________
________
________
from The Spokesman-Review
Newspaper in Spokane, Washington
With the school year only days away, the controversy over mask mandates and other issues is ratcheting higher at school districts in Spokane and the rest of the nation. Locally, tensions reached a new high Monday night when the Central Valley School District board of directors was forced to halt its meeting after only 30 minutes because most attendees refused to wear a mask. That was in defiance of an order from Gov. Jay Inslee that had gone into effect that day; then again, that was the point.
The state has released new guidance that will probably affect many school employee COVID-19 vaccine exemption requests, particularly those based on religion. Five days after mandating vaccines for all teachers and staff, the state superintendent’s office came out Monday night with clarifications around religious exemptions. About 363,000 employees are covered under the vaccine mandate, though it’s unclear how many within that group already are vaccinated.
Vice President Kamala Harris turns her focus to the coronavirus pandemic and global health during her visit to Vietnam, a country grappling with a worsening surge in the virus and stubbornly low vaccination rates. The more infectious delta variant is driving record highs in infections in Vietnam and prompted a recent lockdown in Ho Chi Minh City, the nation’s business hub and the epicenter of the latest outbreak.
The Supreme Court on Tuesday refused to block a court ruling ordering the Biden administration to reinstate a Trump-era policy that forces people to wait in Mexico while seeking asylum in the U.S. With the three liberal justices in dissent, the court said the administration likely violated federal law in its efforts to rescind the program informally known as Remain in Mexico.
Sharply divided leaders of the Group of Seven industrialized democracies clashed Tuesday over U.S. President Joe Biden’s insistence on withdrawing from Afghanistan by August 31 in the face of the Taliban takeover of the country. In a partial show of unity, G7 leaders agreed on conditions for recognizing and dealing with a future Taliban-led Afghan government, but there was palpable disappointment Biden could not be persuaded to extend the U.S. operation at the Kabul airport to ensure that tens of thousands of Americans, Europeans, other third-country nationals and all at-risk Afghans can be evacuated. The virtual meeting of the leaders of Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and the U.S. served not only as a bookend to the West’s 20-year involvement in Afghanistan that began as a response to the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks but also a resigned acknowledgment from European powers that the U.S. calls the shots.
U.S. President Joe Biden declared Tuesday he is sticking to his Aug. 31 deadline for completing a risky airlift of Americans, endangered Afghans and others seeking to escape Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. The decision defies allied leaders who want to give the evacuation more time and opens Biden to criticism that he caved to Taliban deadline demands.
Overweight and obese Americans should start getting screened for diabetes earlier, at age 35 instead of 40, according to updated national guidelines published Tuesday. The new advice stems from rising rates of both obesity and Type 2 diabetes, and research showing health benefits of prevention methods and early treatment. Three out of four U.S. adults is overweight or obese, which increases their chances for developing diabetes.
The American Civil Liberties Union, representing disability rights groups and parents of children with disabilities, filed a federal lawsuit Tuesday over a South Carolina law that bans school districts from requiring face masks, arguing the ban excludes vulnerable students from public schools. The plaintiffs allege that the ban on mask mandates disproportionately affects students with underlying health conditions or disabilities, who are at risk of becoming seriously ill if they contract COVID-19.
In a mountain valley north of Kabul, the last remnants of Afghanistan’s shattered security forces have vowed to resist the Taliban in a remote region that has defied conquerors before. But any attempt to reenact that history could end in tragedy – or farce. Nestled in the towering Hindu Kush, the Panjshir Valley has a single narrow entrance and is the last region not under Taliban control following their stunning blitz across Afghanistan. Local fighters held off the Soviets in the 1980s and the Taliban a decade later under the leadership of Ahmad Shah Massoud, a guerrilla fighter who attained near-mythic status before he was killed in a suicide bombing. His 32-year-old foreign-educated son, Ahmad Massoud, and several top officials from the ousted Western-backed government have gathered in the valley. They include Vice President Amrullah Saleh, who claims to be the caretaker leader after President Ashraf Ghani fled the country.
Idaho hospitals are surging with both COVID and non-COVID patients, and state health officials asked any volunteers who are able to return to the health care workforce to do so as the delta variant sweeps through the state.
The U.S. Forest Service is trying to bring back Idaho’s state tree to its former prominence. Western white pine were wiped out in the early to mid-1900s by a fungus that arrived from Europe in 1910. The blister rust fungus was widespread in the 1940s. By the late 1960s, forest managers moved to salvage as many harvestable trees as possible. Richard T. Bingham, a scientist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, in the 1950s began looking for white pine trees that appeared unaffected by the fungus. He collected seeds and pollen from those trees to breed rust-resistant ones. That effort is continuing at the Forest Service’s Coeur d’Alene Nursery in North Idaho.
New daily coronavirus infections in Israel are approaching record levels, despite the country’s largely successful vaccination campaign and the recent rollout of the world’s first widespread booster shot. The spread has been driven by a surge in the delta variant – even among the vaccinated – and sparked talk of crackdowns on gatherings ahead of the holiest days of the Jewish calendar.
Trent Reedy hasn’t been sleeping much lately. “I’m a wreck,” he said. “I’m ridiculously stressed out.” Reedy’s been stressed and exhausted for the past several weeks – since the start of the mass withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan – because he’s worried his Afghan friends will be killed by the Taliban and there’s almost nothing he can do to help.
________
No comments:
Post a Comment