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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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