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from The Spokesman-Review
Newspaper in Spokane, Washington
U.S. officials have begun blocking the import of solar panels they believe could be the product of forced labor in China, implementing a recent ban that could slow construction of solar-energy projects throughout the country.
Crews returned this week to an Asian giant hornet nest they found earlier this month near Blaine, Washington, and removed more than 1,500 of the world’s largest hornets that were in various stages of development.
The T-Mobile CEO said he was “truly sorry” for a data breach affecting about 50 million users that originated from an unprotected router in East Wenatchee, Washington. A Thursday report in the Wall Street Journal said John Binns, a 21-year-old American hacker living in Turkey, said he hacked into the cellphone carrier’s data center outside East Wenatchee, where stored credentials allowed him to access more than 100 servers. “I was panicking because I had access to something big,” Binns wrote. “Their security is awful.”
If there’s ever been, in the history of local government meetings, a more satisfying rap of the gavel than the one Jerrall Haynes delivered this week, I haven’t heard it. Haynes, president of the Spokane School Board, joined his fellow trustees in the board room Wednesday to consider a packed agenda, and they found themselves facing a crowd of unmasked protesters who had come to rail against the mask mandate in schools. Many of them had demonstrated outside beforehand and were carrying signs with a decidedly feverish flavor, a la “Masks & Vaccines – The New Symbols of Tyranny.” The potential of an angry, pointless circus loomed. Haynes kept the circus tent closed. He started the meeting by asking if the unmasked crowd intended to follow the governor’s order requiring masks indoors in public facilities. When they said no, he adjourned, banged that gavel and moved the hybrid meeting entirely to Zoom.
An 18-year veteran of Spokane County Fire District No. 9 died Thursday at the scene of a brush fire, the firefighting agency reported. Cody Traber was “fatally wounded” after he fell from the Wandermere Bridge while responding to the scene of a reported brush fire, the Spokane County Sheriff’s Office told KHQ News. The fall happened around 10 p.m.
Once the dust settles in the fall of 2023, the new Sacajawea Middle School will be an even better neighbor. Trees will rise along the east and southern edges of the grounds, framing a modern building that will be more inviting. Gone will be the 1950s-era school complex of four long buildings. ... The Peperzak project offers a different perspective. The property, adjacent to Mullan Road Elementary, fronts 63rd Avenue on the north. However, to the south, it overlooks the rolling hills of the Palouse. Designed by Integrus Architecture of Spokane, it maximizes that view by placing the classroom neighborhoods at the south end of the property.
If light is the symbol for knowledge, students at the new Glover Middle School will be inspired the moment they walk inside. When the school year begins Sept. 2, they will step into an outsized room of bright whites and natural sunlight, to stairs that lead to state-of-the-art classrooms and a world of great possibilities.
As the delta variant surges and hospitals are reaching their limits, COVID-19 cases in North Idaho are likely much higher than previously reported. The Panhandle Health District said Friday its backlog is about 1,200 unprocessed cases for the months of July and August.
Bernie Sanders has long argued – but not proved – that his big government populism can win over voters in the largely white, rural communities that flocked to Republican Donald Trump in recent elections. Now, as the chief Senate shepherd of a $3.5 trillion budget proposal, Sanders believes he has another chance to test the theory. The Vermont senator is in Trump country this weekend, promoting a budget plan packed with progressive initiatives and financed by higher taxes on top earners. He’s targeting two congressional districts where Trump’s vote totals increased between 2016 and 2020.
Officials offered new hope for the safety of U.S. schoolchildren threatened by COVID-19 on Friday as Gulf Coast hospitals already full of unvaccinated patients braced for the nightmare scenario of a major hurricane causing a wave of fractures, cuts and heart attacks without enough staff to treat the injured. The Biden administration said half of U.S. adolescents ages 12-17 had gotten at least their first COVID-19 vaccine, and the inoculation rate among teens is growing faster than any other age group. ... Meanwhile, new studies from California both provided more evidence that schools can open safely if they do the right things and highlighted the danger of failing to follow proper precautions.
Tenant advocates and court officials were gearing up Friday for what some fear will be a wave of evictions and others predict will be just a growing trickle after a U.S. Supreme Court action allowing lockouts to resume. The high court’s conservative majority late Thursday blocked the Biden administration from enforcing a temporary ban placed because of the coronavirus pandemic. The action ends protections for about 3.5 million people in the United States who say they faced eviction in the next two months, according to U.S. Census Bureau data from early August.
The Supreme Court’s conservative majority is allowing evictions to resume across the United States, blocking the Biden administration from enforcing a temporary ban that was put in place because of the coronavirus pandemic. The court’s action ends protections for roughly 3.5 million people in the United States who said they faced eviction in the next two months, according to Census Bureau data from early August. The court said late Thursday in an unsigned opinion that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which reimposed the moratorium Aug. 3, lacked the authority to do so under federal law without explicit congressional authorization. The justices rejected the administration’s arguments in support of the CDC’s authority.
American forces working under heightened security and threats of another attack pressed ahead with the evacuation from Kabul’s airport Friday, the day after a deadly suicide bombing wrote a devastating closing chapter on the United States’ withdrawal from its war in Afghanistan. The death toll rose to 169 Afghans, a number that could increase as authorities examine fragmented remains, and 13 U.S. service members.
U.S. intelligence agencies remain divided on the origins of the coronavirus but believe China’s leaders did not know about the virus before the start of the global pandemic, according to results released Friday of a review ordered by President Joe Biden. According to an unclassified summary, four members of the U.S. intelligence community say with low confidence that the virus was initially transmitted from an animal to a human. A fifth intelligence agency believes with moderate confidence that the first human infection was linked to a lab. Analysts do not believe the virus was developed as a bioweapon and most agencies believe the virus was not genetically engineered.
Acting swiftly on President Joe Biden’s promise to retaliate for the deadly suicide bombing at Kabul airport, the U.S. military said it used a drone strike to kill a member of the Islamic State group’s Afghanistan affiliate Saturday. ... Central Command said the drone strike was conducted in Nangahar province against an IS member believed to be involved in planning attacks against the United States in Kabul. The strike killed one individual, spokesman Navy Capt. William Urban said.
Authorities in northern Nigeria announced three separate groups of kidnapped students were freed within a 24-hour period, prompting speculation late Friday that large ransoms had been paid to the gunmen blamed for a spate of recent abductions. Among those now free are some of the youngest children ever taken hostage in Nigeria, a group of 90 pupils who had spent three months in captivity. Hours after those youngsters were brought to the Niger state capital, police in Zamfara state said that 15 older students also had been freed there.
Firefighters battling a stubborn California wildfire Friday near the Lake Tahoe resort region faced gusty winds and dry conditions that made vegetation ready to burn. The Caldor Fire has proved so difficult to fight that fire managers this week pushed back the projected date for full containment from early next week to Sept. 8. But even that estimate was tenuous.
Prime Minister Boris Johnson vowed Friday to “shift heaven and earth” to bring more Afghans to the U.K. once Britain’s airlift from Kabul airport ends in the coming hours, with hundreds of people eligible for evacuation left behind. Britain has evacuated almost 14,000 U.K. citizens and Afghans from Kabul in the two-week operation, but the final flights are departing on Friday. Hundreds of U.K. troops at the airport are due to leave in the next few days. U.K. Defense Secretary Ben Wallace has said that about 1,000 Afghans authorized to come to Britain, and as many as 150 U.K. citizens, have not made it to the airport and will likely be left behind.
Tissue holders sit atop the conference table where the congressman’s aides field frantic requests from constituents desperate for help in getting friends and loved ones out of Afghanistan before it’s too late. The stories have poured in by the thousands with heartbreaking pleas not to be left behind. The tissues are used for crying breaks, one of the aides explained.
Florida school districts can legally require their students to wear masks to prevent the spread of COVID-19, a judge ruled Friday, saying Gov. Ron DeSantis overstepped his authority when he issued an executive order banning such mandates. Leon County Circuit Judge John C. Cooper agreed with a group of parents who claimed in a lawsuit that DeSantis’ order is unconstitutional and cannot be enforced. The governor’s order gave parents the sole right to decide if their child wears a mask at school.
While many schools scrambled to shift to online classes last year, the nation’s virtual charter schools faced little disruption. For them, online learning was already the norm. Most have few physical classrooms, or none at all. Yet when Congress sent $190 billion in pandemic aid to schools, virtual charters received just as much as any other school because the same formula applied to all schools, with more money going to those in high-poverty areas, an Associated Press investigation found.
Homeless shelters in the Spokane region will have to isolate COVID-positive people in their own facilities, upending earlier isolation plans providers relied on. For most of the pandemic, homeless people in the region have been able to isolate at the My Place hotel in Spokane Valley. There they have a bed to sleep in, a private bathroom and meals provided for them as they went through their COVID-19 illness, with or without symptoms, until they were no longer contagious and free to leave. But that option has disappeared in recent weeks and perhaps permanently, with the My Place contract expiring Aug. 31.
Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife officials continue to monitor an outbreak of bluetongue and epizootic hemorrhagic disease (EHD) after 38 whitetail deer in eastern Washington died from the two diseases.
As Oregon shatters its record for daily COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations continue to overwhelm the health system, an outdoor mask mandate was reinstated in the state on Friday. People 5 and older, regardless of vaccination status, are required to wear masks in most public outdoor settings – including large outdoor events where physical distancing is not possible, such as festivals and concerts. The rule does not apply to “fleeting encounters,” such as two people walking by each other on a trail or in a park.
Alexei Navalny is considered the man Vladimir Putin fears and despises more than anyone on Earth. Quite an honor. What’s really unusual about Navalny, a formidable dissident, anti-corruption crusader and now a political prisoner – is his tone. In spite of having been jailed, poisoned, rendered comatose and then jailed again, he’s not dour, solemn or even self-righteous. He’s funny. Navalny, 45, has been likened – in vibe – to Jon Stewart.
Our friends in health care have seen plenty to impale the heart in this COVID-19 pandemic, but nothing more tragic than this: the sight of guilt-ridden young children who believe they’ve killed an unvaccinated parent by bringing the virus home.
Hundreds of parents in Mexico have resorted to filing for court injunctions to get coronavirus vaccines for their children after the government refused to consider vaccinating those under 18. In the U.S. and other countries, childhood vaccinations are already underway, but Mexican officials have downplayed the risk for minors. That is despite the 613 deaths and 60,928 confirmed COVID-19 cases among people under 18 in Mexico to date.
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