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from The Spokesman-Review
Newspaper in Spokane, Washington
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The new owners of the shuttered Ponderay Newsprint in Usk, Washington, have formally requested enough power to restart the mill and build what could be one of the largest cryptocurrency mining operations in the country. Allrise Capital Inc., based in Irvine, California, won an auction in April to purchase the mill for $18.1 million. The mill was one of the largest employers in Pend Oreille County when it closed last year after its previous owners filed for bankruptcy. Todd Behrend, who remained with a skeleton crew to maintain the plant until it sold, has been hired as the CEO of Ponderay Industries LLC. Behrend confirmed the new owners hope to refit the mill to make cardboard packaging as well as add stacks of computers needed for cryptocurrency mining. “Right now, we are waiting for the (Bonneville Power Administration, or BPA) to decide whether and how much power we can have delivered here,” Behrend said. “That will drive all the decisions.” Colin Willenbrock, general manager of Public Utility District No. 1 of Pend Oreille County, said the mill has asked to restore the 85 average megawatts a month of electricity to restart the mill and another 220 average megawatts a month for Blockchain LLC, which is the proposed data center to mine for cryptocurrency.
As I write this, there have been 778 deaths due to COVID-19 in Spokane County residents. By the time you read this, there likely are more. On Sept. 6, those numbers became deeply personal when a longtime family friend died of the coronavirus.
A dozen new laws revising and extending existing RCW’s (Revised Code of Washington) were intended to address a lack of trust between some community members and the officers hired to serve and protect them. For those who see all institutions as systemically racist, the solution to fear was to legislatively limit officers’ discretion and increase officers’ liability. From a law enforcement point of view as expressed by the Washington Association of Sheriffs and Police Chiefs in their July 31 newsletter, the resulting laws had significant gray areas. Officers are now to be held to a standard of care set by state-approved policies yet to be written, based on guidance and clarifications from the attorney general not expected until 2022. It feels like a set-up to fail. There is a lack of trust on both sides. And you can’t legislate trust.
COVID-19 is not the only public health crisis ravaging Washington and the rest of the country. As the 1.6 million Americans with opioid use disorder (OUD) and their loved ones know well, overdose deaths have risen dramatically since the start of the pandemic. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, overdose deaths nationwide climbed to more than 93,000 in 2020, about three-quarters of which were associated with opioids, including fentanyl and heroin. This rise could be explained in part by the increased social isolation and financial stress that have resulted from COVID-19.
Idaho’s largest healthcare provider is “overwhelmed with patient volumes,” its intensive care units are “overflowing” and the overall system is being “absolutely crushed by COVID,” said Chris Roth, president and CEO at St. Luke’s Health System in Boise. After a request from St. Luke’s, the Idaho Department of Health and Welfare declared crisis standards of care statewide Thursday morning. Crisis standards of care mean hospitals can operate outside of normal settings, with different staff ratios and, in the worst-case scenario, ration care to save the most lives. North and Central Idaho have been in crisis standards of care since Sept. 6.
Spokane leaders have scrapped plans to operate a COVID-19 isolation center at a Spokane Valley hotel, but they’re working to build an alternative option at Union Gospel Mission’s Student Impact Center. After securing use of several rooms at the Rodeway Inn and eyeing a long-term contract, plans to isolate people there were recently dropped. Now, the Spokane Regional Health District is finalizing plans to use nine rooms at the Student Impact Center on East Sprague Avenue in Spokane. The evolution in planning is just the latest in a frenzied few weeks since the contract to operate an isolation center at the My Place Hotel in Spokane Valley expired at the end of August.
One of the Tri-Cities’ well-known business leaders and philanthropists spent two days in a North Idaho hospital’s emergency room waiting for a bed in an intensive care unit, says his family. Bob Ferguson was vacationing near Sandpoint when he had a serious stroke, said his daughters, Cathie Kolinski of Chicago and Colleen Ferguson Lowry of Portland. Ferguson, 88, was the deputy assistant secretary of nuclear programs for the Department of Energy and chief executive for the Washington Public Power Supply System. He then founded and developed Tri-Cities area companies focused on nuclear waste management, environmental consulting and nuclear safety training. After a stroke on Aug. 25 he was initially taken to a small Idaho hospital that lacked a neurosurgeon to provide the care he needed. There the search started, scouring the Northwest, including in the Tri-Cities, for a hospital with a critical care bed available. Within a couple hours he was flown by helicopter to a larger hospital in Idaho, where his wait for an ICU bed continued, his daughters said. The experience left them frustrated and angry with people who do not get a COVID-19 vaccination. ICU beds were filled with COVID-19 patients, almost all of whom were not vaccinated against COVID, his daughters were told.
Idaho public health leaders on Thursday expanded health care rationing statewide amid a massive increase in the number of coronavirus patients requiring hospitalization. The Idaho Department of Health and Welfare made the announcement after St. Luke’s Health System, Idaho’s largest hospital network, on Wednesday asked state health leaders to allow “crisis standards of care” because the increase in COVID-19 patients has exhausted the state’s medical resources. Idaho is one of the least vaccinated U.S. states, with only about 40% of its residents fully vaccinated against COVID-19. Only Wyoming and West Virginia have lower vaccination rates.
Australia has canceled a contract with France for conventional submarines and instead will build nuclear-powered submarines using U.S. technology because of changing strategic conditions in the region, Prime Minister Scott Morrison said Thursday. President Joe Biden announced on Wednesday a new U.S. security alliance with Australia and Britain that will help equip Australia with a nuclear submarine fleet. The agreement would make Australia the first country without nuclear weapons to obtain nuclear-powered submarines. Morrison said U.S. nuclear submarine technology wasn’t available to Australia in 2016 when it entered a $43 billion deal with France to build 12 of the world’s largest conventional diesel-electric submarines. The United States has previously only shared the technology with Britain.
The Biden administration has been enlisting one emissary after another to convince Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell to help raise the federal debt limit. It’s not working. Despite the high-level conversations, including a call from Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, the GOP leader is digging in and playing political hardball. He’s telling all who will listen that it’s up to the Democrats, who have narrow control of Congress, to take the unpopular vote over federal borrowing on their own.
Firefighters wrapped the base of the world’s largest tree in a fire-resistant blanket as they tried to save a famous grove of gigantic old-growth sequoias from wildfires burning Thursday in California’s rugged Sierra Nevada. The colossal General Sherman Tree in Sequoia National Park’s Giant Forest, some of the other sequoias, the Giant Forest Museum and other buildings were wrapped as protection against the possibility of intense flames, fire spokeswoman Rebecca Paterson said.
Hundreds of birds migrating through New York City this week died after crashing into the city’s glass towers, a mass casualty event spotlighted by a New York City Audubon volunteer’s tweets showing the World Trade Center littered with bird carcasses. This week’s avian death toll was particularly high, but bird strikes on Manhattan skyscrapers are a persistent problem that NYC Audubon has documented for years, said Kaitlyn Parkins, the group’s associate director of conservation and science. Stormy weather Monday night into Tuesday contributed to the deaths, she said. “We had a big storm and sort of weird weather and lots of birds, and that’s sort of the perfect combination that can lead to bird-window collisions,” Parkins said.
The leaders of a House committee investigating the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection said Thursday they have sought records related to calls from Gen. Mark Milley, the top U.S. military officer, to his Chinese counterpart in the turbulent final months of Donald Trump’s presidency.
In a suburban Denver warehouse tucked between an auto repair shop and a computer recycling business, Seth Viddal is dealing with life and death. He and one of his employees have built a “vessel” they hope will usher in a more environmentally friendly era of mortuary science that includes the natural organic reduction of human remains, also known as body composting.
When a wildfire crested the mountains near North America’s largest alpine lake, embers and ash that zipped across a smoky sky pierced Lake Tahoe’s clear blue waters. The evacuation order for thousands to flee their homes has been lifted, but those who returned have found black stripes of ash building up on the shoreline — a reminder that success fighting the Caldor Fire won’t insulate the resort region on the California-Nevada line from effects that outlast wildfire season.
Congressional Democrats are calling top executives at ExxonMobil and other oil giants to testify at a House hearing as lawmakers investigate what they say is a long-running, industry-wide campaign to spread disinformation about the role of fossil fuels in causing global warming.
Scientists say the hole in the Earth’s protective ozone layer over the Southern Hemisphere is larger than usual this year and already surpasses the size of Antarctica. The European Union’s Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service said Thursday that the so-called ozone hole, which appears every year during the Southern Hemisphere spring, has grown considerably in the past week following an average start.
The recall election that once threatened to derail California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s political future has instead given it new life, offering a rare midterm vote of confidence that could fuel an ambitious legislative agenda featuring new coronavirus vaccine mandates, housing for the homeless and health insurance for people living in the country illegally. Nearly 64% of voters in the recall election voted to keep Newsom in office, according to early returns, giving him a larger margin of victory so far compared to his 2018 election.
The leader of the Islamic State in the Greater Sahara died of wounds from a drone strike that hit him on a motorcycle last month in southern Mali, in a French-led operation involving backup from U.S., EU, Malian and Nigerien military forces, French authorities said Thursday. The French government did not disclose how they identified him as Adnan Abu Walid al-Sahrawi, whose group has terrorized the region. The claim could not immediately be independently verified. France declared the killing a major victory against jihadists in Africa and justification for years of anti-extremist efforts in the Sahel. French government officials described al-Sahrawi as “enemy No. 1” in the region, and accused him of ordering or overseeing attacks on U.S. troops, French aid workers and some 2,000-3,000 African civilians - most of them Muslim.
Three astronauts who lived for 90 days on China’s space station departed Thursday in preparation for returning to Earth. ... While few details have been made public by China’s military, which runs the space program, astronaut trios are expected to be brought on 90-day missions to the station over the next two years to make it fully functional. ... China has sent 14 astronauts into space since 2003, when it became only the third country after the former Soviet Union and the United States to do so on its own. ... China launched its bid to build such facilities in the early 1990s following successes in earlier missions and its exclusion from the International Space Station, largely due to U.S. objections over the Chinese program’s secretive nature and close military ties.
The head of the United Nations called Thursday for “immediate, rapid and large-scale” cuts in greenhouse gas emissions to curb global warming and avert climate disaster. Ahead of the annual U.N. General Assembly meeting next week, Antonio Guterres warned governments that climate change is proceeding faster than predicted and fossil fuel emissions have already bounced back from a pandemic dip.
Let’s just say that your 30-year-old Tandy TRS-80 computer would probably melt if you tried to use it to mine for Bitcoin. Now imagine taking over a huge warehouse and replacing the Tandy’s with modern computers stacked 20-feet high and in rows 100-feet long. That’s the kind of scale being contemplated by the new owners of the Ponderay Newsprint, who have officially requested enough power to begin what could be one of the largest cryptocurrency mining operations in the country just outside of Usk.
Develop or conserve? The Coeur d’Alene Tribe answered that lingering question on Thursday by purchasing a 48-acre parcel of agricultural land in the Latah Valley along U.S. Highway 195. The tribe’s plans include “preservation, restoration and access,” with an ultimate goal of promoting the return of salmon. The acquisition is “an important opportunity for the Tribe to re-establish a presence in our aboriginal territory,” Coeur d’Alene Tribal Chairman Chief James Allan said in a statement. According to the tribe, historical records show land in the area would have been used as a salmon camp during summer and fall. The purchase price was not disclosed. The land was referred to most recently as the “Pilcher property,” due to owner and developer John Pilcher, the former chief operating officer for the City of Spokane. ... “The (High Drive) Bluff and that property in particular serve as a pretty critical wildlife corridor to the South Hill … The Bluff is 500 acres, so adding 48 acres to the bottom expands the passage and prevents so much of it from being cut off,” said Trevor Finchamp, president of Friends of the Bluff.
Officials in Washington state are upset the Biden administration is challenging a law making it easier for workers who become ill at a former nuclear weapons production site to be compensated. The Supreme Court will likely decide in the next few weeks whether to accept the U.S. Department of Justice’s appeal. If the high court rejects the case, the state law will stand. State Attorney General Bob Ferguson on Thursday called on the Biden administration to “stop this assault on Hanford workers.”
In King County, eating at a restaurant indoors, seeing a movie in a theater or working out at a gym will require proof of a coronavirus vaccination or a negative test beginning next month, county leaders and health officials announced Thursday. The health order, issued by Public Health – Seattle and King County Dr. Jeff Duchin, goes into effect Oct. 25 – allowing those who aren’t currently vaccinated to complete both rounds of the Pfizer or Moderna shot by that time. The order applies to most restaurants and bars, indoor recreational venues regardless of size, and outdoor events with 500 people or more. Customers who aren’t vaccinated or don’t have proof will instead need to show results of a negative COVID-19 test taken within the past 72 hours. Children under age 12, who aren’t yet eligible for a vaccine, are exempt. The health order doesn’t require vaccines for employees at restaurants and other establishments covered under the new policy, but strongly recommends workers get vaccinated. The requirements mirror those set in New York, San Francisco and New Orleans, as well as Washington’s Clallam and Jefferson counties, and come amid high COVID-19 case rates attributed in part to the highly contagious delta variant. Washington’s professional and college teams announced last week that fans would be required to provide proof of vaccination or a negative COVID-19 test to attend home games; the Seahawks will begin enforcing the order at this weekend’s game against the Tennessee Titans.
Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte would rather “die first” before facing an international tribunal, his spokesman said Thursday, the day after the International Criminal Court announced it would investigate allegations of crimes against humanity during his bloody war on drugs.
Russian President Vladimir Putin says dozens of his staff have been infected with the coronavirus and that he will continue his self-isolation because of the outbreak. The Kremlin announced earlier this week that he would self-isolate after someone in his inner circle was infected although Putin had tested negative for the virus and he’s fully vaccinated with Russia’s Sputnik V. But Putin said Thursday the infections were extensive
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