________
________
________
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.
________
No comments:
Post a Comment