Doctoral student bridges gap between electronics and optics

New chip can revolutionize the current data rate for processors using microwave photonics

TEXAS A&M UNIVERSITY

Research News

IMAGE: THE ADVANTAGE TO RAMY RADY'S CHIP DESIGN PROJECT OVER ALL PREVIOUS SOLUTIONS IS ITS SMALL SIZE AND HIGH-SPEED OPERATION. view more 

CREDIT: JUSTIN BAETGE, TEXAS A&M ENGINEERING

According to the United Nations' telecommunications agency, 93% of the global population has access to a mobile-broadband network of some kind. With data becoming more readily available to consumers, there is also an appetite for more of it, and at faster speeds.

Ramy Rady, doctoral student in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Texas A&M University, is working with Dr. Kamran Entesari, his faculty advisor and professor, and Dr. Christi Madsen, professor, to design a chip that can revolutionize the current data rate for processors and technologies such as smartphones, laptops, etc. Dr. Sam Palermo, professor, is also involved with the project.

Photons are very fast - moving at the speed of light. By contrast, electrons move much slower at about 2,200 kilometers per second, which is less than 1% of the speed of light. By integrating photonic structures onto a silicon substrate by way of optics, Rady is taking advantage of the speed that photons provide while utilizing the features of existing electronic CMOS (Complementary Metal Oxide Semiconductor) technology to make silicon photonic integrated circuits.

Silicon photonic integrated circuits consume less power and generate less heat than conventional electronic circuits, which allows for an increase in data transmission. Previous work in this area was only conducted using optical processing. Rady and his team are moving toward the use of microwave photonics, which is a branch of optics that focuses on improving the quality of microwave signals using photonic structures. The advantage to Rady's project over all previous solutions is its small size and high-speed operation, i.e. frequency and data rates.

"My prototype chip operates from 25 to 40 gigahertz, creating four channels each of a 5 gigahertz bandwidth," Rady said. "This chip operates at a higher speed with a higher data rate than the previous generation of chips which relied on optical processing. The new chip is capable of reaching nearly five times the bandwidth compared to a contemporary cell phone."

Rady explained that the motion of electrons is limited, and subsequently, the quality of energy that is sent and stored to your phone, for example, is also limited. This is where the integration of photons comes into play.

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This project, which received funding from the National Science Foundation, has been featured in two papers published by Rady.

Aaron Russo's America: Freedom to Fascism

In 1913 America was a free country. Then a band of powerful bankers achieved their fathers' and great grandfathers' goal. America has never been the same. Soon the world will not be the same.

Aaron Russo expertly exposes the traitorous Federal Reserve Act and the fact that there is no law that stipulates American citizens have to pay income taxes. The ratification of the 16th amendment, also known as the "Tax amendment", represents a fundamental undermining of Constitutional law in America. It is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated against the American people by the elite private banking institutions that have usurped government as an arm of their overall control mechanism.

Russo presents interviews with an impressive range of government officials, IRS special agents , FBI officers, Politicians and tax attorneys who have researched and subsequently campaigned against the Federal Reserve Act and thus reveals why the IRS is an illegal foundation.

The income tax does not meet either criteria of Constitutionally legal taxation in America, that is direct apportioned tax or indirect uniform tax. The IRS claims that the 16th Amendment allowed for a third form of taxation, however, the Supreme court ruling on the amendment states that it allows for no new forms of taxation. More supreme court cases in the same period confirm the same conclusion. The 16th Amendment did not allow the Federal Government to levy a new tax, thus there is no Constitutional basis for the income tax.

The findings of the Grace Commission, a Blue-Ribbon panel appointed by President Ronald Reagan found that:

"One hundred percent of what is collected is absorbed solely by interest on the federal debt. All individual income tax revenues are gone before one nickel is spent on the services taxpayers expect from government."

Education, health and community up keep is paid for out of state and local property taxes, gas taxes, liquor taxes, you name it. Proceeds from the income tax do not pay for these things.The income tax money goes to pay for defense and the expansion of corporate America. In essence everyday American people are funding expansionist wars and the playboy lifestyle of the financial institutions that then further profit from that activity and become ever more powerful.

The income tax is the tool of totalitarianism. It is the means by which the corporate controlled government manipulates the people on a mass scale and locks them into servitude. If the people do not know what their rights are then an agency that knowingly breaks the law is not going to tell them.

The banks now control America. They print the currency and tell the people what it's worth. They have the legal right to counterfeit money. This coup d'etat of benign open and accountable government by elitist private interest represents the tipping point from freedom and the long slide towards fascism. Since the government's primary goal stopped being the welfare of the people it has ceased to exist as a legal entity.

This is exactly what Thomas Jefferson warned the American people may happen. Jefferson said:

"If the American people ever allow the banks to control the issuance of their currency...the banks and corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the people of all property, until their children wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered."

Russo, the award winning filmmaker who produced "The Rose" and "Trading Places", confronts the IRS in Washington and is quickly reprimanded by Homeland Security

Biden nominates Victoria Kennedy for Austria ambassadorship

He’s naming a top political fundraiser — Comcast executive David Cohen -- to serve as his ambassador to Canada, the White House said Wednesday.

By AAMER MADHANI

FILE - In this May 7, 2017 file photo, Victoria Reggie Kennedy, widow of Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, arrives at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum before the 2017 Profile in Courage award ceremonies. President Joe Biden is nominating the widow of Sen. Ted Kennedy to serve as his ambassador to Austria Kennedy, an attorney and a gun control advocate, came to know Biden during the years he served with her husband in the Senate. (AP Photo/Steven Senne, File)

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden is nominating Victoria Kennedy, an attorney and the widow of Sen. Ted Kennedy, to serve as his ambassador to Austria. He’s naming a top political fundraiser — Comcast executive David Cohen -- to serve as his ambassador to Canada, the White House said Wednesday.

Kennedy, a gun control advocate, came to know the president during the years when Biden served with her husband in the Senate.

She is the president of the board and co-founder of the Edward M. Kennedy Institute for the United States Senate, a non-partisan nonprofit that educates the public about the U.S. Senate, and also leads the education committee of the board of trustees for the Kennedy Center in Washington.

Kennedy has also served on the boards of gun control advocacy groups, the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence in Washington, D.C., as well as Stop Handgun Violence in Boston. She founded the group Common Sense about Kids and Guns, aimed at reducing guns deaths and injuries to children.

“My parents and grandparents taught us through the example of their own lives how important it is to serve and give back,” Kennedy said in a statement. “And my late husband, and his extended family, embodied the noblest qualities of service to country. I am humbled by the confidence the President has placed in me, and if confirmed, I look forward to being able to serve my country as ambassador to Austria.”

Biden is also giving serious consideration to another member of the Kennedy family.

Caroline Kennedy, the daughter of President John F. Kennedy who served as ambassador to Japan during the Obama administration, is being weighed as a contender to serve in a high-profile ambassadorial role -- perhaps in Asia or Australia, according to a person familiar with the deliberations who was not authorized to comment.

FILE - In this May 8, 2014, file photo David Cohen, Executive Vice President, Comcast Corporation testifies during the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Regulatory Reform, Commercial, and Antitrust Law oversight hearing on the proposed merger of Comcast and Time Warner Cable, on Capitol Hill in Washington. President Joe Biden is nominating Cohen to serve as his ambassador to Canada, according to the White House. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster, File)

Cohen is a senior executive at the cable company Comcast, and previously served as chief of staff to another powerful Biden ally, Ed Rendell, when Rendell was the mayor of Philadelphia. He was an early backer of the president’s third White House run, hosting Biden’s first 2020 presidential campaign fundraiser.

Cohen said in a statement that, if confirmed, he would look to grow “the important relationship” as both nations look to rebound from the coronavirus pandemic. Canada announced this week that it would ease restrictions at the border next month, allowing U.S. citizens and permanent residents living in the United States who are fully vaccinated to enter without quarantining.

The U.S. government on Wednesday extended the closure of the land borders with Canada and Mexico to non-essential travelers until at least Aug. 21.

The White House also announced that Biden was nominating Jamie Harpootlian, a South Carolina attorney and influential Democrat in the early primary state, to serve as his ambassador to Slovenia. She is married to another powerful South Carolina Democratic operative and Biden ally, state Sen. Dick Harpootlian.

The president’s victory in the South Carolina primary turned out to be the turning point for a campaign that struggled out of the gate.

NIXON & REAGAN'S PHONY WAR



50-year war on drugs imprisoned millions of Black Americans

By AARON MORRISON

Landscaping was hardly his lifelong dream.

As a teenager, Alton Lucas believed basketball or music would pluck him out of North Carolina and take him around the world. In the late 1980s, he was the right-hand man to his musical best friend, Youtha Anthony Fowler, who many hip hop and R&B heads know as DJ Nabs.

But rather than jet-setting with Fowler, Lucas discovered drugs and the drug trade at the height of the so-called war on drugs. Addicted to crack cocaine and involved in trafficking the drug, he faced decades-long imprisonment at a time when the drug abuse and violence plaguing major cities and working class Black communities were not seen as the public health issue that opioids are today.

By chance, Lucas received a rare bit of mercy. He got the kind of help that many Black and Latino Americans struggling through the crack epidemic did not: treatment, early release and what many would consider a fresh start.

“I started the landscaping company, to be honest with you, because nobody would hire me because I have a felony,” said Lucas. His Sunflower Landscaping got a boost in 2019 with the help of Inmates to Entrepreneurs, a national nonprofit assisting people with criminal backgrounds by providing practical entrepreneurship education.

Alton Lucas delivers wrapped firewood to a convenience store near his home outside of Raleigh, N.C., on Friday, June 18, 2021. (AP Photo/Allen G. Breed)

Lucas was caught up in a system that imposes lifetime limits on most people who have served time for drug crimes, with little thought given to their ability to rehabilitate. In addition to being denied employment, those with criminal records can be limited in their access to business and educational loans, housing, child custody rights, voting rights and gun rights.

It’s a system that was born when Lucas was barely out of diapers.

Fifty years ago this summer, President Richard Nixon declared a war on drugs. Today, with the U.S. mired in a deadly opioid epidemic that did not abate during the coronavirus pandemic’s worst days, it is questionable whether anyone won the war.

– VIDEO: After 50-year 'war on drugs,' has anyone won?

Yet the loser is clear: Black and Latino Americans, their families and their communities. A key weapon was the imposition of mandatory minimums in prison sentencing. Decades later those harsh federal and state penalties led to an increase in the prison industrial complex that saw millions of people, primarily of color, locked up and shut out of the American dream.

An Associated Press review of federal and state incarceration data shows that, between 1975 and 2019, the U.S. prison population jumped from 240,593 to 1.43 million Americans. Among them, about 1 in 5 people were incarcerated with a drug offense listed as their most serious crime.


The racial disparities reveal the war’s uneven toll. Following the passage of stiffer penalties for crack cocaine and other drugs, the Black incarceration rate in America exploded from about 600 per 100,000 people in 1970 to 1,808 in 2000. In the same timespan, the rate for the Latino population grew from 208 per 100,000 people to 615, while the white incarceration rate grew from 103 per 100,000 people to 242.

Gilberto Gonzalez, a retired special agent for the Drug Enforcement Administration who worked for more than 20 years taking down drug dealers and traffickers in the U.S., Mexico and in South America, said he’ll never forget being cheered on by residents in a predominantly Hispanic neighborhood near Los Angeles as he led away drug traffickers in handcuffs.

“That gave me a sense of the reality of the people that live in these neighborhoods, that are powerless because they’re afraid that the drug dealers that control the street, that control the neighborhood are going to do them and their children harm,” said Gonzalez, 64, who detailed his field experiences in the recently released memoir “Narco Legenda.”

“We realized then that, along with dismantling (drug trafficking) organizations, there was also a real need to clean up communities, to go to where the crime was and help people that are helpless,” he said.

Still, the law enforcement approach has led to many long-lasting consequences for people who have since reformed. Lucas still wonders what would happen for him and his family if he no longer carried the weight of a drug-related conviction on his record.

Even with his sunny disposition and close to 30 years of sober living, Lucas, at age 54, cannot pass most criminal background checks. His wife, whom he’d met two decades ago at a fatherhood counseling conference, said his past had barred him from doing things as innocuous as chaperoning their children on school field trips.

“It’s almost like a life sentence,” he said.

Alton Lucas drives home after dropping some firewood at a local convenience store outside of Raleigh, N.C., on Friday, June 18, 2021. (AP Photo/Allen G. Breed)

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Although Nixon declared the war on drugs on June 17, 1971, the U.S. already had lots of practice imposing drug prohibitions that had racially skewed impacts. The arrival of Chinese migrants in the 1800s saw the rise of criminalizing opium that migrants brought with them. Cannabis went from being called “reefer” to “marijuana,” as a way to associate the plant with Mexican migrants arriving in the U.S. in the 1930s.

By the time Nixon sought reelection amid the anti-Vietnam War and Black power movements, criminalizing heroin was a way to target activists and hippies. One of Nixon’s domestic policy aides, John Ehrlichman, admitted as much about the war on drugs in a 22-year-old interview published by Harper’s Magazine in 2016.

Experts say Nixon’s successors, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, leveraged drug war policies in the following decades to their own political advantage, cementing the drug war’s legacy. The explosion of the U.S. incarceration rate, the expansion of public and private prison systems and the militarization of local police forces are all outgrowths of the drug war.

In this Oct. 11, 1982 file photo, first lady Nancy Reagan speaks at the first national conference of the National Federation of Parents for Drug-Free Youth in Washington. (AP Photo/Barry Thumma, File)

In this June 17, 1971, file photo, President Richard Nixon explains aspects of the special message sent to the Congress, asking for an extra $155 million for a new program to combat the use of drugs. (AP Photo/Harvey Georges, File)


Federal policies, such as mandatory minimum sentencing for drug offenses, were mirrored in state legislatures. Lawmakers also adopted felony disenfranchisement, while also imposing employment and other social barriers for people caught in drug sweeps.

The domestic anti-drug policies were widely accepted, mostly because the use of illicit drugs, including crack cocaine in the late 1980s, was accompanied by an alarming spike in homicides and other violent crimes nationwide. Those policies had the backing of Black clergy and the Congressional Black Caucus, the group of African-American lawmakers whose constituents demanded solutions and resources to stem the violent heroin and crack scourges.

“I think people often flatten this conversation,” said Kassandra Frederique, executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance, a New York-based nonprofit organization pushing decriminalization and safe drug use policies.

“If you’re a Black leader 30 years ago, you’re grabbing for the first (solution) in front of you,” said Frederique, who is Black. “A lot of folks in our community said, ‘OK, get these drug dealers out of our communities, get this crack out of our neighborhood. But also, give us treatment so we can help folks.’”

The heavy hand of law enforcement came without addiction prevention resources, she said.

Use of crack rose sharply in 1985, and peaked in 1989, before quickly declining in the early 1990s, according to a Harvard study.

Drug sales and use were concentrated in cities, particularly those with large Black and Latino populations, although there were spikes in use among white populations, too. Between 1984 and 1989, crack was associated with a doubling of homicides of Black males aged 14 to 17. By the year 2000, the correlation between crack cocaine and violence faded amid waning profits from street sales.

Roland Fryer, an author of the Harvard study and a professor of economics, said the effects of the crack epidemic on a generation of Black families and Black children still haven’t been thoroughly documented. A lack of accountability for the war on drugs bred mistrust of government and law enforcement in the community, he said.

“People ask why Black people don’t trust (public) institutions,” said Fryer, who is Black. “It’s because we have watched how we’ve treated opioids — it’s a public health concern. But crack (cocaine) was, ‘lock them up and throw away the key, what we need is tougher sentencing.’”

In this April 9, 1988, file photo, Los Angeles police officers search one of seven people arrested for selling narcotics in the south-central area of Los Angeles, as more than 1,000 police officers raided gang strongholds to attack on drug dealing and street violence in the nation's second largest city. (AP Photo/Douglas C. Pizac, File)

Another major player in creating hysteria around drug use during the crack era: the media. On June 17, 1986, 15 years to the day after Nixon declared the drug war, NBA draftee Len Bias died of a cocaine-induced heart attack on the University of Maryland campus.

Coverage was frenzied and coupled with racist depictions of crack addiction in mostly Black and Latino communities. Within weeks of Bias’s death, the U.S. House of Representatives drafted the Anti-Abuse Act of 1986.

The law, passed and signed by Reagan that October, imposed mandatory federal sentences of 20 years to life in prison for violating drug laws. The law also made possession and sale of crack rocks harsher than that of powder cocaine.

The basketball player’s death could have been one of the off-ramps in Lucas’s spiral into crack addiction and dealing. By then, he could make $10,000 in four to five hours selling the drug.

“One of the things that I thought would help me, that I thought would be my rehab, was when Len Bias died,” Lucas said. “I thought, if they showed me evidence (he) died from an overdose of smoking crack cocaine, as much as I loved Len Bias, that I would give it up.”

“I did not quit,” he said.

He was first introduced to crack cocaine in 1986, but kept his drug use largely hidden from his friends and family.

“What I didn’t know at the time was that this was a different type of chemical entering my brain and it was going to change me forever,” Lucas said. “Here I am on the verge of being the right-hand man to DJ Nabs, to literally travel the world. That’s how bad the drug did me.”

By 1988, Fowler’s music career had outgrown Durham. He and Lucas moved to Atlanta and, a few years later, Fowler signed a deal to become the official touring DJ for the hip hop group Kris Kross under famed music producer Jermaine Dupri’s So So Def record label. Fowler and the group went on to open for pop music icon Michael Jackson on the European leg of the “Dangerous” tour.

Old photos of Alton Lucas, top and bottom on left, and musician DJ Nabs, lower right, are assembled in a scrapbook in Nabs' home studio outside of Raleigh, N.C., on Saturday, June 26, 2021. (AP Photo/Allen G. Breed)

Lucas, who began trafficking crack cocaine between Georgia and North Carolina, never joined his best friend on the road. Instead, he slipped further into his addiction and returned to Durham, where he took a short-lived job as a preschool instructor.

When he lacked the money to procure drugs to sell or to use, Lucas resorted to robbing businesses for quick cash. He claims that he was never armed when he robbed “soft targets,” like fast food restaurants and convenience stores.

Lucas spent four and a half years in state prison for larceny after robbing several businesses to feed his addiction. Because his crimes were considered nonviolent, Lucas learned in prison that he was eligible for an addiction treatment program that would let him out early. But if he violated the terms of his release or failed to complete the treatment, Lucas would serve more than a decade in prison on separate drug trafficking charges under a deal with the court.

He accepted the deal.

After his release from prison and his graduation from the treatment program, Fowler paid out of his pocket to have his friend’s fines and fees cleared. That’s how Lucas regained his voting rights.

On a recent Saturday, the two best friends met up to talk in depth about the secret that Lucas intentionally kept from Fowler. The DJ learned of his friend’s addiction after seeing a Durham newspaper clipping that detailed the string of robberies.

Musician Youtha Anthony Fowler, known as "DJ Nabs," looks at an old newspaper clipping, top, about his lifelong best friend, Alton Lucas, in his home studio outside of Raleigh, N.C., on Saturday, June 26, 2021. (AP Photo/Allen G. Breed)

Sitting in Fowler’s home, Lucas told his friend that he doesn’t regret not being on the road or missing out on the fringe benefits from touring.

“All I needed was to be around you,” Lucas said.

“Right,” Fowler replied, choking up and wiping tears from his eyes.

Lucas continued: “You know, when I was around you, when there was a party or whatnot, my job, just out of instinct, was to watch your back.”

In a separate interview, Fowler, who is a few years younger than Lucas, said, “I just wanted my brother on the road with me. To help protect me. To help me be strong. And I had to do it by my damn self. And I didn’t like that. That’s what it was.”

Musician Youtha Anthony Fowler, known as DJ Nabs, left, listens to lifelong best friend Alton Lucas talk about his drug addiction in Nabs' home studio outside of Raleigh, N.C., on Saturday, June 26, 2021. (AP Photo/Allen G. Breed)

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Not everyone was as lucky as Lucas. Often, a drug offense conviction in combination with a violent gun offense carried much steeper penalties. At the heights of the war on drugs, federal law allowed violent drug offenders to be prosecuted in gang conspiracy cases, which often pinned homicides on groups of defendants, sometimes irrespective of who pulled the trigger.

These cases resulted in sentences of life imprisonment without the possibility of parole, a punishment disproportionately doled out to Black and Latino gang defendants.

That’s the case for Bill Underwood, who was a successful R&B and hip hop music promoter in New York City in the late ’70s through the ’80s, before his 33-year incarceration. A judge granted him compassionate release from federal custody in January, noting his lauded reputation as a mentor to young men in prison and his high-risk exposure to COVID-19 at age 67.

As the AP reported in 1990, Underwood was found guilty and sentenced to life without parole for racketeering, racketeering conspiracy and narcotics conspiracy, as part of a prosecution that accused his gang of committing six murders and of controlling street-level drug distribution.

“I actually short-changed myself, and my family and my people, by doing what I did,” said Underwood, who acknowledges playing a large part in the multimillion-dollar heroin trade, as a leader of a violent Harlem gang from the 1970s through the 1980s.
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Underwood is now a senior fellow with The Sentencing Project, a nonprofit pushing for an end to life imprisonment. He testified to Congress in June that his punishment was excessive.

“As human beings, we are capable of painful yet transformative self reflection, maturity, and growth, and to deny a person this opportunity is to deny them their humanity,” he said in the testimony.

Sympathy for people like Underwood can be hard to come by. Brett Roman Williams, a Philadelphia-based independent filmmaker and anti-gun violence advocate, grew up watching his older brother, Derrick, serve time in prison for a serious drug offense. But in 2016, his brother was only a month out on parole when he was killed by gunfire in Philadelphia.

“The laws are in place for people to obey, whether you like it or not,” Williams said. “We do need reform, we do need opportunities and equity within our system of economics. But we all have choices.”

Rep. Cori Bush of St. Louis, following similar action by several members of Congress before her, last month introduced legislation to decriminalize all drugs and invest in substance abuse treatment.

“Growing up in St. Louis, the War on Drugs disappeared Black people, not drug use,” Bush, who is Black, wrote in a statement sent to the AP. “Over the course of two years, I lost 40 to 50 friends to incarceration or death because of the War on Drugs. We became so accustomed to loss and trauma that it was our normal.”

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The deleterious impacts of the drug war have, for years, drawn calls for reform and abolition from mostly left-leaning elected officials and social justice advocates. Many of them say that in order to begin to unwind or undo the war on drugs, all narcotics must be decriminalized or legalized, with science-based regulation.

Drug abuse prevention advocates, however, claim that broad drug legalization poses more risks to Americans than it would any benefits.

Provisional data released in December from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show overdose deaths from illicit drug use continued to rise amid the global COVID-19 pandemic. And according to the latest Drug Enforcement Administration narcotics threat assessment released in March, the availability of drugs such as fentanyl, heroin and cocaine remained high or plateaued last year. Domestic and transnational drug trade organizations generate tens of billions of dollars in illicit proceeds from sales annually in the U.S., the DEA said.

“Many people think drug prevention is ‘just say no,’ like Nancy Reagan did in the ’80s, and we know that did not work,” said Becky Vance, CEO of the Texas-based agency Drug Prevention Resources, which has advocated for evidenced-based anti-drug and alcohol abuse education for more than 85 years.

“As a person in long-term recovery, I know firsthand the harms of addiction,” said Vance, who opposes blanket recreational legalization of illicit drugs. “I believe there has to be another way, without legalizing drugs, to reform the criminal justice system and get rid of the inequities.”
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Frederique, of the Drug Policy Alliance, said reckoning with the war on drugs must start with reparations for the generations senselessly swept up and destabilized by racially biased policing.

“This was an intentional policy choice,” Frederique said. “We don’t want to end the war on drugs, and then in 50 years be working on something else that does the same thing. That is the cycle that we’re in.”

“It has always been about control,” Frederique added.

As much as the legacy of the war on drugs is a tragedy, it is also a story about the resilience of people disproportionately targeted by drug policies, said Donovan Ramsey, a journalist and author of the forthcoming book, “When Crack Was King.”

“Even with all of that, it’s still important to recognize and to celebrate that we (Black people) survived the crack epidemic and we survived it with very little help from the federal government and local governments,” Ramsey told the AP.

Fowler thinks the war on drugs didn’t ruin Lucas’ life. “I think he went through it at the right time, truth be told, because he was young enough. Luke’s got more good behind him than bad,” the DJ said.

Lucas sees beauty in making things better, including in his business. But he still dreams of the day when his past isn’t held against him.

“It was the beautification of doing the landscaping that kind of attracted me, because it was like the affirmation that my soul needed,” he said.

“I liked to do something and look back at it and say, ‘Wow, that looks good.’ It’s not just going to wash away in a couple of days. It takes nourishment and upkeep.”

Alton Lucas, right, wraps firewood for sale as he and neighbor Ryan Isaac, a correctional officer, chat outside Lucas' home outside of Raleigh, N.C., on Friday, June 18, 2021. (AP Photo/Allen G. Breed)

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Morrison reported from New York. AP writers Allen G. Breed in Durham, North Carolina, and Angeliki Kastanis in Los Angeles contributed.

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Morrison writes about race and justice for the AP’s Race and Ethnicity team. Follow him on Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/aaronlmorrison.

AP: Few AZ voter fraud cases, discrediting Trump’s claims

By BOB CHRISTIE and CHRISTINA A. CASSIDY

July 16, 2021

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FILE - In this Nov. 3, 2020, file photo voters deliver their ballot to a polling station in Tempe, Ariz. An Associated Press investigation has found county election officials throughout Arizona have identified fewer than 200 cases of potential voter fraud from last year's presidential election that require review by local prosecutors. The findings undermine claims by former President Donald Trump and his allies that widespread fraud is to blame for his loss in Arizona. (AP Photo/Matt York, File)

PHOENIX (AP) — Arizona county election officials have identified fewer than 200 cases of potential voter fraud out of more than 3 million ballots cast in last year’s presidential election, further discrediting former President Donald Trump’s claims of a stolen election as his allies continue a disputed ballot review in the state’s most populous county.

An Associated Press investigation found 182 cases where problems were clear enough that officials referred them to investigators for further review. So far, only four cases have led to charges, including those identified in a separate state investigation. No one has been convicted. No person’s vote was counted twice.

While it’s possible more cases could emerge, the numbers illustrate the implausibility of Trump’s claims that fraud and irregularities in Arizona cost him the state’s electorate votes. In final, certified and audited results, Biden won 10,400 more votes than Trump out of 3.4 million cast.

AP’s findings align with previous studies showing voter fraud is rare. Numerous safeguards are built into the system to not only prevent fraud from happening but to detect it when it does.

“The fact of the matter is that election officials across the state are highly invested in helping to ensure the integrity of our elections and the public’s confidence in them,” said Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, a Democrat. “And part of that entails taking potential voter fraud seriously.”

Arizona’s potential cases also illustrate another reality: Voter fraud is often bipartisan. Of the four Arizona cases that have resulted in criminal charges, two involved Democratic voters and two involved Republicans.

AP’s review supports statements made by many state and local elections officials — and even some Republican county officials and GOP Gov. Doug Ducey — that Arizona’s presidential election was secure and its results valid.

And still, Arizona’s GOP-led state Senate has for months been conducting what it describes as a “forensic audit” of results in Phoenix’s Maricopa County. The effort has been discredited by election experts and faced bipartisan criticism, but some Republicans, including Trump, have suggested it will uncover evidence of widespread fraud.

“This is not a massive issue,” said Adrian Fontes, a Democrat who oversaw the Maricopa County election office during the 2020 election and lost his re-election bid. “It is a lie that has developed over time. It’s been fed by conspiracy theorists.”

The AP tallied the potential cases after submitting public record requests to all Arizona counties. Most counties — 11 out of 15 — reported they had forwarded no potential cases to local prosecutors. The majority of cases identified so far involve people casting a ballot for a relative who had died or people who tried to cast two ballots.

In addition to the AP’s review of county election offices, an Election Integrity Unit of the state attorney general’s office that was created in 2019 to ferret out fraud has been reviewing potential cases of fraud.

A spokesman for Attorney General Mark Brnovich told the AP in April that the unit had 21 active investigations, although he did not specify if all were from last fall.

A month later, the office indicted a woman for casting a ballot on behalf of her dead mother in November. A spokeswoman declined to provide updated information this week.

Maricopa County, which is subject to the disputed ballot review ordered by state Senate Republicans, has identified just one case of potential fraud out of 2.1 million ballots cast. That was a voter who might have cast a ballot in another state. The case was sent to the county attorney’s office, which forwarded it to the state attorney general.

Virtually all the cases identified by county election officials are in Pima County, home to Tucson, and involved voters who attempted to cast two ballots.

The Pima County Recorder’s Office has a practice of referring all cases with even a hint of potential fraud to prosecutors for review, something the state’s 14 other county recorders do not do. Pima County officials forwarded 151 cases to prosecutors. They did not refer 25 others from voters over age 70 because there was a greater chance those errors — typically attempts to vote twice — were the result of memory lapses or confusion, not criminal intent, an election official said.

None of the 176 duplicate ballots was counted twice. A spokesman for the Pima County Attorney’s Office, Joe Watson, said that the 151 cases it received were still being reviewed and that no charges had been filed.

Pima County’s tally of referrals to prosecutors after last year’s election was in line with those in 2016 and 2018. Prosecutors filed no voter fraud cases after the 2016 election and just one after the 2018 election, and that case was later dismissed, Watson said Friday.

But there were some new patterns this year, said deputy recorder Pamela Franklin. An unusually high number of people appeared to have intentionally voted twice, often by voting early in person and then again by mail. In Arizona, where nearly 80% of voters cast ballots by mail, it’s not unusual for someone to forget they returned their mail-in ballot and then later ask for a replacement or try to vote in person, she said. But this pattern was new.

Franklin noted several factors at play, including worries about U.S. Postal Service delays. In addition, Trump at one point encouraged voters who cast their ballots early by mail to show up at their polling places on Election Day and vote again if poll workers couldn’t confirm their mail ballots had been received.

The results in Arizona are similar to early findings in other battleground states. Local election officials in Wisconsin identified just 27 potential cases of voter fraud out of 3.3 million ballots cast last November, according to records obtained by the AP under the state’s open records law. Potential voter fraud cases in other states where Trump and his allies mounted challenges have so far amounted to just a tiny fraction of Trump’s losing margin in those states.


The Associated Press conducted the review following months of Trump and his allies claiming without proof that he had won the 2020 election. His claims of widespread fraud have been rejected by election officials, judges, a group of election security officials and even Trump’s own attorney general at the time. Even so, supporters continue to repeat them and they have been cited by state lawmakers as justification for tighter voting rules across the country.

In Arizona, Republican state lawmakers have used the unsubstantiated claims to justify the unprecedented outside Senate review of the election in Maricopa County and to pass legislation that could make it harder for infrequent voters to receive mail ballots automatically.

Trump, in a statement, called AP’s tally an attempt to “discredit the massive number of voter irregularities and fraud” in key battleground states and said the “real numbers” will be released “shortly.” He did not provide any evidence to back up his assertions.

Senate President Karen Fann has repeatedly said her goal is not to overturn the election results. Instead, she has said she wants to find out if there were any problems and show voters who believe Trump’s claims whether they should trust the results.

“Everybody keeps saying, ‘Oh, there’s no evidence’ and it’s like, ‘Yeah well, let’s do the audit.’ And if there’s nothing there, then we say, ‘Look, there was nothing there,’” Fann told the AP in early May. “If we find something, and it’s a big if, but if we find something, then we can say, ‘OK, we do have evidence and now how do we fix this?’” Fann did not return calls this week to discuss the AP findings.

Aside from double voting, the cases flagged by officials mostly involved a ballot cast after someone had died, including three voters in Yavapai County who face felony charges for casting ballots for spouses who died before the election.

In Yuma County, one case of a voter attempting to cast two ballots was sent to the county attorney for review. Chief Civil Deputy William Kerekus told the AP that there was no intent at voter fraud and the case was closed without charges.

Cochise County Recorder David Stevens found mail-in ballots were received from two voters who died before mail ballots were sent in early October. Sheriff’s deputies investigating the cases found their homes were vacant and closed the cases. The votes were not counted.

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ANY RELATION TO BLACK FUNGUS IN INDIA

‘Superbug’ fungus spread in two cities, health officials say
By MIKE STOBBE

FILE - This 2016 photo made available by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows a strain of Candida auris cultured in a petri dish at a CDC laboratory. On Thursday, July 22, 2021, the CDC said they now have evidence of the untreatable fungus spreading in a Washington, D.C, nursing home and at two Dallas-area hospitals. (Shawn Lockhart/CDC via AP)


NEW YORK (AP) — U.S. health officials said Thursday they now have evidence of an untreatable fungus spreading in two hospitals and a nursing home.

The “superbug” outbreaks were reported in a Washington, D.C, nursing home and at two Dallas-area hospitals, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported. A handful of the patients had invasive fungal infections that were impervious to all three major classes of medications.

“This is really the first time we’ve started seeing clustering of resistance” in which patients seemed to be getting the infections from each other, said the CDC’s Dr. Meghan Lyman.

The fungus, Candida auris, is a harmful form of yeast that is considered dangerous to hospital and nursing home patients with serious medical problems. It is most deadly when it enters the bloodstream, heart or brain. Outbreaks in health care facilities have been spurred when the fungus spread through patient contact or on contaminated surfaces.

Health officials have sounded alarms for years about the superbug after seeing infections in which commonly used drugs had little effect. In 2019, doctors diagnosed three cases in New York that were also resistant to a class of drugs, called echinocandins, that were considered a last line of defense.

In those cases, there was no evidence the infections had spread from patient to patient — scientists concluded the resistance to the drugs formed during treatment.

The new cases did spread, the CDC concluded.

In Washington, D.C., a cluster of 101 C. auris cases at a nursing home dedicated to very sick patients included three that were resistant to all three kinds of antifungal medications. A cluster of 22 in two Dallas-area hospitals included two with that level of resistance. The facilities weren’t identified.

Those cases were seen from January to April. Of the five people who were fully resistant to treatment, three died — both Texas patients and one in Washington.

Lyman said both are ongoing outbreaks and that additional infections have been identified since April. But those added numbers were not reported.

Investigators reviewed medical records and found no evidence of previous antifungal use among the patients in those clusters. Health officials say that means they spread from person to person.

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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

US churches reckon with traumatic legacy of Native schools

By PETER SMITH

AP
In this 1910s photo provided by the United Church of Canada Archives, students write on a chalkboard at the Red Deer Indian Industrial School in Alberta. In Canada, where more than 150,000 Indigenous children attended residential schools over more than a century, a National Truth and Reconciliation Commission identified 3,201 deaths amid poor conditions. (United Church of Canada Archives via AP)

The discoveries of hundreds of unmarked graves at former residential schools for Indigenous children in Canada have prompted renewed calls for a reckoning over the traumatic legacy of similar schools in the United States — and in particular by the churches that operated many of them.

U.S. Catholic and Protestant denominations operated more than 150 boarding schools between the 19th and 20th centuries. Native American and Alaskan Native children were regularly severed from their tribal families, customs, language and religion and brought to the schools in a push to assimilate and Christianize them.

Some U.S. churches have been reckoning with this activity for years through ceremonies, apologies and archival investigations, while others are just getting started. Some advocates say churches have more work to do in opening their archives, educating the public about what was done in the name of their faith and helping former students and their relatives tell their stories of family trauma.

“We all need to work together on this,” said the Rev. Bradley Hauff, a Minnesota-based Episcopal priest and missioner for Indigenous Ministries with the Episcopal Church.

“What’s happening in Canada, that’s a wakeup call to us,” said Hauff, who is enrolled with the Oglala Sioux Tribe.

This painful history has drawn relatively little attention in the United States compared with Canada, where the recent discoveries of graves underscored what a 2015 government commission called a “cultural genocide.”

That’s beginning to change.

This month top officials with the U.S. Episcopal Church acknowledged the denomination’s own need to reckon with its involvement with such boarding schools.

“We have heard with sorrow stories of how this history has harmed the families of many Indigenous Episcopalians,” read a July 12 statement from Presiding Bishop Michael Curry and the Rev. Gay Clark Jennings, president of the denomination’s House of Deputies.

“We must come to a full understanding of the legacies of these schools,” they added, calling for the denomination’s next legislative session in 2022 to earmark funds for independent research into church archives and to educate church members.

Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, the first Native American to serve as a U.S. Cabinet secretary, announced last month that her department would investigate “the loss of human life and the lasting consequences of residential Indian boarding schools.” That would include seeking to identify the schools and their burial sites.

Soon afterward, she spoke at a long-planned ceremony at the former Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania, where the remains of nine children who died at the school more than a century earlier were returned to Rosebud Sioux tribal representatives for reburial in South Dakota.

U.S. religious groups were affiliated at least 156 such schools, according to the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition, formed in 2012 to raise awareness and address the traumas of the institutions. That’s more than 40% of the 367 schools documented so far by the coalition.

Eighty-four were affiliated with the Catholic Church or its religious orders, such as the Jesuits. The other 72 were affiliated with various Protestant groups, including Presbyterians (21), Quakers (15) and Methodists (12). Most have been closed for decades.

Samuel Torres, director of research and programs for the coalition, said church apologies can be a good start but “there is a lot more to be done” on engaging Indigenous community members and educating the public.

Such information is crucial given how little most Americans know about the schools, both in their impact on Indigenous communities and their role “as an armament toward acquisition of Native lands,” he said.

“Without that truth, then there’s really very limited possibilities of healing,” Torres said.

Hauff noted that the experiences of former students, such as his own parents, ranged widely. Some said that even amid austerity, loneliness and family separation, they received a good education, made friends, learned skills and freely spoke tribal languages with peers. But others talked of “unspeakable, cruel abuse,” including physical and sexual assault, malnourishment and being punished for speaking Native languages.

“Even if some of the children did say they had a positive experience, it did come at a price,” Hauff said. “Our church worked hand in hand with the government to assimilate these children. ... We need to acknowledge it happened.”

In Canada, where more than 150,000 Indigenous children attended residential schools over more than a century, a National Truth and Reconciliation Commission identified 3,201 deaths amid poor conditions.

The United Church of Canada, which operated 15 such schools, has apologized for its role, opened its archives and helped identify burial sites.

The Rev. Richard Bott, moderator of the United Church, lamented that “we were perpetrators in this” and that the church “put the national goal of assimilation ahead of our responsibility as Christians.”

The Catholic Church’s response in Canada remains controversial. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said in June that he was “deeply disappointed” the Vatican has not offered a formal apology. Pope Francis expressed “sorrow” following the discovery of the graves and has agreed to meet at the Vatican in December with school survivors and other Indigenous leaders.

Canada’s Catholic bishops said in a joint statement this month that they are “saddened by the Residential Schools legacy.” In Saskatchewan, bishops have launched a fundraising campaign to benefit survivors and other reconciliation efforts.

The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, meanwhile, said it would “look for ways to be of assistance” in the Interior Department’s inquiry.

“We cannot even begin to imagine the deep sorrow these discoveries are causing in Native communities across North America,” spokeswoman Chieko Noguchi said.

Influential voices such as the Jesuit-affiliated America Magazine are urging U.S. Catholic bishops not to repeat their mishandling of cases of child sex abuse by priests and other religious leaders.

“For decades the people of God were anguished by the obfuscation on the part of those church leaders who allowed only a trickle of incomplete document releases from diocesan and provincial archives while investigators struggled to get to the truth,” the magazine said in an editorial. “The church in the United States must demonstrate that it has learned from ... such failures.”

Individual efforts are underway, however, such as at the Red Cloud Indian School in South Dakota, which has formed a Truth and Healing Advisory Committee to reckon with the years it was managed by Catholic orders.

This photo made available by the Presbyterian Historical Society, Philadelphia shows students at a Presbyterian boarding school in Sitka, Alaska in the summer of 1883. U.S. Catholic and Protestant denominations operated more than 150 boarding schools between the 19th and 20th centuries. Native American and Alaskan Native children were regularly severed from their tribal families, customs, language and religion and brought to the schools in a push to assimilate and Christianize them. (Presbyterian Historical Society, Philadelphia via AP)

Other churches have addressed their legacy to varying degrees.

Early in 2017, leaders of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) traveled to Utqiagvik, on Alaska’s North Slope, to deliver a sweeping apology before a packed school auditorium for the treatment of Indigenous persons in general, and specifically for how it operated the boarding schools.

The Rev. Gradye Parsons, former stated clerk for the denomination, told the gathering that the church had been “in contempt of its own proclaimed faith” in suppressing Native spiritual traditions amid its zeal to spread Christianity, and “the church judged when it should have listened.”

“It has taken us too long to get to this apology,” Parsons said. “Many of your people who deserved the apology the most are gone.”

The United Methodist Church held a ceremony of repentance in 2012 for historic injustices against Native peoples, and in 2016 it acknowledged its role in the boarding schools in tandem with a government effort to “intentionally” destroy traditional cultures and belief systems.

Still, the Native American International Caucus of the United Methodist Church recently urged the church to do more “to uncover the truth about our denomination’s role and responsibility in this reprehensible history.”

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Associated Press religion coverage receives support from the Lilly Endowment through The Conversation U.S. The AP is solely responsible for this content.

Unvaccinated staff eyed in rising nursing home cases, deaths

By JASON DEAREN and RICARDO ALONSO-ZALDIVAR

FILE - In this April 26, 2021 file photo, a nursing student administers the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine at a vaccination center at UNLV, in Las Vegas. Lagging vaccination rates among nursing home staff are being linked to a national increase in COVID-19 infections and deaths at senior facilities in July and are at the center of a federal investigation in a hard-hit Colorado location where disease detectives found many workers were not inoculated. (AP Photo/John Locher, File)


WASHINGTON (AP) — Lagging vaccination rates among nursing home staff are being linked to a national increase in COVID-19 infections and deaths at senior facilities, and are at the center of a federal investigation in a hard-hit Colorado location where disease detectives found many workers were not inoculated.

The investigation by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention of facilities in the Grand Junction, Colorado, area raises concerns among public health doctors that successes in protecting vulnerable elders with vaccines could be in peril as the more aggressive delta variant spreads across the country.

Nationally about 59% of nursing home staff have gotten their shots, about the same as the overall percentage of fully vaccinated adults — but significantly lower than the roughly 80% of residents who are vaccinated, according to Medicare. And some states have much lower vaccination rates of around 40%.

Some policy experts are urging the government to close the gap by requiring nursing home staffers get shots, a mandate the Biden administration has been reluctant to issue. Nursing home operators fear such a move could backfire, prompting many staffers with vaccine qualms to simply quit their jobs.

To be sure, the vast majority of fully vaccinated people who become infected with the delta variant suffer only mild symptoms.

But “older adults may not respond fully to the vaccine and there’s enormous risk of someone coming in with the virus,” said Dr. Joshua Sharfstein, vice dean for public health practice at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

“Vaccinating workers in nursing homes is a national emergency because the delta variant is a threat even to those already vaccinated,” he said.

The CDC conducted its investigation of delta variant outbreaks in elder care facilities in Mesa County, Colorado, in May and June. The area is a coronavirus hot spot. The agency said it is assisting states and counties throughout the nation as part of the White House’s COVID-19 “surge teams.”

Nationally, data collected by CDC show that deaths and confirmed infections among nursing home staff have decreased significantly since vaccinations began in January. But the number of deaths reported among staff have begun creeping up again, fueling new concerns.

At one memory care facility in the Grand Junction area, 16 fully vaccinated residents were infected and four died, according to a CDC slide provided to The Associated Press. The residents who died were described as being in hospice care, with a median age of 93, indicating they were particularly frail.

The CDC has not released the findings of its investigation publicly, but said it plans to publish the results in an upcoming Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. The slide was shared with the AP by a person involved in internal deliberations, who requested anonymity because they did not have permission to release the data.

Of the 16 fully vaccinated residents infected at the memory care facility, CDC found that 13 developed symptoms, described as mild in most cases.

The CDC investigated several nursing homes in Mesa County that were experiencing new outbreaks. At one location — described as “Facility A” — 42% of the staff were still not fully vaccinated, contrasting with only about 8% of residents who had failed to complete their shots.

The CDC found a COVID-19 infection rate of 30% among vaccinated residents and staff at the facility, with residents accounting for the vast majority of cases.

Throughout the pandemic, people in long-term care facilities have carried a disproportionate burden of suffering and death, not to mention increased isolation due to lockdowns. It’s estimated that nursing home residents represent about 1% of the U.S. population, but they account for about 22% of COVID-19 deaths — more than 133,400 people whose lives have been lost.

Experts generally agree that staff are one of the main triggers of nursing home outbreaks, because workers may unwittingly bring the virus in from the surrounding community before developing symptoms.

With the arrival of vaccines and an aggressive effort to get residents immunized, cases and deaths plummeted and nursing homes emerged from lockdown. But COVID-19 has not been wiped out. As of the week ending July 4, there were 410 residents sickened nationwide and 146 who died.

Colorado is not alone in seeing nursing home outbreaks as large shares of staff remain unvaccinated.

In Indiana, seven residents died from COVID-19 at a facility where less than half the staff — 44% — was fully vaccinated, said Howard County health officer Dr. Emily Backer. Eleven additional residents tested positive in the outbreak that officials believe started in mid-June.

One of the people who died was fully vaccinated, and five fully vaccinated residents were among those who tested positive, Backer added. She would not name the facility.

Backer acknowledged that the facility’s 44% staff vaccination rate was “lower than we’d like.”

“But at this point,” she added, “they can’t force them.”

Backer said she’s troubled by continued resistance to vaccination, fueled by exaggerated claims about side effects. Some experts fear that hard-won progress in putting down nursing home outbreaks could be lost, at least in some communities.

Laura Gelezunas has firsthand experience with a breakthrough case in a nursing home.

After numerous calls and emails to her mother’s Missouri nursing home and the company’s headquarters in Tennessee, Gelezunas finally got confirmation that her mom’s congestion, headache and sore throat were symptoms of COVID-19.

However, Gelezunas said the facility wasn’t transparent about how her vaccinated mother, Joann, got sick. While the home has pointed to outside visitors, Gelezunas said her mother’s only visitors have been her brother and his wife, who are both vaccinated. Gelezunas believes it was an unvaccinated staff member, but the home has yet to give her answers.

Gelezunas asked that her mother interact with only vaccinated workers, but the directors said they couldn’t make promises because of privacy reasons and their inability to mandate inoculations for workers.

“My mom is bedridden. I got people taking intimate care of her and you’re telling me you can’t tell me that at $7,500 a month that my mom can’t have someone that’s vaccinated take care of her,” said Gelezunas, who lives in Mexico.

Joann told her daughter that between 12 and 15 residents were infected with the virus recently, which she found out from one of her aides.

When it comes to requiring vaccinations, one obstacle is that COVID-19 vaccines aren’t yet fully approved by the Food and Drug Administration, and are being administered under emergency authorization.

“What we need to do is get past the emergency use basis, to have (vaccination) be a standard of care,” said Terry Fulmer, president of the John A. Hartford Foundation, a nonprofit working to improve care for older adults.

Highlighting the potential vulnerability, government numbers show a wide disparity among states in nursing home vaccinations. Vermont has fully vaccinated 95% of its nursing home residents, but in Nevada the figure is 61%. Hawaii is the leader for staff vaccinations, with 84% completely vaccinated. But in Louisiana, it’s half that, 42%.

Harvard health care policy professor David Grabowski said he believes trust is the core question for many nursing home staffers who remain unvaccinated. Low-wage workers may not have much confidence in vaccine messaging from management at their facilities.

“I think some of this mirrors what we see in the overall population, but among health care workers it is really disconcerting,” Grabowski said.

Indiana county health official Backer blames swirling misinformation.

“There’s a lot of really bad information out there that’s completely untrue,” she said. “It’s really sad because I think we have the power to end this with vaccination. Nobody else needs to die from this.”

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Dearen reported from New York City. Associated Press writer Kathleen Foody in Chicago and Patty Nieberg in Denver contributed.

Floods fuel climate debate in Germany’s election campaign

By FRANK JORDANS and BRAM JANSSEN

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A view of a power plant in the town of Frimmersdorf, Germany, Tuesday, July 20, 2021. Last week's flood disaster has propelled the issue of climate change to the fore of an election campaign that will determine who succeeds Angela Merkel as German chancellor after 16 years in office. (AP Photo/Bram Janssen)

LUETZERATH, Germany (AP) — As Germany reels from the deadliest inland floods in living memory, one word has been on the lips of leading politicians: “klimawandel,” the German word for climate change.

Last week’s disaster has propelled the issue to the fore of an election campaign that will determine who succeeds Angela Merkel as German chancellor this fall after her 16 years in office.

It has also put the front-runner in the race, her party’s new leader, Armin Laschet, on the defensive amid accusations that he stalled efforts to expand the use of renewable energy, phase out coal power and introduce universal highway speed limits during four years as governor of North Rhine-Westphalia state.

A house is completely torn open after the flood in Marienthal, Germany, Wednesday, July 21, 2021. The flood destroyed numerous houses here as well. (Thomas Frey/dpa via AP)

An industrial powerhouse, the state is home to almost a quarter of Germany’s population and was among the regions hit hardest by the floods, which claimed more than 200 lives and caused billions of euros (dollars) worth of damage.

“I’ve known for a long time that climate change is a task that we’ll have to deal with,” Laschet said during a testy exchange with journalists on the morning after the worst flooding, insisting that he wanted “more speed” when it came to reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

Such statements offer a glimmer of hope to climate activists like Salome Dorfer, who is campaigning to save the tiny village of Luetzerath from being bulldozed to make way for a coal mine.

The village, located in Laschet’s state and first mentioned in records dating back 853 years, stands a few hundred meters (yards) from a vast pit where German utility giant RWE is extracting lignite coal to burn in nearby power plants.

A view of the Garzweiler lignite mine, which attracts many day tourists who visit the mine, in Garzweiler, Germany, Tuesday, July 20, 2021. (AP Photo/Bram Janssen)

The practice is due to end by 2038, but environmentalists say it needs to stop at least 10 years earlier if Germany is to play its part in meeting the Paris climate accord goal of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit).

“Under every square meter below us is an average of 46 tons of coal,” Dorfer said. “Every square meter we can defend will save a lot of emissions.”

While Dorfer and fellow activists prepare to hole up in tree houses to stop the evictions of villagers, she hopes growing public awareness about the impact of climate change in the wake of the floods will make that fight unnecessary.

Scientists say that while it’s hard to attribute specific storms to climate change, extreme weather of the kind that caused the flash floods in parts of Western Europe last week will become more severe and frequent in a warming world.

“I think people are starting to see now that they are actually affected, that it is necessary to act now,” Dorfer said. “There are devastating effects already. And we’ve (so far) reached around 1.2 degrees Celsius of climate warming. If we exceed 1.5 degrees, it will be a total disaster.”

Standing at a viewing point on the edge of the nearby Garzweiler lignite mine, software engineer Peter Schuette said he, too, expects the recent floods to affect the way people think about climate change and the need for difficult decisions in the years to come, even if it costs some jobs.

A banner reading '"Welcome in Luetzerath forest" hangs in a forest in Luetzerath, Germany, where activists camp to try and stop the construction of a coal mine, Tuesday, July 20, 2021. The village is located just a few hundred meters from a vast pit where German utility giant RWE is extracting lignite coal to burn in nearby power plants.(AP Photo/Bram Janssen)

“I have kids and a family, too, and I just think we can’t go on as before and pretend that’s not our problem,” Schuette 52, said. “So far, many storms you saw were far away, some South Sea islands that were at risk of being flooded. And now, suddenly, the water is flooding our own cellars.”

Germany’s Green party stands to gain from an increased focus on climate change, University of Bonn political scientist Volker Kronenberg said.

“The Greens have a lot of credibility with the public on this issue,” he said, noting that the party’s leaders have so far refrained from trying to capitalize politically on the floods.

The party has pledged to raise carbon prices and bring the country’s exit from coal-fired power forward to 2030. It has sought to soothe concerns about higher energy prices by pledging to give money raised from CO2 charges back to citizens in the form of an “energy bonus” that benefits low earners most.

The Social Democrats have proposed a similar cashback system for climate charges, while also stating that they would introduce a 130 kph (81 mph) speed limit on Germany’s Autobahn — a simple measure experts say would lead to a noticeable reduction in fuel use.

The village of Luetzerath, Germany, is set to be evicted for the build of a coal mine, Tuesday, July 20, 2021. The village stands just a few hundred meters from a vast pit where German utility giant RWE is extracting lignite coal to burn in nearby power plants. (AP Photo/Bram Janssen)

A recent decision by Merkel’s government, in which the Social Democrats are junior partners, to aim for Germany to become carbon neutral by 2045 — five years earlier than previously planned — prompted little opposition in the country.

But telling voters the blunt truth about what Germany may need to do in the coming years to adapt to climate change and further cut emissions will be particularly hard for Laschet, according to Kronenberg.

“North Rhine-Westphalia has very energy-intensive steel and heavy industry,” he said, “It’s a big challenge for companies and jobs.”

And with more than two months to go before the September election, other issues and crises may yet emerge to dominate the debate.

“These images and events will remain in people’s heads,” Kronenberg said. “(But) we mustn’t forget that politics is a fast-moving business.”

Schuette, the software engineer, acknowledged that his country, which is responsible for roughly 4.6% of the man-made greenhouse gas emissions in the atmosphere, won’t be able to save the planet alone.

“But as they say in Germany, ‘You have to sweep your own doorstep first,’” he said.

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Follow AP’s climate coverage at http://www.apnews.com/Climate

IOC to include athletes kneeling in highlights, social media
By GRAHAM DUNBAR

Australia players pose for a group photo with an indigenous flag prior to women's soccer match against New Zealand at the 2020 Summer Olympics, Wednesday, July 21, 2021, in Tokyo. (AP Photo/Ricardo Mazalan)


TOKYO (AP) — After images of Olympic soccer players taking a knee were excluded from official highlight reels and social media channels, the IOC said Thursday that kneeling protests will be shown in the future.

Players from five women’s soccer teams kneeled in support of racial justice Wednesday, the first day it was allowed at the Olympic Games after a ban lasting decades.

The concession under Olympic Charter Rule 50, which has long prohibited any athlete protest inside event venues, was finally allowed this month by the International Olympic Committee.

The IOC has tried to reconcile enforcing the rule while recognizing, and sometimes celebrating, the iconic image of American sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos each raising a black-gloved fist on the medal podium at the 1968 Mexico City Olympics.

On Wednesday, the British and Chilean teams kneeled before the opening games and were followed by the United States, Sweden and New Zealand players in later kickoffs. The Australia team posed with a flag of Australia’s indigenous people.

Those images were excluded from the official Tokyo Olympic highlights package provided by the IOC to media including The Associated Press that could not broadcast the games live.

Official Olympic social media channels also did not include pictures of the athlete activism.

“The IOC is covering the Games on its owned and operated platforms and such moments will be included as well,” the Olympic body said Thursday in an apparent change of policy.

The IOC said hundreds of millions of viewers could have seen the footage watching networks that have official broadcast rights and “can use it as they deem fit.”

The decades-long ban on all demonstrations was eased by the IOC three weeks ago when it was clear some athletes — especially in soccer and track and field — would express opinions on the field in Japan.

It was unclear if the IOC would distribute images of an athlete raising a fist at the start line, as United States sprinter Noah Lyles has done before his 200-meter races in the past year.

Two reviews of Rule 50 in the previous 18 months by the IOC’s own athletes commission had concluded Olympic competitors did not want distractions on their field of play.

The new guidance allows taking a knee or raising a fist in pre-game or pre-race introductions but not on medal ceremony podiums. The IOC will still discipline athletes who protest on the podium.

Sports governing bodies still have a veto, and swimming’s FINA has said its athletes are prohibited on the pool deck from any gesture interpreted as protest.

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