Deal seeks to revive last aluminum smelter in PNW, cut waste

 

By Tom BanseNorthwest News NetworkUPDATED: Tue., Feb. 1, 2022

FERNDALE, Wash. – A complex deal is taking shape to revive the Pacific Northwest’s last remaining aluminum smelter. Alcoa idled its Intalco Works smelter near Ferndale, Washington, a year-and-a-half ago and laid off virtually all the workers there. The plan to bring this industry back involves a new owner, cash from taxpayers and an uncertain new contract for cut-rate wholesale power.

“This funding to modernize … at Intalco will be critical to the reopening of the smelter and to the restoration of more than 700 high-wage union jobs, not to mention the thousands of additional jobs and the economic activity which the facility will help support throughout the state,” former Alcoa worker Brian Urban said in testimony to a state legislative budget committee in January.

Labor leaders, local elected officials and economic development advocates from Whatcom County are urging the state Legislature to approve two budget line items put forward by Democratic Gov. Jay Inslee. Combined, they would have the state spend $10 million to upgrade the Intalco smelter to improve efficiency and greatly reduce pollution emissions. That works out to a public subsidy of about $14,285 per job created.

“It will enable Intalco to produce ‘green’ aluminum, one of only two plants in the U.S. which can do so,” Urban said.

In its glory years during the latter decades of the 20th century, aluminum making was a pillar of the Northwest’s industrial economy. An abundance of cheap, public hydropower supported ten large aluminum smelters in Washington, Oregon and Montana. But when power prices crept up around the turn of the century and global competition stepped up, one by one they all winked out except for the Alcoa smelter north of Bellingham.

In spring 2020, Alcoa announced it was mothballing – “curtailing” in industry-speak – its Ferndale operation due to weakening demand and falling metal prices. Soon thereafter, aluminum prices rebounded and they are now approaching a decade high. Late last year, Alcoa said it would restart curtailed capacity at its smelters in Brazil and Australia.

Alcoa spokesman Jim Beck said the Pittsburgh-based aluminum giant is keeping the Ferndale smelter idled because of numerous shortcomings that limit “its competitiveness for the long term.”

“First operational in 1966, Intalco would require significant capital investment for a potential restart,” Beck wrote in an email. “We appreciate the Governor’s continued support to make resources available that would potentially aid in those efforts.”

A restart seems destined to take place under new ownership, if it happens. Port of Bellingham commissioners have been briefed several times in public sessions about how Alcoa is weighing an offer to sell the 56-year-old smelter. At the commission’s January 18 meeting, the port’s economic development director, Don Goldberg, identified New York City-based private equity firm Blue Wolf Capital Partners as the prospective buyer. Goldberg said that Blue Wolf communicated a desire to bring back all the jobs that were lost in 2020.

Blue Wolf Capital did not respond to a request for comment for this Northwest News Network story. On its website, the firm said it focuses on turning around “distressed” companies and “unlocking value” while following environmental, social and governance (ESG) principles. ESG, or responsible investing, is currently a hot trend on Wall Street.

In an interview with public radio, Larry Brown, president of the Washington State Labor Council (AFL-CIO), said many former Alcoa workers stuck around the area and would come back to the smelter if given the option.

“A substantial number of the folks would be available for rehire,” Brown said. “While there are lots of (other) jobs up there, you have to get maybe two or three of those jobs in order to equal the earning power of just one of these unionized aluminum workers.”

“There’s a lot of momentum in getting this done,” Brown said about the interlocking negotiations underway.

State Senator David Frockt (D-Seattle), the lead writer of the state capital budget, confirmed in an interview that lawmakers are favorably inclined to allocate money toward the smelter revival.

“It is essentially a cleaner way to produce the products that are produced up there,” Frockt said. “It is a labor and climate change alliance that is driving this and I think there is a very good chance that we will be funding that project.”

The sale of the smelter and the injection of public money to upgrade the plant innards are key pieces of the revival plan, but there’s a critical third factor that could make or break the deal. That would be securing an affordable source of electricity to restart the power-hungry smelter.

Population growth and economic expansion across the Northwest have turned low-cost hydropower into a finite resource. Alcoa long purchased electricity directly from regional wholesaler Bonneville Power Administration. That relationship grew contentious at times as BPA tried to finesse the Ferndale smelter’s demands for gobs of power with competing requests from public power utilities who wanted to serve that juice to multitudes of other customers.

BPA spokesman Doug Johnson said the Portland-based regional power agency was in the early stages of negotiating with Blue Wolf’s representatives and that it was too early to know how things could turn out.

“We are continuing discussions, but BPA has made no decision regarding potential service, contract terms and conditions or BPA’s involvement in electric service to the plant,” Johnson said in an emailed statement.

Johnson said BPA terminated its last contract to supply Alcoa with wholesale power at the company’s request months before the Ferndale smelter was indefinitely shut down.

PREVENTABLE INCIDENT

4-year-old dies after shooting himself in backseat of car



Photo by: WRTV photo.
By: Scripps National
Posted  Feb 01, 2022

A 4-year-old boy in Louisiana died after shooting himself, authorities said.

The child was reportedly in the backseat of a car with two siblings when the gun went off. Authorities believe the boy found the gun under the seat.

According to The Times-Picayune/The New Orleans Advocate, the boy's mother and another adult were in the front seat smoking marijuana.

The Associated Press reports that the gun belonged to the child's father.

No one has been arrested, but an investigation is ongoing.

"I don't think it was appropriate to make an arrest at this point," Jefferson Parish Sheriff Joseph Lopinto said. "They just lost a child, and it was certainly wasn't intentional, by any means."

The sheriff cautioned people about leaving guns inside vehicles.

“These types of deaths can certainly be prevented,” he said.

REMINDS ME OF GANGS OF NY
OR FFs Allow Home to Burn Outside of Their District

Firefighters that responded to a house fire near Dorena left without extinguishing the fire because it was outside of their fire district.

Firehouse.com News

South Lane County Fire and Rescue

Feb. 1, 2022

A house fire outside of a fire district was allowed to burn by firefighters.

Firefighters who responded to a house fire in Dorena Monday did not extinguish the fire because the home was outside their fire district.

South Lane Fire and Rescue firefighters responded to the fire on the 39000 block of Row River Road and determined the fire was not within their response area. They ensured that flames from the burning home would not spread, and then left the scene while the home continued to burn.

Area homeowners said that the area is not protected by a fire department, the State Fire Marshal's Office told KEZI 9.

The only thing that remained from the structure was its metal roof, the homeowner said.

Alan A. Stone, 92, Dies; Challenged Psychiatry’s Use in Public Policy

An iconoclastic thinker, he greatly influenced the evolution of psychiatric ethics, and guided the decision to take homosexuality off the list of mental disorders.


Alan A. Stone in an undated photo. He was at the forefront of questions about how psychiatry is used as a tool of public policy. And as psychiatrists began to build careers as expert witnesses in criminal trials, he made enemies by opposing the practice.

Credit...John Chapin/Harvard Law School

By Clay Risen
Feb. 1, 2022

Alan A. Stone, an iconoclastic scholar who used his dual tenured appointments at Harvard’s law and medical schools to exert a powerful influence on the evolution of psychiatric ethics over the last half-century, died on Jan. 23 at his home in Cambridge, Mass. He was 92.

His son Douglas said the cause was laryngeal cancer.

Dr. Stone trained as a psychiatrist and as a psychoanalyst and began teaching at Harvard Law School in the late 1960s, just as the foundations of both fields were coming under scrutiny.

He was at the forefront of questions about how psychiatry is used as a tool of public policy; for example, he criticized the role psychiatrists played in laws that banned abortion based on claims about a woman’s mental health, and in the involuntary commitment of millions of Americans to public mental institutions.

As psychiatrists began to build careers as expert witnesses in criminal trials, he made enemies by opposing the practice, and by refusing to take the stand himself. That didn’t stop him from becoming the president of the American Psychiatric Association in 1979, a post where, among other things, he guided the decision to remove homosexuality from the profession’s list of mental disorders.

Despite his lack of a law degree, Dr. Stone was widely considered one of the best and most popular professors on Harvard’s legal faculty. He often taught courses with the criminal lawyer Alan M. Dershowitz, on subjects ranging from criminal insanity to Shakespeare.

“They were this perfect yin and yang,” the former New York City schools chancellor Joel Klein, who took one of their courses as a law student, said in a phone interview. “Dershowitz was doing what every good Harvard Law School professor does, emphasizing the rational, and what Stone was doing was saying, ‘That’ll get you part of the way down the road, but what about X?’”

Many former students, including Mr. Klein, cited Dr. Stone not just as an exemplary teacher but also as a profound influence on their careers, precisely because his approach differed from the legalistic thinking expounded by other faculty members. His colleagues tended to agree.

“For him the world was never right or wrong,” Mr. Dershowitz said. “It was always ‘why?’”

In part because of his capacity for thorough, critical thinking, the Department of Justice invited Dr. Stone to join a multidisciplinary panel that would examine the 1993 raid by federal agents on a compound near Waco, Texas, that was occupied by a religious sect called the Branch Davidians. Four agents and 76 members of the sect were killed, and Dr. Stone’s panel was charged with assessing whether the tragedy could have been avoided.

But very early on, Dr. Stone came to believe that their job was in fact to rubber-stamp the government’s own self-exculpatory assessment. He publicly criticized the Justice Department when it refused to give him classified material, and he refused to sign the final review until he was allowed to submit his own dissenting report.

He remained a vocal critic of the government throughout the 1990s, and in 1999 he called for the surviving Branch Davidians, several of whom had been sentenced to prison, to be pardoned.

“The Branch Davidians were more victims than culprits,” he wrote in The Wall Street Journal that year.

Dr. Stone made more enemies in 1995 when he declared that Freudian psychoanalysis was no longer useful as a science and was best relegated to the humanities, where it could be used to evaluate works of art.

“Psychoanalysis, both as a theory and as a practice, is an art form,” he said in a speech to the American Academy of Psychoanalysis. “I do not think psychoanalysis is an adequate form of treatment.”

Though legions of psychoanalysts took exception, to Dr. Stone that assessment was no insult — he considered art and psychiatry to be closely intertwined, and mutually supportive. In addition to teaching classes on the law and literature, he was for years a film critic for Boston Review, using his professional insights to tease apart movies like “Million Dollar Baby” (2004), which he argued was a story about the ethics of euthanasia, and “The Tree of Life” (2011), which he hailed for its treatment of Oedipal conflicts.

Later still, he decried his profession for its complicity in the so-called war on terror under George W. Bush, when psychiatrists were employed in “enhanced interrogation” sessions that, Dr. Stone said, amounted to torture.

“What American law and American psychiatrists and psychologists need to do now,” he wrote in The New York Times in 2005, “is to reassert our basic norms of decent and ethical conduct, which seem to have collapsed in our response to 9/11.”


Dr. Stone in 2017. He once argued that psychoanalysis was no longer useful as a science and was best relegated to the humanities, where it could be used to evaluate works of art.

Credit...Dana Smith


Alan Abraham Stone was born on Aug. 15, 1929, in Boston. His father, Julius, was a lawyer, and his mother, Betty (Pastan) Stone, was a homemaker. All four of his grandparents were Jewish immigrants from Lithuania.

Along with his son Douglas, he is survived by his partner, Laura Maslow-Armand; another son, David; six grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren. His wife, Sue (Smart) Stone, died in 1996. His daughter, Karen Stone Zieve, died in 1988.

His parents led a liberal household, taking in Jewish refugees during the 1930s while also weathering antisemitic prejudice; despite clear qualifications, his father struggled to get a low-level judgeship.

He attended Boston Latin School and Harvard, where he majored in social relations. He also played right tackle on the varsity football team; among his teammates on the 1947 roster was Robert F. Kennedy.

He graduated in 1950 and received his medical degree from Yale in 1955. He conducted his residency at McLean Hospital in Belmont, Mass., a suburb of Boston, and trained in psychoanalysis at the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute.

At one point, he made an exception to his refusal to testify as an expert witness. Justice Anthony Kennedy of the Supreme Court staged a “trial” for Hamlet in 1994, on the premise that he had survived the play’s bloody ending and was now charged with murdering Polonius, his uncle’s counselor.

The question, as Justice Kennedy constructed it, was not whether Hamlet had killed Polonius — that’s clear in the play — but whether he was not guilty by reason of insanity. Mr. Klein, Dr. Stone’s former student, was working in the White House at the time, and he suggested his old professor as an expert witness for the prosecution.

The mock trial was conducted several times (in most instances the jury deadlocked), including in 1996 at Boston University.

When asked at that event whether he had made himself familiar with the “record” in the case — that is, the play itself — Dr. Stone responded, “Yes, and I agree with the justice that it’s well written.”


Clay Risen is an obituaries reporter for The New York Times. Previously, he was a senior editor on the Politics desk and a deputy op-ed editor on the Opinion desk. He is the author, most recently, of "Bourbon: The Story of Kentucky Whiskey." @risenc

A version of this article appears in print on Feb. 2, 2022, Section A, Page 17 of the New York edition with the headline: Alan A. Stone, 92, Who Influenced Evolution of Psychiatric Ethics, Dies. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

Biden’s Justice Dept. promised to support a strong journalist shield law. So why hasn’t it?

Trevor

FREEDOM PRESS 
Executive Director

Credit: U.S. Dept. of Justice

More than six months ago, the Department of Justice (DOJ) announced sweeping changes to its “media guidelines” — the agency’s internal rules for when and how it can spy on reporters. In a memo to all its staff, Attorney General Merrick Garland barred the surveillance of journalists who were engaged in ordinary newsgathering in all but the most extreme scenarios.

As we said when the initial announcement was made, the DOJ’s new guidelines were potentially a sea change for press freedom rights — and we called for Congress to quickly enshrine them into law. We explained how action from Congress is vital for the policy to have any teeth.

Sen. Wyden called the Justice Department's inaction 'frustrating and unacceptable.'

At the time, Garland appeared to agree. The attorney general explicitly stated the DOJ would support congressional legislation to bring the force of law to his new rules: “[T]o ensure that protections regarding the use of compulsory legal process for obtaining information from or records of members of the news media continue in succeeding Administrations,” he wrote, “the Department will support congressional legislation to embody protections in law.”

But from what we can tell, the DOJ has not lifted a finger publicly or privately in order to help get its new media rules passed by Congress since — despite the fact that multiple bills have been introduced that would do just that.

The DOJ could easily lend its support to Sen. Ron Wyden’s PRESS Act, which Freedom of the Press Foundation endorsed last year. Sen. Wyden’s bill—which was also introduced in the House by Rep. Jamie Raskin—closely hews to the language the DOJ now supposedly abides by, and it provides law enforcement narrow but legitimate exceptions in cases of emergency.

But according to Sen. Wyden himself, the DOJ has not responded to half a dozen official inquiries from his office for comment on his PRESS Act.

“The Justice Department’s failure to engage on one of the attorney general’s own priorities is extremely frustrating, and frankly unacceptable,” Sen. Wyden said in a statement released to Freedom of the Press Foundation. He continued:

"Attorney General Garland asked Congress to pass a journalist shield law just a few days before I introduced the Press Act to put protections similar to DOJ’s current policies into black letter law. My office reached out to the Justice Department half-a-dozen times over the past six months to work together on my bill with Rep. Raskin, but has gotten zero response."

Through the DOJ’s press office, we also asked the agency’s legislative affairs team whether they have weighed in publicly or privately on any bill since Garland’s promise six months ago. As of press time, we have not heard back either.

Why is this step so important? As it stands, the DOJ media policy is nearly unenforceable; if the DOJ breaks its word, there is no clear avenue to accountability, since the guidelines are only internal to the agency. Indeed, the DOJ has been accused of breaking previous iterations of its own media policy many times over the years. The rules can also be changed at any time by the current attorney general, or the next one, with just a flick of the pen. And the DOJ’s endorsement of any bill could mean the difference between it sailing through Congress and languishing in committee indefinitely.

The DOJ’s internal media policy changes were certainly a welcome break from both the Trump and Obama administrations, where secret and invasive surveillance of journalists became increasingly prevalent. But as of now, it's a half-measure — one that can be taken away from us at any time.

Lest our caution be interpreted as undue cynicism: we’ve seen this movie before — and even played a role in it.

In 2009, to great fanfare, Obama’s Justice Department released new internal guidelines for the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), as part of President Obama's promise to be the most transparent administration ever. But when Congress tried to pass DOJ’s guidelines — almost word for word! — into law, DOJ vociferously opposed the bill in private. It was only after our successful FOIA lawsuit exposing the DOJ’s hypocrisy that the agency was forced to drop its protest to its own rules, and Congress finally passed them.

We hope this time is different, but we fear it is not. The DOJ needs to follow through on its promise, and it can start by immediately endorsing the PRESS Act and helping the bill make its way through Congress.

Media barred from Justice Gorsuch talk to Federalist Society

FILE - Associate Justice Neil Gorsuch stands during a group photo 

at the Supreme Court in Washington, April 23, 2021. 

(Erin Schaff/The New York Times via AP, Pool, File) | Photo: AP


By MARK SHERMAN
Updated: February 01, 2022 

WASHINGTON (AP) - Justice Neil Gorsuch is speaking this weekend to the conservative legal group that boosted his Supreme Court candidacy, in a session at a Florida resort that is closed to news coverage.

Gorsuch is billed as the banquet speaker Friday at the Florida chapter of the Federalist Society's annual meeting, which is being held at the Walt Disney World Resort in Lake Buena Vista.

The schedule on the organization's website notes, "The banquet is closed to press."

Neither the Federalist Society nor the Supreme Court immediately offered any explanation.

The two-day meeting also will feature former Vice President Mike Pence and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, as well as a session billed "The End of Roe v. Wade?" that will be moderated by a federal judge appointed by former President Donald Trump. The high court is weighing a major rollback of abortion rights, and could overrule the 1973 Roe decision.

The Federalist Society typically allows reporters to cover its meetings. That was the case in 2017, when Gorsuch addressed more than 2,000 people at a black-tie dinner at Washington's Union Station, seven months after he joined the Supreme Court.

Gorsuch's ascension to the nation's highest court owes at least in part to his inclusion on a list of possible nominees that the Federalist Society helped compile and that Trump issued during his 2016 campaign for the presidency.

Shortly after taking office, Trump nominated Gorsuch for the seat left vacant by the death of Justice Antonin Scalia in February 2016. Republicans who controlled the Senate refused to confirm former President Barack Obama's nominee, Merrick Garland.

With DeSantis and Gorsuch on the schedule, the meeting features two prominent public figures who have made a point of not wearing masks during the coronavirus pandemic.

At high court arguments in January, Gorsuch was the only justice who did not wear a mask on the bench. His seatmate, Justice Sonia Sotomayor, has had diabetes since childhood and did not attend arguments in person, although she did not ascribe her absence to Gorsuch's decision.

Disney's website says, "Face coverings are required for all Guests (ages 2 and up) in all indoor locations, regardless of vaccination status."

Rep. Ro Khanna on his new book ‘Dignity in a Digital Age

’Feb 1, 2022 6:30 PM EST

Silicon Valley is home to some of the world's largest technology giants such as Meta, Apple and Alphabet. Rep. Ro Khanna represents that influential part of California in Congress. In his new book "Dignity in a Digital Age" he says tech companies should stop concentrating their jobs in cities like San Francisco and create job opportunities across the country. He joins Judy Woodruff to discuss.

Read the Full Transcript

Judy Woodruff:

Silicon Valley is home to some of the world's largest technology giants, Intel, Apple, and Alphabet, the parent company of Google.

Democratic Representative Ro Khanna represents that influential and wealthy part of California in Congress, and in his new book, "Dignity in a Digital Age," he says tech companies should stop concentrating their jobs in cities like San Francisco, and create employment opportunities across the entire country.

And Congressman Ro Khanna joins us now.

Thank you for being here. Congratulations on the book.

I mean, I say, you know, the book is all about democratizing the digital world, but I was struck because you say at the outset your main aspiration is to lessen some of the bitterness within our country.

What are you referring to there?


Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA):

Judy, the young folks in my district are very optimistic about America, $11 trillion of market cap.

It's gone up 40 percent in the two years during the pandemic. Apple has gone from $1 trillion to $3 trillion. The young folks have robotics workshops in their garages.

But, for a lot of America, the new economy hasn't worked. It's meant jobs going offshore, deindustrialization, people buying one-way tickets out of their hometown.

And I believe, to reduce some of the division, we have to bring the opportunities of the modern economy to communities left out, so people can prosper without leaving their hometowns. And so, when Silicon Valley prospers, Youngstown, Ohio, or Beckley, West Virginia, could prosper, and that there's more interconnection in our economy.


Judy Woodruff:

Dig into that a little further, because people — again, people look at you. You represent, as we said, this — these powerful tech giants.

And yet you're saying the wealth needs to be spread around, that the work should be done across the nation. What's the logic here?


Rep. Ro Khanna:

Well, look, Judy, let me give you a very concrete example, Intel.

Now, they could have put more fabs to make semiconductors in my district. They made a decision to invest in New Albany, Ohio. I was just talking to Pat, the CEO of Intel, today, and he said it's not just the economics of it, about creating 3,000 manufacturing jobs and 7,000 construction jobs.

There's something cultural going on, the excitement there, the enthusiasm for an economic revival. And that's what we need to discuss. It's not that these tech jobs are, go become a coder for Google, or turn coal miners into software engineers. There are going to be 25 million of these digital jobs. They intersect with the manufacturing and construction jobs of the future.

And we have got to bring these jobs and opportunities to places that have been totally left out and deindustrialized if we hope to have a comeback in those areas.


Judy Woodruff:

You weave several themes into the book, and one of the things you talk about is, we need an Internet bill of rights. I think a lot of us have heard about that, but what does it really mean?


Rep. Ro Khanna:

Judy, it's a couple of simple principles.

First, before your data is collected, you should have to say, I'm OK with that. Right now, people click through these long agreements, and their data is used. And it's used to target individuals and to make decisions about what you see, without people knowing about it.

The second part of an Internet bill of rights is, we have to deal with a lot of the misinformation online. I mean, there should be basic standards. You can't be a company and sell a product, for example, that's causing teenage depression, in the case of Instagram. You shouldn't be able to put out information that is telling people don't take vaccines and causing a public health crisis.

I don't think there should be the same standards as broadcast journalism. But, certainly, there should be some standards. You can't just say whatever you want online, and think there's no repercussion.


Judy Woodruff:

You also write about what you have described as progressive capitalism.

How does that relate? How — first of all, what does it mean? And then how does it relate to everything else you're saying here?


Rep. Ro Khanna:

It relates in terms of the sense of the Silicon Valley entrepreneur as self-made. And they are self-made in a sense. They haven't inherited millions of dollars.

But they come with certain good fortune. They tend to be young people who are born to middle-class or upper-middle-class families, and they tend to have health care. They have an education. They grow up in safe neighborhoods. And they have the freedom to take risks, the freedom to fail and still have a safety net.

Progressive capitalism, to me, means you want innovation, you want entrepreneurship, but you want everyone to have that basic health care, education, and you want an inclusivity when it comes to race and gender, which, frankly, Silicon Valley has failed at.


Judy Woodruff:

In connection with that, and this other theme of, frankly, trying to even the playing field, you talk about creating a national digital corps of young people who would go and live in different parts of the country for up to six months.

Why would that — why would that accomplish what you're trying to do, or how would it accomplish…


Rep. Ro Khanna:

Well, Judy, let me give you an example of Claflin, a great HBCU in South Carolina.

And they wanted to have a partnership with tech companies. They kept sending 4.0 students and resumes, and they weren't getting hired. And it turns out that those students were not getting the training on the interview techniques and whiteboard interviews.

Now, when you have young people actually working with them, they actually got jobs and opportunities. So, I think we have all of these folks who want to give back. It's not them telling communities what they want to do, but if they work with communities and listen to those communities' aspirations, that could actually help move the needle forward.


Judy Woodruff:

How much of what you're asking for here needs congressional approval? And what makes you think that can happen in this current divided environment, which is what you do write about?


Rep. Ro Khanna:

A lot of what I'm talking about does need congressional action.

There is hope. I mean, with the Intel example in Ohio, the CHIPS Act, which would give funding for semiconductor manufacturing in the United States, actually has passed the Senate. We're hoping to take it up in the House this week or next. I believe that will get to the president's desk, along with the Innovation and Competition Act, which I worked with Senator Schumer and bipartisan, to build technology in the United States.

So there is a place where we have hope of actual action.

On the Internet bill of rights, candidly, Judy, it's been much harder, but here's why I think, ultimately, Congress will face the pressure. They're going to hear from parents that they don't want their kids being manipulated on Instagram, and they don't want teenagers facing anxiety, depression, and even suicide.

They're going to hear from constituents that it's wrong to have anti-vax information circulating on the Internet. And they're going to hear from Americans that these institutions, if unchecked, are harming our democracy. These are the modern town halls.

This is the modern digital sphere. And we can't just cede the construction of that to Mark Zuckerberg or Jack Dorsey. As Americans, we want to construct it. That's the purpose of Congress. And it would be awfully sad if we don't ultimately do our job.

I think people are realizing, this is not tech policy (INAUDIBLE) policy. This is, what do you want 21st century American democracy to look like, and are we up to that task?


Judy Woodruff:

Congressman Ro Khanna, Democrat of California.

The book is "Dignity in a Digital Age: Making Tech Work for All of Us."

Congressman, thank you very much. We appreciate it.


Rep. Ro Khanna:

Thank you, Judy. Appreciate it.

WASHINGTON STATE

Student walkout calls attention to racism at North Thurston Public Schools

UPDATED: Tue., Feb. 1, 2022

By Rolf Boone

The Olympian

About 200 Black student union members and their white allies staged sit-ins and a walkout at two area high schools on Monday, wanting to call attention to racism and other harmful behavior they say North Thurston Public Schools has not done enough to address.

The walkouts took place at North Thurston and River Ridge high schools. About 200 students took part in sit-ins Monday morning inside the schools, then a slightly smaller number gathered outside to march on school grounds or to a nearby destination.

About 60 North Thurston students marched from the high school to the district offices on College Street. During the march, and in front of the district office, they shared stories about what spurred them to action.

“Racism has been happening for as long as I’ve been here,” said North Thurston student Cashmere Tobias, who cited a recent Martin Luther King, Jr. virtual assembly that she says resulted in a backlash against students of color.

Fellow North Thurston student and white ally Molly Kover said a student had shared a poem during the assembly that resulted in hateful comments online.

“It took the school two weeks to address that issue but less than a day for them to discourage the walkout,” Kover said.

Once at the district office, Imanuel Dartey shared stories about the racism and sexism he frequently hears at school.

“Every single day we see someone being victimized,” said Dartey, and then he shared three examples of the comments.

• “Oh, that girl is fine. I’d smash that.”

• “Oh, you see him. He’s so black he looks like charcoal.”

• “Oh, see this girl. She can’t speak English very well, so let’s make fun of her.”

“We have to stand up for ourselves and our family,” he said. “We are a family at North Thurston and that’s how we should be treating each other,” said Dartey to a huge round of cheers.

The Olympian caught up with the River Ridge gathering Monday afternoon.

About the same number of students met on an athletic field next to the school. Student Izzy James often addressed the crowd, but he also took a moment to talk to The Olympian

He said he was propelled to act after two recent incidents. He was confronted by at student from Olympia who directed a racial epithet at him, and he acknowledged that he responded with violence and was suspended by the school. He said the school has protocols for fights, bomb threats and active shooters, but no protocol for racial violence.

James said the other incident was the recent basketball game in Olympia between Capital High School and River Ridge, in which a Black River Ridge player is heard being called a “gorilla,” according to a video of the game that was shared on social media.

That generated anger within the Black community, James said.

“They want a change and they have a right to change,” he said, adding that he doesn’t feel the district is doing enough to address those concerns about racism. He feels they are sweeping it under the rug.

Qayi Steplight, the father of the basketball player who was targeted with racially insensitive comments, also addressed the River Ridge students.

He said the incident has gone viral and has captured the attention of “black and brown leaders in the country who are coming to our aid,” Steplight said. “They are making phone calls, sending letters.”

Steplight called on the students to get their families involved.

Before the gathering at River Ridge came to a close, James asked for the students to come closer.

“We are here to make a difference,” he said. “We will be not ashamed of our color, our figures, who we are, or our gender. We will not allow it.”

North Thurston Public Schools issued a statement Monday afternoon: “North Thurston Public Schools values student voices and is committed to continuous improvement. We have created opportunities to hear directly from students through annual student surveys and expansion of student organizations. Existing lines of communication provided to students include our school-sponsored Black Student Unions, Principal Student Advisory Councils and Superintendent Student Advisory councils. Yet we are open to other options that create open and constructive dialogue between our students and leadership and have started implementing community cafes to hear the voices of families as well.

“We will continue to listen to concerns shared by students and families and thoroughly investigate all reports of injustice. February is Black History Month, which is an opportunity for us to honor the contributions, triumphs, and struggles of African Americans throughout U.S. History. During the month through our advisory programs, we will be providing lessons and more time for student discussion about the issues of race and equity.

“As a school community, NTPS is committed to actively listen, learn, and seek to understand our differences while respecting all human beings regardless of race, ethnic origin, gender, social class, ability, religion, or sexual orientation. We know that by building strong relationships between students, staff, and families, we can create a safe school environment where all feel welcome, accepted, and valued for who they are.”

What an All-Women News Network in India Shows Us About Democracy

OPINION
FARAH STOCKMAN
Feb. 1, 2022

Credit...Illustration by The New York Times; Photographs by Music Box Films and Nopporn Thongchalerm and Suriyawut Suriya for EyeEm, via Getty images.

By Farah Stockman
Ms. Stockman is a member of the The New York Times editorial board.

It started out as a literacy project. Dalit women, formerly known as untouchables, hand-wrote a newsletter about issues that mattered to them: Broken water pumps. Unpaved roads. Known rapists walking free. In 2002 they started a newspaper that covered everything from illegal mining to murders. Perhaps because Dalits make up about 20 percent of the population of the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, some government officials started paying attention. Roads got paved. Toilets got built. Hospitals got stocked with medicines.

“Almost every month, our reporting brings justice to people,” Kavita Devi, the paper’s editor in chief, told me in an email originally written in Hindi.

Today the paper, Khabar Lahariya, whose name in Hindi means “news waves,” is a digital-first rural news network with its own talk shows and nearly 550,000 subscribers on YouTube.

The publication ran up against the many familiar hurdles that can make news gathering as difficult as it is essential to the success of democracy. Reporters were intimidated and belittled. It was hard to get taken seriously in a country where media giants often hire high-caste men from big cities who kowtow to the party in office. The powerful don’t like pushback. And for a group of women who were viewed as powerless by virtue of their gender and caste, the power of the press was their only option. Democracy, their story shows us, requires not just courage and hard work but also constant vigilance and ingenuity in the face of change.

The story of how newly literate rural women became investigative journalists is chronicled in a new documentary, “Writing With Fire,” which made the Academy Awards shortlist this year.

If it wins, it will make history as the first film about India directed by Indians to receive an Oscar. It will also give a boost to democracy’s unsung champions at a time when democratic norms are under threat around the world. The movie opens with Meera, the chief reporter, interviewing a woman who recounts being raped in her home on six separate occasions in a single month. The woman’s husband tried to file a complaint, but police officers refused to take it. In the film, Meera walks into the police station and demands an explanation.

“Journalism is the essence of democracy,” she says afterward. “When citizens demand their rights, it is us journalists who can take their demands to the government.”

The married team that made the film, Sushmit Ghosh and Rintu Thomas, who are not Dalit, began shooting footage in 2016, the year Khabar Lahariya’s reporters made the leap to digital news. In the film, women, some of whom don’t have electricity in their homes, unwrap boxes of brand-new cellphones gingerly, like bricks of dynamite. By the end of the film, Meera and her colleagues are pushing through crowds at political rallies with their cellphone cameras rolling. Although the staff members are from marginalized groups — Dalits, tribal people and the so-called backward castes — they don’t see themselves as part of any political movement. First and foremost, they are reporters who claim objectivity and independence as core values.

“A lot of people say: ‘Where do you think they get this crazy courage from? Is it that they have nothing to lose?’” Ms. Thomas told me. “I don’t see it like that. Each one of them is so aware of how rare it was to have had access to education and how much it means to people whose voice they have become. They know that if they don’t show up reporting that story, nobody else will.”

“Writing With Fire” is a road map of sorts for how to stand up for democracy even in the face of great danger. In 2017, Yogi Adityanath, a Hindu monk who once announced that he was preparing for a religious war, took the helm as chief minister in Uttar Pradesh. Members of the Hindu Youth Brigade, an organization he founded, brandished swords in the streets, vowing to protect Hindus and punish Muslims. Khabar Lahariya’s reporters created a game plan for how to cover the rise of Hindu nationalism. They tread carefully, assigning only the most experienced reporters. In the film, Meera interviews a leader of the Hindu Youth Brigade and gets him to explain his vision for the country.

“My absolute priority is to protect our holy cows,” he tells her.

Meera doesn’t have to add commentary to display the truth: In a place where women must beg for protection from rape, aspiring politicians were making a name for themselves by pledging to protect cows.

Some high-caste journalists expressed shock at how quickly the political culture in India turned. In a matter of just a few years, people once considered extremists were suddenly running large swaths of the country. But reporters at Khabar Lahariya saw it coming.

“They seem to know how to respond to the times we are in,” Mr. Ghosh said.

Maybe that’s because Khabar Lahariya journalists were already deeply familiar with living under threat, as were the people they write about.

I asked Meera what advice she had for American journalists who are concerned about the erosion of democratic norms in the United States. She advised me to make sure to tell the stories of ordinary people.

“If you wish to run an objective magazine about stories that matter,” she said a voice message in Hindi, “you have to get down to the ground level.”

The documentary celebrating Khabar Lahariya’s courageous coverage comes at a time when many mainstream news organizations in India that once spoke up for the principles of secularism and pluralism have largely fallen silent in the face of assassinations and threats.

In a country where, to this day in rural areas, Dalits are often forbidden to drink from higher-caste wells or eat from the same dishes, Dalits have a history of standing up for democratic norms. A Dalit legal scholar, Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, was the main author of India’s Constitution, which offers protection to religious minorities and equal citizenship to all. Today, while some Dalit politicians have joined the ruling party, hoping to finally be embraced by high-caste Hindus, others are among the most vocal voices pushing back against attacks on Muslims and other minorities. It is only natural that those who have endured thousands of years of humiliation under the Hindu caste system would be more skeptical of Hindu nationalism. If liberal democracy is going to be saved in India, it will be saved by the Dalits

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Farah Stockman joined the Times editorial board in 2020. For four years, she was a reporter for The Times, covering politics, social movements and race. She previously worked at The Boston Globe, where she won a Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 2016. @fstockman

A version of this article appears in print on Feb. 2, 2022, Section A, Page 18 of the New York edition with the headline: Reporting for Justice in India. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

What a way to start a new job: A bridge has collapsed, and you have to help lift out a 22-ton bus

JESSE BUNCH
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
FEB 1, 2022

In the beginning days of a new job, most employees would be happy to have learned their co-workers’ names.

For Alexander Delp, day 10 as a mechanical engineer at Allegheny Crane meant arriving on the scene of one of Pittsburgh’s worst infrastructure disasters in recent memory.

“On Friday, I came in, I had just learned how to do a permit,” said Mr. Delp, 23, of Lower Burrell, standing next to Kyrk Pyros — his boss and owner of the company that extracted the Port Authority bus from the wreckage of the collapsed Fern Hollow Bridge on Monday.

“[I] was still learning things, and getting my hands in everybody’s pie, everyone’s business,” Mr. Delp said. “Learning how to do it all.”

 

Jesse Bunch and Kris B. Mamula
Port Authority bus towed to West Mifflin garage as NTSB investigators dig into camera footage

He would end up learning much more on Friday, when Allegheny Crane was called to the scene.

In the hours after the collapse, the team used a 275-ton capacity crane to lift pieces of the wreckage and determine whether anyone was trapped below.

About five hours of searching yielded no fatalities, and Allegheny Crane began the 18-hour process of constructing its even larger, 400-ton crane to retrieve the fallen bus from the bottom of the ravine.


Mr. Delp was thrown into the action, taking measurements and using surveying and range-finding equipment to determine how the team would configure the crane for the extraction.

The newcomer wasn’t alone, however, as Mr. Pyros said the operation took 35 to 40 company crew members.

“Me and one of the crane operators, we pulled a tape together, and I was getting my hands dirty and getting in there with him,” Mr. Delp said. “Because that’s how a team and a family works — that’s how we get stuff done.”

As frigid temperatures settled in on Fern Hollow Monday evening, Pittsburghers gathered to marvel at the sight of yet another bright red bus in big trouble. Though this time, Allegheny Crane wasn’t pulling it out of a Downtown sinkhole, but was lifting the 22-ton vehicle high into the air out of the hollow.

 

Joel Jacobs, Ed Blazina, Ashley Murray and Sean D. Hamill
State ordered Fern Hollow Bridge to be inspected more frequently years before collapse

As owner of the company for 18 years, Mr. Pyros is surprisingly familiar with chaos — “we do a lot of disasters, if you want to call it that,” the 54-year-old said. Mr. Pyros is also a structural engineer and the president of KP Builders Inc.

He called the collaborative atmosphere at the bridge “Pittsburgh at its finest,” with police, firefighters, engineers, and even the local church and auto shop coming together.

From a makeshift office across South Braddock Avenue — space lent by Frick Auto to his engineering team — Mr. Pyros remembered the challenges they faced beginning on Friday, days before the bus was raised.

According to Mr. Pyros, the company’s forestry division had to cut down trees to gain access to the collapse site. Later, a three-member engineering team worked to configure the right ground pressure for the crane.

He also remembered the relief when no fatalities were found on Friday.

“It is a miracle no one died,” Mr. Pyros said. “When you see the devastation of that bridge up close, it’s a miracle — just flat out.”

But by Tuesday afternoon, with the bus extracted and hauled away, the scene had lost its wartime energy.

In the basement-turned-warming center of the Waverly Presbyterian Church, Mr. Delp and Mr. Pyros finally took a breather.

As pieces of the larger crane’s frame were being deconstructed and loaded on to flatbed trucks outside, Mr. Pyros mentioned three vehicles still remained in the bottom among the wreckage of the bridge.

Mr. Pyros said that it’s up to the city as to who removes the remaining cars — which are in stable condition — but it will likely be a demolition team.

The Allegheny Crane team only extracted one vehicle besides the bus, because it was leaking fuel.

And despite this weekend’s engineering spectacle, there won’t be any breaks for Mr. Pyros or Mr. Delp.

For the owner, clients are waiting on their now-delayed crane.

For the fresh-faced employee, it’s time to get back to his second week of work.

“This is the best way I learn, just being surrounded by the people I’m surrounded with,” Mr. Delp said. “Rising to the occasion is what we do.”

Jesse Bunch: jbunch@post-gazette.com
First Published February 1, 2022