunged to their deaths. At least seven people died in the chaos, U.S. officials said, as America’s longest war ended with its enemy the victor. The crowds came while the Taliban enforced their rule over the capital of 5 million people after a lightning advance across the country that took just over a week to dethrone the country’s Western-backed government. There were no major reports of abuses or fighting, but many residents stayed home and remained fearful after the insurgents’ takeover saw prisons emptied and armories looted.
Firefighters battling flames in Northern California forests girded Monday for new bouts of windy weather, and a utility warned thousands of customers it might cut their electricity to prevent new fires from igniting if gusts damage power lines. Conditions that suppressed the huge Dixie Fire overnight were expected to give way late in the day to winds that could push flames toward mountain communities in a region where drought and summer heat have turned vegetation to tinder.
U.S. experts are expected to recommend COVID-19 vaccine boosters for all Americans, regardless of age, eight months after they received their second dose of the shot to ensure lasting protection against the coronavirus as the delta variant spreads across the country.
A wildfire raced through more than 6,000 acres Monday east of Ford and filled the horizon north of Spokane with a wall of smoke. Fire officials called for the immediate evacuations of Ford and several communities as fire threatened hundreds of buildings. Residents gathered their animals, belongings and farming equipment to avoid what they feared could be a worst-case scenario as strong steady winds and gusts of 30 miles per hour pushed what started as a brush fire Sunday afternoon.
In the early 1990s, trail advocates began to eye a pair of old railbeds in Idaho. The first was a 15-mile stretch of right of way over St. Paul Pass on the Montana-Idaho border. The Milwaukee Road was one of three transcontinental rail lines to cross the northern tier of the country, but it was constructed about 25 years after its competitors and struggled to attract freight. What it lacked in freight traffic, though, it gained in scenery, which it used to lure passengers aboard its trains, including the most famous, the Olympian Hiawatha. The passenger train stopped running in 1961, and the rail line was abandoned 20 years later. Parts of the railroad were acquired by the U.S. Forest Service, which opened the section between Taft Tunnel and Pearson as the Route of the Hiawatha in 1992. The other abandoned rail line was a branch of the Union Pacific Railroad that crossed the northern panhandle to serve mines there. When the railroad stopped running in 1993, state and federal agencies discovered the right of way was contaminated because it had been built using hazardous mining tailings. A cleanup was ordered, but because the route was so long, only some of the most toxic materials were removed, and the rest was capped in place with asphalt – perfect for a trail. The 73-mile-long Trail of the Coeur d’Alenes was opened in 2004. Both trails became instant favorites, and in 2010, they were inducted together into the Rails-to-Trails Conservancy’s Rail-Trail Hall of Fame.
After more than 35 years in downtown Spokane, the Crosswalk Youth Shelter is planning to move east. Volunteers of America unveiled plans and launched a fundraising campaign this week in support of a new 45,000-square-foot shelter near Spokane Community College. And while the location is new, the goal is the same – prevent homeless kids from becoming homeless adults. With a projected opening in 2023, the new Crosswalk shelter will have double the capacity and an array of amenities not available in its current space on Second Avenue. ... Planned for an empty lot at 3024 East Mission Avenue, the shelter will be easily accessible from Spokane Transit Authority’s upcoming City Line, which will provide rapid bus service between downtown and Spokane Community College.
Spokane shelter providers are imploring elected leaders to maintain a COVID-19 isolation facility as outbreaks are on the rise among people who are homeless. The agreement allowing the Spokane Regional Health District to operate an isolation facility at the My Place Hotel in Spokane Valley, which first opened last year, is set to expire at the end of the month. The hotel will not be an option moving forward, and health district leaders have not revealed where new isolation facilities will be after August.
They told them they had bad blood. What they actually had was syphilis, but the U.S. Public Health Service never shared that diagnosis with the almost 400 African American men, most of them poor and undereducated sharecroppers, they recruited for a secret study at Tuskegee Institute in 1932. Indeed, health officials did little for those men for 40 years, except watch the progression of the disease. ... People often point to the so-called Tuskegee Experiment to explain why African Americans tend to mistrust the medical establishment, but while what happened in Alabama was obscene, it was hardly unique. To the contrary, from experimental procedures on the vaginas of enslaved women to grave robbers stealing Black bodies for use in medical schools, to forced sterilization in the name of eugenics, to studies revealing that white doctors think Black people feel less pain, to new mother Serena Williams having to battle doctors and nurses who ignored her as she suffered a life-threatening medical emergency, Black people have been routinely betrayed by this profession whose prime directive is, “First, do no harm.” So the mistrust is grounded in hard experience. I can speak to this at first hand. In recent years, I’ve lost a brother-in-law and a cousin after they declined to follow medical advice. Another brother-in-law has heart issues – and trusts his doctors about like he would a $4 bill. I also have two sons and a grandson who refuse to take the COVID vaccine. I am scared to death for them. Most of the public discussion of vaccine hesitancy is dominated by Republicans behaving badly, the clownish people who think vaccines will magnetize them or let Bill Gates track their movements. But beyond political party, race (along with age) has emerged as a major predictor of skepticism. A recent Economist/YouGov poll found that less than half of Black and Hispanic adults have been fully vaccinated, compared with well over 60% of white ones. And mistrust is a major reason, though not the only reason, for that disparity. ... My boys and I, we do this dance. They give me their reasons for not getting the shot, I give them rebuttals. ... And while we dance, 616,000 Americans lie dead, a disproportionate number of them people of color. There’s nothing wrong with skepticism. Skepticism can be healthy, can even save your life. But skepticism can also make you blind. So this is me begging my sons and all our sons and daughters: Just take the damn shot. Look around. People who’ve done that are not dying. People who haven’t are. That’s a fact. Please don’t be so skeptical that you can’t see what might save your life. I’m not asking you to trust your doctor. I am asking you to trust your eyes.
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