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from The Spokesman-Review
Newspaper in Spokane, Washington
Four companies in the drug industry said Saturday that enough states had agreed to a settlement of lawsuits over the opioid crisis for them to move ahead with the $26 billion deal. An announcement from the three largest U.S. drug distribution companies and a confirmation from drugmaker Johnson & Johnson, which had previously announced that it would move ahead, came Saturday. That was the deadline for the companies to decide whether there was enough buy-in to continue the settlement plan. The distribution companies — AmerisourceBergen, Cardinal Health and McKesson — said that 42 states had agreed to join. Johnson & Johnson did not immediately say how many states agreed to its part of the settlement.
A judge has temporarily shielded some Texas abortion clinics from being sued by the state’s largest anti-abortion group under a new law banning most abortions. The temporary restraining order was issued Friday by District Judge Maya Guerra Gamble in Austin in response to a Planned Parenthood request. Although the law remains in effect, the judge’s order shields Planned Parenthood’s clinics, specifically, from whistleblower lawsuits by the nonprofit group Texas Right to Life, its legislative director and people working in concert with the group.
Full restoration of electricity to some of the hardest-hit areas of Louisiana battered to an unprecedented degree by Hurricane Ida could take until the end of the month, the head of Entergy Louisiana warned Saturday. At least 16 deaths were blamed on the storm in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama. Ida damaged or destroyed more than 22,000 power poles, more than hurricanes Katrina, Zeta and Delta combined, an impact Entergy President and CEO Phillip May called “staggering.” More than 5,200 transformers failed and nearly 26,000 spans of wire — the stretch of transmission wires between poles — were down.
Firefighters are making progress on a California wildfire threatening South Lake Tahoe, officials said Saturday, lifting hopes for tens of thousands of residents who are waiting this weekend to return to the resort town. Lighter winds and higher humidity continue to reduce the spread of flames and fire crews were quick to take advantage by doubling down on burning and cutting fire lines around the Caldor fire. Bulldozers with giant blades, crews armed with shovels and a fleet of aircraft dropping hundreds of thousands of gallons of water and fire retardant helped keep the fire’s advance to a couple of thousand acres – a fraction of its explosive spread last month and the smallest increase in two weeks.
The road to a Texas law that bans most abortions in the state, sidestepping for now the Supreme Court’s landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, began in a town called Waskom, population 1,600. The Supreme Court’s decision this past week not to interfere with the state’s strict abortion law, provoked outrage from liberals and cheers from many conservatives. President Joe Biden assailed it. But the decision also astonished many that Texas could essentially outmaneuver Supreme Court precedent on women’s constitutional right to abortion. Texas’ abortion law S.B. 8 follows a model first used in Waskom to ban abortion within its boundaries in 2019. The novel legal approach used by the city on Texas’ border with Louisiana is one envisioned by a former top lawyer for the state.
Flood-stricken families and business owners across the Northeast were hauling waterlogged belongings to the curb Saturday and scraping away noxious mud as cleanup from the deadly remnants of Hurricane Ida moves into high gear.
The U.S. Coast Guard said Saturday that cleanup crews are responding to a sizable oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico following Hurricane Ida. The spill, which is ongoing, appears to be coming from a source underwater at an offshore drilling lease about two milessouth of Port Fourchon, Louisiana. The reported location is near the site of a miles-long brown and black oil slick visible in aerial photos first published Wednesday by the Associated Press.
Bone-tired like everyone else in Kabul, Taliban fighters spent the last moments of the 20-year Afghanistan war watching the night skies for the flares that would signal the United States was gone. From afar, U.S. generals watched video screens with the same anticipation. Relief washed over the war’s winners and the losers when the final U.S. plane took off.
Veteran-led rescue groups say the Biden administration’s estimate that no more than 200 U.S. citizens were left behind in Afghanistan is too low and also overlooks hundreds of other people they consider to be equally American: permanent legal residents with green cards. Some groups say they continue to be contacted by American citizens in Afghanistan who did not register with the U.S. Embassy before it closed and by others not included in previous counts because they expressed misgivings about leaving loved ones behind. As for green card holders, they have lived in the U.S. for years, paid taxes, become part of their communities and often have children who are U.S. citizens. Yet the administration says it does not have an estimate on the number of such permanent residents who are in Afghanistan and desperately trying to escape Taliban rule.
Cattle producers for 35 years have been bankrolling one of the nation’s most iconic marketing campaigns, but now many want to end the program that created the “Beef. It’s What’s for Dinner” slogan. What’s the ranchers’ beef? It’s that their mandatory fee of $1 per head of cattle sold is not specifically promoting American beef at a time when imports are flooding the market and plant-based, “fake meat” products are proliferating in grocery stores.
Two of the most frequently used words in right-wing America, “freedom” and “Constitution,” are also among the most misused. Many American conservatives believe the “Constitution” gives them the “freedom” to do just about anything they like. They are free to own guns and carry them openly, free to refuse to be vaccinated, free to refuse to wear masks in public places, free to refuse to accept the results of a free and fair election, and, to some, even free to invade government buildings and threaten those who work there with violence or death. Combining the two, these conservatives are convinced that anyone who asserts such “freedom” in the name of the “Constitution” is a “patriot.”
There are eight of us, all women, all physicians who take care of the sickest children in the nation in Pediatric Intensive Care Units (PICUs) in the Midwest, the East Coast, the West Coast and the South. Some of us work in community hospitals, and some of us work at nationally rated hospitals, the kind everyone knows. We have an intense bond that has been formed over the last year and a half, even though most of us have never met in person. We initially connected on Twitter and have supported each other virtually as the pandemic has kept us separated yet living a shared experience. We discussed mask mandates and how our local communities are responding to the pandemic. We rejoiced when the COVID-19 vaccine was approved, and we discussed how and when we could get it for ourselves, our colleagues and our patients. ... The PICU is the last line of defense for children, but the system is not designed to take on this magnitude of preventable illnesses. This is what haunts us: the reality that we might not be able to care for every child who needs us. We are pro-vaccine, pro-masks and pro-child. We are eight pediatric intensive care doctors standing together and asking you to stand up to protect children.
Washington’s largest state worker union has announced a tentative agreement with Gov. Jay Inslee’s administration on parts of the governor’s vaccine mandate. The deal announced by the Washington Federation of State Employees (WFSE) doesn’t change the substance of the requirement ordered by Inslee last month: State workers must be completely vaccinated by Oct. 18 or they will lose their job. But if workers ratify the deal this week, there will be a little wiggle room as they seek religious or medical exemptions.
Protesters clashed with hundreds of riot police in the old capital of Montenegro on Saturday, setting up blockades of tires and large rocks ahead of the inauguration of the new head of the Serbian Orthodox Church in the small Balkan nation. The ceremony planned for Sunday in Cetinje has angered opponents of the Serbian church in Montenegro, which declared independence from neighboring Serbia in 2006.
Germany’s top health official is urging more citizens to get vaccinated, warning Saturday that if the vaccination numbers don’t go up the country’s hospitals may get overwhelmed by COVID-19 patients toward the end of the year. “We need at least 5 million vaccinations for a safe autumn and winter,” Health Minister Jens Spahn tweeted. More than 61% of the German population, or 50.9 million people, are fully vaccinated, but that’s less than in other European countries. The daily vaccination rate has been dropping for weeks, while new infection cases have been going up again.
Taliban special forces in camouflage fired their weapons into the air Saturday, bringing an abrupt and frightening end to the latest protest march in the capital by Afghan women demanding equal rights from the new rulers. Also on Saturday, the chief of Pakistan’s powerful intelligence agency, which has an outsized influence on the Taliban, made a surprise visit to Kabul.
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