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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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