Friday, October 15, 2021

In the news, Friday, September 3, 2021


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SEP 02      INDEX      SEP 04
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from The Spokesman-Review
Newspaper in Spokane, Washington

U.S. wildfire managers have started shifting from seasonal to full-time firefighting crews to deal with what has become a year-round wildfire season as climate change has made the American West warmer and drier. The crews also could remove brush and other hazardous fuels when not battling blazes. The U.S. Bureau of Land Management said Thursday that it’s adding 76 firefighters and support personnel to its 3,400-person firefighting workforce. Additionally, 428 firefighters will change from part-time seasonal work to either full-time seasonal or permanent work with health and retirement benefits.

One obituary is a portrait of a life. Several taken together form a portrait of a community. Recent obituaries tell the stories of a chef and a school teacher, a political pioneer and a Kaiser supervisor, a small-town doctor and a big-town journalist.

The people of the Spokane region are being overcharged for public transit. You might be surprised to hear that, but the facts demonstrate it’s true. Statistics from nearly every database show ridership on the decline. Public data shows ridership for Spokane Transit Authority has steadily dropped while taxes paid by area working families to support transit continue to increase. Numbers for the five years leading up to COVID (2015 to 2019) show STA ridership fell by 8 percent, according to the Federal Transit Administration. The numbers were even more dramatic last year. It’s not a surprise that COVID negatively impacted ridership in 2020, resulting in a 42 percent decrease. But the long-term numbers tell a more troubling story. Looking at the first four months of 2021 and comparing it to the same period in 2019 pre-COVID, ridership at STA is about 35 percent lower.

Steven Hobaica wasn’t necessarily surprised that the findings matched his hypothesis. Hobaica co-authored a study published this summer examining the correlation between the political leanings of a school district and levels of bullying against LGBTQ+ students. To do so, authors used the 2018 Washington State Healthy Youth Survey, which was completed by 49,555 public school students representing 227 of the state’s 295 school districts, along with school district voting records from the 2016 presidential election. The Healthy Youth Survey was completed by students in eighth, 10th and 12th grade during a school day in 2018, according to the study, with 20% of participants identifying as LGBTQ+. The findings, published in the journal Analyses of Social Issues and Public Policy, show that LGBTQ+ students in school districts with more votes for President Donald Trump during the 2016 election reported more bullying. The survey data in general found that bullying was associated with greater psychological distress – such as anxiety, depression and suicidal tendencies – for all students, even more so for LGBTQ+ students.

Opponents of a sweeping Republican elections overhaul in Texas sued Gov. Greg Abbott on Friday, going to court even before he had signed into law changes that would further tighten the state’s already strict voting rules. Two lawsuits, filed in separate federal courts in Texas, are believed to be the first to challenge the far-reaching measure known as Senate Bill 1, which the Legislature approved this week after Democrats ended months of protests over changes that include new limits on voting hours and criminal penalties for obstructing partisan poll watchers.

President Joe Biden’s plans to start delivery of booster shots by Sept. 20 for most Americans who received the COVID-19 vaccines are facing new complications that could delay the availability of third doses for those who received the Moderna vaccine, administration officials said Friday. Biden announced last month that his administration was planning for boosters to be available for all Americans who received the mRNA vaccines in an effort to provide more enduring protection against the coronavirus, pending approvals from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration. Those agencies, though, are awaiting critical data before signing off on the third doses, with Moderna’s vaccine increasingly seen as unlikely to make the Sept. 20 milestone.

Health experts and medical groups are pushing to stamp out the growing use of a decades-old parasite drug to treat COVID-19, warning that it can cause harmful side effects and that there’s little evidence it helps. With a fourth wave of infections, more Americans are turning to ivermectin, a cheap drug used to kill worms and other parasites in humans and animals.

Better weather has slowed the growth of the huge California wildfire near Lake Tahoe resort communities, authorities said Friday. The Caldor Fire remained only a few miles from the city of South Lake Tahoe, which was emptied of 22,000 residents days ago, along with casinos and shops across the state line in Nevada, but no significant fire activity occurred since Thursday, officials said. ... The fire had been driven northeast on a course leading to South Lake Tahoe for days by southwestern winds, but that pattern ended this week. Calmer winds and increased humidity Thursday and Friday helped crews increase containment of the blaze to 29%.

President Joe Biden on Friday directed the declassification of certain documents related to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, a supportive gesture to victims’ families who have long sought the records in hopes of implicating the Saudi government. The order, coming little more than a week before the 20th anniversary of the attacks, is a significant moment in a yearslong tussle between the government and the families over what classified information about the run-up to the attacks could be made public.

At least 50,000 Afghans are expected to be admitted into the United States following the fall of Kabul as part of an “enduring commitment” to help people who aided the American war effort and others who are particularly vulnerable under Taliban rule, the secretary of homeland security said Friday.

As fearful Lake Tahoe residents packed up belongings and fled a raging wildfire burning toward the California-Nevada border, some encountered an unexpected obstacle: price gouging.

Power should be restored to New Orleans by the middle of next week, utility officials said Friday, and sheriff’s deputies warned people returning to communities outside the city to come equipped like survivalists because of the lack of basic services in the aftermath of Hurricane Ida.

Less than a week after Hurricane Ida battered the Gulf Coast, President Joe Biden walked the streets of a hardhit Louisiana neighborhood on Friday and told local residents, “I know you’re hurting, I know you’re hurting.” Biden pledged robust federal assistance to get people back on their feet and said the government already had distributed $100 million directly to individuals in the state in $500 checks to give them a first slice of critical help. Many people, he said, don’t know what help is available because they can’t get cellphone service.

Washington health officials are working with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and other national organizations to conduct a pilot study on surveillance of breakthrough COVID-19 cases. The state will now use immunization records and match them to positive COVID-19 cases in order to identify breakthrough cases. Previously, the state was relying on local health disease investigators to find out whether or not a person was two weeks past their second dose to verify that they had an actual breakthrough case. Now the state’s pairing immunization records systems with positive COVID-19 case data to do that work.

With Oregon getting an additional congressional seat based on population growth, Republican and Democratic state lawmakers on Friday presented dueling visions on where that new district should be. ... Four of Oregon’s House seats in Congress are currently held by Democrats while one has long been held by a Republican. The Democrats’ map says new congressional District 6 should be south of Portland, Oregon’s biggest city, and west of Interstate 5. Republicans also put it south of Portland, but on the east side of the interstate. The new district would be safely Democratic under the Democrats’ map and competitive under the Republican map, according to an analysis by FiveThirtyEight, a website that gets its name from the number of Electoral College members and which focuses on opinion poll analysis, politics and other topics.

Idaho hit a grim COVID-19 trifecta this week, reaching record numbers of emergency room visits, hospitalizations and ICU patients. Medical experts say the deeply conservative state will likely see 30,000 new infections a week by mid-September. With a critical shortage of hospital beds and staff and one of the nation’s lowest vaccination rates, Idaho health providers are growing desperate and preparing to follow crisis standards of care, which call for giving scarce resources to patients most likely to survive.

It’s been five years since I first speculated in this space about the end of American democracy. In doing so, I felt like a man climbing out on an especially creaky limb. But as hyperpartisanship rose to ever more bizarre extremes, as the misinformation crisis left ever more people babbling angry gobbledygook, as voter suppression resurrected the zombie of Jim Crow and as Donald Trump swore an oath he didn’t mean, that limb began to feel like bedrock. Even so, I struggled with the obvious follow-up question. If America faced an existential threat, what form would it take? I thought: maybe a newly energized secession movement. Or a fascist regime rising from the ruins of a hollowed-out democracy. ... The radical right has explicitly shown us and told us what they plan to do. I propose we take them at their word — take the threat seriously. And act accordingly.

Skyview High School, Alki Middle School and Chinook Elementary School were placed on lockdown Friday when people protesting Washington’s mask mandate in schools tried to get inside the high school, according to Vancouver Public Schools. Students and staff were placed on lockdown at around 11:15 a.m. for about an hour, according to district spokeswoman Pat Nuzzo, when about 12 people approached Skyview’s entrance. School security and administrators kept the people out of the building, Nuzzo said.

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In the news, Thursday, September 2, 2021


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SEP 01      INDEX      SEP 03
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from The Spokesman-Review
Newspaper in Spokane, Washington

Before we can rebuild aging infrastructure, we need to rebuild respect for the men and women who make it happen. It takes apprentices who invest as much or more time and effort into learning their professions as most undergraduates put into pursuing a four year college degree.

The surge of COVID-19 cases in Washington might be slowing down, and state health officials hope this means a plateau is in sight. Hospitalizations, however, are not projected to ease, and while the state is not at a “crisis” point yet, hospitals continue to be stretched incredibly thin. ... As of Wednesday there were 1,565 patients being treated for COVID-19 in hospitals statewide, a record high. In the Inland Northwest, across four Spokane hospitals and Kootenai Health, 314 patients are hospitalized with the virus.

With the continued surge of the delta variant, efficient and readily available COVID-19 testing may no longer be a guarantee in Spokane County. Previously, local providers like CHAS offered drive-through testing at the Spokane Arena, then at Spokane Community College, along with vaccines. But those mass sites closed earlier this summer when demand for the vaccines dwindled and case rates dropped significantly. Then last month, the delta variant led to a massive and now sustained surge in COVID activity and demand for testing resources increased not only locally, but statewide. Health care providers are still offering testing, but not on a large scale, in part due to staffing shortages impacting hospitals and health care systems statewide, Spokane County interim Health Officer Dr. Francisco Velazquez told reporters Wednesday.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has appealed a judge’s ruling that the governor exceeded his authority by ordering school boards not to impose strict mask requirements on students to combat the spread of the coronavirus. The governor’s lawyers took their case Thursday to the 1st District Court of Appeal in Tallahassee. DeSantis wants the appeals court to reverse last week’s decision by Leon County Circuit Judge John C. Cooper, which essentially gave Florida’s 67 school boards the power to impose a student mask mandate without parental consent. Cooper’s ruling was automatically stayed by the appeal.

Republican states that have passed increasingly tough abortion restrictions only to see them blocked by the federal courts have a new template in an unusually written Texas law that represents the most far-reaching curb on abortions in nearly half a century. On Thursday, Republican lawmakers in at least half a dozen states said they planned to introduce bills using the Texas law as a model, hoping it provides a pathway to enacting the kind of abortion crackdown they have sought for years.

The COVID-19 pandemic has created a nurse staffing crisis that is forcing many U.S. hospitals to pay top dollar to get the help they need to handle the crush of patients this summer. The problem, health leaders say, is twofold: Nurses are quitting or retiring, exhausted or demoralized by the crisis. And many are leaving for lucrative temporary jobs with traveling-nurse agencies that can pay $5,000 or more a week.

Even before a strict abortion ban took effect in Texas this week, clinics in neighboring states were fielding growing numbers of calls from women desperate for options. The Texas law, allowed to stand in a decision Thursday by the U.S. Supreme Court, bans abortions once medical professionals can detect cardiac activity, typically around six weeks. In a highly unusual twist, enforcement will be done by private citizens who can sue anyone they believe is violating the law.

Explainer: What to know about the new Texas abortion law

Centrist Sen. Joe Manchin said Thursday that Congress should take a “strategic pause” on more spending, warning that he does not support President Joe Biden’s plans for a sweeping $3.5 trillion effort to rebuild and reshape the economy. The West Virginia Democrat’s pointed opposition was stronger than his past statements and taps into a grab-bag of arguments over inflation, national security and other concerns to deny Biden and his party a crucial vote on the emerging package. The timing of his comments comes as lawmakers are laboring behind the scenes to draft the legislation ahead of this month’s deadlines.

President Joe Biden on Thursday pledged robust federal help for the Northeastern and Gulf states battered by Hurricane Ida and for Western states beset by wildfires — with the catastrophes serving as deadly reminders that the “climate crisis” has arrived.

President Joe Biden on Thursday blasted the Supreme Court’s decision not to block a new Texas law banning most abortions in the state and directed federal agencies to do what they can to “insulate women and providers” from the impact. Hours earlier, in the middle of the night, a deeply divided high court allowed the law to remain in force. It is the nation’s biggest curb to abortion rights since the court announced in its landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that women have a constitutional right to abortion.

Still reeling from the European Union’s shortcomings in Afghanistan, officials from the 27-nation bloc on Thursday discussed ways to improve their response to future crises and not be so reliant on the U.S. “Afghanistan has shown that the deficiency in our strategic autonomy comes with a price,” EU top diplomat Josep Borrell said following talks in Slovenia with defense ministers that also involved NATO and UN officials. “And that the only way forward is to combine our forces and to strengthen not only our capacity, but also our will to act.”

NASA’s newest Mars rover may have successfully collected its first rock sample for return to Earth, after last month’s attempt came up empty. The Perseverance rover’s chief engineer, Adam Steltzner, called it a perfect core sample. ... But NASA later said it was awaiting more photos before declaring success although the “team is confident that the sample is in the tube.” A month ago, Perseverance drilled into much softer rock, and the sample crumbled and didn’t get in the titanium tube. The rover drove a half-mile to a better spot to try again.

Better weather on Thursday helped the battle against a huge California wildfire threatening communities around Lake Tahoe, but fire commanders warned firefighters to be prepared for ongoing dangers. Strong winds and dry conditions that drove the Caldor Fire east through high elevations of the Sierra Nevada for days faded, sparing for now the largest city of a recreational gem that straddles the California-Nevada state line. Thousands were forced to flee South Lake Tahoe earlier this week. “I feel like we are truly the luckiest community in the entire world right now. I’m so incredibly happy,” said Mayor Tamara Wallace, who evacuated to Truckee, California. But wind gusts were likely in some areas, and the forest was still extremely dry, officials warned. The fire is pushing on several fronts, threatening multiple communities.

A monthslong campaign by the Republican Party, fueled in part by the false narrative of widespread fraud in last year’s presidential election, has led to a wave of new voting laws that will tighten access to the ballot for millions of Americans. The restrictions especially target voting methods that have been rising in popularity across the country, erecting hurdles to mail balloting and early voting that saw explosive growth during the pandemic. More than 40% of all voters last fall cast mail ballots, a record.

Commercial flights resumed in New Orleans and power returned to parts of the business district Thursday, four days after Hurricane Ida slammed into the Gulf Coast, but electricity, drinking water and fuel remained scarce across much of a sweltering Louisiana. Meanwhile, the remnants of the system walloped parts of the Northeast, dumping record-breaking rain in a region that had not expected a serious blow and killing at least 46 people from Maryland to Connecticut. Eleven people in New York City drowned in basement apartments.

An intergovernmental conference has taken early steps toward drawing up an agreement to curb plastic pollution and marine litter around the world, which can choke off sea life, harm food safety and coastal tourism, and contribute to climate change. A draft resolution presented by Peru and Rwanda, and backed by the European Union and several other countries, at the end of a two-day Geneva conference on Thursday amounts to a procedural step, but one that aims to build momentum for drawing up language as early as next year on a binding global deal. The draft, which mostly aims to set up a committee to negotiate the language of a possible accord, is expected to be considered at a U.N. Environment Assembly meeting in February.

House Democrats have promoted Republican Rep. Liz Cheney to vice chairwoman of a committee investigating the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection, placing her in a leadership spot on the panel as some Republicans are threatening to oust her from the GOP conference for participating. Cheney, a fierce critic of former President Donald Trump, has remained defiant amid the criticism from her own party, insisting that Congress must probe the Capitol attack, in which hundreds of Trump’s supporters violently pushed past police, broke into the building and interrupted the certification of Joe Biden’s presidential election victory.

A stunned East Coast faced a rising death toll, surging rivers and tornado damage Thursday after the remnants of Hurricane Ida walloped the region with record-breaking rain, drowning at least 46 people in their homes and cars. In a region that had been warned about potentially deadly flash flooding but hadn’t braced for such a blow from the no-longer-hurricane, the storm killed people from Maryland to Connecticut on Wednesday night and Thursday morning.

After a wildfire blazed through a once-picturesque nature reserve near the French Riviera, winemakers who grow the region’s celebrated crop are taking stock of the damage. Rows of charred grapevines stand next to a vast expanse of steaming black vegetation devastated by the fire, which raged for a week in late August. The blaze left two people dead, injured 27 and forced some 10,000 people to evacuate around the Var region, not far from the famed coastal resort of Saint-Tropez. The region is well-known for its Cotes de Provence wines. At least one small wine estate saw its vines completely destroyed. And the grapes that survived may be too smoke-damaged to produce a sellable wine.

Qatar’s top diplomat said Thursday that experts are racing to reopen Kabul’s airport but warned it was not clear when flights would resume, with many still desperate to flee Afghanistan’s new Taliban leaders amid concerns over what their rule will hold. In the wake of their rapid takeover, the Taliban have sought to calm those fears, including pledging to let women and girls attend school and allow people to travel freely. But many are skeptical, and Britain’s foreign minister stressed the importance of engaging with the new rulers to test their promises.

Angela Merkel will leave office as one of modern Germany’s longest-serving leaders and a global diplomatic heavyweight, with a legacy defined by her management of a succession of crises that shook a fragile Europe rather than any grand visions for her own country. In 16 years at the helm of Europe’s biggest economy, Merkel did end military conscription, set Germany on course for a future without nuclear and fossil-fueled power, enable the legalization of same-sex marriage, introduce a national minimum wage and benefits encouraging fathers to look after young children, among other things.

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In the news, Wednesday, September 1, 2021


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AUG 31      INDEX      SEP 02
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from The Spokesman-Review
Newspaper in Spokane, Washington

A federal bankruptcy judge gave conditional approval Wednesday to a sweeping, potentially $10 billion plan submitted by OxyContin maker Purdue Pharma to settle a mountain of lawsuits over its role in the opioid crisis that has killed a half-million Americans over the past two decades. Under the settlement, the Sackler family will give up ownership of the company and contribute $4.5 billion. But the Sacklers will be shielded from any future lawsuits over opioids. The drug maker itself will be reorganized into a new company with a board appointed by public officials and will funnel its profits into government-led efforts to prevent and treat addiction. Also, the settlement sets up a compensation fund that will pay some victims of drugs an expected $3,500 to $48,000 each. After an all-day hearing in which he analyzed the plan’s pros and cons for a nonstop 6½ hours, U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Robert Drain said he would approve it as long as two relatively small changes were made. If so, he said, he will formally enter the decision on Thursday. ... State and local governments came to support the plan overwhelmingly, if grudgingly in many cases. But nine states and others had opposed it, largely because of the protections granted to the Sackler family. The attorneys general of Connecticut, the District of Columbia and state of Washington immediately announced they will either appeal the ruling or explore the possibility of doing so.

White House officials are outlining plans to build and restore more than 2 million homes, a response to the volcanic rise in housing prices over the past year. Millions of Americans are getting priced out of ownership or stuck spending the bulk of their income on rent.

About one year ago, schools in North Carolina opened for in-person instruction. Some followed a program of strict pandemic protocols – strict mask wearing, distancing and hand-washing – and some did not. A team of Duke University researchers tracked infections in the mask-wearing schools, compared them to community spread at the time, and found “extremely limited” secondary transmission in the 11 school districts that followed the protocols, even as case rates were high in the surrounding community.

Travelers who are fully vaccinated have found their status the key to entering countries, dining indoors, seeing shows and reclaiming some level of normalcy during the pandemic. But with the Biden administration’s announcement that booster shots will be offered widely starting Sept. 20, Americans might be wondering if future travel plans should revolve around an extra jab.

Our new-found and vigorously asserted right not to wear a mask to combat COVID 19 is prompting me to advocacy on another front. I grew up in South Africa, where we drive on the left. And as I talk to others who learned to drive on the left, and would be comfortable doing what comes more naturally to us, I increasingly realize it’s time to claim our “right to go left.”

The delta variant’s transmissibility has led to more people, including children and teens, testing positive for the virus as Labor Day approaches, and health officials are asking people to take safety precautions over the holiday weekend. Earlier this week, six children were hospitalized with COVID-19 in Spokane. ... The numbers, while low, indicate an increase in young people being hospitalized with the virus. During the winter surge, it was often the case that one child or teen would be hospitalized at a time for the virus. Case counts overall are steadily increasing as the three-day weekend approaches, and health officials are asking people to gather safely by going outdoors, wearing masks and limiting the number of people at gatherings.

A Texas ban on abortions after a fetal heartbeat can be detected went into effect Wednesday, spurring worries in the state of Washington that such restrictive laws could trigger a domino effect on abortion access elsewhere. Early Thursday Eastern time, the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that the state’s ban can stay in place, meaning Texas doctors who perform an abortion after they detect cardiac activity in a fetus could face a $10,000 lawsuit from any private citizen. With Chief Justice John Roberts joining the three dissenting liberal justices, the Texas ban spurred big-picture questions about ripple effects on abortion access throughout the nation. Though Washington state legislators codified the right to abortion in the state constitution, Vice President of Public Affairs at Planned Parenthood of Greater Washington and North Idaho Paul Dillon said the Texas law could have a domino effect on access to reproductive services if the Supreme Court overturns the 1973 Roe v. Wade case.

The federal government expects U.S. mortality rates to be elevated by 15% over pre-pandemic norms in 2021 and not return to normal levels until 2023, according to a report released Tuesday by the Trustees of the Social Security and Medicare programs. The trustees concluded that these elevated mortality rates, along with lower immigration and depressed fertility rates, have had a significant effect on the trust funds supporting both programs in the short term. But the virus’ long-term effects on America’s retirement system and health care system remain unclear as the pandemic appears far from over.


A federal appeals court’s decision allowing a Texas fetal heartbeat law to take effect Wednesday isn’t enough to trigger Idaho’s similar fetal heartbeat law, but backers say it’s a near miss that bodes well for banning nearly all abortions in Idaho. The Idaho law signed by Republican Gov. Brad Little in April contains a trigger mechanism putting it into effect 30 days after a federal appeals court upholds similar legislation in another state. The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals refused to block enforcement of the Texas law, but the appeals court didn’t rule on its constitutionality, needed to trigger the Idaho law.

Kids are returning to classrooms at the height of the delta surge in the Inland Northwest. Health officials are expecting to see cases in classrooms again, so it’s wise to be prepared to potentially quarantine your child or teen at home at some point in the coming school year.

Army Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said Wednesday that it’s “possible” that the U.S. will have to coordinate with the Taliban on any future counterterrorism strikes in Afghanistan against Islamic State militants or others.

A Central Texas school district is temporarily closing after two teachers died of COVID-19 in the same week, while parents and legislators in the state continue to clash over mask mandates in classrooms.

A deeply divided Supreme Court is allowing a Texas law that bans most abortions to remain in force, stripping most women of the right to an abortion in the nation’s second-largest state. The court voted 5-4 early Thursday to deny an emergency appeal from abortion providers and others that sought to block enforcement of the law that went into effect Wednesday.

Lights came back on for a fortunate few, some corner stores opened their doors and crews cleared fallen trees and debris from a growing number of roadways Wednesday — small signs of progress amid the monumental task of repairing the damage inflicted by Hurricane Ida. Still, suffering remained widespread three days after Ida battered Louisiana and parts of Mississippi as the fifth-most-powerful hurricane to strike the U.S. Some low-lying communities remained largely underwater. Roughly a million homes and businesses still had no electricity, and health officials said more than 600,000 people lacked running water.

Favorable weather helped firefighters trying to save communities on the south end of Lake Tahoe from an approaching wildfire, but officials warned Wednesday that stiff winds and dry conditions mean that homes in the California-Nevada alpine region are still in danger. ... The Caldor Fire remained roughly 3 miles south of the recently evacuated city of South Lake Tahoe, moving northeast toward the California-Nevada state line, said Henry Herrera, a battalion chief for the agency, which is also known as Cal Fire.

President Joe Biden used his first meeting with a foreign leader since ending the war in Afghanistan to send the message Wednesday that the United States — unburdened of its “forever war” — is determined to become a more reliable ally to its friends, in this case Ukraine. Biden played host to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy for a long-sought Oval Office meeting and tried to reassure him that his administration remains squarely behind the Eastern European nation.

The United Nations’ stockpiles of food in Afghanistan could run out this month, a senior official warned Wednesday, threatening to add a hunger crisis to the challenges facing the country’s new Taliban rulers as they try to restore stability after decades of war. About one third of the country’s population of 38 million doesn’t know if they will have a meal every day, according to Ramiz Alakbarov, the U.N.’s humanitarian chief in Afghanistan.

A deeply divided Supreme Court is allowing a Texas law that bans most abortions to remain in force, stripping most women of the right to an abortion in the nation’s second-largest state. The court voted 5-4 early Thursday to deny an emergency appeal from abortion providers and others that sought to block enforcement of the law that went into effect Wednesday.

North Carolina Republicans sent a bill Wednesday to the state’s Democratic governor that would limit how teachers can discuss certain racial concepts in the classroom. The measure aims to prohibit teachers from compelling their students to personally adopt any of 13 beliefs, but does little to nothing to prevent any of the more than 500 alleged cases of “indoctrination” that were included in a task force report that GOP Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson released earlier this month. Even so, Republican leaders insist the bill will hold teachers accountable by shedding light on questionable classroom activities.

America’s major religions and denominations, often divided on other big issues, have united behind the effort to help receive an influx of refugees from Afghanistan following the end of the United States’ longest war and one of the largest airlifts in history. Among those gearing up to help are Jewish refugee resettlement agencies and Islamic groups; conservative and liberal Protestant churches; and prominent Catholic relief organizations, providing everything from food and clothes to legal assistance and housing.

Pope Francis has criticized the West’s two-decade-long involvement in Afghanistan as an outsider’s attempt to impose democracy — although he did it by citing Russian President Vladimir Putin while thinking he was quoting German Chancellor Angela Merkel. Asked during a radio interview aired Wednesday about the new political map taking shape in Afghanistan after the United States and its allies withdrew from the Taliban-controlled country following 20 years of war, the pope said he would answer with a quote that he attributed to Merkel, whom he described as “one of the world’s greatest political figures.” “It is necessary to put an end to the irresponsible policy of intervening from outside and building democracy in other countries, ignoring the traditions of the peoples,” the pope said, using his own translation into Spanish. But the words were spoken last month by Putin in the presence of Merkel, during her visit to Moscow.

The Biden administration has extended for one year a Trump-era ban on the use of U.S. passports for travel to North Korea. The ban had first been imposed by former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson in 2017 after the death of American student Otto Warmbier, who suffered grievous injuries while in North Korean custody. It has been extended annually ever since.

In the nearly two months since President Jovenel Moïse was assassinated, Haiti has suffered a devastating earthquake and a drenching tropical storm, the twin natural disasters deflecting attention from the man-made one that preceded them. Add the constant worry over deteriorating security at the hands of gangs that by some estimates control territory that’s home to about a fifth of Haiti’s 11 million citizens, and the investigation into Moïse’s killing is fast fading from the public consciousness. Even those still paying attention, demanding accountability and pressuring for a thorough investigation give no chance to the crime’s masterminds being brought to justice in a country where impunity reigns. It doesn’t help that Moïse was despised by a large portion of the population.

Weather disasters are striking the world four to five times more often and causing seven times more damage than in the 1970s, the United Nations weather agency reports. But these disasters are killing far fewer people. In the 1970s and 1980s, they killed an average of about 170 people a day worldwide. In the 2010s, that dropped to about 40 per day, the World Meteorological Organization said in a report Wednesday that looks at more than 11,000 weather disasters in the past half-century.

The independent committee redrawing Spokane County’s commissioner districts began discussing map proposals for the first time Tuesday, marking the start of an eight-week compromise process that will determine the future political makeup of the county government’s most powerful elected officials.

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In the news, Tuesday, August 31, 2021


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AUG 30      INDEX      SEP 01
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from The Spokesman-Review
Newspaper in Spokane, Washington

Canadian National’s $33.6 billion deal to acquire Kansas City Southern railroad is in jeopardy after federal regulators on Tuesday rejected a key part of the plan and opened the door for a competing $31 billion offer from Canadian Pacific Railway. The Surface Transportation Board said Canadian National won’t be able to use a voting trust to acquire Kansas City Southern and hold the railroad while the board reviews the overall deal.

Competition is the key that has made the American economy the world’s greatest. That’s why President Biden’s latest executive order calling for greater competition in various industries such as health care, transportation, and others makes sense. Increasing competition is the smartest way to lower prices, increase wages, and promote economic growth. This has been the case in electricity markets as well, where the Western Energy Imbalance Market has created $1.28 billion in benefits since 2014. There’s an opportunity to expand access to competitive electricity markets in most of the Western Interconnection – including Washington State – and it’s something officials in Olympia should seriously consider.

COVID hospitalizations are still leading to deaths, even if the reporting of those deaths may have been delayed. The Panhandle Health District reported 15 additional deaths on Tuesday. Those new deaths may be due to the backlog of cases in the district. In Spokane County, 18 COVID-related deaths were reported in the last week alone. The delta variant has led to a massive surge in hospitalizations in the Inland Northwest and subsequent deaths. In both Washington and Idaho, the vast majority of hospitalized COVID patients and those who die from the virus are unvaccinated. In Washington state from February through July, 92.4% of COVID deaths were in people who had not been vaccinated against the virus.

The COVID-19 surge is stretching oxygen supplies and sending hospitals scrambling for more ventilators, even as there are signs of hope that the spread of the virus is slowing down in pockets of the U.S.

The United States is promising up to $60 million in military aid to Ukraine in advance of a White House meeting on Wednesday between President Joe Biden and his Kyiv counterpart, Volodymyr Zelenskyy. The Biden administration said in a notification to Congress that the aid package for Ukraine was necessary because of a “major increase in Russian military activity along its border” and because of mortar attacks, cease-fire violations and other provocations.

Addressing the nation, a defensive President Joe Biden on Tuesday called the U.S. military airlift to extract more than 120,000 Afghans, Americans and other allies to end a 20 year war an “extraordinary success,” though more than 100 Americans and thousands of Afghans looking to leave remain. Twenty-four hours after the departure of the last American C-17 cargo plane from Kabul, Biden vigorously defended his decision to end America’s longest war and withdraw all U.S. troops ahead of an Aug. 31 deadline. “I was not going to extend this forever war,” Biden said in an address from the White House State Dining Room. “And I was not going to extend a forever exit.”

After more than a year of attending church virtually, Monique Allen has struggled to explain to her asthmatic daughter why people from their congregation of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints don’t wear masks. Allen said she’s taught her daughter that wearing a mask is Christlike, but now she worries her child feels like an outcast. Church leaders recently issued their strongest statement yet urging people to “limit the spread” by getting COVID-19 vaccines and wearing masks, but Allen said she fears it’s still not enough to convince the many families in her congregation who refuse to wear masks and have succumbed to anti-vaccine misinformation. Members of the faith widely known as the Mormon church remain deeply divided on vaccines and mask-wearing despite consistent guidance from church leaders as the highly contagious delta variant of the coronavirus spreads.

A day after an explosive wildfire emptied a resort city at the southern tip of Lake Tahoe, a huge firefighting force braced for strong winds Tuesday as some residents in neighboring Nevada were ordered to evacuate. The city of South Lake Tahoe, usually bustling with summer tourists, was eerily empty and the air thick and hazy with smoke from the Caldor Fire, one of two major fires burning in the same area. On Monday, roughly 22,000 residents jammed the city’s main artery for hours as they sought to leave after they were ordered to evacuate as the fire advanced, blazing through drought-stricken vegetation.

It was Nov. 13 , 2001. The sun had just begun to rise over the Hindu Kush Mountains when the Taliban disappeared from Kabul, the battered capital of Afghanistan. The bodies of foreign Arabs who had stayed behind were mutilated and bloodied. They had been found and killed by advancing Afghans of another faction who were brought to the city by a blistering U.S.-led campaign that drove the Taliban from power. America was still reeling from the horrific terrorist attacks of two months earlier, when planes flown by al-Qaida terrorists crashed into three iconic buildings and a Pennsylvania field, killing nearly 3,000 people. The perpetrators and their leader, Osama bin Laden, were somewhere in Afghanistan, sheltered by the Taliban. The mission: Find him. Bring him to justice.

Hundreds of Afghan refugees who fled their home country in the mass evacuation that ended Monday are likely to arrive in Spokane in the coming months. Mark Finney, director of World Relief Spokane, a Christian group that helps refugees settle into their new homes, said his organization expects between 200 and 300 Afghans to arrive in Spokane . An exact number and timeline is not yet clear. Finney said he based his estimate on Afghans who already live in the Spokane area and hope to reunite with loved ones who were able to board evacuation flights.

U.S. home prices jumped by a record amount in June as homebuyers competed for a limited supply of available houses, the latest evidence that the housing market remains red-hot. The S&P CoreLogic Case-Shiller 20-city home price index soared 19.1% in June compared with a year earlier, the largest increase on records dating back to 2000.

The deadline for many Washington employees to get a COVID-19 vaccine or face job termination is growing near, and so is the fight over how it will happen. Unions for affected employees are in the process of bargaining over issues like time off for vaccines, exemptions and help from the state on vaccinating its employees. But for the largest union representing state employees, the question about their ability to bargain the vaccine mandate in contract talks with the governor’s office may be decided in court.

Hanford nuclear reservation workers who do not provide proof of COVID-19 vaccination will be required to be tested at least weekly to be allowed on site. The policy announced Monday will cover about 11,000 Department of Energy, contractor and subcontractor workers, The Tri-City Herald reported.

Washington officials are urging people who are behind on water and energy bills to check in with their utility companies before the state’s temporary moratorium on service shut-offs ends next month. The moratorium has been in place since April 2020, when Gov. Jay Inslee ordered a halt to disconnections as the state restricted commerce and social activities to curb the spread of COVID-19. The moratorium on disconnections for electricity, water and natural gas services is scheduled to end Sept. 30, which is also the same day a temporary ban on evictions for unpaid rent in Washington is set to lift.

Another health system in Tacoma on Monday said it’s having to turn to redeployed staff and tents to accommodate patients in a devastating COVID-19 surge that is putting the state and Pierce County to the test. Virginia Mason Franciscan Health, which operates St. Joseph Medical Center in Tacoma, St. Anthony Hospital in Gig Harbor, St. Clare Hospital in Lakewood and St. Elizabeth Hospital in Enumclaw, among others, told The News Tribune in response to questions Monday it was facing the strain of the latest wave. Earlier Monday, MultiCare noted it was using tents at its busiest locations, including Tacoma General and Good Samaritan in Puyallup.

Forty-six years ago, after Saigon fell and the Vietnam War ended, Washington, more than any other state, opened its arms. Washington, in 1975, was the only state in the country to develop a state-run resettlement program to welcome arriving refugees. Now, as the two-decade war in Afghanistan concludes, with chaos and bloodshed, Washington is no longer alone, but is once again welcoming refugees fleeing war and oppression.

The summer of 2021 included Spokane’s second-warmest June, hottest July, highest minimum temperature, highest temperature, the most 90-degree-plus days, a tie for the most 100-degree-plus days, and the hottest summer (June, July, August) recorded. “What’s worrying is that that’s expected to be more and more common as we move through the century,” said Professor Brian G. Henning, director of the Gonzaga Center for Climate, Society and the Environment. “It’s expected that summers like this, rather than being exceptional, will be fairly typical by the time we reach the middle of the century.”

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In the news, Monday, August 30, 2021


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AUG 29      INDEX      AUG 31
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from The Spokesman-Review
Newspaper in Spokane, Washington

Production of leaded gasoline has ended worldwide now that the last refinery has exhausted its supply of the fuel that’s been poisoning the air for almost a century. The end of the toxic fuel follows intense diplomatic efforts by the U.S. and the United Nations over the past two decades, the UN’s Environment Programme said in a statement. ... Leaded gasoline was used mainly in Africa and in other low-income countries, according to the UNEP. As of 2002, more than 100 countries were still burning the fuel. ... Tetraethyl lead was first added to gasoline in the early 1920s to improve the performance of car engines; its use continued for decades despite warnings from public health authorities.

Spokane Teachers Credit Union announced Monday it will be opening its third Spokane Valley branch and completing a merger early next month with Coulee Dam Federal Credit Union.

The European Union recommended Monday that its 27 nations reinstate restrictions on tourists from the U.S. because of rising coronavirus infections there, but member countries will keep the option of allowing fully vaccinated U.S. travelers in. The decision by the European Council to remove the U.S. from a safe list of countries for nonessential travel reverses the advice that it gave in June, when the bloc recommended lifting restrictions on all U.S. travelers before the summer tourism season.

In a city where the mayor has declared a housing emergency, where traffic is becoming increasingly congested and where the effects of climate change are increasingly impossible to ignore, planners are hoping to push more development – and more compact development – along the Spokane Transit Authority’s growing network of high performance transit. They are also aiming to boost pedestrian and bicycling infrastructure around stops and stations to increase access to, as well as ridership on, that transit.

Religious reasons constitute one of two exceptions to the vaccine mandate, with the other being medical-related. Gov. Jay Inslee recently expanded the vaccination directive already in place for state and health care employees, requiring workers in K-12 and higher education institutions as well as most child care and early learning centers to be fully vaccinated by Oct. 18.

The United States completed its withdrawal from Afghanistan late Monday, ending America’s longest war and closing a chapter in military history likely to be remembered for colossal failures, unfulfilled promises and a frantic final exit that cost the lives of more than 180 Afghans and 13 U.S. service members, some barely older than the war. Hours ahead of President Joe Biden’s Tuesday deadline for shutting down a final airlift, and thus ending the U.S. war, Air Force transport planes carried a remaining contingent of troops from Kabul airport. Thousands of troops had spent a harrowing two weeks protecting the airlift of tens of thousands of Afghans, Americans and others seeking to escape a country once again ruled by Taliban militants. In announcing the completion of the evacuation and war effort. Gen. Frank McKenzie, head of U.S. Central Command, said the last planes took off from Kabul airport at 3:29 p.m. Washington time, or one minute before midnight in Kabul. He said a number of American citizens, likely numbering in “the very low hundreds,” were left behind, and that he believes they will still be able to leave the country.

America’s 20-year war in Afghanistan entered its final hours Monday with the last Americans seeking to be evacuated and the U.S. military preparing to end its airlift and depart the Taliban-controlled capital. “Obviously we are reaching the end of our prescribed mission,” Maj. Gen. Hank Taylor of the Pentagon’s Joint Staff told reporters, adding that details of the final evacuation movements were being kept secret for security reasons.

The Marin County, Calif. elementary school had been conscientious about following COVID-19 protocols. Masks were required indoors, desks were spaced 6 feet apart, and the students kept socially distant. But the delta variant found an opening anyway. On May 19, one teacher, who was not vaccinated against the coronavirus, began feeling fatigued and had some nasal congestion. She dismissed it as allergies and powered through. While she was usually masked, she made an exception for story time so she could read to the class. By the time she learned she was positive for the coronavirus two days later, half her class of 24 had been infected – nearly all of them in the two rows closest to her desk – and the outbreak had spread to other classes, siblings and parents, including some who were fully vaccinated.

The Biden administration has designated the Department of Homeland Security as the lead federal agency charged with facilitating the entry of Afghans into the United States. Refugee resettlement groups say the process has been too slow but they remain hopeful the nation is up to the task. DHS will coordinate efforts across federal agencies to resettle vulnerable Afghans, including those who worked on behalf of the U.S. That includes immigration processing, COVID-19 testing, quarantine of people who test positive and support for evacuees who are not U.S. citizens or lawful permanent residents, according to the White House.

U.S. military planes have carried the last U.S. service members and diplomats from Kabul’s airport, ending America’s longest war. Ordinary Americans closely watched the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan, as they did the start of the war nearly 20 years ago, in the weeks after the 9/11 attacks. But Americans often tended to forget about the Afghanistan war in between, and it received measurably less oversight from Congress than the Vietnam War did. But its death toll for Afghans and Americans and their NATO allies is in the many tens of thousands. And because the U.S. borrowed most of the money to pay for it, generations of Americans to come will be paying off its cost, in the trillions of dollars.

A storied New Orleans jazz site where a young Louis Armstrong once worked toppled when Ida blew through Louisiana as one of the most powerful hurricanes to ever hit the U.S. The Karnofsky Tailor Shop, where a Jewish family employed Armstrong, collapsed Sunday during the storm. Armstrong would play a small tin horn as he worked on the coal and junk wagons, according to the National Park Service.

In 2014, in the middle of a severe drought that would test California’s complex water storage system like never before, voters told the state to borrow $7.5 billion and use part of it to build projects to stockpile more water. Seven years later, that drought has come and gone, replaced by an even hotter and drier one that is draining the state’s reservoirs at an alarming rate. But none of the more than half-dozen water storage projects scheduled to receive that money has been built.

Despite a few high-profile conservation success stories – like the dramatic comeback of bald eagle populations in North America – birds of prey are in decline worldwide. A new analysis of data from the International Union for the Conservation of Nature and BirdLife International found that 30% of 557 raptor species worldwide are considered near threatened, vulnerable or endangered or critically endangered. Eighteen species are critically endangered, including the Philippine eagle, the hooded vulture and the Annobon scops owl, the researchers found.

A popular vacation haven normally filled with tens of thousands of summer tourists was clogged with fleeing vehicles Monday after the entire resort city of South Lake Tahoe was ordered to leave as a ferocious wildfire raced toward Lake Tahoe, a sparkling gem on the California-Nevada border. Vehicles loaded with bikes and camping gear and hauling boats were in gridlock traffic in the city of 22,000, stalled in hazy, brown air that smelled like a campfire. Police and other emergency vehicles whizzed by.

Taliban fighters watched the last U.S. planes disappear into the sky over Afghanistan around midnight Monday and then fired their guns into the air, celebrating victory after a 20-year insurgency that drove the world’s most powerful military out of one of the poorest countries. The departure of the U.S. cargo planes marked the end of a massive airlift in which tens of thousands of people fled Afghanistan, fearful of the return of Taliban rule after the militants took over most of the country and rolled into the capital earlier this month. “The last five aircraft have left, it’s over!” said Hemad Sherzad, a Taliban fighter stationed at Kabul’s international airport. “I cannot express my happiness in words. … Our 20 years of sacrifice worked.”

The Education Department announced Monday that it’s investigating five Republican-led states that have banned mask requirements in schools, saying the policies could amount to discrimination against students with disabilities or health conditions. The department’s Office for Civil Rights sent letters to education chiefs in Iowa, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Utah. Those states have barred schools from requiring masks among all students and staff, a move that the department says could prevent some students from safely attending school.

Some of the biggest school systems in the U.S. are taking a hard line with teachers and staff members who are not yet vaccinated against COVID-19: Get a jab or lose your job. Most teachers already are vaccinated, and national teachers’ unions have endorsed vaccine mandates, but the policies have sparked protests from educators and, in some cases, pushback from local district leaders who fear large numbers of departures.

Italian firefighters tackled hot spots Monday in a 20-story apartment building in Milan that was destroyed by fire but said there were no indications that anyone was missing inside, as questions arose about the cladding that witnesses said rapidly fueled the fire. Some cases of smoke inhalation were reported from Sunday’s blaze, but no serious injuries or deaths. The fire that sent up a huge plume of black smoke visible for miles recalled the deadly fire that swept through Grenfell Tower in London in 2017, killing 72 people. In that case, the cladding on the outside of that building was blamed for the speed at which the fire engulfed the block, and officials noted similar issues in the Milan fire.

Leaded gasoline has finally reached the end of the road, the U.N. environment office said Monday, after the last country in the world halted the sale of the highly toxic fuel. Algeria stopped providing leaded gas last month, prompting the U.N. Environment Agency to declare the “official end” of its use in cars, which has been blamed for a wide range of human health problems. ... Leaded gas is still used in aviation fuel for small planes, an issue that McCabe said the EPA was working with the Federal Aviation Administration to address.

Rescuers in boats, helicopters and high-water trucks brought hundreds of people trapped by Hurricane Ida’s floodwaters to safety Monday and utility repair crews rushed in, after the furious storm swamped the Louisiana coast and ravaged the electrical grid in the stifling, late-summer heat. Residents living amid the maze of rivers and bayous along the state’s Gulf Coast retreated desperately to their attics or roofs and posted their addresses on social media with instructions for search-and-rescue teams on where to find them. More than 1 million homes and businesses in Louisiana and Mississippi – including all of New Orleans – were left without power as Ida, one of the most powerful hurricanes ever to hit the U.S. mainland, pushed through on Sunday. The damage was so extensive that officials warned it could be weeks before the power grid was repaired.

Qatar played an outsized role in U.S. efforts to evacuate tens of thousands of people from Afghanistan. Now the tiny Gulf Arab state is being asked to help shape what is next for Afghanistan because of its ties with both Washington and the Taliban, who are in charge in Kabul. Qatar will be among global heavyweights on Monday when U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken hosts a virtual meeting to discuss a coordinated approach for the days ahead, as the U.S. completes its withdrawal from Afghanistan following the Taliban takeover of the country. The meeting will also include Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, Turkey, the European Union and NATO. Qatar is also in talks about providing civilian technical assistance to the Taliban at Kabul’s international airport once the U.S. military withdrawal is complete on Tuesday.

Alaska residents don’t know how much money they might get from the state’s oil wealth this year – or even when they might get the unique payout just for living in the state – and many are upset. Some see the annual checks, which have ranged from about $331 to $2,072, as an entitlement, a benefit from the state’s resources. But lawmakers have come to rely on the same pot of money traditionally used for the checks to help fund the government in a place with no statewide sales or personal income tax. The Alaska Permanent Fund, seeded with oil money and grown through investments following its creation in 1976, has an estimated value of $81.1 billion. Residents’ checks come from the fund’s earnings, which lawmakers have leaned on for expenses, with oil revenue a fraction of what it was a decade ago.

The surge in COVID-19 hospitalizations statewide did not slow over the weekend. There are 1,440 people hospitalized with the virus in Washington hospitals as of Sunday, and 182 of those people are on ventilators. ...  At Confluence Health in Wenatchee, there was a day last week when every BiPap machine, a device that opens a patient’s lungs with air pressure, was in use.“We were at a point where if we had one more patient, we wouldn’t be able to handle them,” said Dr. Mark Johnson, an infectious disease specialist at Confluence. ... The overwhelming majority of COVID-19 patients at Confluence as well as every hospital statewide are not vaccinated against the virus. “The vast majority of them are expressing supreme remorse when they find out how severe this disease is,” Johnson said. Hospital administrators described staffing challenges, exhausted staff and low morale. “I have not ever in my career been this concerned about our providers,” Dr. Dave Carlson, chief physician officer of MultiCare hospitals in Washington, said, noting the possibility of not being able to take care of patients should the surge overwhelm the state’s health care system. He said 96% to 98% of COVID-19 patients in MultiCare hospitals, including those in Spokane, are unvaccinated. “The hospital crisis was completely preventable,” he said, adding that if vaccination rates were significantly higher in communities, the number of COVID patients in hospitals would be much lower and manageable.

Dr. Hamid Habibi felt mixed emotions Monday when he learned the U.S. had withdrawn its last troops from Afghanistan. He felt guilty because he was safe in Spokane while some of his family members in Afghanistan were in danger. He felt glad American soldiers were getting home safe. And he felt profound sadness for the millions of Afghans whose lives might change for the worse now that the Taliban has reclaimed the country.

I’ve always taken it as illustration of an enduring paradox. Namely, that experience is a thing of extraordinary value and often exorbitant price. And yet, when you try to give it away, to hand it over to someone else free of charge, they frequently refuse to accept it. That’s frustrating when you’re dealing with financial matters. It is beyond frustrating when you’re dealing with life and death. And here I’m thinking of Philip Valentine, whose funeral was last weekend. He was a conservative radio host and vaccine skeptic in Nashville who recently died of COVID-19. Not that I was personally touched by his death; I’d never even heard of him before he was hospitalized. But he has become the latest symbol of this era’s defining cliche: the COVID-19 denier or vaccine holdout who ends up dying an excruciating death and wishing he had not refused to accept the benefit of other people’s experience. Not to pick on Valentine. He is not the first and, sadly, probably will not be the last. But again, he is the latest on a list that is growing long.

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In the news, Sunday, August 29, 2021


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AUG 28      INDEX      AUG 30
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from The Spokesman-Review
Newspaper in Spokane, Washington

One month after Penny Antonelli-Flegel purchased her business in February 2020, the coronavirus pandemic prompted a shutdown that put much of the Spokane-area economy on an uneasy, indefinite hold. ... But she, like thousands of businesses in the region and millions of companies across the nation, tapped into Payroll Protection Program loans offered by the U.S. Small Business Administration, which previously had been known mostly for offering low-interest loans to victims of natural disasters. Chaos over ever-changing rules for how the money could be used, whether the money was a grant or a further financial burden in the form of more debt, and a clunky computer system got the program off to a rough start. But the SBA rallied. Glitches got fixed. Bankers worked overtime, the rules got streamlined and money began flowing into empty coffers. As of Aug. 15, the SBA had made about $471 billion in payments in response to about $498 billion in requests to be forgiven and classified as grants instead of low-interest loans, according to the agency.

Given all the stressors of late – flooded basements, job insecurity, the ongoing pandemic, fears that the delta variant will cause more havoc ahead – I’d daresay many people aren’t worrying a lot about data breaches and ID theft. But the crooks aren’t giving up. T-Mobile confirmed recently it was hit by a “highly sophisticated cyberattack” that exposed names, dates of birth, Social Security numbers and driver’s license information for more than 40 million consumers who had applied for credit with T-Mobile.

Ed Asner, the burly and prolific character actor who became a star in middle age as the gruff but lovable newsman Lou Grant, first in the hit comedy “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” and later in the drama “Lou Grant,” died Sunday. He was 91.

The independent committee charged with dividing Spokane County into five commissioner districts unveiled draft maps late Tuesday night, giving the public a first glimpse at what the county’s political boundaries could look like for the coming decades. Each of the four maps presents a different option for splitting the county. One appears to clearly favor Republicans and would likely create a 4-1 GOP commissioner majority, another might give Democrats a chance of seating three commissioners and two maps fall somewhere in between. ... Spokane County currently has three commissioners – Republicans Josh Kerns, Al French and Mary Kuney. Those commissioners run in district-specific primary elections but are chosen by voters countywide in the general election. That arrangement has to change due to a law enacted by the state Legislature in 2018. The county will transition to five commissioners with elections in 2022, and those commissioners will be chosen only by voters within their own districts.

ire officials ordered more evacuations around the Tahoe Basin Sunday evening as crews dealt with a two-week old blaze they said was “more aggressive than anticipated,” and continued to edge toward the pristine waters of Lake Tahoe. “Today’s been a rough day and there’s no bones about it,” said Jeff Marsoleis, forest supervisor for El Dorado National Forest. A few days ago, he thought crews could halt the Caldor Fire’s eastern progress, but “today it let loose.” Flames churned through mountains just a few miles southwest of the Tahoe Basin, where thick smoke sent tourists packing at a time when summer vacations would usually be in full swing ahead of the Labor Day weekend. “To put it in perspective, we’ve been seeing about a half-mile of movement on the fire’s perimeter each day for the last couple of weeks, and today, this has already moved at 2.5 miles on us, with no sign that it’s starting to slow down,” said Cal Fire Division Chief Eric Schwab.

Hundreds of emergency responders were in place in Louisiana and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers had power restoration experts and generators at the ready as Hurricane Ida hit on Sunday as one of the most powerful hurricanes to make landfall in the U.S., federal officials said.

A Nevada school board member said he had thoughts of suicide before stepping down amid threats and harassment. In Virginia, a board member resigned over what she saw as politics driving decisions on masks. The vitriol at board meetings in Wisconsin had one member fearing he would find his tires slashed. School board members are largely unpaid volunteers, traditionally former educators and parents who step forward to shape school policy, choose a superintendent and review the budget. But a growing number are resigning or questioning their willingness to serve as meetings have devolved into shouting contests between deeply political constituencies over how racial issues are taught, masks in schools, and COVID-19 vaccines and testing requirements.

The Treasury Department said this week that just over $5.1 billion of the estimated $46.5 billion in federal rental assistance – only 11% – has been distributed by states and localities through July. This includes some $3 billion handed out by the end of June and another $1.5 billion by May 31. Nearly a million households have been served and 70 places have gotten at least half their money out, including several states, among them Virginia and Texas, according to Treasury. New York, which hadn’t distributed anything through May, has now distributed more than $156 million. But there are 16 states, according to the latest data, that had distributed less than 5% and nine that spent less than 3%. Most, according to the National Low Income Housing Coalition, are red states, often with tough-to-reach rural populations. Besides South Carolina, they include Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Iowa, Indiana, Florida, Nebraska, North and South Dakota, Mississippi and New Mexico.

U.S. military aircraft are now ferrying food, tarps and other material into southern Haiti amid a shift in the international relief effort to focus on helping people in the areas hardest hit by the recent earthquake to make it through the hurricane season. Aircraft flying out of the capital, Port-au-Prince, arrived throughout the day Saturday in the mostly rural, mountainous southern peninsula that was the epicenter of the Aug. 14 earthquake. In Jeremie, people waved and cheered as a Marine Corps unit from North Carolina descended in a tilt-rotor Osprey with pallets of rice, tarps and other supplies. Most of the supplies, however, were not destined for Jeremie. They were for distribution to remote mountain communities where landslides destroyed homes and the small plots of the many subsistence farmers in the area, said Patrick Tiné of Haiti Bible Mission, one of several groups coordinating the delivery of aid.

Hurricane Ida blasted ashore Sunday as one of the most powerful storms ever to hit the U.S., knocking out power to all of New Orleans, blowing roofs off buildings and reversing the flow of the Mississippi River as it rushed from the Louisiana coast into one of the nation’s most important industrial corridors. ... Ida — a Category 4 storm — hit on the same date Hurricane Katrina ravaged Louisiana and Mississippi 16 years earlier, coming ashore about 45 miles west of where Category 3 Katrina first struck land. Ida’s 150-mph winds tied it for the fifth-strongest hurricane to ever hit the mainland U.S. It dropped hours later to a Category 1 storm with maximum winds of 95 mph as it crawled inland, its eye about 45 miles northwest of New Orleans.

The United States has the capacity to evacuate the approximately 300 U.S. citizens remaining in Afghanistan who want to leave before President Joe Biden’s Tuesday deadline, senior Biden administration officials said Sunday, as another U.S. drone strike against suspected Islamic State militants underscored the grave threat in the war’s final days.

A U.S. drone strike blew up a vehicle carrying “multiple suicide bombers” from Afghanistan’s Islamic State affiliate on Sunday before they could attack the ongoing military evacuation at Kabul’s international airport, American officials said. An Afghan official said three children were killed in the strike. The strike came just two days before the U.S. is set to conclude a massive two-week-long airlift of more than 114,000 Afghans and foreigners and withdraw the last of its troops, ending America’s longest war with the Taliban back in power. A statement from U.S. Central Command said the U.S. is aware of reports of civilian casualties and is assessing the results of the strike. Navy Capt. William Urban, spokesman for Central Command, said that “substantial and powerful” subsequent explosions resulted from the destruction of the vehicle, which may have caused additional casualties.

In hushed reverence, President Joe Biden stood witness with grieving families Sunday under a gray sky as, one by one, the remains of 13 U.S. troops killed in the Kabul suicide bombing were removed with solemnity from a military aircraft that brought them home.

A former U.K. Royal Marine who waged a high-profile campaign to leave Afghanistan with almost 200 rescued dogs and cats has flown to safety — with the animals, but without his charity’s Afghan staff, who were left behind in Kabul. A privately funded chartered plane carrying Paul “Pen” Farthing and his animals landed at London’s Heathrow Airport on Sunday after a saga that gripped and divided Britain, raising difficult questions about the relative value placed on human and animal lives.

Each week, The Spokesman-Review examines one question from the Naturalization Test immigrants must pass to become United States citizens. Today’s question: Why did the United States enter the Vietnam War? The right answer for the naturalization test is “to stop the spread of communism.” The full answer is a bit more complicated for a chapter of American history that started in the 1940s and continued into the 1970s. “It was about communism, but it was also about capitalism,” said Matthew Sutton, a professor of modern U.S. history at Washington State University. There was a competition between the United States and the Soviet Union for foreign markets and access to natural resources. It was also about the end of colonialism and an effort to bring a Western-style democracy to a country that had no cultural or political basis for such a system.

Whatever you do in the next few weeks, don’t suffer a heart attack or have a stroke. Don’t hurt yourself so badly it requires hospitalization. Given the surge of unvaccinated COVID-19 patients filling up hospital beds across the state, it’s possible the care you need won’t be available. Hospitals, which were already quite full, are now surging due to predominantly COVID-positive patients who have not been vaccinated. As a result, patients with other emergency medical needs from strokes to infections in rural hospitals are sitting and waiting – and in some cases deteriorating – while they wait for a bed to open somewhere.

This is tough country. Toppled trees covered in moss. Spiders rappelling into your hair. And everything tilted at an absurd angle – 35 to 40 degrees – making progress a thing measured in hundreds of feet, not miles. And so, 667 days after a 28-year-old Moses Lake woman vanished into these hills and 657 days after the Skagit County Search and Rescue team suspended their search, a ragged group of volunteers pauses to take a breather. It’s Aug. 14. Among them is a former Marine, who days after Rachel Lakoduk went missing on Oct. 17, 2019, spent an entire night searching for her. Beside him sits a county search and rescue volunteer who goes “rogue” occasionally, spending time outside the bounds of the county system, trying to bring closure to a family left wondering what happened to their daughter. There is a woman from Spokane who met Lakoduk’s husband in community college and felt compelled to help. And then there is Carlton “Bud” Carr Jr., the man who brought them together.

Before Bob Ross was known as the amiable television artist with the soothing voice and identifiable mane from “The Joy of Painting,” the prolific painter was stationed at Fairchild Air Force Base. In 1978, Ross visited Spokane Falls Community College and met artist John Thamm, who helped develop the skills of the then-fledgling artist.

Idaho Fish and Game officials said Wednesday that a deer die-off centered around Kamiah is caused by a variant of epizootic hemorrhagic disease, and they believe deer dying in other areas of the Clearwater Region may be caused by a different strain of the viral illness. Test results from a lab in Georgia confirmed EHD 2 is responsible for the deaths of several hundred deer in and around Kamiah. The variant of the disease that is spread by biting gnats appears to be particularly virulent.

Among the mountains and high alpine of the Cascade Mountains a carnivore, highly adapted to the snow pack and rugged terrain, roams the tree line. This creature’s savage reputation is more tall-tale than fact, preferring to scavenge and feed on small mammals, and it would rather run as soon as human eyes get a rare glance. The wolverine is more than elusive, and not just because of its demanding abode. Wiped out from Washington in the 1920s as aggressive trapping engulfed the Pacific Northwest, only one lone male was known to call the south Cascades home for years. After a decade of monitoring the singular male who would wander around Mount Adams and the surrounding area, a female by the name of Pepper was found, and then another in late 2019.

Although its waters have long nourished Montana, the Yellowstone River has a reputation for being untamed, forceful and during high spring runoff extremely destructive. So a new two-mile long channel that should be connected to the river by spring 2023 seems as out of place as a green golf fairway in a beige desert. The channel’s manicured rock and soil banks have been sloped with precision to a 40-foot wide, curving channel that looks more ready for barge traffic than canoes and jet boats. Mostly finished last summer, the channel is designed to provide fish – especially endangered pallid sturgeon – a route around Intake Dam to reach spawning habitat upstream. With the bypass, the big fish and other species will be able to swim another 165 miles upstream, reconnecting portions of the river cut off since the dam was completed in 1905 to divert water to irrigators plowing Eastern Montana’s prairie.

A SpaceX shipment of ants, avocados and a human-sized robotic arm rocketed toward the International Space Station on Sunday. The delivery — due to arrive Monday — is the company’s 23rd for NASA in just under a decade. ... The Dragon is carrying more than 4,800 pounds of supplies and experiments, and fresh food including avocados, lemons and even ice cream for the space station’s seven astronauts.

A new law that requires collective bargaining be conducted in open view is unconstitutional, a Spokane County Superior Court judge ruled. The largest public employees union in Spokane – Local 270, which represents about 1,000 city employees – sued the city, claiming the Spokane Charter amendment approved by city voters in 2019 violates state law. Judge Tony Hazel ruled Aug. 13 that Section 40 of the Spokane Charter is unconstitutional and the city is prohibited from enforcing that section of its city charter. The Aug. 13 court documents were filed Thursday. ... Hazel’s ruling states the charter section is in conflict with general state laws “clearly on its face and by application under the facts before the Court.” The charter amendment was approved by 77% of voters.

I’m a respiratory therapist. With the fourth wave of the pandemic in full swing, fueled by the highly contagious delta variant, the trajectory of the patients I see, from admission to critical care, is all too familiar. When they’re vaccinated, their COVID-19 infections most likely end after Stage 1. If only that were the case for everyone. Get vaccinated. If you choose not to, here’s what to expect if you are hospitalized for a serious case of COVID-19.

It’s almost time for Washington residents to decide between a state long-term health care benefit or a private one. Beginning in 2022, Washington workers will see a payroll tax for long-term care, part of a statewide benefit that will be available to residents beginning in 2025. Workers have until this November to opt out.

For more than half a century, volunteer firefighter Jim Krouse kept the people of Colfax safe. Now, for the first time in 52 years, Colfax will be without one of its staunchest defenders. On Saturday, the 76-year-old Krouse died of an apparent heart attack while responding to his fourth call of the day.

Italian firefighters on Sunday battled a high-rise blaze in Milan that spread rapidly through a 20-story residential building and poured black smoke into the air. Residents were hurriedly evacuated. Mayor Giuseppe Sala said there were no reports of injuries or deaths, but that firefighters were kicking down doors, apartment by apartment, to make sure there were no victims.

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