________
________
________
from The Spokesman-Review
Newspaper in Spokane, Washington
China’s import and export growth accelerated in August despite disruptions because of the spread of the coronavirus’s delta variant. Exports rose 25.6% over a year earlier to $294.3 billion, up from July’s 18.9% growth, customs data showed Tuesday. Imports rose 33.1% to $236 billion, up from the previous month’s 28.7%.
Millions of jobless Americans lost their unemployment benefits on Monday, leaving only a handful of economic support programs for those who are still being hit financially by the year-and-a-half-old coronavirus pandemic. Two critical programs expired on Monday. One provided jobless aid to self-employed and gig workers and another provided benefits to those who have been unemployed more than six months. Further, the Biden administration’s $300 weekly supplemental unemployment benefit also ran out on Monday.
When Betsy Wilkerson was a girl growing up in East Central in the 1960s, she wasn’t focused on the racist and economic forces that led federal highway planners to route Interstate 90 between Second and Third avenues, splitting her part of the city in two. She wasn’t worrying about redlining policies that made it nearly impossible for residents – many of them immigrants, African Americans and those with low incomes – to get a mortgage, own their homes and build equity. She wasn’t aware that such exclusionary practices had driven down land prices, making the area attractive to officials who needed to buy right of way at an affordable cost to make way for the new interstate system. She was going to middle school with her friends. ... A half-century or so later, Wilkerson is a Spokane city councilwoman, and now she knows better. ... With the backing of the city of Spokane and support from Wilkerson, the East Central neighborhood council and others, WSDOT recently submitted a grant that would allocate $1.3 million to “look at the potential of a land bridge across I-90,” according to Char Kay, the department’s regional planning and strategic community partnerships director. The goal, Kay said, would be “to restore areas that have been bifurcated by the interstate infrastructure” near Liberty Park.
President Joe Biden marked the Labor Day holiday on Monday by delivering deli sandwiches to union members, the people he says built the middle class. A casually dressed Biden stepped from his dark SUV holding boxes of sandwiches from Capriotti’s, a restaurant chain founded in Wilmington, in his home state of Delaware, in 1976. Wearing Ray-Ban sun shades, Biden put the boxes on a table alongside other food at an event held by the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 313 in New Castle, Delaware.
Shaken by haunting images of surging rivers, flooded roads and subways and other damage caused by the remnants of Hurricane Ida, lawmakers from both parties are vowing to upgrade the nation’s aging infrastructure network. As the deadly storm moved from the Gulf Coast through the Northeast, members of Congress said the deluge offered irrefutable evidence that power lines, roads, bridges and other infrastructure are deteriorating even as storms and other extreme weather are strengthening. At least 50 people from Virginia to Connecticut died as storm water from Ida’s remnants cascaded into people’s homes and engulfed automobiles, overwhelming urban drainage systems unable to handle so much rain in such a short time.
Officials in New Orleans will thoroughly inspect senior living apartments in the city in the aftermath of Hurricane Ida after finding people living in buildings without working generators, which left residents trapped in wheelchairs on dark, sweltering upper floors. Hundreds were evacuated Saturday and the city later said five people had died in the privately run buildings in the days after the storm. The coroner’s office is investigating whether the deaths will be attributed to the hurricane, which struck land nine days before.
The Taliban said Monday they seized the last province not in their control after their blitz through Afghanistan last month, overrunning forces who had opposed their takeover. Thousands of Taliban fighters charged into eight districts of Panjshir province overnight, according to witnesses from the area who spoke on condition of anonymity because they feared for their safety. Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid confirmed that the province, which is north of the capital, was now held by their fighters.
A towering statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee in Richmond, Virginia, is set to come down Wednesday, more than 130 years after it was built as a tribute to a Civil War hero who is now widely seen as a symbol of racial injustice, state officials said Monday.
President Joe Biden approved major disaster declarations Monday greenlighting federal aid for people in six New Jersey counties and five New York counties affected by devastating flooding last week from the remnants of Hurricane Ida. At least 50 people were killed in six Eastern states as record rainfall last Wednesday overwhelmed rivers and sewer systems. Some people were trapped in fast-filling basement apartments and cars, or swept away as they tried to escape. The storm also spawned several tornadoes.
The fast-spreading delta variant has flooded hospitals across the South. It’s killed more people in Florida and Louisiana than the darkest days of the pandemic winter, and left so many COVID-19 patients gasping for breath that some places face shortages of medical oxygen. This harsh reality, likely fueled by a failure to adequately vaccinate the most vulnerable, has undercut the best efforts of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and other Republican leaders to simply move past COVID.
One hundred years ago, construction on the Peace Arch in Blaine was completed. On. Sept. 6, 1921, the 67-foot white arch stood tall at the border between the United States and Canada, commemorating the end of the War of 1812 when the two countries agreed on an unguarded border. An inscription on the inside of the arch reads: “MAY THESE GATES NEVER BE CLOSED.” Now, almost 18 months since the COVID-19 pandemic began to surge in North America, travel between the two countries remains restricted....
residents evacuated Malden and Pine City. A year later, cars rolled into Malden on a sunny September day. People climbed out, shook hands, hugged and waved as they gathered around a flag pole flying a tattered and faded American flag. The Babb Road Fire raced through Malden and Pine City on Sept. 7, 2020, burning 80% of the towns’ homes and leaving hundreds of residents with nowhere to go. Since then, many residents have moved on, finding new places to live, while others have returned to their burned properties , at least temporarily, in RVs. The recovery process has been slow but support from communities and organizations across the region hasn’t waned. Residents and community members gathered Monday to recognize the day that changed their lives.
Once Malden was chosen in 1908 as the headquarters for the railroad’s Columbia Division, which stretched from Avery, Idaho, to Cle Elum, Washington, people and investment flooded the new city. The railroad promised 300 or more stable jobs and kicked off several years of explosive growth in the little valley 5 miles west of Rosalia. In 1908 alone, more than 25 new businesses started, including a bank, grocery stores, hardware stores and hotels. Moreland and the railroad’s land company sold house lots. Contractors arrived to build houses for workers, though the first trains were still a few years away. ... The Milwaukee’s demise in 1980 left Malden as a rural bedroom community with vague memories of its brief heyday. The few commercial buildings still standing were wiped away by the Labor Day fire in 2020 and were the only reminders of the once vibrant business district.
Up the center of Malden’s main hill, past the freshly painted white church, is a postage stamp of a property. A little gate held closed with a blue Pringles can keeps Goldie, a tan, yappy and often ash-covered dog, close to her 90-year-old owner. Jim Jacobs, clad in his daily uniform of a collared shirt, suspenders, work-worn jeans and tattered sneakers, descends the metal steps of the motor home where he now lives, parked on the cement slab that held the house he built for his wife decades ago.
Can we first just say how bizarre it is? Yes, it’s invasive, and hypocritical, too, and we’ll get to that soon enough. But first, let us spare a moment for how purely, intensely and prodigiously strange it is. As you’ve likely heard, Texas’ new anti-abortion law, which the Supreme Court refused to block on Wednesday night, bars termination of pregnancy after six weeks – long before a woman generally even knows she’s carrying – with no exception for incest or rape. But it imposes no criminal sanctions.
Christopher Columbus is getting kicked off Mexico City’s most iconic boulevard. Mayor Claudia Sheinbaum announced that the Columbus statue on the Paseo de la Reforma, often a focal point for Indigenous rights protests, would be replaced by a statue honoring Indigenous women. “To them we owe … the history of our country, of our fatherland,” she said. She made the announcement on Sunday, which was International Day of the Indigenous Woman.
________
No comments:
Post a Comment