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from The Spokesman-Review
Newspaper in Spokane, Washington
There’s a new Silicon Valley corporate name change on the block. A month after Facebook renamed itself Meta, Square Inc., the payments company headed by former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, is changing its name to Block Inc.
Tesla says it has officially moved its corporate headquarters from Silicon Valley to a large factory under construction outside of Austin, Texas. The company made the announcement late Wednesday in a filing with U.S. securities regulators. CEO Elon Musk had said at the company’s annual meeting in October that the move was coming.
In a fresh sign of his growing concerns about inflation, Chair Jerome Powell said Wednesday the Federal Reserve can’t be sure price increases will slow in the second half of next year as many economists expect. Powell told the House Financial Services Committee most economists regard the current price spikes, which have sent consumer inflation to a three-decade high, as largely a response to the pandemic’s persistent disruptions to supply and demand. As Americans have spent more time at home, they have ramped up spending on furniture, appliances, laptop computers. Soaring demand for such goods, combined with parts shortages, have resulted in supply chain snarls and higher prices.
General Motors is forming a joint venture with Posco Chemical of South Korea to build a North American battery materials plant as it brings more steps in the electric vehicle supply chain under its umbrella. The Detroit automaker said Wednesday that details of the venture are still being worked out, including investment amounts and the plant location. GM said the factory will supply materials to make cathodes, the energy center of a battery that amounts to 40% of the cost. ... Automakers are racing to line up suppliers for scarce battery materials and components in anticipation of a widespread shift from internal combustion vehicles to those powered by electricity.
Tourism businesses that were just finding their footing after nearly two years of devastation wrought by the COVID-19 pandemic are being rattled again as countries throw up new barriers to travel in an effort to contain the omicron variant. From shopping districts in Japan and tour guides in the Holy Land to ski resorts in the Alps and airlines the world over, a familiar dread is rising about the renewed restrictions.
Last year’s critical race theory freakout in Idaho, which resulted in a defund-the-academy movement in the state Legislature, was sustained in part by a single professor at Boise State University. This political science prof, Scott Yenor, has been yoked to the wagon of Idaho’s anti-CRT project like a determined miniature donkey, serving as the project’s supposed intellectual heft and celebrated as a truth-teller of Copernican proportions. It was a silly, nonsensical charade. It was also something more pernicious: An attack on academic freedom in favor of political indoctrination, such as we’re seeing all over the country.
The theft of a statue honoring a legendary Lincoln County resident has investigators asking the public for help. A 3-foot bronze sculpture of a cowboy praying atop his horse was ripped from its mooring outside the Roadside Chapel near Creston sometime early Tuesday morning, according to authorities. The statue was a family gift to Deb Copenhaver, an accomplished rodeo athlete and World War II veteran who died in 2019. “I just thought it was perfect for in front of daddy’s church,” said Deborah Copenhaver-Fellows, who sculpted the piece and is also responsible for Spokane’s Vietnam War memorial statue as well as the statue of Bing Crosby at Gonzaga University.
After more than three decades of watching salmon populations in steady and dangerous decline, our region now has a historic opportunity not just to reverse that trend but to restore the fish to healthy numbers. And we have the political leadership in place to seize the opportunity. Notably, with U.S. Sens. Patty Murray and Maria Cantwell, and Gov. Jay Inslee, we have leadership that operates at national and state levels and weaves together immediate wins and long-term vision. What we don’t have is time.
More than 700,000 American lives have been lost to HIV/AIDS since the first cases were reported in the U.S. 40 years ago. On World AIDS Day, which was Wednesday, about 60 people gathered at the Washington Cracker Building in downtown Spokane to remember those who have died from the disease, to raise awareness of rising HIV cases and to end the stigma that often comes along with the virus. “HIV has cost America too much for too long and remains a significant public health issue,” said Grant Ogren, executive director of the Spokane AIDS Network, which hosted Wednesday’s AIDS event. Ogren said more than 1.1 million Americans are living with HIV and many more are at risk of infection. New HIV diagnoses have declined significantly since its peak, but progress has stalled, with an estimated 38,000 Americans being diagnosed each year, Ogren said.
The new omicron variant of coronavirus was detected in California on Wednesday, and health officials say it’s only a matter of time before it’s detected in Washington. Omicron will arrive when a third of Washington’s population is still vulnerable to the virus, according to state modeling, State Epidemiologist Dr. Scott Lindquist told reporters Wednesday. “That model shows us about 34%, or a third of the entire state’s population, is still vulnerable to this infection, and that means they aren’t vaccinated or haven’t been infected,” Lindquist said.
In early November, laboratories in South Africa’s Gauteng province began picking up something unusual while processing COVID-19 tests: They weren’t able to detect the virus gene that creates the spike protein enabling the pathogen to enter human cells and spread. Around the same time, doctors in the region saw a sudden flood of patients with fatigue and headaches. The new cases appeared after weeks of calm that ensued following a delta variant-driven third coronavirus wave, which had ripped through Johannesburg and the capital Pretoria in July.
Jury trials will be paused again in North Idaho due to rising COVID-19 cases. Trials in the Panhandle Health District, which includes Benewah, Bonner, Boundary, Kootenai and Shoshone counties, will be suspended for the week starting Monday. The order states counties within a public health district where Idaho’s crisis standards of care are activated should pause jury trials and grand jury proceedings.
It’s not uncommon for siblings and cousins to follow each other through school or even play the same sport – especially at a small school. But when your last name is Isaak at Almira/Coulee-Hartline, it carries a completely different set of expectations. Senior Dane Isaak knows all about those expectations, and he hopes to carve out a special place in that legacy on Saturday, when his Warriors (11-0) face Quilcene (10-1) in the State 1B championship game at noon at Mt. Tahoma High School. Dane is the last Isaak – for now – in a long line to play quarterback for ACH. He follows three brothers and a cousin in that regard.
The federal government could be heading for a temporary shutdown, with Republicans poised to stall a must-pass funding bill in their effort to force a debate in Congress on rolling back the Biden administration’s COVID-19 vaccine mandates for some workers. Conservative Republicans in the House and Senate who are opposed to Biden’s vaccine rules want Congress to take a hardline stand against the mandated shots, even if it means shutting down federal offices over the weekend. But not all Republicans are on board. One GOP senator after another left a private lunch meeting Wednesday voicing concern they will be blamed for even a short stoppage of the federal government that will not play well with the public.
The House panel investigating the Jan. 6 U.S. Capitol insurrection voted Wednesday to pursue contempt charges against Jeffrey Clark, a former Justice Department official who refused to answer the committee’s questions — but the panel agreed to let him come back for another try. The committee voted 9-0 to pursue criminal charges against Clark, who aligned with Donald Trump ahead of the violent attack as the then-president tried to overturn his election defeat. Clark appeared for a deposition last month but refused to be interviewed, citing Trump’s legal efforts to block the committee’s investigation.
America needs to rethink and reduce the way it generates plastics because so much of the material is littering the oceans and other waters, the National Academy of Sciences says in a new report. The United States, the world’s top plastics waste producer, generates more than 46 million tons a year, and about 2.2 billion pounds ends up in the world’s oceans, according to the academy’s report.
If you’ve visited the Smithsonian’s National Zoo recently, you might have enjoyed watching giant panda cub Xiao Qi Ji or his parents munch on bamboo. You probably didn’t have a hard time finding him in his enclosure. Pandas are big animals and sport large patches of black-and-white fur. In the wild, such standout coloration could mean that predators such as leopards, tigers and wild dogs called dholes might have an easy time seeing this animal. But, surprisingly, researchers have discovered that this may not be the case.
In the biggest challenge to abortion rights in decades, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority on Wednesday signaled they would allow states to ban abortion much earlier in pregnancy and may even overturn the nationwide right that has existed for nearly 50 years. With hundreds of demonstrators outside chanting for and against, the justices led arguments that could decide the fate of the court’s historic 1973 Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion throughout the United States and its 1992 ruling in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, which reaffirmed Roe.
A person in California who had been vaccinated against COVID-19 became the first in the U.S. to have an identified case of the omicron variant, the White House announced Wednesday as scientists continue to study the risks posed by the new virus strain. Dr. Anthony Fauci told reporters that the person was a traveler who returned from South Africa on Nov. 22 and tested positive on Nov. 29. Fauci said the person was vaccinated but had not received a booster shot and was experiencing “mild symptoms.”
Hundreds of abortion debate partisans crowded the plaza in front of the Supreme Court on Wednesday, trading chants as justices heard the highly anticipated arguments inside. “Whose choice?” “My choice!” was a frequent call-and-response on the abortion rights side, countered by “Hey hey, ho ho, Roe v. Wade has got to go.”
A pandemic-weary world faces weeks of confusing uncertainty as countries restrict travel and take other steps to halt the newest potentially risky coronavirus mutant before anyone knows just how dangerous omicron really is. Will it spread even faster than the already extra-contagious delta variant? Does it make people sicker? Does it evade vaccines’ protection or reinfect survivors? There are lots of guesses but little hard evidence as scientists race to find answers amid scrutiny from an anxious public.
NATO became a victim of mission creep in Afghanistan as the international community upped its aims from fighting extremists to rebuilding the conflict-torn country over two decades, the military organization’s civilian leader said Wednesday. “That broader task proved much more difficult, so we must ensure that our levels of ambition remain realistic,” NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said after chairing a meeting of alliance foreign ministers in Latvia where a report on lessons learned in Afghanistan was discussed.
Christmas Bureau volunteers spent Tuesday unpacking toys, setting up computers and getting ready for the thousands of families who will come to the Spokane County Fair and Expo Center beginning Saturday to get a food voucher for their family plus a toy and a book for each child. The Christmas Bureau is a collaboration among Catholic Charities, Volunteers of America and The Spokesman-Review. This is the 76th year the Christmas Bureau has provided assistance to those in need. Time: 10 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. Dates: Dec. 4-16, excluding Sundays.
President Vladimir Putin said Wednesday that Moscow would seek Western guarantees precluding any further NATO expansion and deployment of its weapons near his country’s borders, a stern demand that comes amid fears of a Russian invasion of Ukraine. Ukrainian and Western officials have worried about a Russian troop buildup near Ukraine, saying it could signal Moscow’s intention of an attack. Russian diplomats countered those claims by expressing concern about Ukraine’s own military buildup near the area of the separatist conflict in the eastern part of the country.
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