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from The Spokesman-Review
Newspaper in Spokane, Washington
After initially getting derailed this spring, Canadian Pacific Railway’s $31 billion acquisition of Kansas City Southern is back on track after Canadian National dropped out of the bidding war Wednesday. The deal could still face tough scrutiny from regulators at the federal Surface Transportation Board, which hasn’t approved any major railroad mergers since the 1990s. But KCS shareholders will be set to get paid once shareholders of both companies and Mexican regulators approve it regardless of what the STB ultimately decides. The $31 billion deal includes 2.884 CP shares and $90 in cash for each shareholder and the assumption of roughly $3.8 billion in debt.
President Joe Biden met Wednesday with the CEOs of Walt Disney and Columbia Sportswear and other business leaders to discuss his recently announced vaccine requirement for companies that employ at least 100 people. The White House meeting comes less than a week after Biden said the Labor Department is working to require businesses with 100 or more employees to order those workers to be fully vaccinated against COVID-19, or show a negative test result at least weekly.
The top U.S. military officer on Wednesday defended the phone calls he made to his Chinese counterpart in the turbulent final months of Donald Trump’s presidency, saying the conversations were intended to convey “reassurance” to the Chinese military and were in line with his responsibilities as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Some in Congress accused Gen. Mark Milley of having overstepped his authority and urged President Joe Biden to fire him, but Biden indicated Wednesday he stands behind Milley.
Hours after California Gov. Gavin Newsom beat back a recall election that could have cost him his job, his fellow Democrats in the state Legislature said Wednesday that they will push for changes to make it more difficult to challenge a sitting governor. That could include increasing the number of signatures needed to force a recall election, raising the standard to require wrongdoing on the part of the officeholder and changing the process that could permit someone with a small percentage of votes to replace the state’s top elected official.
Late Tuesday night, House Democrats rejected a Republican effort to add legislation inspired by the fire that destroyed the Eastern Washington towns of Malden and Pine City in 2020 to the $3.5 trillion spending package Democrats are in the process of crafting. In a “markup” session in which lawmakers propose amendments to revise a bill, the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee rejected – by a 39 to 27 vote – an amendment proposed by Rep. Doug LaMalfa, R-Calif., that would have added provisions from a bill introduced in June by Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, R-Wash. The Malden Act would require a president to respond within 30 days to governors’ requests to declare a major disaster in the wake of wildfires and other emergencies. That provision was inspired by former President Donald Trump blocking aid to fire victims in Malden and Pine City after the two Whitman County towns were destroyed by the Babb Road Fire on Sept. 7, 2020.
Looking down a hillside dotted with large stumps and nearly devoid of trees, a pair of retired U.S. Forest Service employees lamented logging policies they helped craft to deal with two harbingers of climate change — pine beetles and wildfires. Timber production dramatically ramped up two decades ago in the Black Hills National Forest along the South Dakota-Wyoming border, as beetles ravaged huge expanses of forest and worries grew over wildfires.
The Biden administration began notifying governors and state refugee coordinators across the country about how many Afghan evacuees from among the first group of nearly 37,000 arrivals are slated to be resettled in their states.
President Joe Biden announced Wednesday that the United States is forming a new Indo-Pacific security alliance with Britain and Australia that will allow for greater sharing of defense capabilities — including helping equip Australia with nuclear-powered submarines. It’s a move that could deepen a growing chasm in U.S.-China relations. Biden made the announcement alongside British Prime Minister Boris Johnson and Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison, who joined him by video to unveil the new alliance, which will be called AUKUS (pronounced AWK-us). The three announced they would quickly turn their attention to developing nuclear-powered submarines for Australia.
SpaceX’s first private flight blasted off Wednesday night with two contest winners, a health care worker and their rich sponsor, the most ambitious leap yet in space tourism. It was the first time a rocket streaked toward orbit with an all-amateur crew – no professional astronauts. The Dragon capsule’s two men and two women are looking to spend three days circling the world from an unusually high orbit – 100 miles higher than the International Space Station – before splashing down off the Florida coast this weekend. Leading the flight is Jared Isaacman, 38, who made his fortune with a payment-processing company he started in his teens. It’s SpaceX founder Elon Musk’s first entry in the competition for space tourism dollars. Isaacman is the third billionaire to launch this summer, following the brief space-skimming flights by Virgin Galactic’s Richard Branson and Blue Origin’s Jeff Bezos in July. Joining Isaacman on the trip dubbed Inspiration4 is Hayley Arceneaux, 29, a childhood cancer survivor who works as a physician assistant where she was treated – St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee. Isaacman has pledged $100 million out of his own pocket to the hospital and is seeking another $100 million in donations. Also along for the ride: sweepstakes winners Chris Sembroski, 42, a data engineer in Everett, and Sian Proctor, 51, a community college educator in Tempe, Arizona.
A House committee dealt an ominous if tentative blow Wednesday to President Joe Biden’s huge social and environment package, derailing a money-saving plan to let Medicare negotiate the price it pays for prescription drugs. The House Energy and Commerce Committee vote to drop the proposal from its piece of Biden’s signature 10-year, $3.5 trillion spending plan was not necessarily fatal. The separate House Ways and Means Committee kept it alive by approving nearly identical drug-pricing language. Even so, the provision’s rejection by one committee underscores the clout that moderates looking to curb new spending — or any small group of Democrats — have as Biden and party leaders try pushing the entire package through the narrowly divided Congress. Facing unanimous Republican opposition, Democrats will be able to lose just three House votes and none in the 50-50 Senate to send the overall measure to Biden. That’s a precarious margin for what will be an enormous bill laced with numerous politically sensitive initiatives on spending and taxes.
World leaders will have to be vaccinated against the coronavirus to speak at the U.N. General Assembly’s big meeting next week, the assembly leader and New York City officials have said, prompting swift objections from at least one nation. With the diplomatic world’s premier event being held in person for the first time during the pandemic, city International Affairs commissioner Penny Abeywardena told the assembly in a letter last week that officials consider the hall a “convention center” and therefore subject to the city’s vaccination requirement.
Fire crews moved to ramp up the battle Wednesday against two expanding forest fires threatening Sequoia National Park’s giant sequoia trees and infrastructure. The Colony and Paradise fires, ignited by lightning strikes last week, covered about 11 square miles in California’s steep Sierra Nevada.
One Texas woman traveled nearly 1,000 miles to Colorado for an abortion. Others are driving four hours to New Mexico. And in Houston, clinics that typically perform more than 100 abortions in a week are are down to a few a day. Two weeks after the nation’s strictest abortion law took effect in Texas, new court filings show the deepening impact a near-total ban on abortion is already having, as the Biden administration late Tuesday asked a federal court in Austin for an emergency order to temporarily halt enforcement of the measure known as Senate Bill 8. One network of clinics in Texas, which performed more than 9,000 abortions in 2020, said it has so far turned away more than 100 patients. “Since S.B. 8 took effect on September 1, exactly what we feared would happen has come to pass,” Melaney Linton, president of Planned Parenthood Gulf Coast, said in a court filing.
Pope Francis said Wednesday that Catholic bishops must minister with “compassion and tenderness,” not condemnation, to politicians who support abortion rights and warned that clerics shouldn’t let politics enter into questions about receiving Communion. Francis was asked en route home from Slovakia about the debate in the U.S. church about whether President Joe Biden and other politicians should be denied Communion because of their stances on abortion. U.S. bishops have agreed to draft a “teaching document” that many of them hope will rebuke Catholic politicians, including Biden, for receiving Communion despite their support for abortion rights. Francis declined to give a “yes” or “no” answer, saying he didn’t know the U.S. case well enough. He repeated that abortion was “homicide,” and that Catholic priests cannot give the Eucharist to someone who is not in communion with the church. He cited the case of a Jew, or someone who isn’t baptized or who has fallen away from the church.
An ominous four-word message issued by California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s campaign on the morning of Aug. 5 served as the shock Democrats needed to take seriously a recall election that could remove him from office: “This recall is close.” Newsom’s warning in a fundraising email came just days after a poll indicated the once-popular Democratic governor who was elected in a 2018 landslide was facing the unthinkable prospect of losing his job in a state that hadn’t elected a Republican in a statewide race in 15 years.
TAPACHULA, Mexico — Caribe Dorvil wakes up at 3 a.m. each day to prepare food to sell in a small street market with dozens of other Haitian migrants in this southern Mexican city. Unable to find other work because they still lack legal status, Dorvil and Haitian migrants sell meals, soft drinks, clothing and offer services such as haircuts, manicures and tailoring under umbrellas in the street market. Dorvil has requested asylum in Mexico, but the agency processing such requests is deeply backed up and has not had enough resources to deal with the exponential growth in asylum claims in recent years. A couple years ago, migrants such as Dorvil might have quickly passed through Tapachula, historically a stop on one of the main migrant routes north. But more recently it has become a Kafkaesque quagmire of bureaucracy without exit for thousands. The growing frustration led hundreds of migrants to walk out of Tapachula this month and attempt to travel north. Mexican authorities stopped them each time, sometimes violently. Another attempted caravan has been rumored for this week. Former U.S. President Donald Trump threatened Mexico with tariffs if it did not slow the flow of migrants to the U.S. border. Mexico responded by deploying its National Guard and more immigration agents to try to contain migrants in the south.
Twenty-five handwritten letters. That’s what the critical care nurses at Kootenai Health did for a COVID-19 patient who refused to go on a ventilator. The patient was too weak to write letters with goodbyes to family and friends, so the nurses did it, said Emily Farness, a nurse at the Coeur d’Alene hospital. The patient went into comfort care and eventually died from the virus. “It’s hard to take that on emotionally,” Farness told reporters on Wednesday. Farness and her colleagues at Kootenai Health have recently received some backup from contracted federal workers who will fill open nursing, medical assistant and respiratory therapist jobs along with nonclinical positions. Joan Simon, chief nursing officer at Kootenai Health, said 70 workers from ACI Federal, a federal staffing agency, have arrived to help at the Coeur d’Alene hospital. Kootenai Health has about 500 job openings, including 280 jobs for clinical care staff. Even with the agency workers and help from a Department of Defense team, Kootenai Health will remain in crisis standards of care until COVID cases decline, Simon said.
With North Idaho hospitals already rationing care under stress from the influx of COVID-19 patients, Washington health leaders are making preparations in case they need to do the same. Health officials said the stress felt in the state’s health care system could continue for days or even weeks. Hospitals around Washington are expanding their intensive care units into nontraditional settings, emergency departments remain backed up with patients and COVID patients are delaying other necessary health care, including surgeries to remove cancerous tumors. Since July 1, the Washington Medical Coordination Center has received more than 1,000 requests from hospitals to transfer patients elsewhere, especially from rural hospitals where patients are typically stabilized before they are transferred elsewhere for intensive care. “We’re doing everything we can, so we don’t stretch that system to the point it breaks and we have to implement crisis standards of care,” Secretary of Health Dr. Umair Shah said on Wednesday.
It was an earlier-than-usual morning on a perfect bluebird day. Constantia Red, an assistant vice president at Goldman-Sachs, was attending a technology training session with three colleagues on the 19th floor of a building in the financial district of New York City. She’d been in the training for a couple of hours when a fire alarm sounded. “Of course, nobody moved,” Red said. “Nobody was concerned.” Fire drills occurred all the time. No big deal. Then a security guard opened the door and told the trainees they were being evacuated and would need to take the stairs. Was the building on fire? Was there another emergency? As they began to head toward the stairs, the guard said, “For those who haven’t heard, two planes crashed into the Twin Towers on purpose.”
Homeless shelter operators say they want to be good neighbors – but some city leaders want them to put that promise in writing. A proposal to fund a homeless shelter in northwest Spokane has renewed calls for a “good neighbor agreement” between the shelter’s nonprofit operator, the Salvation Army, and the surrounding community. Proponents, including Councilwoman Karen Stratton, believe a written agreement would help establish an understanding between the shelter and its neighbors to address common concerns like security.
The workforce that built the U.S. nuclear arsenal, thousands of them already sickened or killed by workplace hazards, has been delivered two frustrating blows by the federal government. At least 937 nuclear workers nationwide – including some from Washington’s Hanford nuclear reservation – seeking federal benefits for conditions resulting from their work are facing yearlong waits, as the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health wrestles with cyber vulnerabilities even as new benefits applications stack up. Adding to the workers’ woes, President Joe Biden’s administration on Tuesday announced it plans to continue a Trump-era legal challenge to a Washington state law that makes it easier for sick workers to access benefits. Advocates for sick nuclear workers have characterized the collision of disappointments as “callous” and “cruel.”
An estimated 2,600 Los Angeles Police Department employees are citing religious objections to try to get out of the required COVID-19 vaccination. In Washington state, thousands of state workers are seeking similar exemptions. And in Arkansas, a hospital has been swamped with so many such requests from employees that it is apparently calling their bluff. Religious objections, once used sparingly around the country to get exempted from various required vaccines, are becoming a much more widely used loophole against the COVID-19 shot. And it is only likely to grow following President Joe Biden’s sweeping new vaccine mandates covering more than 100 million Americans, including executive branch employees and workers at businesses with more than 100 people on the payroll.
It didn’t look like much, just a snake of black pipe running along the shoulder of a dirt road, above the bank of a small stream called Blue Creek. But this 8-inch, high-density polyethylene tube will soon become the means of conveying treated but contaminated water from the former Midnite uranium mine on the Spokane Reservation to the depths of the Spokane Arm of Lake Roosevelt, 5.1 miles away. There, the water will be diffused and diluted far below the surface. That new system for transporting and releasing the contaminated water will replace the existing system, which involves depositing water from the uranium mine directly into the creek. The change will mean a significant improvement of the water quality in the creek and will reduce toxic exposure for people and wildlife in the area without causing undue harm to the lake, according to the Environmental Protection Agency, which oversees the mine’s Superfund cleanup, and the Spokane Tribe of Indians, which advocated for the pipeline’s construction.
North Korea said Thursday it successfully launched ballistic missiles from a train for the first time and was continuing to bolster its defenses, after the two Koreas test-fired missiles hours apart in dueling displays of military might. Wednesday’s launches underscored a return of the tensions between the rivals amid a prolonged stalemate in U.S.-led talks aimed at stripping North Korea of its nuclear weapons program.
France’s president announced the death of Islamic State in the Greater Sahara’s leader late Wednesday, calling Adnan Abu Walid al-Sahrawi’s killing “a major success” for the French military after more than eight years fighting extremists in the Sahel.
Friction between pragmatists and ideologues in the Taliban leadership has intensified since the group formed a hard-line Cabinet last week that is more in line with their harsh rule in the 1990s than their recent promises of inclusiveness, two Afghans familiar with the power struggle said.
Roughly 400 Afghan refugees will resettle in Idaho over the next fiscal year, officials with the International Rescue Committee in Boise said on Tuesday. About 50,000 Afghans are expected to be admitted to the United States under a program called “Operation Allies Welcome.” The group will include translators, drivers and others who helped the U.S. military during the 20-year war and who feared reprisals from the Taliban after they quickly seized power last month.
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