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from The Spokesman-Review
Newspaper in Spokane, Washington
Kansas City Southern is in talks with Canadian Pacific to determine whether its $31 billion bid for the railroad is the best offer on the table after regulators rejected a key part of Canadian National’s $33.6 billion bid last week. Kansas City Southern said Saturday that its board believes CP’s lower offer could be the better deal. That would be because the Surface Transportation Board said Canadian National won’t be able to use a voting trust to acquire Kansas City Southern and then hold the railroad during the board’s lengthy review of the overall deal. In contrast, regulators have already approved Canadian Pacific’s use of a voting trust because there are fewer competitive concerns about combining Canadian Pacific and Kansas City Southern. So there is a clearer path forward for the CP-KCS deal, although it would still face a detailed review from the Surface Transportation Board. It would be the first major railroad merger since the 1990s.
Washington State University joined athletic teams across the state when it announced fans 12 and older will have to get vaccinated to attend games, a decision made by arenas and athletic departments to offset spikes in COVID-19 hospitalizations. For everyone 5 and older, masks will be required starting Tuesday at WSU Athletics events, WSU said in a statement. Attendees 12 and over will have to show proof of their vaccination at home games starting in October, with the first contest scheduled for Oct. 9 against Oregon State University at Gesa Field.
‘We hoped this day would not come’: COVID-19 surge brings rationing of care to North Idaho hospitals
If you’re going to an emergency room in North Idaho, expect a longer wait, treatment in the hallway or to be sent elsewhere – if there’s even a bed available. COVID patients are filling North Idaho hospitals, impacting access and treatment for everyone needing medical care, and now, setting up potentially dire scenarios for hospital staff who must ration care with an eye toward saving the most lives. These are the conditions under crisis standards of care, which the state enacted Tuesday in 10 North Idaho hospitals as COVID patients continue to fill hospitals in the region and staffing and space are stretched to their limit.
Record-breaking COVID-19 numbers in Kootenai County and a strong recommendation from Coeur d’Alene schools weren’t enough to convince many students to don a mask when classes began Tuesday. At the district’s elementary schools, about 1 in 10 wore a mask, according to a district spokesman. Numbers were lower at the secondary level. “It’s safe to say most students aren’t wearing masks,” said Scott Maben, director of communications for the district, which welcomed about 10,300 students back to class. Of those, only 162 opted for an online option.
I want to understand my neighbors who vehemently oppose getting vaccinated and showing proof because those things impinge on personal freedoms. Yet, as adults, they are vaccinated for mumps, measles, whooping cough, smallpox and tetanus and carry other government issued documents like driver’s licenses which they show to board flights or to complete other transactions. Perhaps they are even willing to consider taking a medicine developed for livestock to protect themselves, but are unwilling to take clinically proven vaccines that reduce the risk of getting Covid by 15-20 times, as evidenced by the proportion of unvaccinated-to-vaccinated people who are now are in ICUs. Are they aware that the politicians most vocal in encouraging them to “stand up for your rights” have all been vaccinated, including Donald Trump? It is the height of cynicism.
Jill Biden has gone back to her whiteboard. After months of teaching writing and English to community college students in boxes on a computer screen, the first lady resumed teaching in person Tuesday from a classroom at Northern Virginia Community College, where she has worked since 2009. She is the first first lady to leave the White House to log hours at a full-time job.
The huge wildfire near the Lake Tahoe resort region was about half contained Tuesday, with the head of California’s firefighting agency saying crews largely have been able to keep flames away from populated areas. “We’ve been able to herd these fires around and outside of the main community corridors,” California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection Chief Thom Porter said. That includes the city of South Lake Tahoe and nearby Meyers that were threatened by the Caldor Fire as it churned east, and the communities of Pollock Pines and nearby Sly Park near where the fire ignited 3 1/2 weeks ago.
The White House is preparing an urgent and populist message for selling President Joe Biden’s $3.5 trillion “build back better” agenda, even as House committee leaders begin churning out pieces of the forthcoming measure. In a memo sent Tuesday to Capitol Hill and obtained by the Associated Press, the administration warns there is no time to waste in passing the package of corporate tax hikes and domestic initiatives by the end of the month.
Republicans in one of America’s largest conservative states for years racked up victories under the slogan “Keep Texas Red,” a pledge to quash a coming blue wave that Democrats argued was inevitable given shifting demographics. Now, those population transformations have arrived, with the 2020 census confirming that the state got bigger, more suburban and far more diverse. Yet a more apt state GOP rallying cry for today might be “Make Texas Even Redder.” Faced with increasingly dire demographic threats to their party’s dominance, Texas Republicans have championed a bevy of boundary-pushing conservative policymaking that dramatically expands gun rights, curbs abortions and tightens election laws – steering a state that was already far to the right even more so. Far from tiptoeing toward the middle to appease the Democratic-leaning Texans driving population growth, the party is embracing its base and vowing to use a new round of redistricting to ensure things stay that way through 2030 – becoming a national model for staying on the offensive no matter how political winds may eventually shift.
The Biden administration is preparing to ask Congress to include over $30 billion for hurricane and wildfire relief and resettlement of Afghan refugees in the United States in a short-term stopgap funding bill appropriators are prepping to try to avert a partial government shutdown after Sept. 30. The Office of Management and Budget said Tuesday that more than $14 billion is needed to pay for unmet needs from recent natural disasters including hurricanes Laura and Delta last fall and wildfires that occurred before Hurricane Ida struck Louisiana recently.
Veterans’ groups, Democratic lawmakers and Afghans called Tuesday for urgent Biden administration action on a weeklong standoff that has left hundreds of would-be evacuees from Afghanistan desperate to board waiting charter flights out of the Taliban-ruled country. They say several dozen Americans, along with a much larger number of U.S. green card holders and family members, are among vulnerable Afghans waiting to board pre-arranged charter flights at the airport in the northern Afghan city of Mazar-e-Sharif that are being prevented from leaving. “We think we are in some kind of jail,” said one Afghan woman among the would-be evacuees gathered in Mazar-e-Sharif. She said elderly American citizens and parents of Afghan-Americans in the U.S. are among those being blocked from boarding evacuation planes.
Health experts and medical groups are pushing to stamp out the growing use of a decades-old parasite drug to treat COVID-19, warning that it can cause harmful side effects and that there’s little evidence it helps. With a fourth wave of infections, more Americans are turning to ivermectin, a cheap drug used to kill worms and other parasites in humans and animals. Federal health officials have seen a surge in prescriptions this summer, accompanied by worrying increases in reported overdoses. The drug was even given to inmates at a jail in northwest Arkansas for COVID-19, despite federal warnings against that use. On Wednesday, podcaster Joe Rogan, who has been dismissive of the COVID-19 vaccine, announced he had tested positive for the virus and was taking the medication.
COVID-19 booster shots may be coming for at least some Americans but already the Biden administration is being forced to scale back expectations – illustrating just how much important science still has to be worked out. The initial plan was to offer Pfizer or Moderna boosters starting Sept. 20, contingent on authorization from U.S. regulators. But now administration officials acknowledge Moderna boosters probably won’t be ready by then – the Food and Drug Administration needs more evidence to judge them. Adding to the complexity, Moderna wants its booster to be half the dose of the original shots.
President Joe Biden declared climate change has become “everybody’s crisis” on Tuesday as he toured neighborhoods flooded by the remnants of Hurricane Ida, warning it’s time for America to get serious about the “code red” danger or face ever worse loss of life and property. Biden spoke after walking streets in New Jersey and then Queens in New York City, meeting people whose homes were destroyed or severely damaged by flooding when Ida barreled through. The storm dumped record amounts of rain onto already saturated ground and was blamed for more than a dozen deaths in the city.
“Turn on your television.” Those words were repeated in millions of homes on Sept. 11, 2001. Friends and relatives took to the telephone: Something awful was happening. You have to see. Before social media and with online news in its infancy, the story of the day when suicide terrorists killed 2,996 people unfolded primarily on television. Even some people inside New York’s World Trade Center made the phone call. They felt a shudder, could smell smoke. Could someone watch the news and find out what was happening? Most Americans were guided through the unimaginable by one of three men: Tom Brokaw of NBC News, Peter Jennings of ABC and Dan Rather of CBS. “They were the closest thing that America had to national leaders on 9/11,” said Garrett Graff, author of “The Only Plane in the Sky,” an oral history of the attack. “They were the moral authority for the country on that first day, fulfilling a very historical role of basically counseling the country through this tragedy at a moment its political leadership was largely silent and largely absent from the conversation.” On that day, when America faced the worst of humanity, it had three newsmen at the peak of their powers.
Hundreds of Washingtonians are looking for a way to skirt state COVID-19 vaccine mandates, and one Gig Harbor-based organization led by a Washington State Patrol chaplain is willing to help. Workshops offering advice on claiming the exemption are drawing large crowds and support from some notable Pierce County Republicans, including two state senators and three state representatives. Leaders of the nonprofit organization One Washington, which is running the workshops in churches across Washington and Oregon, say they’re not doing anything political, just educational. One Washington co-president Thomas Jonez is a Washington State Patrol chaplain and former owner of a closed vocational school that left hundreds of students with worthless diplomas and crippling loan debt in the mid-2000s. Jonez said his state duties and past business failures have nothing to do with his One Washington activities.
In the early days of Joe Biden’s term, clever observers had a piece of advice for the new president and his party that was repeated often: Do popular things. It was a bit tongue-in-cheek for being so obvious, but that was the point. Rather than turn his political strategy into a Rube Goldberg machine with a hundred moving parts, he should simply pursue his most widely supported objectives. That, it was said, is the only way to win, especially to prevent one’s presidency being hamstrung by a midterm election loss that gives the opposition control of Congress.
Mexico’s Supreme Court ruled Tuesday that it is unconstitutional to punish abortion, unanimously annulling several provisions of a law from Coahuila, a northern state on the Texas border, that had made abortion a criminal act beyond six weeks of gestation in the womb. The decision will immediately affect only the northern border state, but it establishes a historic precedent and “obligatory criteria for all of the country’s judges,” compelling them to act the same way in similar cases, said court President Arturo Zaldívar. “From now on you will not be able to, without violating the court’s criteria and the constitution, charge any woman who aborts under the circumstances this court has ruled as valid.”
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