“The Methodist Health System Family is heartbroken at the loss of two of our beloved team members,” Methodist Hospital executives said in a statement. “Our entire organization is grieving this unimaginable tragedy. During this devastating time, we want to ensure our patients and employees that Methodist Dallas Medical Center is safe, and there is no ongoing threat. Our prayers are with our lost co-workers and their families, as well as our entire Methodist family. We appreciate the community’s support during this difficult time.”
In the aftermath, as loved ones and community members mourn the losses, nurses unions are demanding better protection for health care workers.
“It is devastating to learn about the loss of our fellow nurses’ lives in Dallas, Texas,” said R.N. Jean Ross, president of National Nurses United, the country’s largest union and professional association of registered nurses with almost 225,000 members nationwide. “Our hearts go out to the families and colleagues of the nurses who died. No one should lose their life because they went to work.”
Texas Nurses Association CEO Serena Bumpus says the state’s nursing community is overcome with “sadness, disbelief and anger.”
“We mourn for the victim’s families, but also for the staff at Dallas Methodist,” Bumpus told the Star-Telegram. “The loss of their co-workers in this senseless tragedy is difficult to understand. There were still patients who had to be cared for, babies to be delivered etc. So, many went right back work. It’s difficult to process a loss when you don’t have an opportunity to stop and reflect.”
Health care workers face increased threats
Concern about violence against health care workers has been renewed with recent incidents like the one in Dallas. Over the summer, a shooting at a Tulsa medical facility on June 1 left four people dead.
“There is an epidemic of violence against nurses and other health care workers,” Ross told the Star-Telegram.
Health care and social service workers are five times as likely to be injured from violence in their workplace than other workers, TIME magazine reported. Over the last decade, the number of such injuries has risen dramatically —from 6.4 incidents per 10,000 workers annually in 2011 to 10.3 per 10,000 in 2020.
It’s become even worse during the COVID-19 pandemic, health care workers say. In September, nearly a third of respondents to a National Nurses United survey said they’d experienced an increase in workplace violence.
“It was only a matter of time before we experienced a tragedy like this,” Bumpus says. “Nurses deal with violence from patients and their families regularly.”
Nurses are often the targets of physical assault. The violence-related injury rate for registered nurses is more than three times higher than for workers overall, according to NNU. A September Press Ganey study found that an average of two nurses were assaulted every hour at work. Nurses often experience workplace violence from patients and family members/visitors due to several reasons — illness, medications, high-trauma situations, altered states caused by memory loss, dementia, mental illness, and delays in needed care. Because there’s a nursing shortage, nurses often have no choice but to go back to work right away.
These high rates of workplace violence contribute significantly to high rates of stress, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder, burnout, moral distress, and turnover among nurses.
Underreporting of workplace violence incidents is a significant issue, according to NNU, so the actual statistics may be even higher. Underreporting can be due to pressure from employers not to report, fear of retaliation or to lack of employer response when reports have been made.
“Nurses need a safe place to work so that patients have a safe place to heal. When nurses aren’t safe, patients aren’t safe,” Ross said. “Health care workplace violence can impact everyone in the vicinity—including patients and their families. Everyone is a patient at some time in their lives, so we need to make sure our hospitals are safe.”
A safer work environment
It’s the hospital’s responsibility to provide a safe work environment, NNU says.
“Management needs to protect the spaces where people come to be healed by stopping physical violence and threats from ever occurring in the first place,” Ross said. “Because many hospitals fail to implement workplace violence prevention plans, we need a national, enforceable standard to hold health care employers accountable to keeping nurses, other health care workers, and our patients safe from violence in the workplace.”
The unions want the U.S. Senate to pass the Workplace Violence for Health Care and Social Service Workers Act (HR 1195/S 4182). The bill passed the House last year and was introduced in the Senate this year. It would create national minimum requirements for health care employers to implement research-proven measures to prevent workplace violence, including safe staffing, and improve reporting and tracking.
Hospitals need to ensure that units are staffed appropriately, NNU says. Safe staffing gives more time to recognize and deescalate potentially violent behavior, and ensures that patients get the care they need when they need it.
“Health care employers could prevent workplace violence, through unit-specific prevention plans, environmental and administrative controls like safer staffing levels, hands-on training, and reporting and tracking systems, but many employers fail to put necessary measures in place,” Ross said.
Listen to the audio of Bob Woodward’s interviews with Trump that made him think of the former president as an ‘unparalleled danger’ rather than simply incompetent
Hannah Getahun – October 23, 2022
Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward and former President Donald Trump.William B. Plowman/NBC NewsWire via Getty Images and Anna Moneymaker-Pool/Getty Images
Bob Woodward said he changed his mind about Trump after re-listening to his own interviews.
Woodward previously described the former president as the “wrong man” for the presidency.
But “Trump is an unparalleled danger,” Woodward wrote on Sunday in the Washington Post.
Ahead of the release of his never-before-heard audio interviews with former President Donald Trump, Watergate journalist Bob Woodward wrote that after listening to the unreleased tapes again, he concluded that Trump was an “unparalleled danger” rather than just the “wrong man” to be president.
“The Trump Tapes: Bob Woodward’s Twenty Interviews with President Trump,” set to be released Oct. 25, is an audiobook of previously unreleased conversations between the veteran journalist and the businessman-turned-politician.
In an op-ed for the Washington Post released Sunday, which includes previously unreleased snippets of “The Trump Tapes,” Woodward wrote that he had concluded his 2020 book on Trump by calling him “the wrong man for the job.”
Woodward now says his assessment of Trump did not accurately describe the former president.
“Two years later, I realize I didn’t go far enough. Trump is an unparalleled danger,” Woodward wrote.
He continued: “When you listen to him on the range of issues from foreign policy to the virus to racial injustice, it’s clear he did not know what to do. Trump was overwhelmed by the job. He was largely disconnected from the needs and leadership expectations of the public and his absolute self-focus became the presidency.”
Woodward explains in his piece for the Post that he decided to release the tapes to capture Trump’s personality in a way that the written word couldn’t. “Trump’s voice magnifies his presence,” Woodward said.
The tapes allow listeners to hear Trump repeatedly interrupting and at times mocking Woodward as they speak about the most pressing policy issues of his presidency, including his handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, which Woodward described as Trump’s “greatest failure.”
In clips of the Trump Tapes previously released by CNN, Trump can be heard talking about his admiration for strongmen leaders like Russian President Vladimir Putin and North Korean President Kim Jong Un. In another clip, Trump also bragged to Woodward that no other president was “tougher” than him when faced with impeachment.
A representative for Trump did not immediately respond to Insider’s request for comment.
US politics’ post-shame era: how Republicans became the party of hate
David Smith in Washington – October 23, 2022
Photograph: Jeff Swensen/Getty Images
Republicans were in trouble. Mitt Romney, their US presidential nominee, had been crushed by Barack Obama. The party commissioned an “autopsy” report that proposed a radical rethink. “If we want ethnic minority voters to support Republicans,” it said, “we have to engage them and show our sincerity.”
Ten years after Romney’s loss, Republicans are fighting their first election since the presidency of Donald Trump. But far from entering next month’s midterms as the party of tolerance, diversity and sincerity, critics say, they have shown itself to be unapologetically the party of hate.
Perhaps nothing captures the charge more eloquently than a three-word post that appeared on the official Twitter account for Republicans on the House of Representatives’ judiciary committee – ranking member Jim Jordan – on 6 October. It said, simply and strangely: “Kanye. Elon. Trump.”
The first of this unholy trinity referred to Ye, the rapper formerly known as Kanye West, who has recently drawn fierce criticism for wearing a “White Lives Matter” T-shirt at Paris fashion week and for antisemitic messages on social media, including one that said he would soon go “death con 3 on JEWISH PEOPLE”.
The second was billionaire Elon Musk, who published a pro-Russian peace plan for Ukraine and denied reports that he had been speaking to Russian autocrat Vladimir Putin.
The third was former president Donald Trump, who wrote last weekend that American Jews have offered insufficient praise of his policies toward Israel, warning that they need to “get their act together” before “it is too late!” The comment played into the antisemitic prejudice that American Jews have dual loyalties to the US and Israel.
It was condemned by the White House as “insulting” and “antisemitic”. But when historian Michael Beschloss tweeted: “Do any Republican Party leaders have any comment at all on Trump’s admonition to American Jews?”, the silence was deafening.
Jim Jordan, who recently tweeted ‘Kanye. Elon. Trump’, speaks at a rally held by Trump in Youngstown, Ohio, in September. Photograph: Gaelen Morse/Reuters
Republicans have long been accused of coded bigotry and nodding and winking to their base. There was an assumption of rules of political etiquette and taboos that could not be broken. Now, it seems, politics has entered a post-shame era where anything goes.
Jared Holt, an extremism researcher at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue thinktank, said: “The type of things they would say in closed rooms full of donors they’re just saying out in the open now. It’s a cliche but I always remember what I heard growing up which is, when people tell you who they are, you should believe them.”
The examples are becoming increasingly difficult to downplay or ignore. Earlier this month Tommy Tuberville, a Republican senator for Alabama, told an election rally in Nevada that Democrats support reparations for the descendants of enslaved people because “they think the people that do the crime are owed that”. The remark was widely condemned for stereotyping African Americans as people committing crimes.
And Marjorie Taylor Greene, a congresswoman from Georgia, echoed the rightwing “great replacement” theory when she told a rally in Arizona: “Joe Biden’s 5 million illegal aliens are on the verge of replacing you, replacing your jobs and replacing your kids in school and, coming from all over the world, they’re also replacing your culture.”
Such comments have handed ammunition to Democrats as they battle to preserve wafer thin majorities in the House and Senate. Although the party is facing electoral headwinds from inflation, crime and border security, it has plenty of evidence that Trump remains dominant among Republicans – a huge motivator for Democratic turnout.
Indeed, Trump did more than anyone to turn the 2013 autopsy on its head. In his first run for president, he referred to Mexicans as criminals, drug dealers and rapists and pledged to build a border wall and impose a Muslim ban. Opponents suggest that he liberated Republicans to say the unsayable, rail against so-called political correctness and give supporters the thrill of transgression.
Antjuan Seawright, a senior adviser to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, said: “He has been the creator of the permission slip and the validator of the permission slip. For many of them, he is their trampoline to jump even further with their right wing red meat racial rhetoric.”
Beyond Republicans’ headline-grabbing stars, the trend is also manifest at the grassroots. In schools, the party has launched a sweeping assault on what teachers can say or teach about race, gender identity, LGBTQ+ issues and American history. An analysis by the Washington Post newspaper found that 25 states have passed 64 laws reshaping what students can learn and do at school over the past three academic years.
There are examples of the new extremism all over the country. The New York Republican Club will on Monday host an event with Katie Hopkins, a British far-right political commentator who has compared migrants to cockroaches and was repeatedly retweeted by Trump before both were banned by the social media platform.
In Idaho, long a deeply conservative state, Dorothy Moon, the new chairwoman of the state Republican party, is accused of close associations with militia groups and white nationalists. Last month she appeared on Trump ally Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast to accuse the state’s Pride festival and parade of sexualising children.
A recent headline in the Idaho Capital Sun newspaper stated: “Hate makes a comeback in Idaho, this time with political support.”
Michelle Vincent, a senior adviser to Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stephen Heidt, noted the such currents have long been a problem in Idaho but said: “Trump made hate OK. He made bad behavior seem OK because of the extremes of what he was doing. They started emulating him. People were were abused here during Black Lives Matter protests. We have so much militia here and they are out of control.”
In many cases, the naked bigotry goes hand in hand with Trump’s “big lie” that the last election was stolen from him due to widespread voter fraud. A New York Times investigation found that about 70% of Republican midterm candidates running for Congress in next month’s midterm elections have either questioned or flat-out denied the results of the 2020 election.
They can now count on support from Tulsi Gabbard, a former Democratic congresswoman and presidential candidate who in 2017 met with Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad and dismissed his entire opposition as “terrorists” Gabbard this week defected to the Republicans and campaigned for Kari Lake, the Republican nominee for governor of Arizona and an unabashed defender of the big lie.
Another election denier is Doug Mastriano, a political novice running for governor of Pennsylvania with the help of far-right figures. He was outside the US Capitol during the January 6 insurrection and photographed watching demonstrators attacking police before he supposedly walked away.
Mastriano has repeatedly criticised his opponent, attorney general Josh Shapiro, for attending and sending his children to what he brands a “privileged, exclusive, elite” school, suggesting that this demonstrates Shapiro’s “disdain for people like us”. It is a Jewish day school where students receive both secular and religious instruction.
After a long courtship, Trump himself has in recent months begun embracing the antisemitic conspiracy theory QAnon in earnest. In September, using his Truth Social platform, the former president reposted an image of himself wearing a Q lapel pin overlaid with the words “The Storm is Coming”. A QAnon song has been played at the end of several his campaign rallies.
Ron Klein, chair of the Jewish Democratic Council of America, said: “It’s very unfortunate that the Republican party is either silent and complicit in this antisemitic language that’s being put forward by Donald Trump and others that align with him. But it’s very indicative of a Republican party that does not want to take on rightwing extremists.”
Klein, a former congressman, added: “Some members of Republican party did use dog whistles and symbolic language to make their points about minorities, including the Jewish community, and that was very troubling. But the era of Donald Trump has just lifted the rock under which these people now feel it’s OK and even helpful for them to make these kinds of statements and use these kinds of words to gain political power and political stature, which is very troubling in our American political system.”
The 2013 autopsy now looks like a blip, an outlier, in half a century of Republican politics. Richard Nixon’s 1968 “law and order” message stoked racial fear and resentment in the south. Ronald Reagan demonised “welfare queens” in 1976 and, four years later, launched his election campaign with a speech lauding “states’ rights” near the site of the “Mississippi Burning” murders – seen by many as a nod to southern states that resented the federal government enforcing civil rights.
A political action committee linked to George HW Bush’s campaign in 1988 paid for an attack advert blaming Democratic rival Michael Dukakis for the case of Willie Horton, an African American convict who committed rape during a furlough from prison. Lee Atwater, Bush’s campaign manager, bragged that he would turn Horton into “Dukakis’s running mate”.
I don’t think Donald Trump made people more racist or antisemitic; I think he gave them permission to express it
Stuart Stevens, veteran Republican campaign strategist
The Atwater playbook is being deployed again in Senate midterm races as Republicans Ron Johnson of Wisconsin and Mehmet Oz of Pennsylvania run attack ads accusing their Democratic opponents, Mandela Barnes and John Fetterman, of being soft on crime, often with images of Black prison inmates.
Stuart Stevens, a veteran Republican campaign strategist who wrote a withering indictment of the party’s trajectory, It Was All a Lie: How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump, said: “I don’t think Donald Trump made people more racist or antisemitic; I think he gave them permission to express it.”
Stevens, a senior adviser at the Lincoln Project, an anti-Trump group, continued: “It’s a party of white grievance and anger and hate is an element of that.”
Kurt Bardella, a Democratic strategist and former Republican congressional aide, agreed: “The real consequence of Donald Trump’s presidency is it did give permission to so many people within the party who used to try to mask or hide their racism. They now feel like they can proudly wear it and they do.”
With hate crimes on the rise across America, there are fears that comments by Trump, Tuberville, Greene and others will lead to threats and violence that put lives in danger. Bardella added: “We learned after January 6 that, to the Republican party faithful, these aren’t just words, they are instructions. It’s a very dangerous development that one of the major political parties in America has made the conscious decision to wrap itself in the embrace of white nationalism.”
Health and Wellness: Knee surgery gone wrong? It’s more common than you think
Carrie Jose – October 22, 2022
Carrie Jose
Arthroscopic knee surgery is one of the most common surgeries performed – despite research telling us that it’s not nearly as effective as most people are led to believe. Furthermore, the science tells us that people who do undergo arthroscopic knee surgery are likely to have knee arthritis that advances more rapidly – resulting in a total knee replacement that quite possibly could have been avoided.
Arthroscopic knee surgery is a minimally invasive procedure that’s commonly done to help “clean out” your knee joint if you’ve got degenerative arthritis, or to clip out pieces of a torn meniscus that might be irritating your knee.
Sounds pretty simple and harmless – right?
Well… it is until it isn’t. The big problem is that arthroscopic knee surgery is not necessary for most cases of knee pain. If there is a complication – which there are many even with “minimally invasive” procedures – you could end up being worse off than when you went in. Plus – if you never even needed the surgery to begin with – you just put your knee through unnecessary trauma that you’ve got to now heal from. This further delays you from addressing the root cause of your knee pain.
The truth is that most people can get full relief of their knee pain as well as full restoration of knee function without any type of surgery or procedure. This is true for 70% of all knee pain cases.
An early research study from 2002 by JB Mosely and colleagues, and published in the New England Journal of Medicine, revealed that placebo surgery for advanced knee arthritis was just as effective as actual arthroscopic surgery. Since then, numerous studies have proven similar results. This means that even if you have a torn meniscus or degenerative arthritis in your knee – you can still get better naturally and with conservative treatment.
So why then – despite all this research – are surgeons still performing arthroscopic knee surgery more than ever?
In some cases it’s just what the surgeon knows, and they haven’t kept up with the research. Other times, it’s due to poor conservative management of knee pain. If you’ve gotten physical therapy and it wasn’t effective, people are led to believe that the physical therapy “didn’t work”. But more often than not, you just haven’t found the right physical therapist yet – someone who understands how to diagnose knee pain properly and get you the customized approach that is required to avoid surgery.
And then there’s the elephant in the room.
It’s very common for knee pain to be coming from somewhere other than your knee. Knee pain can come from your ankle, hip, or back. One study showed that 40% of the time – knee pain is caused by your back – even when you don’t have any back pain. MRI’s add even more confusion to this. It’s entirely possible to have degenerative changes, a torn meniscus, or advanced arthritis in your knee – and still have your knee pain stemming from a source other than your knee.
Over the course of my 20 year career, I’ve seen many knee surgeries go wrong. Most of the time, it has nothing to do with the procedure itself, but everything to do with an incorrect diagnosis going in. If your knee pain can be resolved conservatively – and you put it through unnecessary trauma (surgery) – there’s a good chance you’re going to have more problems afterwards. If you get knee surgery when your knee problem isn’t even coming from your knee – then you’re definitely going to have problems afterwards.
The moral of this story is to make absolutely certain that 1) your knee problem is really a knee problem and 2) you’ve fully exhausted all (quality) conservative therapy options before going under the knife.
Remember that 70% of all knee pain cases do not need surgery. Science has proven this. Don’t resort to knee surgery unless you’re 100% sure you really need it. Because it can go wrong and when it does – it’s much harder to come back from then if you had avoided it to begin with.
Dr. Carrie Jose, Physical Therapist and Pilates expert, owns CJ Physical Therapy & Pilates in Portsmouth and writes for Seacoast Media Group. To get in touch or sign up for her upcoming Masterclass for Knee Pain Sufferers – visit www.cjphysicaltherapy.com or call 603-605-0402.
‘We are going to be homeless’: How mobile homeowners are being forced out in metro Phoenix
Catherine Reagor, Juliette Rihl and Kunle Falayi, – October 22, 2022
Homeowners in mobile home parks across metro Phoenix are getting evicted.
Many own the mobile home but rent the small lot it sets on.
“This is more than just a notice to get out,” said Priscilla Salazar, whose family has lived 11 years in the Weldon Park mobile home community near 16th Street and Osborn Road. “We are going to be homeless.”
Like Valley apartments, some mobile home park owners are raising rents when leases expire and evicting tenants who can’t pay.
In other cases, owners are shutting the parks down so the land can be used for something else, including housing that mobile homeowners can’t afford. Some mobile home park buyers are clearing out tenants and flipping the infill sites for big profits.
Mobile homes have long been one of the most affordable housing options for metro Phoenix residents, but the growing number of parks closing or becoming pricier is putting many residents in a bind. New affordable parks aren’t being built, and many mobile homeowners can’t afford to live elsewhere or move their homes to other communities in the Valley, alarming housing advocates and prompting government officials to seek solutions.
In mid-September, tenants of Weldon Court received a notice that their park would be closing. It had been sold for $5.48 million to an investor from California just days before. Tenants were given six months to move out.
The Weldon Court mobile home park was recently sold, and mobile homeowners in the community were given six months to move out.
“This is our little mini Phoenix. This is our community,” said Salazar, whose children have grown up in the park. Many tenants are low-income families or seniors on fixed incomes.
Residents of Weldon Court and two other Valley mobile home parks that are evicting tenants or raising rents recently protested at the Arizona Capitol and Phoenix City Council chambers. The other two parks with residents fighting their landlords are Las Casitas — which is now called Beacon — at 19th Avenue and Buckeye Road, and Periwinkle, at 27th Avenue and Colter Street.
Mobile home park buying spree
Like with affordable Phoenix-area apartments, investors are snatching up mobile home parks in the Valley.
Since the beginning of 2021, at least 30 trailer, manufactured and mobile home parks have sold for almost $260 million, according to an Arizona Republic analysis of real estate records.
The Valley has been a hub for factory-built homes since after World War II. Many GIs returning home headed to the Southwest. Some hitched a travel trailer to their cars and put down roots and wheels in metro Phoenix.
Most of the metro Phoenix mobile home parks to sell during the past five years are prime infill sites.
The mobile home park buying and closure spree comes as Arizona is facing a shortage of 270,000 homes.
“It’s horrible for people who own their mobile home and have been living in a park for decades,” said Pamela Bridge, director of litigation and advocacy at Community Legal Services. “Investors are raising rents and our office is seeing so many more evictions in older parks.”
She said many longtime residents in Phoenix-area mobile home parks have paid off their homes and made improvements on them, but they can’t afford to move them and can’t find other parks where they can rent a space.
“These people have done nothing wrong,” she said. “We need to leave these mobile home park owners in stable situations.”
Jerry Suter, an 83-year-old veteran who has lived at the Periwinkle Mobile Home Park for 28 years, planned to live out the rest of his days there. He called the park’s closing “devastating” and “traumatic.” With an income of $1,290 in Social Security payments each month, he said he can’t afford to live anywhere else.
Grand Canyon University bought the park six years ago, decided to close it and plans to build student housing.
“They’re going to literally have to drag me out of there,” Suter said. “I’m not giving up my trailer.”
Phoenix has about 20,000 mobile homes, which represents about 3.1% of all of the area’s homes, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. That’s far more than the number of mobile homes that can be found in cities with similar populations, including Houston, San Diego and Philadelphia.
But the supply of mobile homes and parks is shrinking. About 5% of Phoenix homes were in mobile home parks in 2018.
The rapid disappearance of mobile home parks is due, in part, to transactions like this: In 2018, homebuilder Taylor Morrison bought the former Scottsdale Wheel Inn Ranch RV and Mobile Home Park, where residents were evicted by another owner a few years before. Similar scenarios with investors buying the parks, evicting the tenants and then selling to a developer are happening across metro Phoenix.
The Phoenix city manager’s office recently created a task force to research potential solutions to the mobile home dilemma. The task force will present its findings to the City Council next month.
District 8 Councilmember Carlos Garcia, whose district includes Las Casitas mobile home park, said he wants to find a way to keep people in their homes or, if the evictions move forward, find new places for the residents to live.
“To me, all options are on the table,” Garcia said. “Priority is to make sure these families don’t end up on the streets.”
Sylvia Herrera (left) and Raquel Hernandez meet during an emergency meeting at the Beacon mobile home park (formerly Las Casitas mobile home park) on Sept. 20, 2022, in Phoenix. The residents were asked to sign a four-month lease and are worried about being evicted by the new owner. Hernandez recently bought her mobile home in the park.
Residents of Beacon mobile home park were given a new lease in late September. Their rent will increase by 88% over the next four years, it said.
Elvia Ramirez, who lives in the park with her children, started looking for somewhere else to move. But the single mother of four, who works as a receptionist and has lived in the park since she was a teenager, hasn’t been able to find something within her budget.
“Even the mobile homes are too expensive now,” said Ramirez, 33. If she doesn’t secure a new home, she said, she and her kids will probably have to move in with family.
The median price of a U.S. mobile home is now $61,400, according to a LendingTree study. That’s up 35% since 2016.
Many mobile homes are several decades old, and some are even trailers, the oldest type of mobile house. Some of the parks in metro Phoenix sold since early last year are more than 70 years old.
Many parks won’t rent to owners of older mobile homes because their houses may not be up to code. Also, some with additions can’t be moved without damaging them.
The typical rent for a mobile home lot in the Phoenix area was about $400 to $500 a month in 2019, according to housing advocates. Now, rents are rising above $1,000 per lot in some Valley parks.
Help available to mobile homeowners
Arizona has a fund to help, but some mobile homeowners don’t hear about it, and others cannot fully benefit from it because of the age of their residences.
For some owners, the fund isn’t enough to help them move, so they take less than $2,000 in state funds to walk away from their mobile home.
Under Arizona law, mobile home park residents who are displaced because of redevelopment are eligible to receive up to $12,500 from the state’s relocation fund.
But many of the mobile homes are so old, they cannot be moved to another park, either because they would fall apart or because they don’t meet current wind-resistance codes.
Residents who have to leave their homes in place because they can’t be moved can get only $1,875 from the fund, which is managed by the Arizona Housing Department.
Many residents and housing advocates said more help is needed.
“Now I have to abandon my home and give it to the university,” Suter said. “What am I gonna buy for $1,875?”
Patricia Dominguez said her family recently spent $4,000 on a new roof for their home — more than double what they will be reimbursed if they abandon it.
“What they’re offering is nothing compared to the love, and the blood, and the sweat and tears that we’ve all put into our unit,” said Dominguez. Her mother and sister, Salazar, live in Weldon Court.
Community organizer Sylvia Herrera, who is working with residents of all three parks to get more time and money before eviction, said the state relocation fund is “deceiving” because many people can’t move their trailers and therefore can’t access the full relocation amount.
“These are not really resources if you can’t qualify,” she said.
Tara Brunetti, assistant deputy director of the Arizona Department of Housing’s Manufactured Housing Division, said park owners must notify the agency if they plan on closing a park and give tenants 180 days’ notice.
“That gives us time to reach out to the residents” and offer them help, she said. “We are definitely seeing more applications for the fund now.”
The fund has more than $7.6 million to help mobile home park residents.
Sylvia Herrera leads an emergency meeting of residents at the Beacon mobile home park (formerly Las Casitas mobile home park) on Sept. 20, 2022, in Phoenix. The residents were asked to sign a four-month lease and are worried about being evicted by the new owner.
The state program does offer more money than it did five years ago, but it took a legislative move to get the increase.
Mobile homeowners and their advocates are hoping for a different kind of fix.
Some cities, including Portland, Oregon, and Austin, Texas, have updated their zoning laws to help prevent mobile home residents from displacement.
A 2018 Austin city ordinance zoned existing mobile home parks as a “mobile home residence district.” That means if the landowner wanted to use the land for a different purpose, they would need City Council approval to change the zoning.
In 2018, when a new owner began evicting longtime residents from the Tempe Mobile Home Park near Arizona State University, the city of Tempe stepped in and helped get rent concessions from the landlord. Tempe also set up meetings for the tenants to negotiate with the new owner and get aid from the Arizona Housing Department.
That former mobile home park is now high-end apartments.
“I believe there should be laws or community work in cities and counties that come up with long-term solutions for people in the park. These people are a vital part of our community,” said Bridge, of Community Legal Services. “We want their children to remain in schools and for the parents to be able to get to their jobs nearby.”
Then, big Wall Street-backed investment firms were behind most of the sales. Now, big and small investors are driving the trend, but almost all are out-of-state buyers.
The biggest Phoenix-area mobile home park sale since the beginning of 2021 was $84.5 million for the Royal Palm park in Phoenix at 19th and Dunlap avenues. Property records show Chicago-based Continental Communities is the new manager.
Bridge said she has come across several cases of new out-of-state mobile home park owners not giving tenants or the state enough move-out notice.
Mobile home evictions are tracked differently than other rental evictions, and the data to tally the total isn’t available in Arizona.
“Because of the housing crisis, there is no affordable housing. Trailer parks are the most affordable housing right now that you can find,” Herrera said. “People are just trying to retain that, trying to hold on to living in mobile home parks.”
Coverage of housing insecurity on azcentral.com and in The Arizona Republic is supported by a grant from the Arizona Community Foundation.
DOJ Slams Trump Filing Claiming 9 Mar-A-Lago Files Are His ‘Personal’ Property
Mary Papenfuss – October 21, 2022
The Department of Justice has fired back at Donald Trump’s claim that nine White House files seized from his Mar-a-Lago compound by the FBI are his “personal” property.
The files include two documents related to U.S. immigration policy, six requests for clemency to the then-president, and a letter to him from someone in a military academy, according to the DOJ’s letter, filed Thursday in Florida to U.S. District Judge Raymond Dearie, the special master appointed to review the confiscated documents.
The Justice Department dismissed the notion that any of the materials belong to Trump. It pointed out that the pardon requests, for example, “were received by plaintiff in his capacity as the official with authority to grant reprieves and pardons, not in his personal capacity.”
The DOJ letter cited the Presidential Records Act, which states that all documentary materials created or received by a president, his staff or his office in the course of official activities are government property that should go to the National Archives when a president leaves office.
Trump also claimed that four documents should be withheld from investigators because of executive privilege. They include the two immigration policy documents, which Trump’s team said were “predecisional materials,” and two documents about meetings.
The Justice Department argued that the former president can’t claim the immigration documents are both his personal records and protected by executive privilege. The claims are contradictory and he must argue one or the other, the filing said.
Dearie made a similar point about mixed and confusing claims concerning the documents in a conference call with the parties earlier this week. He pointed out that there’s “certainly an incongruity there” when Trump’s lawyers insist that some documents are protected both by executive privilege and as Trump’s personal records.
Dearie also complained on the call that Trump’s legal team hadn’t offered much substance in either case to support its claims.
The special master was appointed last month by U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon at Trump’s request. He is tasked with reviewing about 11,000 pages of documents to determine if any should be shielded by attorney-client or executive privilege. Dearie’s name was submitted by Trump’s legal team.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit ruled earlier this month that the Justice Department can resume reviewing the seized classified records, blocking part of a stay issued earlier by Cannon. The appeals court also prohibited Dearie from vetting the documents marked classified.
How unhealthy is red meat? And how beneficial is it to eat vegetables? A new rating system could help you cut through the health guidelines
Aleksandr Aravkin, Associate Professor of Applied Mathematics, University of Washington, Jeffrey Stanaway, Assistant Professor of Global Health and Health Metrics Sciences, University of Washington, and Christian Razo, Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, University of Washington – October 21, 2022
The new rating system shows that eating the right amount of vegetables can lower your risk of heart disease by nearly 20%. Westend61/Getty Images
The Research Brief is a short take about interesting academic work.
The big idea
We developed a new method for assessing health risks that our research suggests should make it a lot easier for people to determine which health advice to follow – and which to ignore. The approach, recently published in the journal Nature Medicine, offers a straightforward way for both policymakers and the general public to assess the strength of evidence for a given health risk – like consuming red meat – and the corresponding outcome – ischemic heart disease – using a rating system of one to five stars.
The system we developed is based on several systematic reviews of studies regarding risk factors like smoking and health outcomes such as lung cancer. Well-established relationships between risks and outcomes score between three and five stars, whereas cases in which research evidence is lacking or contradictory garner one to two stars.
In our analysis, only eight of the 180 pairs that we analyzed received the top rating of five stars, indicating very strong evidence of association. The relationship between smoking and lung cancer, as well as the relationship between high systolic blood pressure – the higher of the two numbers in a blood pressure reading – and ischemic heart disease were among those eight five-star pairs.
This rating system enables consumers to easily identify how harmful or protective a behavior may be and how strong the evidence is for each risk-outcome pair. For instance, a consumer seeing a low star rating can use that knowledge to decide whether to shift a health habit or choice.
While the visualization tool provides a nuanced understanding of risk across the range of blood pressures, the five-star rating signals that the overall evidence is very strong. As a result, this means that clear guidelines can be given on the importance of controlling blood pressure.
Why it matters
Clear messages and evidence-based guidance regarding healthy behaviors are crucial. Yet health guidance is often contradictory and difficult to understand.
Currently, most epidemiological analyses make strong assumptions about relationships between risks and health outcomes, and study results often disagree as to the strength of risk-outcome relationships. It can be confusing for experts and nonexperts alike to parse through conflicting studies of varying strength of results and determine if a lifestyle change is needed.
This is where our method comes in: The star-based rating system can offer decision-makers and consumers alike much-needed context before headline-grabbing health guidance is dispensed and adopted.
For example, the average risk of ischemic heart disease with a blood pressure of 165 mmHG – or millimeters of mercury, the basic unit used for measuring pressure – is 4.5 times the risk of the disease with blood pressure of 100 mmHG; but this is just a single estimate. The relative risk of ischemic heart disease increases by more than four times across the blood pressure range, and there is inherent uncertainty in the estimate based on available data. The rating of five stars incorporates all of this information, and in this case means that relative risk of ischemic heart disease across the entire range of exposures increases by at least 85%.
On the other hand, take the example of red meat consumption. Consuming 100 grams of red meat per day – as opposed to none – results in a very modest (12%) increase in risk for ischemic heart disease. That’s why it scores a rating of just two stars, consistent with only a weak association.
People should be well aware of their levels of exposure to risks classified with three to five stars, such as systolic blood pressure. By monitoring and keeping one’s blood pressure as low as possible, a person can substantially reduce the risk of developing ischemic heart disease.
What’s next
Our hope is that decision-makers will be able to use our star rating system to create informed policy recommendations that will have the greatest benefits for human health. We also hope the public can use the ratings and the visualization tool as a way to more clearly understand the current level of knowledge for different pairs of health risks and outcomes.
Jeffrey Stanaway receives funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
Aleksandr Aravkin and Christian Razo do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Republicans plan to torpedo key Biden policies as polls predict midterm victory
Chris Stein in Washington DC – October 21, 2022
Photograph: Evelyn Hockstein/Reuters
A standoff over the debt ceiling. Aid to Ukraine on the chopping block. And impeachment proceedings against homeland security secretary Alejandro Mayorkas – or perhaps even president Joe Biden himself.
With polls indicating they have a good shot of winning a majority in the House of Representatives in the 8 November midterms, top Republican lawmakers have in recent weeks offered a preview what they might do with their resurgent power, and made clear they have their sights set on key aspects of the Biden administration’s policies at home and abroad.
Kevin McCarthy, the top Republican in the chamber, this week signaled in an interview with Punchbowl News that if Congress is going to approve an increase in the amount the federal government can borrow – as it’s expected to need to by sometime next year – Republicans are going to want an agreement to cut spending in return.
“You can’t just continue down the path to keep spending and adding to the debt,” said McCarthy, who is likely to be elevated to speaker of the house in a Republican led-chamber. “And if people want to make a debt ceiling [for a longer period of time], just like anything else, there comes a point in time where, okay, we’ll provide you more money, but you got to change your current behavior.”
Asked if he might demand that Social Security and Medicare, the two massive federal retirement and healthcare benefit programs that are nearing insolvency, be reformed as part of debt ceiling negotiations, McCarthy replied that he would not “predetermine” anything.
But the California lawmaker warned that members of his caucus were starting to question the money Washington was sending to Ukraine to help it fend off Russia’s invasion. “Ukraine is important, but at the same time it can’t be the only thing they do and it can’t be a blank check,” he told Punchbowl.
Then there’s the question of if Republicans will choose to exercise the House’s powers of impeachment – as they did against Bill Clinton in 1998, and as Democrats did to Donald Trump in 2019 and 2021.
The prime target appears to be Mayorkas, whom Republicans have pilloried amid an uptick in arrivals of migrants at the United States’ border with Mexico. Yet another target could be Biden himself – as Jim Banks, chair of the conservative Republican Study Committee, which crafts policy for the party, suggested on Thursday.
Political realities may pose an obstacle to McCarthy and his allies’ ability to see their plans through. High inflation and Biden’s low approval ratings have given them momentum to retake the House, but their chances of winning a majority in the Senate are seen as a toss-up. Even if they did win that chamber, they’re unlikely to have the two-thirds majority necessary to convict Biden, Mayorkas, or whomever else they intend to impeach – or even the numbers to overcome Democratic filibusters of any legislation they try to pass.
Matt Grossman, director of Michigan State University’s Institute for Public Policy and Social Research, questioned the GOP’s willingness to legislate. The party’s plans, as outlined in the Commitment to America McCarthy unveiled last month, appear thin in comparison to similar platforms rolled out in 1994 and 2010, when Republicans again took back Congress’ lower chamber from Democratic majorities.
“There’s a longstanding asymmetry between the parties. Republicans legitimately want government to do less,” he said.
“They’re doing pretty well electorally without necessarily needing a policy agenda, and they’re tied to, kind of, defending the Trump administration or attacking the Biden administration. There’s not much of a felt need for a lot of policy.”
There are also signs of division within the party over how the GOP should use its new majority. In his interview with Punchbowl, McCarthy said he was against “impeachment for political purposes” and focused instead on addressing crime, border security and economic issues, all familiar themes for Republicans running this year.
The split was even more pronounced when it came to Ukraine. On Wednesday, Trump’s former vice-president Mike Pence called in a speech at influential conservative group the Heritage Foundation for Republicans to continue to support the country, saying “there can be no room in the conservative movement for apologists to” Russian president Vladimir Putin.
The day after, the foundation’s president Kevin Roberts put out a statement saying: “Heritage will vigorously oppose Washington’s big spenders who attempt to pass another Ukrainian aid package lacking debate, a clear strategy, targeted funding and spending offsets.”
Democrats are assured control of Congress until the end of the year, and have taken note of the apparent erosion of will to support Kyiv. NBC News reports they may push for another big military aid infusion in a year-end spending bill, intended to keep the Ukrainians armed for months to come.
It seems clear that Republicans will eventually coalesce behind a strategy to strong-arm the Biden administration for some purpose, but Grossman predicted the likely result would be similar to the 2013 government shutdown, when then president Barack Obama and the Democrats refused the GOP’s demands to dismantle his signature health care law.
“With McCarthy it just seems like he is a go along,” he said. “He’s going to be a go-along speaker and that’s going to be the case with a pretty fractious caucus.”
Photos show the Mississippi River is so low that it’s grounding barges, disrupting the supply chain, and revealing a 19th-century shipwreck
Morgan McFall-Johnsen, Paola Rosa-Aquino – October 21, 2022
Randy Statler sits on a rock to watch people walk to Tower Rock, an attraction normally surrounded by the Mississippi River and only accessible by boat, in Perry County, Missouri, on October 19, 2022.Jeff Roberson/AP Photo
The waters of the Mississippi River have fallen to historic lows, driving a shipping and industry crisis in the heart of the US.
The Mississippi is a major channel for shipping and tourism, running from northern Minnesota down through the Midwest plains and emptying through Louisiana, with numerous tributaries stretching east and west. All that boat-based commerce relies on the river’s deep waters, which can accommodate hefty vessels carrying cargo like soybeans, corn, fertilizer, and oil, or cruise-line passengers.
A barge tow floats past the exposed banks of the Mississippi River in Vicksburg, Mississippi, on October 11, 2022.Rogelio V. Solis/AP Photo
For the past month, though, the water has dwindled so low that ships are getting stuck in the mud and sandbars at the river bottom. The Coast Guard imposed new restrictions on how low ships and barges can sit in the water. The price of shipping goods along the river skyrocketed, The Wall Street Journal reported on Friday, and the US Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) began emergency dredging to deepen the river at more than a dozen key choke points, where a backup of about 2,000 barges built up.
A NASA satellite image from October 7 shows the parched river, with barges queued up along its shorelines.
An image from a Landsat satellite shows the parched Mississippi River north of Vicksburg, Mississippi, on October 7, 2022.NASA Earth Observatory/USGS Landsat
“This is the most severe we’ve ever seen in our industry in recent history,” Mike Ellis, the CEO of American Commercial Barge Line, told CNBC on Wednesday.
A close look at the satellite image reveals barges waiting on the river’s shores.NASA Earth Observatory/USGS Landsat
“That’s a significant impact to our supply chain,” Ellis said, adding, “We can’t get the goods there.”
Even more barges were waiting in another part of the satellite image.NASA Earth Observatory/USGS Landsat
The water receded so much that it revealed human remains and a 200-year-old shipwreck along the river’s new banks. In Missouri, people are walking across the dry, exposed riverbed to an island that’s normally only accessible by boat.
A man walking along the Mississippi River in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, stops to look at a shipwreck revealed by the low water level on October 17, 2022.Sara Cline/AP Photo
On the Louisiana coast, the river is so low that ocean water from the Gulf of Mexico began pushing upstream. USACE is racing to build a 1,500-foot-wide underwater levee to prevent saltwater from creeping further up the river, where it could contaminate drinking water, CNN reported on Tuesday. Already, there’s a drinking water advisory in effect for the coastal region of Plaquemines Parish.
Drought is drying the Mississippi River to record lows
A passenger paddle wheeler passes between the river bridges in Vicksburg, Mississippi, on October 11, 2022.Rogelio V. Solis/AP Photo
Just a few months ago, the Mississippi River basin was flooding. This summer, historic rainfall caused flash flooding and overflowing rivers in Kentucky, St. Louis, Missouri, parts of Illinois, and Jackson, Mississippi.
Despite these extreme sporadic rainfall events, overall, the Midwest is in an abnormal drought. The Ohio River Valley and the Upper Mississippi aren’t getting enough rain to feed the giant river.
US Drought Monitor
Up and down the Mississippi, waters have dropped to levels approaching the record low set in 1988. In Memphis, Tennessee, the waters plunged below that record on Monday, according to data from the National Weather Service.
“There is no rain in sight, that is the bottom line,” Lisa Parker, spokeswoman for the USACE Mississippi Valley Division, told the Journal. “The rivers are just bottoming out.”
Boats rest in mud at Mud Island Marina as the water on the Mississippi River continues to recede in Memphis, Tennessee, on October 19, 2022.Scott Olson/Getty Images
Scientists must conduct rigorous analysis to attribute any single event to climate change. However, this year’s extreme conditions of both drought and floods is consistent with what scientists have been predicting and observing: Rising global temperatures are driving more weather variability in the central US, fueling both more severe droughts and one-off rainfall events.
That’s because climate change, driven by all the greenhouse gasses that humans have released into the atmosphere, is changing the planet’s water cycle. Rising temperatures are increasing water evaporation and changing the atmospheric and ocean currents that distribute moisture across the globe.
Droughts are unearthing relics and remains of the past
The remains of a ship lay on the banks of the Mississippi River after recently being revealed due to the low water level, in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, on October 17, 2022.Sara Cline/AP Photo
The severe drought along the river is so intense that it uncovered a centuries-old shipwreck. In early October, low water levels revealed the old sunken ship along the banks of the Mississippi River in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Archaeologists believe these remains are from a ferry that sunk in the late 19th or early 20th century, The Associated Press reported.
Though this is the first time the ship has been fully exposed, it’s not a new discovery. Small parts of the vessel emerged from low waters in the 1990s.
“At that time the vessel was completely full of mud and there was mud all around it so only the very tip tops of the sides were visible,” Chip McGimsey, Louisiana’s state archaeologist, told the AP. “They had to move a lot of dirt just to get some narrow windows in to see bits and pieces,” McGimsey said.
A shipwreck is exposed along the banks of the Mississippi River due to low water levels, in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, on October 18, 2022.Stephen Smith/AP Photo
McGimsey thinks the ship could be the Brookhill Ferry, which carried people and possibly horse-drawn wagons across the Mississippi, until it sunk in a storm in 1915, according to news stories from the State Times archives.
The river’s receding waters also led to a more gruesome discovery. On Saturday, a Mississippi woman found human remains while searching for rocks with her family on the banks of the drought-stricken river. The remains included a lower jawbone, rib bones, and some unidentified bone pieces, Scotty Meredith, Coahoma County’s chief medical examiner, told CNN.
“Because these water levels are so low that we knew it was only a short matter of time before human remains were found,” Crystal Foster, the woman who found the remains, told WMC.
They are the latest in a bevy of discoveries to surface from receding waters. Over the summer, multiple set of remains were found in Nevada’s Lake Mead, which fell to historically low levels amid climate change-fueled drought.
But it’s not all bad news. Shrinking bodies of water could be a boon for experts tasked with solving missing persons cases, according to Jennifer Byrnes, a forensic anthropologist who consults with the Clark County coroner’s office, which reviews deaths in Lake Mead.
“A big body of water disappearing is going to help us, from a forensic perspective,” Byrnes told Insider.
Correction: October 21, 2022 —A photo caption in an earlier version of this story misstated the location of Vicksburg. The city is in Mississippi, not Louisiana.
Study: Cancer-causing gas leaking from CA stoves, pipes
Drew Costley – October 20, 2022
Gas stoves in California homes are leaking cancer-causing benzene, researchers found in a new study published on Thursday, though they say more research is needed to understand how many homes have leaks.
In the study, published in Environmental Science and Technology on Thursday, researchers also estimated that over 4 tons of benzene per year are being leaked into the atmosphere from outdoor pipes that deliver the gas to buildings around California — the equivalent to the benzene emissions from nearly 60,000 vehicles. And those emissions are unaccounted for by the state.
The researchers collected samples of gas from 159 homes in different regions of California and measured to see what types of gases were being emitted into homes when stoves were off. They found that all of the samples they tested had hazardous air pollutants, like benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene and xylene (BTEX), all of which can have adverse health effects in humans with chronic exposure or acute exposure in larger amounts.
Of most concern to the researchers was benzene, a known carcinogen that can lead to leukemia and other cancers and blood disorders, according to the National Cancer Institute.
The finding could have major implications for indoor and outdoor air quality in California, which has the second highest level of residential natural gas use in the United States.
“What our science shows is that people in California are exposed to potentially hazardous levels of benzene from the gas that is piped into their homes,” said Drew Michanowicz, a study co-author and senior scientist at PSE Healthy Energy, an energy research and policy institute. “We hope that policymakers will consider this data when they are making policy to ensure current and future policies are health-protective in light of this new research.” 0:01 0:38 Scroll back up to restore default view.
Homes in the Greater Los Angeles, the North San Fernando Valley, and the San Clarita Valley areas had the highest benzene in gas levels. Leaks from stoves in these regions could emit enough benzene to significantly exceed the limit determined to be safe by the California Office of Environmental Health Hazards Assessment.
This finding in particular didn’t surprise residents and health care workers in the region who spoke to The Associated Press about the study. That’s because many of them experienced the largest-known natural gas leak in the nation in Aliso Canyon in 2015.
Back then, 100,000 tons of methane and other gases, including benzene, leaked from a failed well operated by Southern California Gas Co. It took nearly four months to get the leak under control and resulted in headaches, nausea and nose bleeds.
Dr. Jeffrey Nordella was a physician at an urgent care in the region during this time and remembers being puzzled by the variety of symptoms patients were experiencing. “I didn’t have much to offer them,” except to help them try to detox from the exposures, he said.
That was an acute exposure of a large amount of benzene, which is different from chronic exposure to smaller amounts, but “remember what the World Health Organization said: there’s no safe level of benzene,” he said.
Kyoko Hibino was one of the residents exposed to toxic air pollution as a result of the Aliso Canyon gas leak. After the leak, she started having a persistent cough and nosebleeds and eventually was diagnosed with breast cancer, which has also been linked to benzene exposure. Her cats also started having nosebleeds and one recently passed away from leukemia.
“I’d say let’s take this study really seriously and understand how bad (benzene exposure) is,” she said.
