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Rural NC counties are shrinking. Republican policies aren’t helping at all.

Rural NC counties are shrinking. Republican policies aren’t helping at all.

Ned Barnett                        

 

The General Assembly’s Republican majority overwhelmingly represents rural North Carolina, but rural North Carolina has little to show for it.

Actually, it has less to show for it. Of the state’s 100 counties, 51 mostly rural counties lost population in a census report issued this month, even as booming urban areas increased the state’s population by 9.5 percent. Rebecca Tippett, the director of Carolina Demography at UNC-Chapel Hill, said, “More counties than expected lost population and the losses were larger than expected.”

The shift refutes the low-tax, low-spending policies Republican legislative leaders have slavishly followed since taking control of the General Assembly in 2011. While the movement from rural to urban areas is a national trend, the legislative majority has accelerated the exodus by blocking or neglecting policies and investments that would spur rural job growth.

Norris Tolson, a former Democratic state legislator and former state secretary of transportation and secretary of commerce, now leads Carolinas Gateway Partnership, a group trying to boost economic development in Tolson’s native Edgecombe County. Since 2010, the county has lost 14 percent of its population. “The migration of the population speaks for itself,” he said. “People are moving to where they think the jobs are.”

Republicans have hurt the very people who elected them. Consider what the majority has done:

• Blocked Medicaid expansion for seven years. That has left hundreds of thousands of working poor without medical insurance and denied the state billions of dollars in federal aid. The impact has fallen hardest on rural hospitals. Since 2010, five of North Carolina’s 50 rural hospitals have closed and another nine are considered at risk of closing, according to a report from the Chartis Center for Rural Health.

• Slowed spending on public schools. Public schools are the main employer in 59 counties. Starving them for operating and capital funds stymies the local economy. Urban counties have raised property taxes to compensate. Rural counties don’t have the tax base to do that.

• Cut income taxes in ways that give the biggest breaks to large corporations and higher earners. The reductions mostly benefit white-collar urban workers even as they reduce the state’s ability to invest in rural areas.

• Opposed state borrowing. Republican leaders prefer a pay-as-you-go approach over approving state bond issues. What rural governments need most is money for roads, water and sewer, but the legislature has not supported the level of borrowing needed to fund major rural infrastructure projects.

• Bungled broadband expansion. In 2011, the legislature, kowtowing to telecommunications companies, blocked municipalities from operating their own broadband networks. Ten years later, access to high-speed internet – an essential tool for businesses, remote work, virtual schooling and telemedicine – is still unavailable or of poor quality in much of rural North Carolina.

• Targeted undocumented immigrants. Hispanic immigrants are a key part of the rural workforce in meatpacking and agriculture and their share of the rural population is growing. In Duplin, Sampson and Lee counties, for instance, 20 percent of the population is Hispanic, and that’s likely an undercount. Rather than helping the undocumented among the Hispanic population gain legal status, Republicans have encouraged their arrest and deportation.

Tolson said there is no single “silver bullet” to help rural counties, but “good, conscientious government policy” can make a difference.

On the other side, bad, callous government policy also has an effect.

Ten years ago, rural voters put their faith in Republican promises to lift their communities. Now, feeling the effects of those broken promises, rural residents are increasingly voting with their feet.

Associate opinion editor Ned Barnett can be reached at 919-829-4512, or nbarnett@ newsobserver.com

As California burns, some ecologists say it’s time to rethink forest management

As California burns, some ecologists say it’s time to rethink forest management

Hayley Smith, Alex Wigglesworth                     
Palm Springs, CA - August 10: Chad Hanson, ecologist and president of the John Muir Project examines the burn scar region of the San Jacinto Mountains on Tuesday, Aug. 10, 2021, in Palm Springs, CA. (Madeleine Hordinski / Los Angeles Times)
Chad Hanson, ecologist and president of the John Muir Project, examines the burn scar region of the San Jacinto Mountains. (Madeleine Hordinski / Los Angeles Times) 

As he stood amid the rubble of the town of Greenville, Gov. Gavin Newsom this month vowed to take proactive steps to protect California’s residents from increasingly devastating wildfires.

“We recognize that we’ve got to do more in active forest management, vegetation management,” Newsom said, noting that the region’s extreme heat and drought are leading to “wildfire challenges the likes of which we’ve never seen in our history.”

Yet despite a universal desire to avoid more destruction, experts aren’t always in agreement about what should be done before a blaze ignites. Forest management has long been touted as essential to fighting wildfires, with one new set of studies led by the University of Wisconsin and the U.S. Forest Service concluding that there is strong scientific evidence to support the effectiveness of thinning dense forests and reducing fuels through prescribed burns.

But some ecologists say that logging, thinning and other tactics that may have worked in the past are no longer useful in an era of ever hotter, larger and more frequent wildfires.

“The fact is that forest management is not stopping weather- and climate-driven fires,” said Chad Hanson, a forest and fire ecologist and the president of the John Muir Project.

Many of California’s most devastating recent fires — including 2018’s deadly Camp fire and the Dixie fire, now the state’s second largest on record — seared straight through forests that had been treated for fuel reduction and fire prevention purposes, Hanson said.

But reimagining well-worn approaches to forest management will require a reckoning with what is and isn’t working amid the state’s shifting landscape. In lieu of focusing funds and resources on fuel treatment, Hanson and other ecologists have said the onus should shift toward home hardening and community protection.

“This is a climate change issue, and you can’t address it with chainsaws and bulldozers or even drip torches,” Hanson said. “The only effective way to protect communities from wildland fire is to focus directly on homes.”

Though fuel reduction has been part of Cal Fire and the U.S. Forest Service’s practices for decades, former President Trump helped politicize it when he announced in 2018 that California’s devastating wildfires could be thwarted by better “raking” the forest floors.

Yet vegetation removal is only one among a handful of strategies that fall under the umbrella of forest management — not all of which were created equal, said Morgan Tingley, an associate professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at UCLA.

Tingley outlined three basic categories of work: prescribed burns, forest thinning and clear-cutting.

Prescribed burns, also known as controlled fires, are among the better solutions for maintaining forest health, he said. But given the restrictions, planning and logistics required for those types of burns, it’s impossible to utilize them to any real benefit.

The Forest Service this month vowed to stomp out every fire that ignites — a statement of political necessity that left many ecologists grimacing at the implications for the landscape.

Even more controversial than prescribed burning is mechanical thinning, a vegetation reduction process that can involve chainsaws, masticators and other tools to clear out certain types of trees or densities of trees. While some ecologists believe that removing accumulated fuels can help limit the potential for catastrophic fires, others have argued that thinning can in fact make conflagrations worse.

One 2016 study published by the Ecological Society of America and coauthored by Hanson examined three decades of fire data across the western U.S., and found that protected forests — those that had not been thinned — had lower levels of burn severity despite having higher amounts of biomass and fuels.

A 2008 study published by Forest Ecology and Management similarly worked to combat misconceptions. It took a more tempered approach, noting that some forest thinning can be helpful, but also said that removing vegetation to reduce the size and frequency of wildfires is “both futile and counter-productive,” and warned that fuel reduction should not be viewed as a panacea for reducing fire hazards.

“Given the right conditions, wildlands will inevitably burn. It is a misconception to think that treating fuels can ‘fire-proof’ important areas,” the report said.

Among the primary concerns is that thinning a forest not only eliminates much of the forest’s carbon-sucking benefits, but also removes canopies that provide shade and help maintain moisture.

The 2018 Camp fire, which reduced much of the Butte County town of Paradise to ashes, burned in an area of forest that had been logged for fuel reduction and fire prevention purposes, Hanson said. When the wind-whipped fire reached the thinned-out, sun-baked forest, it flared up so quickly that it arrived in Paradise hours sooner than it otherwise would have.

The fire ultimately destroyed 19,000 structures and killed 86 people.

“It was going to reach the town no matter what, but it definitely burned more intensely and got there faster because of the logging,” Hanson said. “I think it would have meant the difference between life and death for most of those people.”

And it’s not just the Camp fire: A similar pattern can be seen in several other high profile fires, including the Dixie fire, the Caldor fire and the 413,000-acre Bootleg fire in Oregon, said Bryant Baker, conservation director for the Los Padres ForestWatch.

Maps of those fires fit almost squarely over maps of recently logged and treated forestlands, he said.

“We’ve heard a lot of folks in the Forest Service say that we need a paradigm shift in the way we deal with fire, and almost always, it’s a shift into the same paradigm we’ve been in: Keep suppressing fires, and double down on fuel treatment and cutting vegetation,” Baker said.

“What we’re actually talking about is a real paradigm shift. We really do have to rethink how we live with wildfire.”

One major element of that paradigm shift is home hardening and community defense, Baker said. That includes steps like reducing debris from gutters, retrofitting roofs and windows with ignition-resistant materials, and moving combustible items away from homes’ exteriors.

It also means improving early warning and evacuation systems within communities. If employed effectively, these strategies have been shown to protect more lives and homes during even very intense wildfires.

“It’s the one blanket approach that works,” he said.

Yet even as crews struggle to gain a footing on the massive Dixie fire, Forest Service officials said the blaze is doing what it was intended to do, at least in part.

“From an ecological standpoint, [fuel treatment] is not really supposed to stop fire,” said Ryan Bauer, fuels and prescribed fire program manager for the Plumas National Forest. “The treatments are supposed to make the forest healthy enough to withstand fire.”

He pointed to successful fuel treatments around Meadow Valley, Butterfly Valley and Twain, where he said crews were able to hold the fire off from communities. He also said the Dixie fire has burned through a mix of treated and untreated land, as well as logged areas and burn scars.

“Certain areas of the forest are really well managed, and then other parts have almost no management history in the last several decades,” he said. “When the fire’s this big, it’s a mixed bag. It’s running over everything.”

Although the Forest Service had recently completed a large hazardous-fuels reduction project around Greenville that included prescribed fire, thinning and fuel breaks, Bauer said it simply wasn’t enough to make a difference — particularly once winds picked up and carried spot fires over the ridge and into the town, with a steep drainage right behind the community also contributing to the extreme fire behavior.

Another challenge is that many communities including Greenville are surrounded by a buffer of private land separating them from the national forest, resulting in a patchwork of owners who are sometimes unwilling to participate in treatment projects, he said.

But what happened in Greenville adds to multiple examples in years past of fuel breaks failing to guard towns against wind-driven fires, which can launch embers right over them.

“There’s no way to keep fire out of forests,” Bauer said. “If you do it then the fuels conditions just become worse and worse until you get a really bad fire on a really bad weather day and it burns then. All putting fire out does really is defer the risk to a future fire.”

Managers of the Plumas National Forest have known for several years that there was enough fuel on the landscape for it to be critical during any given summer when conditions are right, and it appears that time has arrived, he said.

“A year like this is the primate example of that, that year that we’ve deferred all of our risk into,” Bauer said. “It’s so dry this year that it doesn’t matter how much fuel is on the landscape. The fuel that’s there is going to burn. And we just have to hope that the trees on those landscapes are resilient enough to survive it.”

One thing most experts agree on is that clear-cutting — or logging all or most of the trees in an area — has almost no benefits to the forests or to their surrounding communities.

That the Forest Service remains in the timber sales business is something that has left some ecologists flummoxed, particularly since the federal agency is still required to meet annual quotas known as timber targets.

“Clear cutting is a purely economic choice,” said Tingley, of UCLA. “It is. There is no forest that is healthier if all the trees are cut down.”

When mechanical thinning or logging are done for profit — or when whoever is doing it gets to use the timber they’re taking out — that instead incentivizes removing the oldest, biggest and strongest trees, which fetch a higher price, and leaves behind the trees that are the least fire-resilient, he said.

In March, more than 300 scientists, stakeholders and community members signed a letter to Newsom asking him to reconsider his wildfire budget allocations for 2021 and 2022, noting that logging and clearance projects have “consistently failed to protect our neighborhoods from wildfire.”

The budget includes more than $1 billion to increase the pace and scale of forest management and fuel reduction projects, the governor’s office said. $100 million has been allocated to building disaster-resilient communities.

Rick Halsey, the California Chaparral Institute director who spearheaded the letter, said he is growing increasingly frustrated by the imbalance.

“There’s essentially nothing we can do on the landscape to stop these fires because the environment is conducive to them, so we have to sort of stare that in the face and acknowledge it,” Halsey said. “What can we do? We can protect communities.”

That means focusing on making homes less permeable to embers, reducing flammable materials within 100 feet of structures and preventing developers from placing neighborhoods in harm’s way, he said.

Hanson echoed the sentiment as he walked through the scar of a wildfire in the San Bernardino National Forest, pointing to dense vegetation and old-growth trees that withstood catching and spreading the flames.

If wildfire management could shift from a forest-focused approach to a homes-focused one, he said, more tragedies like those of Paradise and Greenville could be avoided.

“We don’t need to lose another community — and another community and another community — every fire season,” he said. “Once we start focusing on the right places, it’s going to be incredibly effective.”

U.S. report finds multiple problems with Keystone pipeline

U.S. report finds multiple problems with Keystone pipeline

 

A supply depot servicing the Keystone XL crude oil pipeline lies idle in Oyen.

 

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -The U.S. government watchdog found multiple problems with the construction, manufacture and design of the Keystone pipeline, validating President Joe Biden’s decision to revoke the permit for a Keystone XL extension, leaders of several House Democratic committees said on Monday.

The lawmakers requested the Government Accountability Office report in November 2019 after more than 11,000 barrels of oil leaked from the pipeline system in two releases in less than two years.

“GAO found that preventable construction issues contributed to the current Keystone pipeline’s spills more frequently than the industry-wide trends,” they said in a statement.

Keystone’s four largest spills were “caused by issues related to the original design, manufacturing of the pipe, or construction of the pipeline,” the GAO report said.

Biden canceled Keystone XL’s permit on his first day in office on Jan. 20, dealing a death blow to a project that would have carried 830,000 barrels per day of heavy oil sands crude from Alberta to Nebraska. [L1N2JX1D8]

“TC Energy’s record among its peers is one of the worst in terms of volume of oil spilled per mile transported,” a statement from the lawmakers said. The lawmakers included Representative Frank Pallone, energy and commerce committee chair.

TC Energy Corp officially canceled the $9 billion Keystone XL in June. It filed a notice of intent in July to begin a legacy North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) claim and is seeking more than $15 billion in damages from the U.S. government.

The company did not immediately respond on Monday to a request for comment.

Pipeline opponents want to slow the movement of Canadian oil to the United States. But pipeline supporters say it will be shipped anyway and that oil sent by rail has caused numerous fiery accidents.

Biden “was clearly right to question this operator’s ability to construct a safe and resilient pipeline, and we support his decision to put Americans’ health and environment above industry interests,” the U.S. representatives said.

(Reporting by Doina Chiacu and Timothy Gardner; Editing by Barbara Lewis and Dan Grebler)

‘Our Biggest Export Is Air’: The Pandemic and Trump-Era Policies Have Created a Massive Trade Imbalance, According to the Head of the Port of Los Angeles

‘Our Biggest Export Is Air’: The Pandemic and Trump-Era Policies Have Created a Massive Trade Imbalance, According to the Head of the Port of Los Angeles

Eben Shapiro                      

Gene Seroka, executive director, Port of Los Angeles. Credit – Courtesy Port of Los Angeles

(To receive weekly emails of conversations with the world’s top CEOs and business decisionmakers, click here.)

“All I see are ships,” said Gene Seroka, executive director of the Port of Los Angeles, the busiest port in America, gazing out of his office window recently toward the Pacific Ocean.

The pandemic has wreaked havoc across the global supply chain, and the evidence is stacking up high in the world’s overcrowded ports. Normally, pre-COVID-19, ships could steam directly into ports in L.A. and Long Beach with no waiting. But, as of Aug. 18, there were 32 vessels waiting at sea for a spot to unload at one of the two ports.

The congestion is largely due to the tremendous volume of traffic coming from ocean carriers to satisfy the intense demand for imports. The Port of Los Angeles just completed its busiest June ever, reporting a 27% increase in unit shipments. For the first six months of 2021, cargo volume at the port increased by 44% compared to 2020. Prices are soaring, and the Federal Maritime Commission recently launched an investigation into price gouging. Industry experts estimate that 99.5% of all available ships in the world are deployed right now.

The delays have been exacerbated this summer by COVID-related shutdowns at shipping facilities and a host of climate-change impacts (including wildfires that have slowed rail traffic in Canada and floods that hampered barge movement in Europe). In the U.S., the world’s largest economy, overflowing warehouses are also understaffed during a labor shortage. There aren’t enough long-haul truck drivers either, and earlier this summer, several major railroads announced they were hitting pause for a week on new pickups because they had railroad cars backed up for miles in the Midwest. (For a vivid and delightful example of the impact of supply-chain delays on one product, read my colleague Alana Semuels’ piece on ordering a stuffed giraffe for her son.)

Seroka joined TIME on Aug. 11 for a video conversation on what it will take to ease the supply-line congestion, the state of cybersecurity and the cargo that unexpectedly set off an alarm. The interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

In a speech last week, President Biden said the Administration was “tracking congestion” at the Port of Los Angeles. Did you watch the President’s comments on the port, and what was your reaction?

I watched it three times. It’s positive. To get that kind of attention from the nation’s Chief Executive and the people he has put on the case is just awesome.

What can the federal government do to help alleviate the congestion?

If you get a call from the Secretary of Transportation, you’re probably going to pick up the phone, and then you’re going to attend the meeting. They have strong convening powers to bring all of these massive stakeholders together.

I understand that your view is that some of these supply-chain issues predated the pandemic and were brought on by the Trump trade wars and tariffs. What was the impact on supply-chain dynamics?

Those policies hurt the American exporter and primarily the American farmer, because China then instituted retaliatory tariffs on our exports.

We got beat to the punch by every other trading nation. Brazil knocked us out of the game on soybeans, as an example. So here at the Port of Los Angeles, our export market is down now 28 of the last 32 months.

How has this trade imbalance affected the business?

In our industry, a lot of the focus is on round-trip economics, meaning I want to bring in as much as I push out on the export side. Now what we’ve seen with the surge in imports is that it is a 5:1 ratio: five imports that come in for every one export. So that means that our biggest export is air.

We’re exporting empty containers back to Asia so they can be pre-positioned at the factories to bring the next round of imports here to the U.S. That’s not efficient, because you don’t get revenue from air, right? The railroad companies, the trucking companies, the forwarder and broker community are spending a lot of time repositioning those empty boxes with very little return.

What kind of issues are the delays causing for your customers?

The key word for this surge has been uncertainty. I’m not sure if my products are going to be on the shelf. I’m not sure how long they’re going to take to get to me if I buy online. I’m not sure that I know when the cargo is going to get off the ship.

What is fundamentally driving this?

It all starts with the American consumer. I’ve never had more stuff in my closet. I’ve never had more sneakers. The output of the manufacturing sector is at its highest recordable levels. They can’t keep up with the orders that are coming in. They’re making as much product as they can. We’re putting it on every available ship, but we need more ships to carry this volume.

Then when it got here, we started to see the railroads get very full, and the warehouses overflowing with inventory because we’re buying so much overseas. We’ve got 2 billion sq. ft. of warehouses, from the shores of the Pacific, out to the Mojave Desert and by car.

Now with COVID-19, the workforce looked a little different too because we can no longer work in teams very close to each other. Some people got sick. Other people were scared to go to work for fear of getting sick. So we didn’t have the necessary labor force on the ground, day in and day out.

On top of that, some of the railroads hit pause.

It amounted to about 15% of our cargo that would pause there for about a seven-to-10 day period. I understood their rationale because they’re facing the same thing. Chicago’s got 50 miles of trains waiting to be unloaded right now. There’s so much cargo coming in, and the importers are not picking up the cargo as quickly as they used to, pre-COVID.

So if the cargo sits longer, the next train comes in, the next ship comes in, and it all starts backing up.

That’s a huge productivity increase regarding how fast you unload a ship. How have you been able to accomplish that? How did the longshoremen accomplish that?

They’re averaging six to seven days of work per week for 18 straight months. They’ve really rallied to the challenge. The workforce, men and women of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union, are the best in the business, and they have the capacity to improve through training time on the job to get higher certifications of skill. And that’s what we’re seeing today, all those hours that the men and women have put in to reach those new markers is paying off for us right now.

What’s the highest skill level?

You start off as an apprentice, or what we call a casual longshore member, and you’re doing just about anything and everything to get on the docks. And then it goes all the way up to the people who run those very tall ship-to-shore cranes that are now over 170 ft. in the air.

That is the highest skill, to be able to put that crane mechanism 170 ft. down to a ship, connect to a container, pick it up and move it onto a truck bed for carriage out of the terminal.

Are you experiencing the same kind of cyberattacks that many businesses have been hit with during the pandemic?

We created the nation’s first cybersecurity operation center at a port, and today it’s stopping 40 million cyber-intrusion attempts per month. It’s double what it was pre-COVID, because the bad guys are out there.

What climate-change impacts are you seeing today, and how are you responding?

It’s huge. Climate change is real. I’ve lived in port cities most of my life. There’s nothing more I would love to see than a zero-emissions port complex, and that’s the goal that L.A. Mayor [Eric] Garcetti and I have today. You still have a lot of work to do.

We’ve reduced diesel particulate matter, the tailpipe exhaust from trucks, by 87% [between 2006 and 2020], and other source categories have come down by large numbers, but we still have to get after greenhouse gases, and we still have to find a way to get to a zero-emissions platform, whether it be battery, electric, hydrogen-fuel cell or other possibilities. We’re testing them now on the ground in Los Angeles.

In December, there was a raid by U.S. Customs officials, working in conjunction with port security, that uncovered a million fake Viagra pills and counterfeit sneakers. How big of a concern is smuggling?

It’s a big issue. We worry about human trafficking, not just goods. We want to make sure that the world is safe from those types of folks who want to do that type of illicit work.

What is the strangest thing that you’re aware of that was found in a shipping container, either licit or illicit?

We did contact and noncontact radiation exams, and we had a series of containers that were pulled aside because they tripped the buttons. Come to find out it was the potassium in the bananas that was setting it off.

Do you get calls from anxious customers trying to track down their shipments?

Every minute. Every day. Every waking hour.

The Creative Habit That Might Ward Off Dementia Symptoms, Even if You Start Later in Life

Re-Post, in light of Tony Bennett retirement:

The Creative Habit That Might Ward Off Dementia Symptoms, Even if You Start Later in Life

Arielle Weg                     August 22, 2021  (Pub. 
Photo credit: Jolygon - Getty Images
Photo credit: Jolygon – Getty Images
  • New research suggests that actively playing music may have a small but positive impact on cognitive function, even in older adults who already show signs of dementia.
  • Playing music works multiple areas of the brain at the same time.
  • Other crucial habits, like staying active and being social, can also help mitigate your risk of cognitive decline.

Music does wonders for your mood, but did you know it might give your brain a boost, too? In fact, playing music—not just listening to it—has a positive effect on your cognition, even if you’re already showing signs of dementia, new research suggests.

For a new meta-analysis published in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society, researchers from the University of Pittsburgh examined nine studies with 495 participants over age 65 who have mild cognitive impairment (MCI) or dementia. The studies specifically evaluated older adults with MCI who took part in improvising music, playing existing music, singing, playing instruments, or other forms of music making.

Mild cognitive impairment was defined as “a preclinical state between normal cognitive aging and Alzheimer’s disease.” Dementia, an umbrella term for various age-related cognitive symptoms, was defined as a “debilitating disease that can dramatically alter the cognitive, emotional, and social aspects of a person’s life.”

The finding? Making music has a small but statistically significant effect on cognitive functioning, such as thinking and memory, says lead author Jennie L. Dorris, a Ph.D. student in rehabilitation science and a graduate student researcher in the University of Pittsburgh’s Department of Occupational Therapy.

That’s because playing music works multiple areas of your brain at the same time. “You are coordinating your motor movements with the sounds you hear and the visual patterns of the written music,” explains Dorris. “Music has been called a ‘full-body workout’ for the brain, and we think that it’s unique because it calls on multiple systems at once.”

As a bonus, music-making habits also had a positive effect on mood and quality of life—so go ahead and get musical, no matter your age. “Because we saw a positive effect across all different active music-making activities, we know that people have options and can choose the activity that they prefer,” says Dorris, “Whether it’s singing in a choir, joining a drum circle, or registering for an online music class where you learn how to compose, it’s just important that you are actively participating in the music-making process.”

Of course, reconnecting with the guitar that’s gathered dust in your basement is just one step you can take to keep your brain sharp. And the sooner you start, the better: Of older adults who don’t already have Alzheimer’s disease, 15% of them likely have mild cognitive impairment. Up to 38% of them will then go on to develop Alzheimer’s within five years, the researchers note.

To mitigate your dementia risk, it’s also important to stay active most days of the week, eat a Mediterranean-style diet, stay social by connecting with loved ones, and seek help for chronic health issues like depression, high cholesterol, and sleep disorders. All of these pieces add up over time, ensuring a healthier body—and mind—for years to come.

Though young and healthy, unvaccinated father dies of COVID

Though young and healthy, unvaccinated father dies of COVID

Kim Chandler                     August 21, 2021

 

MONTGOMERY, Ala. (AP) — Healthy and in their 30s, Christina and Josh Tidmore figured they were low-risk for COVID-19. With conflicting viewpoints about whether to get vaccinated against the virus filling their social media feeds and social circles, they decided to wait.

On July 20, Josh came home from work with a slight cough initially thought to be sinus trouble. On Aug. 11, he died of COVID-19 at a north Alabama hospital as Christina Tidmore witnessed a doctor and her team frantically try to resuscitate her husband.

“She would say, ’I need a pulse. ’I would hear, ‘no pulse,’ “Christina Tidmore said through tears. “They were trying so hard.”

“Nobody should go through this. He was only 36 and I’m 35 and we have three kids.”

She is now imploring young adults not to dismiss the risk and to consider getting vaccinated.

“Josh was completely healthy, active, not a smoker.” He would have turned 37 on Saturday.

Doctors say they are seeing a spike in cases among young adults and children as the highly contagious delta variant sweeps through unvaccinated populations. Medical officials say there is conflicting information on whether it makes people more severely ill or whether young people are more vulnerable to it, but it’s clear the contagiousness means more young people and children are getting sick.

“There is no question that the average age of people who are being hospitalized is going down,” State Health Officer Scott Harris said Friday.

“I don’t know if it’s clear that delta is worse in that age group or worse than any of the strains we’ve seen before. … But what you have though is one that is just much, much more transmissible. Because seniors are the ones that are predominately the vaccinated population in our state, the most vulnerable are these younger people. So you see them getting infected at much higher rates than we had before.”

In the past four weeks, people ages 25 to 49 years, made up 14% of all COVID deaths in the state. And people 50 to 64 years made up about 29%.

The state is also seeing a surge in COVID cases among children, although deaths so far have been rare. The state this week set a record for pediatric hospitalizations with 50 children hospitalized with COVID-19.

In the past four weeks, 6% of cases of COVID-19 in Alabama have been among children under five while 8% have been among children between the ages of five and 17, according to the Alabama Department of Public Health.

“I am very concerned that the children of Alabama are experiencing more illness and hospitalizations as a result of COVID-19. Children can and do contract and spread COVID-19 disease. COVID-19 can be a very serious illness in children with at least 6% of children experiencing long-term consequences of this disease,” said Dr. Karen Landers, a pediatrician with the Alabama Department of Public Health.

The Alabama Hospital Association said this week that 85% of hospitalized COVID-19 patients are unvaccinated.

Christina Tidmore also had COVID-19 but recovered. She said she and her husband were not anti-vaccine, but heard conflicting information — including, she said, from doctors.

“It’s just a fight out there. This side and that side, and political garbage. … You don’t know who to believe,” she said.

A jokester with a heart of gold, Josh loved to help others and to make people laugh, especially kids. He sauntered into Easter and Christmas gatherings wearing an inflatable dinosaur costume and ran around hugging family members. He would cheerfully photobomb beachgoers. He didn’t hesitate to rush to help a motorcyclist injured in an accident near the north Alabama church his grandparents founded.

“He could make you feel better when nobody else could. He would listen. He genuinely cared about everybody,” Christina Tidmore said.

The family is relying on their faith to get through and Christina Tidmore wants to share her husband’s story to help people — as Josh would have wanted.

“If you can try to save your life, then you probably should,” she said of vaccinations.

“I have lots of feelings and lots of regret and lots of what ifs,” she said. “”you don’t want to do that. You don’t.”

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This story corrects the first sentence in the summary to read Alabama, not Mississippi.

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California hiker dies in Death Valley, heatstroke suspected

California hiker dies in Death Valley, heatstroke suspected

In this Wednesday, Aug. 18, 2021, photo provided by the National Park Service, an inter-agency search and rescue crew walks past a sign reading” “Stop, Extreme Heat Danger,” with park rangers responding on foot near Red Cathedral along the Golden Canyon Trail in Death Valley National Park, Calif. Authorities say 60-year-old Lawrence Stanback died Wednesday, Aug. 18, 2021, while hiking near Red Cathedral along the Golden Canyon Trail. That day temperatures reached 108 degrees Fahrenheit. (National Park Service via AP).
DEATH VALLEY, Calif. (AP) — A San Francisco man died while hiking in Death Valley National Park, where temperatures can be among the hottest on Earth, authorities said Saturday.

 

Lawrence Stanback, 60, died Wednesday while hiking near Red Cathedral along the Golden Canyon Trail, according to a joint statement from the park and the Inyo County Sheriff’s Office. That day temperatures reached 108 degrees Fahrenheit (42 Celsius).

Park rangers received a report of a suspected heatstroke Wednesday afternoon and set out on foot to look for Stanback. He was already dead when the rangers found him, officials said.

A helicopter with the California Highway Patrol tried to fly in to recover the body but strong winds prevented it from landing. Park rangers recovered Stanback’s body during the cooler evening hours, they said.

The Inyo County Sheriff’s Office and Inyo County coroner are investigating the cause of death.

Last month, the National Weather Service said Death Valley recorded a high temperature of 130 F (55 C). Death Valley holds the record for the highest recorded temperature on Earth at 134 F (57 C), set in 1913, although some dispute its accuracy.

Park rangers urged visitors to hike only before 10 a.m. or at high elevations. They also said hikers should stay safe by drinking plenty of water, eating snacks, and staying close to an air-conditioned building or vehicle to cool down when necessary.

Minnesota GOP ‘in ruins’ after shocking scandal

Politico

Minnesota GOP ‘in ruins’ after shocking scandal

David Siders and Paul Demko                  

 

Less than a year ago, Minnesota looked every bit a swing state. Donald Trump was pouring millions of dollars into his campaign there, after nearly flipping the state in 2016, Republicans were making inroads in the ancestrally Democratic Iron Range. In the Twin Cities suburbs, nervous Democrats feared protests following the police murder of George Floyd could turn some voters to the GOP.

That all fell apart with Joe Biden’s victory in November. And nine months later, the resignation of the Minnesota Republican Party’s embattled chair, Jennifer Carnahan, on Thursday night marked a new low for a state party in decline.

The proximate cause of Carnahan’s departure was a firestorm that engulfed the party in recent days, after a GOP donor she was close to, Anton “Tony” Lazzaro, was indicted on federal sex-trafficking charges. A pile-on ensued, with Carnahan, the wife of Republican U.S. Rep. Jim Hagedorn, accused by party officials and former staffers of running a toxic, retaliatory workplace, mismanaging party finances and, through the use of non-disclosure agreements, squashing transparency.

“The party is in ruins,” Michael Brodkorb, a former deputy chair of the Minnesota GOP, said on Friday.

He added, “I don’t know if the party has hit rock bottom yet.”

There are reasons to think the party might not have. Even with Carnahan gone, Republicans are confronting what will likely be a months long slog of internal reviews and ongoing headlines about the saga — a drag on the party just over a year ahead of the midterm elections. In addition to the charges against Lazzaro, the chairwoman of the University of St. Thomas College Republicans was arrested on charges she assisted him in trafficking minors for sex, the Minneapolis Star Tribune reported.

Four former executive directors of the state party have called for an external financial audit.

First term state Sen. Julia Coleman, who was among the first GOP elected officials in the state to call for Carnahan’s ouster, said a big reason she decided to run for office was to get more young people, particularly women, to embrace the Republican Party, but that the current scandal has undermined those efforts.

“When you have woman after woman after woman coming out and saying that they had an issue with abuse or sexual assault and that our chairwoman stifled their story, that’s concerning to me,” said Coleman, whose father-in-law is former Republican U.S. Sen. Norm Coleman. “If I was a young woman recently graduating, I wouldn’t want to come anywhere near the MN GOP.”

Republicans in Minnesota were losing ground statewide long before Carnahan was forced out. Trump, who viewed Minnesota as one of his few pick-up opportunities in the November election, lost to Biden by more than 7 percentage points. And though Republicans flipped one rural congressional seat and maintained a majority in the state Senate last fall, they ceded ground in the state’s populous — and growing — suburbs, an ominous sign for the party’s future in a once-promising state.

Minnesota’s Democratic governor, Tim Walz, is expected to easily win reelection next year, while one of the state’s most prominent Republicans is now pillow salesman-turned-conspiracy promoter Mike Lindell.

In the wake of Carnahan’s departure, some Minnesota Republicans see reason for optimism. The party had rid itself of a “terrible chair” who “wielded a hammer and kept power in this state through intimidation and false accusations and all the things people hate about politics,” said Amy Koch, a former Republican state Senate majority leader.

“What happened this week,” she said, “is that a bunch of activists and legislators and former legislators, all those folks stood up and said it’s not OK. It’s not OK. We’re not going to allow this to go forward.”

But the party is nowhere close to moving forward in unison. Carnahan did not exit quietly, casting the deciding vote on Thursday to give herself a severance of about $38,000. Carnahan maintained in a statement that she had no knowledge of Lazzaro’s alleged activities, and decried a “mob mentality” that she said sought to “defame, tarnish and attempt to ruin my personal and professional reputation.” An attorney for Carnahan said she neither knew of nor covered up any harassment of staffers and that she expects to file defamation suits based on claims against her that he said are false.

Carnahan, after winning reelection as chair earlier this year, continues to retain some support within the party, and the rift between those supporters and her critics is now hanging over the GOP.

“The party’s going to have to suffer to some extent,” said Joe Polunc, a former GOP chair in Carver County, a fast-growing area southwest of Minneapolis that Trump carried in 2020, but where Republicans have been losing voting share. “I mean, the media’s all over it … so there’s going to be a period of time, it will be difficult.”

Polunc, who said Carnahan was unfairly tarnished by innuendo, said the GOP is “going to have to rebrand itself, come together, and move forward. It’s unfortunate, to be sure.”

Stanley Hubbard, the billionaire Minnesota Republican donor, said he has “no idea whether [Carnahan] did anything they said she did” but that jettisoning her may have been the product of a “panic-driven rush to judgment.” As a result, he said voters — and donors — may view Carnahan as an “innocent victim.”

At the moment, the midterm outlook for Minnesota Republicans is bleak. The marquee election in the state next year will be the governor’s race, where the Democratic incumbent, Walz, defeated his last Republican opponent, Jeff Johnson, by more than 11 percentage points.

Walz’s public approval ratings remain relatively strong. And the Twin Cities metro area has become so prominent in Minnesota’s statewide elections — and so Democratic — that Republicans now face a reality where they would have to run up gigantic margins in the state’s rural areas to overcome it.

Regionally, Minnesotan Republicans remain competitive in rural swaths of Minnesota. But in statewide elections, they have not won a contest in 15 years, and the GOP has been shut out of presidential races even longer — with the state last voting for a Republican, Richard Nixon, in 1972. Now the party has an internal maelstrom to overcome on top of that.

“When you have these sorts of breakups, so to speak, it causes angst in the party,” said Eric Langness, vice chair of the GOP in the state’s 6th Congressional District. “It causes relationships and trust to be compromised. I think our party has some serious challenges ahead. We really need to look deep and say, ‘OK, here’s the wrongs of our past. How do we make it so that this is not going to happen again?’”

Jennifer DeJournett, president of Voices of Conservative Women and a longtime GOP activist, said there needs to be a thorough outside investigation of the alleged personnel abuses, as well as an independent audit of the party’s finances before there can be any hope of moving forward.

“But the operation of politics doesn’t stop,” DeJournett said. “There’s a ton of alphabet soup groups out there that are still doing the work to help push causes and candidates … Politics doesn’t stop while the state party is getting its act together.”

DeJournett and other veteran party activists were around a decade ago when the Minnesota Republican Party faced a similar crisis after running up huge debts and the party leadership collapsed. She sees a silver lining in how quickly Carnahan resigned.

“The last time we went through this, it took months and months and months of media stories to get to the ultimate end where there needed to be a change at the top,” DeJournett said. “This time, it took less than seven days.”

Before the party can begin to pick up the pieces, it will need to elect a new party chair, along with other leadership positions. State Sen. Mark Koran, who unsuccessfully challenged Carnahan earlier this year for party chair, is a likely candidate. Other names being floated: former state Rep. Kelly Fenton, former state Senate Minority Leader David Hann, lawyer and longtime GOP activist Harry Niska and Republican National Committeeman Max Rymer.

“There’s definitely healing that needs to occur,” Koran said.

Outside of the party, it remains unclear how the electorate will respond to the state party’s implosion. An early test will come next week, at the Minnesota State Fair.

Polunc, who will be at the state party’s booth there, said, “It will be interesting to see what kind of response we get from the public at large as they walk by, and we’ll see what kind of comments.”

He added, “It might be challenging at times.”

Crews rescue residents from heavy flooding in Tennessee

Crews rescue residents from heavy flooding in Tennessee

August 21, 2021

 

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) — Heavy flooding in several Middle Tennessee counties on Saturday prompted water rescues, road closures, and communications disruptions, with several people reported missing, officials said.

Parts of Hickman County received more than 11.6 inches (29 centimeters) of rain, according to The Tennessean, and flash flood warnings were in effect for parts of Dickson, Houston and Montgomery and Stewart counties on Saturday evening.

National Weather Service meteorologist Krissy Hurley told the newspaper the area had received “about 20-25% of the yearly rainfall total that this area sees in a year” in a single morning.

Cities in Humphreys County like Waverly and McEwen were facing a “dire, catastrophic situation,” she said. “People are trapped in their homes and have no way to get out.”

Waverly couple Cindy Dunn, 48, and her husband Jimmy, 49, were rescued from their attic by a crew who used a bulldozer to reach them.

“Hell. That’s what we had to go through,” Cindy Dunn said.

She told The Tennessean that her husband woke her up Saturday, telling her that floodwaters had pushed her car to their backyard. Eventually the water in their house rose to at least 6 feet (1.8 meters) high, forcing them to the attic. Dunn said the rooftop wasn’t an option.

“My husband is dealing with cancer. He’s going through chemotherapy. And I am an amputee. So there was no going anywhere besides the attic,” Dunn said.

Dunn said their home and neighboring houses “are gone.”

Hickman County Chief Deputy Rob Edwards said in a text message to the newspaper that several people are missing and cellphone service has been disrupted throughout the county.

Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee tweeted on Saturday, “Tennesseans, please stay cautious of rising floodwaters caused by heavy rainfall in parts of Middle TN. We are actively working with emergency response officials & first responders as they support Tennesseans in flooded areas.”

The Tennessee Emergency Management Agency activated its emergency operations center and said agencies that include the Tennessee National Guard, the state Highway Patrol, and Fire Mutual Aid were responding to the flooding. In a bulletin, TEMA called the situation “dangerous and evolving” and urged people to avoid travel in the affected counties.