MATERNAL MORTALITY KILLS BLACK MOTHERS

US Pregnancy-related deaths climbed in pandemic’s first year

Pregnancy-related deaths for U.S. mothers climbed higher in the pandemic’s first year, continuing a decades-long trend that disproportionately affects Black people, according to a government report released Wednesday.

By LINDSEY TANNER

Cots and cribs are arranged at the Mountain America Expo Center in Sandy, Utah, on April 6, 2020, as an alternate care site or for hospital overflow amid the COVID-19 pandemic. According to a National Center for Health Statistics report released on Wednesday, Feb. 23, 2022, maternal mortality rates for U.S. women climbed higher in the pandemic's first year, continuing a trend that disproportionately affects Black mothers. (AP Photo/Rick Bowmer, File)

Overall in 2020, there were almost 24 deaths per 100,000 births, or 861 deaths total — numbers that reflect mothers dying during pregnancy, childbirth or the year after. The rate was 20 per 100,000 in 2019.

Among Black people, there were 55 maternal deaths per 100,000 births — almost triple the rate for whites.

The report from the National Center for Health Statistics does not include reasons for the trend and researchers said they have not fully examined how COVID-19, which increases risks for severe illness in pregnancy, might have contributed.

The coronavirus could have had an indirect effect. Many people put off medical care early in the pandemic for fear of catching the virus, and virus surges strained the health care system, which could have an impact on pregnancy-related deaths, said Eugene Declercq, a professor and maternal death researcher at Boston University School of Public Health.

He called the high rates “terrible news” and noted that the U.S. has continually fared worse in maternal mortality than many other developed countries.

Pregnancy-related deaths per 100,000 births climbed from 44 in 2019 to 55 in 2020 among Black people and from 13 to 18 among Hispanics. The 2020 rate among whites, 19 per 100,000 births, was essentially unchanged.

Reasons for those disparities are not included in the data. But experts have blamed many factors including differences in rates of underlying health conditions, poor access to quality health care and structural racism.

“This is incredibly sad news and especially scary for Black women,” said Dr. Laura Riley, OB-GYN chief at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York.

Dr. Janelle Bolden, an assistant OB-GYN professor at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine, said the report is not surprising.

“The pandemic has uncovered the disparities in access to care, healthcare quality and delivery. It has also laid bare the lack of support for public health and social agencies that many people rely on for basic needs,″ Bolden said. “These disparities and inadequacies lead to poor care and worse outcomes.”

The U.S. maternal mortality rate has more than tripled in 35 years. A decade ago, it was 16 deaths per 100,000 births. It has climbed along with rising rates of obesity, heart disease and cesarean sections, which all increase risks for people giving birth.

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Follow AP Medical Writer Lindsey Tanner at @LindseyTanner.

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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.

Italian city fundraises to pay retirees’ rising energy bills

By MARIA GRAZIA MURRU

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Luigi Boni, a 95-year-old Florentine retiree, shows the latest water bill in his house during an interview with The Associated Press in Florence, Italy, Thursday, Feb. 17, 2022. Boni said that he can't cope with the more than 50% hike in water, gas and electricity bills this winter. Boni was included in a relief program 'Adopt a bill' that collects and redistributes donations from wealthier fellow citizens to help pay the utility bills of those elderly people in need. (AP Photo/Domenico Stinellis)


FLORENCE, Italy (AP) — Florence is famed for its contributions to Italian art, architecture and cuisine. But these days, local leaders in the city regarded as the birthplace of the Renaissance are concerned with more mundane matters: paying the bills.

Amid soaring energy costs across Europe, officials at Palazzo Vecchio — the building that serves as Florence’s city hall as well as a museum —-have teamed up with a local nonprofit to help fixed-income retirees keep their power on through an “Adopt-a-Bill” fundraising campaign.

“Florence is a city where you live well, and for this reason, too, people live very long,” Mayor Dario Nardella said.

A significant number of Florence’s retirees, however, live on less than 9,000 euros ($10,205) a year and can’t afford to make ends meet with an expected 55% increase in home electricity costs and a 42% hike in residential gas bills, he said.

Widower Luigi Boni, 96, confirms that. He says that by the end of February, he will have emptied his bank account and spent his monthly pension check of under 600 euros ($680) before covering utilities.

“Either I eat or I pay the rent,” Boni said as he sat on his sofa with a daily newspaper in his hands.

To assist him and others among Florence’s estimated 30,000 residents over age 65 and living alone, the city administration launched the fundraising campaign with the nonprofit Montedomini Foundation, which runs projects aimed at helping the city’s retirees.

The campaign raised 33,000 euros (more than $37,000) in its first few days. Private citizens, including Florentines living abroad, made more than 200 donations, according to the city’s welfare counselor, Sara Funaro.

“Our goal is to raise funds to make sure that every elderly person who asks us for help can receive help to cover the increase in bills due to (energy costs) increasing,” Funaro said.

Spiking energy prices are raising utility bills — and driving a record rise in inflation — from Poland to the United Kingdom. In response, governments across Europe are rushing to pass aid for residents and businesses as utility companies pass on costs to consumers.

In Turkey, where the economic pressure is extreme and has fueled protests, Istanbul, Ankara and Izmir are among opposition-led municipalities with similar “Adopt-a-Bill” initiatives. Istanbul’s municipal website says nearly 49 million Turkish lira (about $3.6 million) was donated since 2020, covering 320,000 utility bills.

Italian Premier Mario Draghi’s government has passed measures valued at more than 8 billion euros ($9 billion) to help blunt the impact of soaring energy prices for businesses and individuals.

The government’s most recent decree, issued Friday, also had a forward-looking component: it looked to accelerate Italy’s transition to more renewable energy sources, particularly solar power, to make the country less dependent on imported supplies.

Italy currently imports 90% of its gas, much of it from Russia, and Draghi has insisted that any European Union sanctions to punish Russia for recognizing two separatist-controlled areas of eastern Ukraine must exempt the energy sector.

The Italian mayors’ association has said the government’s response has so far been insufficient to help cities cope with hundreds of millions of euros in additional energy costs, making them choose between balancing budgets or cutting services.

Florence, Rome and other cities kept their municipal monuments and local government buildings dark on Feb. 10 to draw attention to the situation.

Florence’s Adopt-a-Bill campaign enjoys popular support. As well as being a top tourist destination, the capital of Italy’s Tuscany region has a long record of successfully providing social services to poor and vulnerable residents.

“It’s a great initiative because you can help people who can’t make it to pay a bill that in a shameless way has reached unsustainable costs,” said Luca Menoni, the owner of a butcher’s shop in Florence’s Sant’Ambrogio indoor food market.

“I myself am paying a (electricity) bill double what I used to,” Menoni said.

Boni may be getting some help with his energy bills to get him through the winter and stave off an expected move into a nursing home. But he still has a tight budget that doesn’t allow many luxuries.

“Steaks? Meat? Let’s not even talk about it. I eat (cheap) packaged food,” he said. After his wife died, he said, “I became an expert in economic cooking.”

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Nicole Winfield in Rome, and Zeynep Bilginsoy, in Istanbul, contributed to this report.

South Korea’s presidential race puts misogyny in spotlight

By JUWON PARK, KIM TONG-HYUNG and KIM JUNG YOON

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Demonstrators supporting the #MeToo movement stage a rally to mark the International Women's Day in Seoul, South Korea, March 8, 2018. For years, the story of South Korean women has been defined by perseverance as they made gradual but steady progress in the workplace and fought against a deeply entrenched culture of misogyny and harassment. (AP Photo/Ahn Young-joon, File)

SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — As South Korea enters a bitter presidential race, Hong Hee-jin is one of many young women who feel that the country’s politics has become dominated by discrimination against women, even outright misogyny.

“Women are being treated like they don’t even have voting rights,” the 27-year-old office worker in the capital, Seoul, said.

For years, South Korean women have made slow but steady progress in the workplace as they confronted an entrenched culture of male chauvinism and harassment. But this extremely tight presidential race, which culminates March 9, has exposed the fragility of what’s been won.

Top conservative candidate Yoon Suk Yeol and his liberal rival Lee Jae-myung — both men above 55 — are fighting for what they see as a “male” vote crucial for victory. They have increasingly focused their messages on young men who decry gender equality policies and the loss of traditional privileges in a hyper-competitive job market.

“Politicians are taking the easy path,” Hong said. “Instead of coming up with real policies to solve problems facing young people, they are fanning gender conflicts, telling men in their 20s that their difficulties stem from women receiving too many benefits.”

The tensions can be seen on the streets. Hundreds of women have marched in protest against the “election of misogyny.” Small but vocal groups of anti-feminist men have staged rallies in response.

Divisive gender politics has grown as South Korea deals with a fast-aging population, a plummeting birth rate, soaring personal debt, a decaying job market and stark inequality. There’s also the growing nuclear threat from North Korea and fears of being squeezed in the confrontation between the United States and China.

No campaign issue, however, has caused more debate than Yoon’s vow to abolish the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family, which the candidate says promotes policies unfair to men.

A former prosecutor general, Yoon, 61, has also vowed stronger penalties for false sexual crime reports. Critics say this makes up only a small number of rape claims, and that the threat of tougher punishment could intimidate victims from coming forward amid a recent male backlash against the #MeToo movement.

Liberal ruling party candidate Lee, 57, has taken a cautious approach to gender issues, while clashing with Yoon over the economy and North Korea policy.


Narrowly trailing Yoon in the polls, Lee has faced calls to appeal to more young men, whose support of conservative candidates in mayoral by-elections in Seoul and Busan may have led to a shocking double-defeat for the liberals.

Lee has described gender tensions as related to joblessness and says men shouldn’t be discriminated against. He said he plans to keep the gender ministry, but under a different Korean name that no longer includes the word “women.”

Yoon’s campaign has been influenced by his party’s chairman, Lee Jun-seok, a 36-year-old Harvard-educated “men’s rights” advocate who describes hiring targets for women and other gender equality policies as “reverse discrimination.” Lee calls feminist politics “blowfish poison.”

Yoon during a presidential debate on Monday repeated an argument that South Korea no longer has any structural barriers to women’s success, saying discrimination is now about “individual versus individual.”

The World Economic Forum ranks South Korea 102 out of 156 nations in an index that examines gender gaps in jobs, education, health and political representation.

South Korea has by far the largest gender pay gap among developed economies at around 32%, according to the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, and women remain significantly underrepresented in corporate boardrooms and politics. The country’s record-low birth rate underscores how many women find it impossible to combine careers and family.

Scrapping the gender ministry could weaken women’s rights and “take a toll on democracy,” said Chung Hyun-back, a scholar who served as gender equality minister in 2017-18, under current liberal President Moon Jae-in. It is also a key government department committed to helping single parents, sexual abuse survivors and the families of minorities and migrants.

People stage a rally supporting feminism in Seoul, South Korea, Feb. 12, 2022. The signs at top read " The 20th Presidential Election Vote." For years, the story of South Korean women has been defined by perseverance as they made gradual but steady progress in the workplace and fought against a deeply entrenched culture of misogyny and harassment. (AP Photo/Ahn Young-joon)

The prospect frustrates Kang Ji-woo, a 36-year-old single mother who once struggled to find a job in a deeply conservative society and who receives child care support from the gender ministry. Unwed mothers in South Korea are sometimes pressured and shamed into having abortions or relinquishing their children for adoption.

“There’s no candidate worth trusting on polices aimed at helping the disadvantaged,” she said.

South Korean conservatives are galvanizing around a Trump-like brand of divisive “identity politics” that speaks almost exclusively to men after years of disarray following the 2017 ouster of the country’s first female president, Park Geun-hye, over a massive corruption scandal, according to Park Won-Ho, a Seoul National University politics professor.

Park Geun-hye had drawn power from older conservative voters who saw her dictator father, Park Chung-hee, as a hero who lifted the nation from the devastation of the 1950-53 Korean War.

Yoon is tapping into the resentment of men in their 20s and 30s who face a bleak job market while agonizing over soaring housing prices and dimming prospects for marriage and parenthood. They are increasingly sensitive to competition from women, who often outpace them at school and are more eager to break from traditional gender roles for professional advancement.

Even as many men cling to the notion that their female colleagues have it easier in the workplace — including being exempt from a mandatory 18-month military service — women have begun to more loudly criticize a male-centered corporate culture that exposes them to harassment, unequal pay and promotions, and often derails their careers after they have children.

Hong Eun-pyo, a 39-year-old who runs an anti-feminist YouTube channel, justifies higher pay for men, insisting they put in longer hours or perform more difficult tasks. “If they want to reach as high as their male peers and be paid the same wages, they should keep working and not get pregnant,” he said.

Song Tae-woong, an office worker, says young men, worried about a life path that seems tougher than their fathers, resent women’s increasing complaints about society.

“Our parents’ generation, now in their 50s and 60s, got married early and progressed step by step,” he said. “People today are ... extremely restless.”

Some experts, including Chung, think politicians are overplaying the gender grievances of certain middle-class, college-educated men who have become radicalized over the internet as they compete with women for a shrinking number of decent jobs.

Recent surveys, however, show a striking political divide between increasingly conservative young men and their more left-leaning female peers, not just over gender issues but also on the economy and national security, says Park, the politics professor. This indicates conservatives are successfully mobilizing their young male supporters to back broader agendas, including tougher approaches on North Korea and policies emphasizing economic growth over welfare spending. Younger women are left feeling largely unrepresented, polls show.

Lee Ji-young, a teacher who has risen to the top of her field in the highly competitive private tutoring business, remembers years of verbal and physical sexual harassment and unwanted advances by male colleagues who constantly questioned her competitiveness.

One colleague told her that Korean society was stable during the medieval era “because women were quiet, but that now they have ruined South Korea,” Lee said.

She said she once twisted the wrist of a male colleague when he tried to touch her backside.

“Usually women wouldn’t react this way,” Lee said. “I’ve witnessed women who would cry at home or quit work ... because they were afraid of being judged, personally and professionally.”

UN: Wildfires getting worse globally, governments unprepared

By MATTHEW BROWN

Firefighters work at the scene of forest fire near Kyuyorelyakh village at Gorny Ulus area, west of Yakutsk, in Russia Thursday, Aug. 5, 2021. A warming planet and land use changes mean more wildfires will scorch large parts of the globe in coming decades. That's according to a UN report released Wednesday, Feb. 23, 2022 that says many governments are ill-prepared to address the problem. (AP Photo/Ivan Nikiforov, File)

BILLINGS, Mont. (AP) — A warming planet and changes to land use patterns mean more wildfires will scorch large parts of the globe in coming decades, causing spikes in unhealthy smoke pollution and other problems that governments are ill prepared to confront, according to a U.N. report released Wednesday.

The Western U.S., northern Siberia, central India, and eastern Australia already are seeing more blazes, and the likelihood of catastrophic wildfires globally could increase by a third by 2050 and more than 50% by the turn of the century, according to the report from the United Nations Environment Program.

Areas once considered safe from major fires won’t be immune, including the Arctic, which the report said was “very likely to experience a significant increase in burning.”

Tropical forests in Indonesia and the southern Amazon of South America also are likely to see increased wildfires, the report concluded.

“Uncontrollable and devastating wildfires are becoming an expected part of the seasonal calendars in many parts of the world,” said Andrew Sullivan, with the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation in Australia, one of the report’s authors.

The report describes a worsening cycle: Climate change brings more drought and higher temperatures that make it easy for fires to start and spread, and in turn those blazes release more climate-changing carbon into the atmosphere as they burn through forests and peatland.

Some areas including parts of Africa are seeing decreasing wildfires, in part because more land is being devoted to agriculture, said report co-author Glynis Humphrey from the University of Cape Town.

But U.N. researchers said many nations continue to spend too much time and money fighting fires and not enough trying to prevent them. Land use changes can make the fires worse, such as logging that leaves behind debris that can easily burn and forests that are intentionally ignited to clear land for farming, the report said.

Poor communities are often hit hardest by fires, which can degrade water quality, destroy crops and reduce land available to grow food.

“It impacts people’s jobs and the economic situation that people are in,” Humphrey said. “It’s integral that fire be in the same category of disaster management as floods and droughts. It’s absolutely essential.”

In the United States, officials recently unveiled a $50 billion effort to reduce fire risks over the next decade by more aggressively thinning forests around “hot spots” where nature and neighborhoods collide. Only some of that work has funding so far — about $3 billion over five years under the recently passed federal infrastructure bill, according to officials in President Joe Biden’s administration.

Critics of the administration’s plan say it continues to put too much emphasis on fighting some fires that can be useful to clear out underbrush when the flames remain relatively small and don’t threaten houses.

The U.N. researchers also called for more awareness of the dangers from wildfire smoke inhalation, which can affect tens of millions of people annuall y as plumes from major wildfires drift thousands of miles across international borders.

As climate change costs mount, Biden seeks to price damages

By MATTHEW BROWN

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In this Nov. 15, 2016 photo, a haul truck with a 250-ton capacity carries coal after being loaded from a nearby mechanized shovel at the Spring Creek strip mine near Decker, Mont. The mine is in the Powder River Basin of Montana and Wyoming, the largest source of coal in the U.S. Environmentalists are pushing to end mining because emissions from burning coal help drive climate change. (AP Photo/Matthew Brown)

HARDIN, Mont. (AP) — In the coal fields of eastern Montana, climate change is forcing a stark choice: halt mining that helped build everything from schools to senior centers or risk astronomical future damage as fossil fuel emissions warm the planet and increase disasters, crop losses and premature deaths.

One of the largest mines in this arid region straddling the Wyoming border is Spring Creek -- a gaping hole among sagebrush hills where house-sized mechanical shovels dig up millions of tons of coal annually, much of it shipped overseas and burned in Asian power plants.

Spring Creek’s hundreds of jobs help undergird the economy of the Crow Indian Reservation and nearby parts of Wyoming. In Big Horn County, encompassing most of the reservation, taxes and royalties from coal fund almost two-thirds of government services. It’s one of the most coal-dependent communities in America.

“Everything’s got coal dust on it,” said county commissioner George Real Bird III, referring to civic projects coal money has financed since Spring Creek opened 40 years ago.

Greenhouse gas emissions from burning that coal also stoke climate change, and President Joe Biden’s administration wants to put a cost on the resulting damages to people and the environment. Highlighting the “social cost of carbon” could justify emission reduction rules for fossil fuels, transportation and other industries.

But a federal judge in Louisiana temporarily halted such efforts this month and blocked the administration from using an interim standard of $51 in damages per ton of carbon dioxide emitted.

The White House had been preparing to update its climate damage price tag in coming weeks. Many economists expected the figure to increase dramatically and even double. Republicans and business groups argued the emphasis on future climate damages would hobble the economy, particularly the energy industry.

For Spring Creek, applying the administration’s carbon cost would yield estimated damages of more than $1 billion annually from a federal government coal sale that would keep it mining at least another few years.

It’s an eye-popping number from just one of 15 mines dotting the Powder River Basin of Montana and Wyoming. But, after a federal judge in Montana ruled that the government overstated the mine’s economic benefits, the Biden administration is weighing the climate costs and reconsidering the mine’s permit.

Environmentalists want the department to stop an ongoing Spring Creek expansion and end mining. Their goal is to use the social cost of carbon to deny fossil fuel projects, not just to inform rules and policies as in the past.

BRACING FOR A DOWNTURN

Climate change already is being felt in this sparsely populated region -- where recurring droughts hit farms and ranches, lower river levels harm fishing and massive wildfires rip across the landscape.

“The impacts just from the greenhouse gas emissions from burning this coal are tremendous,” said attorney Shiloh Hernandez, who represents environmentalists against mining. “These are real impacts that cause real harm to real people.”

Pending the permit review, Spring Creek keeps digging — 13 million tons last year as Powder River Basin coal prices reached record levels when the economy rebounded from its early-pandemic slump. The mine is owned by a Navajo corporation that became the third largest U.S. coal producer when it took over bankrupt Cloud Peak Energy three years ago.

Spokesperson Erny Zah said the Navajo Transitional Energy Company values responsible mining and balances the environment against the economic needs of people around Spring Creek.

Local officials aren’t counting on coal’s recent bump to last: Over the past decade, U.S. demand plummeted and dreams of shipping more coal overseas were blocked by West Coast states. A mine next to Spring Creek closed in early 2021.

Worried Big Horn County commissioners enlisted accountant Michael Opie eight years ago to help navigate the industry’s collapse. At the time, he figured coal had about 10 years left. He won’t offer a prediction anymore.

After cutbacks hit key services such as maintenance of 1,000 miles (1,609 kilometers) of gravel roads, the county’s shifting the tax burden onto local residents to keep its sheriff’s office and other departments functioning.

“We’ve had to ... basically boil down government to the bare minimum,” Real Bird said.

Spring Creek contributed $23 million in local and state taxes and other payments last year, Zah said. The company expects 2022 to be good for coal but is bracing for another downturn — halting new equipment investment and planning to shift workers into mine reclamation jobs.

DEBATE OVER CARBON COST

The Obama administration first adopted the social cost of carbon and used it more than 80 times in cost-benefit analyses for government rules, including tightened vehicle emissions standards and regulations aimed at shuttering coal plants.

In seeking to roll back those rules, the Trump administration cut the social cost of carbon to $7 or less per ton. The lower number included only domestic climate impacts and not global damages, making it harder to justify expensive rules for industry.

Biden restored Obama’s $51-ton estimate on an interim basis and signaled an even higher number would be adopted. On Saturday, the administration appealed the Feb. 11 court ruling that blocked use of the social cost of carbon, saying it could affect more than 30 pending rules, delay permits and leasing for federal fossil fuel reserves and undermine international climate talks by silencing U.S. officials on the topic.

“It’s a little shocking to see all of the impacted actions,” said Romany Webb, a Columbia Law School researcher focused on climate change.

Republican attorneys general led by Louisiana’s Jeff Landry warned of more burdensome rules across daily life if the administration prevails — including for home appliances, vehicles and electricity. They called the use of the carbon cost possibly “the most significant regulatory encroachment upon individual liberty and state sovereignty in American history.”

But many economists say rationally confronting climate change means weighing its future costs in today’s decisions.

The $51-ton estimate came from climate models developed by three economists in the 1990s.

Two of them -- William Nordhaus at Yale University and Richard Tol at the University of Sussex in the U.K. -- say updated models show more damage than previously expected.

“Estimates are higher ... because we now better understand the impact of climate change on labor productivity -- the human body cannot work hard when it is hot and humid,” Tol said.

Nordhaus in a recent study reported a “substantial increase” in the social cost of carbon -- up to twice previous estimates. He predicted trillions of dollars in damages, equating to 2% of global income based on warming of 3 degrees Celsius (5.4 degrees Fahrenheit).

However, some economists say the models fail to capture complexities of climate change that could result in less damage than feared.

“You have to model the global climate system, you have to model the global economy and you have to do it for centuries. There’s an enormous amount of uncertainty,” said Steve Rose, a senior economist at the Electric Power Research Institute, a non-profit organization funded by utilities and government contracts.

Despite debate over the correct dollar value for climate damage, previous court rulings made clear that future impacts must be considered in some fashion, Rose and several legal experts said.

With much of Biden’s climate agenda stalled in Congress, the issue could take center stage if the administration uses executive branch rules to limit industry emissions, said Michael Greenstone, former chief economist for the White House Council of Economic Advisers.

“Climate science and climate economics have advanced rapidly,” said Greenstone, who helped establish the Obama carbon cost and argued in court to apply it at Spring Creek. He believes a major cost increase is warranted. “It would be easy to justify a value of around $200-a-ton that would represent the frontier of our understanding.”

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Follow Matthew Brown on Twitter: @MatthewBrownAP

BOSSES LOCKOUT
MLB: Season to be shortened if no deal by end of Monday

By RONALD BLUM

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Major League Baseball Players Association executive director Tony Clark, left, and chief negotiator Bruce Meyer arrive for contract negotiations at Roger Dean Stadium in Jupiter, Fla., Wednesday, Feb. 23, 2022. (Greg Lovett/The Palm Beach Post via AP)


JUPITER, Fla. (AP) — Major League Baseball said only five days remain to salvage March 31 openers and a full season, telling locked out players that games would be canceled if a labor contract is not agreed to by the end of Monday.

After the third straight day of negotiations with little movement, MLB went public with what it had told the union on Feb. 12.

“A deadline is a deadline. Missed games are missed games. Salary will not be paid for those games,” an MLB spokesman said after Wednesday’s bargaining ended. The spokesman spoke on behalf of MLB on the condition the spokesman not be identified by name.

Players have not accepted Monday as a deadline and have suggested any missed games could be made up as part of doubleheaders, a method MLB said it will not agree to.

The union told MLB if games are missed and salaries are lost, clubs should not expect players to agree to management’s proposals to expand the postseason and to allow advertisements on uniforms and helmets.

Bargaining is scheduled to continue Thursday, and both sides said they are prepared to meet through Monday.

A shortened season would be baseball’s second in three years following a 2020 schedule cut from 162 games to 60 because of the coronavirus pandemic. The last seasons truncated by labor strife were during the strike that ended the 1994 schedule on Aug. 12 and caused the start of the following season to be delayed from April 2 to April 25. The 1995 schedule was reduced from 162 games to 144.

Players are paid only during the regular season, accruing 1/162nd of their salary daily. Players would be subject to losing as much as $232,975 daily in the case of Mets pitcher Max Scherzer, or as little as $3,441 for a player at a $640,000 minimum.

Baseball’s work stoppage was in its 84th day, and the three sessions this week increased the total on core economic issues to just nine since the lockout began Dec. 2.

Spring training workouts had been scheduled to start on Feb. 16, and MLB already has canceled the first week of exhibitions, which were to begin Friday.

Baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred said on Feb. 10 a minimum of four weeks of training are needed before starting the season. A deal by Monday would allow that plus a few days for players to report to camps in Arizona and Florida.

Manfred has spoken publicly just once since the day the lockout began and union head Tony Clark not at all.

MLB’s public statement was interpreted as a pressure tactic by the union, which was angered payrolls decreased during the expired five-year deal and an increased number of teams jettisoned higher-salaries veterans and transitioned to rebuilding mode.

“To get bears in the forest, you can’t offer them bear traps,” said Scott Boras, agent for five of eight players on the union’s executive subcommittee.

Labor talks resume with MLB deadline looming

A day after the union made only small moves in response to management’s incremental proposal of a day earlier, MLB advanced only one change: Teams offered to increase the minimum salary from $570,500 to $640,000, up from their previous proposal of $630,000. The minimum would increase by an additional $10,000 each season during a five-year agreement. Clubs withdrew their proposal for a tiered minimum, which players opposed.

Players have asked for $775,000 in 2022 and additional $30,000 jumps in each succeeding season. The union evaluated MLB’s proposal as adding $5 million annually.

There was no discussion Wednesday on the key issue of luxury tax thresholds and rates, but players voiced their concern over a lack of competition and the need for younger players to get higher salaries earlier in their careers.

The union proposed a $115 million pool of money that would go to 150 pre-arbitration players annually, while the clubs offered $20 million that would be distributed to 30.

Yankees pitchers Gerrit Cole and Zack Britton joined the talks, two of six members on hand from the executive subcommittee that supervises the negotiations. They were joined by Scherzer, free agent pitcher Andrew Miller, Mets shortstop Francisco Lindor, and Houston catcher Jason Castro.

After meeting at the start of the day at Roger Dean Stadium, the vacant spring training home of the Miami Marlins and St. Louis Cardinals, the sides caucused and then had a smaller group meeting that included Deputy Commissioner Dan Halem, Colorado CEO Dick Monfort, Scherzer and Miller.

Teams have told the union they will not decrease revenue sharing and will not add new methods for players to accrue service time, which the union said is needed to prevent teams from holding players back to delay free agency.

Clubs also are refusing to increase arbitration eligibility among players with at least two years of service and less than three, of which the top 22% by service time are eligible. The union wants it expanded to 75%.

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MLB lockout could cost Scherzer $232K daily, Cole $193K

By RONALD BLUM

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FILE - Los Angeles Dodgers starting pitcher Max Scherzer tosses the ball during the third inning of the team's baseball game against the Colorado Rockies on Sept. 23, 2021, in Denver. Sometime soon, lockout costs become real: Scherzer would forfeit $232,975 for each regular-season day lost and Gerrit Cole $193,548. Based on last year's base salaries that totaled just over $3.8 billion, major league players would combine to lose $20.5 million for each day wiped off the 186-day regular season schedule.

 (AP Photo/David Zalubowski, File)


JUPITER, Fla. (AP) — Sometime soon, lockout costs become real: Max Scherzer would forfeit $232,975 for each regular-season day lost, and Gerrit Cole $193,548.

Based on last year’s base salaries that totaled just over $3.8 billion, major league players would combine to lose $20.5 million for each day wiped off the 186-day regular-season schedule.

Major League Baseball has told the players’ association a labor deal must be reached by Monday in order for opening day to come off as scheduled on March 31 and a 162-game season to remain intact. The union hasn’t said whether it believes that deadline, and there likely is some leeway based on timing after the 1990 lockout, the 1994-95 strike and the 2020 pandemic delay.

Talks resumed this week in the second-longest work stoppage in baseball history, which started Dec. 2.

A player at management’s proposed $630,000 minimum would lose $3,387 for each day he’s not on a big league roster, the amount rising to $4,167 under the union’s offer of a $775,000 minimum.

While medical insurance would expire after March 31 for players in the major leagues when last season ended, the union would pay COBRA payments to continue their coverage and also will cover the subsidy usually paid for the medical coverage of former players.

It’s harder to calculate what owners of the 30 teams would lose if games are lost, but a similar amount is likely. While players received about half of industry revenue that reached a high of $9.7 billion in 2019 (a percentage that includes spending on draft picks and international amateurs), they are paid during the regular season, and teams receive a substantial percentage of revenue from the postseason.

For players, the cost is clear: Each earns 1/186th of his base salary each day.

Scherzer and Cole are on the union’s eight-man executive subcommittee, which supervises the negotiations. Among others in the union’s leadership group, the daily price comes to $172,043 for Francisco Lindor, $134,409 for Marcus Semien, $75,269 for Zack Britton, $32,258 for James Paxton and $20,161 for Jason Castro. Andrew Miller, the other member, is among the hundreds of players who remained unsigned heading into the transaction freeze that began with the lockout.

Veterans are likely to have savings to rely on. Scherzer last season finished a $210 million, seven-year contract he signed with Washington. That deal included deferred money that called for him to receive $15 million each July 1 from 2022 to 2028, though the pandemic-shortened 2020 season will reduce the amount slightly.

Cole earned $25,895,061 in major league pay from 2013 to 2019 before signing a $324 million, nine-year contract with the Yankees that raised his earnings through last season to $71,228,394. Lindor has earned $41,548,655 and Semien $33,714,217.

Stoppage costs would compound in future seasons due to the major league service time that wouldn’t be accrued. Once 15 days of the regular season are missed, the free-agent eligibility of some players would be delayed by one year unless management agrees to give credit in an eventual agreement, which it hasn’t done in the past.

That would delay free-agent eligibility for Shohei Ohtani from 2023 to 2024, Pete Alonso from 2024 to 2025, Jake Cronenworth from 2025 to 2026 and Jonathan India from 2026 to 2027.

Others in danger of delayed free agency after 15 missed days — players currently with major league service ending in an even number of years with no additional days — include Tejay Antone, Jordan Hicks, Cristian Javier, Brad Keller, Isiah Kiner-Falefa, Chris Paddack, Brady Singer, Andrew Vaughn and Garrett Whitlock.

In Lindor’s case, because of deferred compensation in his contract, he would lose money both this year and a decade from now. He would forfeit $145,161 each day from the $27 million he is owed this season and $26,882 each day from the $5 million due on July 1, 2032.

Players also may find it more difficult to reach provisions in their contracts to guarantee future seasons triggered by statistics such as plate appearances, games and innings, but the sides have agreed to prorating those in past settlements.

Clubs would lose broadcast revenue and ticket money, though the impact is somewhat uneven. Some teams generate less revenue from April games than they produce in the summer, and there likely are different contractual arrangements regarding the flow of broadcast fees, credits, refunds and delayed/forfeited payments.

In addition, a large percentage of broadcast revenue is for the postseason. MLB gave the union a slide two years ago that contracts called for $787 million in media money from the 2020 postseason: $370 million from Fox, $310 million from Turner, $27 million from ESPN, $30 million from MLB Network and $50 million from international and other.

The prospect of an extended stoppage to some degree is likely to have depressed ticket sales among fans wary of purchasing tickets for games that may not be played.

And there is no public knowledge of debt financing among the clubs and how much liabilities increased during a pandemic that caused a huge revenue loss.

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More AP MLB: https://apnews.com/hub/MLB and https://twitter.com/AP_Sports

SNL MEETS FOX

Russia state TV paints Moscow as savior of eastern Ukraine
By DASHA LITVINOVA

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The app of the Russian government newspaper is displayed on an iPhone screen showing Russian President Vladimir Putin during his speech in the Kremlin in Moscow, Russia, Tuesday, Feb. 22, 2022. As the West sounds the alarm about the Kremlin ordering troops into eastern Ukraine and decries an invasion, Russian state media paints a completely different picture. It portrays the move as Moscow coming to the rescue of war-torn areas tormented by Ukraine’s aggression and bringing them much-needed peace. (AP Photo/Alexander Zemlianichenko Jr)


MOSCOW (AP) — As the West sounded the alarm about the Kremlin ordering troops into eastern Ukraine and decried it as an invasion, Russian state media painted a completely different picture — of Moscow coming to the rescue of war-torn areas tormented by Ukraine’s aggression and bringing them peace.

The fanfare came hours after Vladimir Putin announced Russia’s recognition of the separatist areas in eastern Ukraine as independent states and ordered its troops to “maintain peace” in territory where Russia-backed rebels have been fighting Kyiv’s forces since 2014 — a conflict that has killed over 14,000 people.

TV presenters hailed the “historic” day and professed the end of suffering for the residents of the breakaway regions.

“You paid with your blood for these eight years of torment and anticipation,” anchor Olga Skabeyeva told residents of the areas known as Donbas during a popular political talk show Tuesday morning on Russia 1 state TV. “Russia will now be defending Donbas.”

TV pundit Vladimir Solovyev echoed those sentiments on his morning show on state Vesti.FM radio. “We will ensure their safety,” he declared. “It is now dangerous to fight with them … because one will now have to fight with the Russian army.”

Channel One, another popular state-funded TV station, struck a more festive tone, with its correspondent in Donetsk asserting that local residents “say it is the best news over the past years of war.”

“Now they have confidence in the future and that the years-long war will finally come to an end,” she said.

Whether ordinary Russians are buying it is another question.

After his announcement Monday evening, Putin said he was “positive about the people’s support.”

But critics denounced the moves as harmful for both Ukraine and Russia.

Imprisoned opposition leader Alexei Navalny, in a message from behind bars posted on social media, said Putin “won’t let Ukraine develop, drag it into a swamp, but Russia will also pay the same price.”

A Facebook campaign with the hashtag “I’m not staying silent,” launched by independent Russian news site Holod urged people “to express their opinion about the war aloud — and also to remember that each of us has something connecting us to Ukraine.” It brought dozens of posts sharing memories about Ukraine and condemning the Kremlin’s moves.

Still, many have voiced their wholehearted support for Putin’s decision.

“It should have been done a long time ago,” said Irina Nareyko, a Moscow resident. “These poor people who identify as Russian, who mainly identify as Orthodox, who cannot wait anymore and live expecting to be killed … we should have accepted them a long time ago.”

Denis Volkov, director of the Levada Center, Russia’s top independent pollster, said that according to its poll data, more than half of Russians were ready to support Putin’s moves.

“The situation, as it is understood by the majority, is that the West is pressuring Ukraine” to make a move against the rebel-held areas, “and Russia needs to somehow help,” Volkov told the AP. “This notion of helping in an extraordinary situation translates into support” for recognition of the separatist regions.

The narrative of Ukraine having aggressive designs on Donbas has been actively promoted by the Russian authorities — along with accusations that the West is pumping Ukraine full of weapons and warmongering.

The Kremlin has denied plans to invade Ukraine, something the West fears due to a massive buildup of Russian troops along Ukraine’s borders. Russian officials point fingers at Kyiv instead, saying it has massed its own troops and could try to retake the rebel-held areas by force, which the Ukraine government denies.

The official rhetoric heated up last week, when Putin charged that “what is now happening in Donbas is genocide.” Popular newscasts and political talk shows on state TV channels started widely using the term.

Prominent news anchor Dmitry Kiselev likened what was happening in Donbas to World War II atrocities committed by Nazi Germany and dressed down German Chancellor Olaf Scholz for challenging Putin’s use of the word “genocide.”

“It is, simply, solidarity with the genocide of today,” he charged on Russia 1′s flagship news show .

Over the weekend, separatist officials added a sense of urgency to the picture, announcing mass evacuations of Donetsk and Luhansk residents into Russia and mobilizing troops in the face of a purportedly imminent attack by Ukrainian forces.

News bulletins showed emotional visuals of women and children lining up to board buses, followed by segments alleging massive shelling of the areas by Ukrainian forces. Some of those segments stressed that Kyiv’s military was deliberately targeting civilians.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s speech at a Munich security conference Saturday, during which he threatened to pull out of an agreement to abandon the nuclear weapons left in Ukraine after the Soviet collapse in exchange for security guarantees, fueled the fire even further.

Russian state TV channels aired multiple segments about Kyiv’s capability to develop its own nuclear weapons, and news show hosts warned the threat shouldn’t be taken lightly.

Finally, to drive home the point about Ukraine’s alleged aggressions, Russian officials on Monday accused Ukrainian forces of an attempted incursion into Russia— an allegation Ukraine dismissed as false “disinformation.”

“The invasion has begun,” Russia 1 TV host Yevgeny Popov proclaimed. “But it wasn’t Putin who invaded Ukraine — instead, Ukraine went to war with Russia and Donbas.”

Several hours later, Putin announced recognition of the self-proclaimed republics in eastern Ukraine.

Political analyst Abbas Gallyamov says that while the majority of Russians will support the decision, the impact of such propaganda on the domestic audience is limited, compared to 2014, when the Kremlin managed to rally Russians around the idea of annexing Crimea.

The only popular show of support for the moves on eastern Ukraine took place in St. Petersburg on Wednesday — the day Russia celebrates Defender of the Fatherland Day, a holiday that commemorates the country’s veterans.

Russian media reported several hundred pro-Kremlin activists gathered in the city center with Russian flags and banners saying: “We don’t abandon our own.” According to reports, some of the demonstrators didn’t know what the rally was about and said they were promised a hot meal after it.

At the same time, rights groups in Moscow reported six protesters detained over holding pickets against a war with Ukraine.

State TV channels showed a top official from the Kremlin’s United Russia party laying flowers at a memorial for the “defenders of Donbas” in Donetsk, along with the area’s separatist leader.

Putin will score some political points at home, but not too many, Gallyamov believes.

“People remember what (the annexation of Crimea) led to. People understand that there will be sanctions now, the economy will decline even further, and living conditions will continue to worsen.”

“They remember that there was a hangover after the party.”

Moscow resident Sergei, who only gave his first name, appeared to be one of those skeptics. “It’s terrible, it’s very bad,” he said.

“As usual, nobody asked anybody about anything,” he said. “The economic repercussions are economic repercussions for us, not the ruling elite.”

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Vladimir Kondrashov and Anatoly Kozlov in Moscow contributed to this report.

What Lies Beneath: Vets worry polluted base made them ill


By MARTHA MENDOZA, JULIET LINDERMAN and JASON DEAREN

February 23, 2022 

FORT ORD NATIONAL MONUMENT, Calif. (AP) — For nearly 80 years, recruits reporting to central California’s Fort Ord considered themselves the lucky ones, privileged to live and work amid sparkling seas, sandy dunes and sage-covered hills.

But there was an underside, the dirty work of soldiering. Recruits tossed live grenades into the canyons of “Mortar Alley,” sprayed soapy chemicals on burn pits of scrap metal and solvents, poured toxic substances down drains and into leaky tanks they buried underground.

When it rained, poisons percolated into aquifers from which they drew drinking water.

Through the years, soldiers and civilians who lived at the U.S. Army base didn’t question whether their tap water was safe to drink.

But in 1990, four years before it began the process of closing as an active military training base, Fort Ord was added to the Environmental Protection Agency’s list of the most polluted places in the nation. Included in that pollution were dozens of chemicals, some now known to cause cancer, found in the base’s drinking water and soil.

Decades later, several Fort Ord veterans who were diagnosed with cancers — especially rare blood disorders — took the question to Facebook: Are there more of us?

Soon, the group grew to hundreds of people who had lived or served at Fort Ord and were concerned that their health problems might be tied to the chemicals there.

The Associated Press interviewed nearly two dozen of these veterans for this story and identified many more. The AP also reviewed thousands of pages of documents, and interviewed military, medical and environmental scientists.

There is rarely a way to directly connect toxic exposure to a specific individual’s medical condition. Indeed, the concentrations of the toxics are tiny, measured in parts per billion or trillion, far below the levels of an immediate poisoning. Local utilities, the Defense Department and some in the Department of Veterans Affairs insist Fort Ord’s water is safe and always has been.
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But the VA’s own hazardous materials exposure website, along with scientists and doctors, agree that dangers do exist for military personnel exposed to contaminants.

The problem is not just at Fort Ord. This is happening all over the U.S. and abroad, almost everywhere the military has set foot, and the federal government is still learning about the extent of both the pollution and the health effects of its toxic legacy.

The AP’s review of public documents shows the Army knew that chemicals had been improperly dumped at Fort Ord for decades. Even after the contamination was documented, the Army downplayed the risks.

And ailing veterans are being denied benefits based on a 25-year-old health assessment. The CDC’s Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry concluded in 1996 that there were no likely past, present or future risks from exposures at Fort Ord.


But that conclusion was made based on limited data, and before medical science understood the relationship between some of these chemicals and cancer.

This is what is known:

Veterans in general have higher blood cancer rates than the general population, according to VA cancer data. And in the region that includes Fort Ord, veterans have a 35 percent higher rate of multiple myeloma diagnosis than the general U.S. population.

Veterans like Julie Akey.

Akey, now 50, arrived at Fort Ord in 1996 with a gift for linguistics. She enlisted in the Army on the condition that she could learn a new language. And so the 25-year-old was sent to the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California, and lived at Fort Ord as a soldier. By then the base was mostly closed but still housed troops for limited purposes.

“It was incredibly beautiful,” she said. “You have the ocean on one side, and these expansive beaches, and the rolling hills and the mountains behind.”

What she didn’t know at the time was that the ground under her feet, and the water that ran through the sandy soil into an aquifer that supplied some of the base’s drinking water was polluted. Among the contaminants were cancer-causing chemicals including trichloroethylene, also known as the miracle degreaser TCE.

She’d learn this decades later, as she tried to understand how, at just 46 and with no family history of blood cancers, she was diagnosed with multiple myeloma.

“No one told us,” she said.

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Despite the military’s claims that there aren’t any health problems associated with living and serving at Fort Ord, nor hundreds of other shuttered military bases, almost every closure has exposed widespread toxic pollution and required a massive cleanup. Dozens have contaminated groundwater, from Fort Dix in New Jersey to Adak Naval Air Station in Alaska. Fort Ord is 25 years into its cleanup as a federal Superfund site, and it’s expected to continue for decades.

To date, the military has only acknowledged troops’ health could have been damaged by drinking contaminated water at a single U.S. base: Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, and only during a 35-year window, between 1953 to 1987. Servicemembers there were found by federal epidemiologists to have higher mortality rates from many cancers, including multiple myeloma and leukemia. Men developed breast cancer, and pregnant women tended to have children with higher rates of birth defects and low birth weight. Like Fort Ord, Camp Lejeune began closing contaminated wells in the mid-’80s.

Soldiers are often stationed at different bases during their years of military service, but neither the Defense Department nor the VA has systematically tracked toxic exposures at various locations.

Fort Ord’s primary mission was training troops who deployed to World Wars I and II, Korea and Vietnam. It supported several thriving small towns on a piece of coastal land the size of San Francisco. Soldiers and their families lived in houses and apartments connected to its water system, and civilians worked at its airfields, hospitals and other facilities.

In the course of their work preparing for battle, they spilled solvents into the base’s drains, sloughed chemical sludge into underground storage tanks and discarded 55-gallon drums of caustic material in the base landfill, according to a 1982 hazardous waste inventory report.


Curt Gandy, a former airplane mechanic, recalls being routinely doused with toxic chemicals from the 1970s to the 1990s. He said he hosed down aircraft with solvents, cleaned engine parts and stripped paint off fuselages without any protection. There were barrels of toluene, xylene, jet fuel and more.

“It gets on your body, it gets in your face, you get splashed with it, and we’re using pumps to spray this stuff,” he said. “It’s got 250 pounds of pressure and we’re spraying it into the air and it’s atomized.”

On Fridays, crews would forklift barrels of the used flammable liquids down a bumpy sandy road, dumping solvents, paint and metal chips onto the hulks of broken aircraft and tanks at a burn pit. One weekend a month, airfield firefighters would light up the toxic sludge and then douse the roaring fires with foam.

In 1984, an anonymous caller tipped off Fort Ord’s officials that “approximately 30 55-gallon drums,” containing about 600 gallons of a “solvent-type liquid” had been illegally spilled there, an Army report said. The state, which ordered a cleanup two years later, determined the Army had mismanaged the site in a way that threatened both ground and surface waters.

And the burn pit wasn’t the base’s only polluted site.

In 1991, when the Army began investigating what had actually been disposed of at the base’s dump overlooking Monterey Bay, officials told the public the trash was similar to what one would find in the landfill of any small city, according to transcripts of community meetings.




(AP Video/Serginho Roosblad and Marshall Ritzel)

While it’s true that much of the trash going into that dump came from nearby houses — food scraps, old furniture, busted appliances, even gasoline — the Army officials who spoke at the meetings made no mention of the toxic stew of paints and solvents that today are banned from open landfills. The solvent TCE was among dozens of pollutants that scientists discovered as early as 1985 and today still exists in concentrations above the legal limit for drinking water in the aquifer below, according to local and federal water quality reports.

“The water from the aquifer above leaks down into the aquifer below and the pollution just gets deeper,” said Dan O’Brien, a former board member of the Marina Coast Water District, which took over the Army’s wells in 2001. “The toxic material remains in the soil under where it was dumped. Every time it rains, more of the toxin in the soil leeches down into the water table.”

The Army’s early tests of Fort Ord’s wells near the landfill detected levels of TCE 43 separate times from 1985 to 1994. The VA told the AP the contamination was “within the allowable safe range” in areas that provided drinking water.

But 18 of those TCE hits exceeded legal safety limits; one reading was five times that amount. It’s unclear how long and at what concentrations TCE may have been in the water before 1985. And TCE was only one problem. The EPA identified more than 40 “chemicals of concern” in soil and groundwater.

“It was not recognized that it was so toxic back then, and they threw it on the ground after use. They used a ton of it. Now, it’s the most pervasive groundwater contaminant we have,” said Thomas Burke, an environmental epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and a former EPA official.


Contractors initially brought in to clean up the contaminated groundwater were warned not to tell community members what they found in their drinking water, specifically not the news media or even local public agencies, according to a 1985 military memo.

At the time, there were elevated levels of TCE in the aquifers, yet the military assured the public the drinking water was safe.

“There never have been any test results that indicate that Fort Ord’s water was unsafe,” an Army official told several local papers in August 1985.

Since then, advances in medical science have increased the understanding of the dangers of the chemicals at Fort Ord. TCE, for example, is now a known human carcinogen, and epidemiological studies indicate a possible link between TCE and blood cancers like non-Hodgkin lymphoma and multiple myeloma.

TCE “circulates in the body real effectively when you breathe it or drink it,” Burke said. “It’s related strongly to kidney cancer, the development of kidney cancers and suspected in several other cancers.”

Julie Akey spent years collecting names of people who lived at Fort Ord and were later diagnosed with cancers. Her database eventually grew to more than 400 people, nearly 200 of which were listed as having those blood cancers.
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Akey spent most of her Fort Ord days in a classroom, studying Arabic. But in the afternoons and evenings, she’d run along the coastline and do military drills. At home, she watered her small vegetable plot with the base’s water supply, harvesting the fresh crops to chop into salads.

She filled her water bottle from the tap before heading out each morning, and thought nothing of the showers she took each night. After all, she was among hundreds of thousands of soldiers in the base’s history who did the same.

She fell ill in Bogota, Colombia, in 2016. She’d left the military after nearly six years as a translator and interrogator to become a State Department foreign service officer, a dream job that gave her the chance to travel the world with her twin sons. Quite suddenly she became fatigued with a persistent ache in her bones. Soon she was in screaming pain.

When the Colombian doctors couldn’t find a cause, Akey was sent to the U.S. for what she assumed would be a quick trip. She left plants on the mantel, food in the refrigerator and clothes at the dry cleaners.

She never went back.

After weeks at the Cleveland Clinic, she was diagnosed with multiple myeloma, a rare and aggressive form of cancer that attacks plasma cells, and is most often detected in elderly African American men. The disease is treatable but has no cure.

“I was a zombie,” she said. “I cried all the time.”

Worried about keeping her government health insurance, she applied to work at a nearby airport as a part-time baggage checker while recovering from a bone marrow transplant.

“You don’t ever think you’re going to have cancer at 46. Why? Why do I get this crazy cancer that no one’s ever heard of? So, I started looking for answers,” she said.





Akey meticulously reviewed her assignments in Spain and Haiti, her stints in Guyana, Ecuador, Nigeria, at Fort Bragg in North Carolina and Fort Gordon in Georgia. And Fort Ord — a federal Superfund site.

“I think that that was my answer,” she said.

Akey read as much as she could about the base, and searched for others like her. She combed through EPA reports, water records, newspaper clippings and obituaries. She scoured social media, and built a database of sick veterans; it’s grown to 491 people to date.

Soon after Akey started a Facebook group in June of 2019, she connected with Tracy Lindquist. Lindquist’s husband, Scott, was stationed at Fort Ord for two years in the 1980s. He has three types of rare cancers, including multiple myeloma. He had a stem cell transplant a few years back, and has been on chemotherapy since 2014.

He has health insurance through the VA, but when he applied for disability payments that would have allowed him to stop working, Tracy said, his claims were denied — twice.

Until May, he drove a van for $11 an hour, shuttling people with developmental disabilities from their group homes to daylong workshops. Sometimes he had to change the oil or do maintenance, and the physical labor was hard on him, Tracy said. Then he started having seizures, and could no longer drive. He tried working three days a week, cleaning the vans and assisting clients, but he couldn’t even manage that. Earlier this month, he was approved for Social Security disability payments.

“Scott hardly ever left the base and he drank water like a fish, and that water was contaminated,” Tracy said. “I know there are people out there, they’ve lost legs and arms, and they need to take care of those people who got hurt in action. But this is a disability, too.”

Debi Schoenrock, who lived around the corner from Akey’s house at Fort Ord, was diagnosed in 2009 with multiple myeloma at 47. Like Akey, she was stunned. She was a military wife and lived on base for three years, from 1990 until 1993. She’d never been sick, and had no family history of cancer. Nobody said anything about toxic substances, she said.


In 1991, the Army surveyed dozens of community members to find out what they knew about groundwater contamination at Fort Ord. Everyone said they were concerned, and no one reported receiving any information from the Army.

Five years later, a federal report assured them that “because the concentration of contamination detected in the past in Fort Ord and Marina drinking water wells was low and the duration was not over a lifetime (70-years), those exposures will not likely result in adverse health effects.”

Decades on, such health assessments at Fort Ord and other military bases are outdated and based on old science, said Burke of Johns Hopkins.

“A 1990s health assessment is a weak thing,” he said.

Peter deFur, a biologist who worked as an EPA-funded scientific adviser at the base, agrees. The report “stated that there could not be future health effects, which is not possible to know,” he said.

While the federal government has established acceptable standards for the amount of TCE in drinking water, no level of such carcinogens is safe, according to the Safe Drinking Water Act of 1974. Complicating matters, TCE vaporizes easily, and when it is inhaled it can be even more dangerous, according to a National Toxicology Program assessment.

William Collins, who is leading Fort Ord’s cleanup for the Army, said he’s never heard of anyone sickened by pollution at the base. Like the VA, Collins points to the 25-year-old study that found no likely human risks from exposure at Fort Ord. He said anyone can request a new, updated study if they want, which is what happened at Camp Lejeune in 2017.

Federal health officials told the AP no one has done so at Fort Ord.

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LeVonne Stone and her husband, Donald, were living at Fort Ord when the base shut down. LeVonne had a civilian job there, and Donald had been in the 7th Infantry Division.

During the base conversion, Stone formed the Fort Ord Environmental Justice Network, demanding answers about the toxic materials and the impact on friends and neighbors, who, at the time, made up the only significant Black community on California’s central coast. But she said military and state officials were determined to develop the valuable coastal property and, in her mind, didn’t want to deal with the pollution.

“We tried telling everybody, the state, the federal, everybody,” she said. “There’s so many people who have died of cancer. They have not done anything for the community locally. … They just turned their heads, they looked the other way.”

There have been efforts in recent years to force the government to come to grips with the effects of the military’s environmental abuses.

Numerous bills have been introduced seeking to compensate veterans sickened by exposure to toxic chemicals during their service, but nothing significant has passed.

Last year President Joe Biden called on the VA to examine the impact of burn pits and other airborne hazards. In November, the White House announced that soldiers exposed to burn pits in a handful of foreign countries, who developed any of three specific ailments — asthma, rhinitis and sinusitis — within 10 years can receive disability benefits.

The Board of Veterans Appeals has ruled repeatedly that there’s no presumptive service connection for any disease — stroke, cancer, vision problems, heart disorders and more — due to exposure to toxic chemicals at Fort Ord, according to an AP review of claims.

The VA told the AP that it is updating how it determines links between medical conditions and military service, and encourages veterans who believe their ailments may have been caused by their service to file a claim.

Burke, the Johns Hopkins epidemiologist, said doing a study of health effects of living at Fort Ord now is difficult, if not impossible. “We can’t reproduce what happened on that base in California,” he said. “We need to admit we exposed people to a huge amount of toxic materials.”

And it’s not just a matter of exposures in the past.

Today Fort Ord is home to a small public university; some students live in former Army housing and spend weekends “Ording,” exploring the abandoned, and contaminated, military buildings. More than 1.5 million mountain bikers, hikers and horseback riders a year enjoy some 85 miles of trails in a vast national monument. Brand-new neighborhoods with million-dollar homes are being built across the street from the Superfund landfill cleanup. Local water officials say drinking water is now pulled from other areas and treated before being delivered to customers.


Former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta grew up next to Fort Ord, went through basic training on the base and now runs a nonprofit institute there.

Too often, he said, the military does whatever is necessary at its bases to ready troops for war, “and they don’t spend a lot of time worrying about the implications of what will happen once they leave.”

Panetta said the military is abandoning communities, leaving huge messes to clean up.

“I think that they have every right to ask the question whether or not whatever physical ailments they may have was in part due to the failure to provide proper cleanup,” Panetta said. “And in those situations, there is liability. And somebody has to take care of people who have been adversely impacted.”

___

For Akey and other veterans with cancer, it’s a matter of accountability. Health insurance, disability benefits and an acknowledgment of wrongdoing, she said, “isn’t asking for too much.”

“You’re not just serving for six years, like me, and then you’re out,” she said. “If you’ve been given cancer, that’s a life sentence.”

On a recent foggy morning, Gandy, the former airplane mechanic, walked past the rusting hangar at the old airfield where he used to work. The single-landing strip and buildings are now the Marina Municipal Airport. But much of the legacy military infrastructure remains, including sheds with old paint cans, an oil separator the size of a school bus and disconnected nozzles and hoses.

Gandy became an outspoken activist along with LeVonne Stone, and also founded community groups to maintain pressure on the military to clean up the site.

His group repeatedly sued the Army, but a judge agreed with Defense Department attorneys who said the claims were moot because a rigorous cleanup was underway.

Gandy, now 70, said he talked to the base commanders, every mayor and health and safety officer. Twenty-five years later, Gandy’s comments — captured in videos and transcripts of contentious community meetings — seem prescient.

“I told them, ‘If we do what we need to do now, nobody will know that we did the right thing. But if we do it wrong, they’re going to know, because in about 20 years people are going to start dying,’” he said.

The AP obtained a roster of Gandy’s co-workers on a single day at the airfield in 1986. There were 46 pilots and welders, mechanics and radio engineers. Today, he was told, almost a third of them are dead, many of cancers and rare diseases, some in their 50s.

He knew three former colleagues had died, not 13. “I feel terrible,” he said, tearing up. “It breaks my heart. Those guys were good guys and they deserved better.”

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Contact AP’s global investigative team at Investigative@ap.org.

US vaccination drive is bottoming out as omicron subsides

By JAY REEVES and MIKE STOBBE

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Nurse Jordan Ledbetter prepares to perform a test for COVID-19 outside the Marion County Health Department in Hamilton, Alabama, on Tuesday, Feb. 15, 2022. The reality of the COVID-19 pandemic reality is colliding with the hope for a late surge of new vaccinations in the county, a rural, mostly white area that trails much of the nation in immunizations. (AP Photo/Jay Reeves)


HAMILTON, Ala. (AP) — A handwritten log kept by nurses tells the story of the losing battle to get more people vaccinated against COVID-19 in this corner of Alabama: Just 14 people showed up at the Marion County Health Department for their initial shot during the first six weeks of the year.

That was true even as hospitals in and around the county of roughly 30,000 people filled with virus patients and the death toll climbed. On many days, no one got a first shot at all, while a Mexican restaurant up the street, Los Amigos, was full of unmasked diners at lunchtime.

The vaccination drive in the U.S. is grinding to a halt, and demand has all but collapsed in places like this deeply conservative manufacturing town where many weren’t interested in the shots to begin with.

The average number of Americans getting their first shot is down to about 90,000 a day, the lowest point since the first few days of the U.S. vaccination campaign, in December 2020. And hopes of any substantial improvement in the immediate future have largely evaporated.

About 76% of the U.S. population has received at least one shot. Less than 65% of all Americans are fully vaccinated.

Vaccination incentive programs that gave away cash, sports tickets, beer and other prizes have largely gone away. Government and employer vaccine mandates have faced court challenges and may have gone as far as they ever will.

And with COVID-19 cases, hospitalizations and deaths subsiding across the U.S., people who are against getting vaccinated don’t see much reason to change their minds.

“People are just over it. They’re tired of it,” said Judy Smith, administrator for a 12-county public health district in northwestern Alabama.

The bottoming-out of demand for the first round of vaccinations is especially evident in conservative areas around the country.

On most days in Idaho, the number of people statewide getting their first shot rarely surpasses 500.

In Wyoming, a total of about 280 people statewide got their first shot in the past week, and the waiting area at the Cheyenne-Laramie County Health Department stood empty Tuesday morning. The head of the department fondly recalled just a few months ago, when the lobby was bustling on Friday afternoons after school with children getting their doses. But they aren’t showing up anymore either.

“People heard more stories about, well, the omicron’s not that bad,” Executive Director Kathy Emmons said. “I think a lot of people just kind of rolled the dice and decided, ‘Well, if it’s not that bad, I’m just going to kind of wait it out and see what happens.’”

Marion County, along the Mississippi line, is part of a band of Alabama counties where most people aren’t fully vaccinated more than a year after shots were rolled out. Just to the east, Winston County has the state’s lowest share of fully vaccinated residents, at 26%, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. About 42% are fully immunized in Marion County.

The digital sign outside First National Bank flashes Bible verses along with the temperature, and many Marion County residents work in small plants that make mobile homes and components for prefab housing. Most area jobs are blue-collar, and TVs are typically turned to Fox News. A conservative, working-class ethic runs deep.

The area went heavily for President Donald Trump in the 2020 election. And yet resistance to the vaccine is so strong that two counties over, in Cullman, some booed Trump when he encouraged vaccinations during a rally that drew thousands last summer.




COVID-19 has killed almost 18,000 people in Alabama, giving the state the nation’s fourth-highest rate of deaths relative to population. Marion County’s rate exceeds the state average at 1.78%, with more than 140 deaths, according to data from Johns Hopkins University.

Health officials expected to have a hard time persuading Black people to get government-sponsored vaccines in Alabama, home of the infamous Tuskegee syphilis study and a place where distrust of Washington runs deep. They started work on public education campaigns weeks early in mostly Black areas, which now have some of the state’s highest vaccination rates, at 60% or more.

But they didn’t expect the stiff resistance among rural whites that has kept vaccination numbers stubbornly low in places like Marion County, which is 94% white. While rural transportation difficulties, confusion over vaccine costs — they’re free — and a lack of health care access have also been factors, the partisan divide in America killed the vaccine drive for some before it really got started, officials said.

“Rural white men who identify as conservative are just not interested in this. That caught us off guard,” said Dr. Scott Harris, head of the Alabama Department of Public Health. “By the first or second month of the vaccine campaign, it became clear that those folks just weren’t going to come in.”

Richard Kitchens is among that group. The owner of a clothing and sports shoe shop on the square in Hamilton, Kitchens said he isn’t interested in the vaccine after getting COVID-19 in 2020 before vaccines were available and having relatives who contracted the illness, developed only minor symptoms and recovered.

Short of a proven guarantee against illness — which no vaccine provides — he doesn’t see the point.

“I guess if I knew I could go out and get a shot and wouldn’t get it or spread it, I would go get it, and they say it helps,” Kitchens said. “But I think that will be determined sometime down the road maybe.”

Doris Peterson is fully vaccinated, but she said she didn’t get a booster on the advice of her two adult daughters, neither of whom is vaccinated. Peterson said she is used to being one of the few people around still wearing a mask in public.

“Most of the time I am it,” she said.

Kelly Moore, a former Tennessee health official who now heads a CDC-funded vaccination advocacy organization named Immunize.org, recalled seeing data from a recent survey that hit her like a punch to the gut.

The results were presented at a CDC meeting of vaccine experts earlier this month. The January survey of about 1,000 adults asked unvaccinated participants what, if anything, would change their mind and persuade them to get a shot. Half said “nothing.”

“It was quite demoralizing to see those results, frankly,” Moore said.

With the pandemic still a mortal threat, public health workers haven’t given up on getting more people vaccinated, even if it feels like an uphill slog.

Jordan Ledbetter, a nurse who works at the Marion County Health Department, was thrilled when two people came in for first-time shots on the same day recently.

“That was exciting,” she said. “There are days when I haven’t given any vaccines.”

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Associated Press Writer Mead Gruver contributed to this report from Cheyenne, Wyoming.