The Full Belmonte, 8/13/2023
Death toll from Maui wildfire reaches 93, making it the deadliest in the US in more than 100 years
Authorities warned that the effort to find and identify the dead in the devastating Maui wildfires was still in its early stages
Damage in Lahaina.Philip Cheung for The New York Times
Jeanine SantucciN'dea Yancey-BraggClaire Thornton
USA TODAY
“LAHAINA, Hawaii — As the death toll from a wildfire that razed a historic Maui town reached 93, authorities warned Saturday that the effort to find and identify the dead was still in its early stages. It's already the deadliest U.S. wildfire for over a century.
The newly released figure surpassed the toll of the 2018 Camp Fire in northern California, which left 85 dead. A century earlier, the 1918 Cloquet Fire broke out in drought-stricken northern Minnesota and raced through a number of rural communities, destroying thousands of homes and killing hundreds.
At least two other fires have been burning in Maui, with no fatalities reported thus far: in south Maui’s Kihei area and in the mountainous, inland communities known as Upcountry. A fourth broke out Friday evening in Kaanapali, a coastal community in West Maui north of Lahaina, but crews were able to extinguish it, authorities said….” Read more at USA Today
Trump swoops into Iowa fair, defying customs and clashing with DeSantis
Pork chops, protesters of the Florida governor and a swift visit by the former president were at the center of a high-drama day
“DES MOINES — The crowd that had craned to watch Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) flip pork chops with Iowa’s governor suddenly looked toward the sky: Donald Trump’s plane was arriving. They clapped and cheered. ‘We love Trump!’ some of them had chanted earlier.
When Trump got to the pork tent midday — with DeSantis’s camp far away and resting in the shade — he didn’t partake in the actual grilling and brought an entourage of supportive lawmakers from DeSantis’s home state. They posed for selfies and passed out Make America Great Again hats to a crowd that clogged the fair’s grand concourse.
And rather than linger all day to court voters, Trump was gone before 2 p.m. The high-drama day at the fair perfectly captured the way that the former president has flouted many traditions of campaigning while still dominating the GOP presidential race, relentlessly commanding attention and also seizing any opportunity to needle his top rival, DeSantis.
Trump supporters at the fair, a must-stop event for Republican White House hopefuls, passed out pamphlets bashing DeSantis’s record on agriculture, and a mysterious plane circled over DeSantis’s ‘fairside chat’ with a taunting message echoing criticisms DeSantis that is too stiff: ‘Be likable Ron!’ The Trump campaign paid for the banner, according to a person familiar with the situation.
DeSantis, in turn, told reporters that Trump’s attacks on Iowa’s popular Republican governor, Kim Reynolds, were ‘totally out of bounds.’
DeSantis and other presidential hopefuls embraced all the customs of face-to-face campaigning in the first-in-the-nation GOP caucus state. The Florida governor, who was there before Trump arrived and after he left, brought his wife and three young kids to the Ferris wheel, the Magic Maze slide and a fair game where his son, Mason, walked away with a stuffed Pikachu. He sat for a Q&A with Reynolds, trying his best to ignore the handful of apparently liberal protesters who made a ruckus for 10 minutes straight, until law enforcement physically removed them.
Trump, in contrast, blew off Reynolds’s fairside chats with the candidates and showed off his star power — an echo of his first run in 2015, when he arrived at the fair by helicopter and bragged about the size of his crowds.
It wasn’t clear that many voters here would hold it against him.
‘We don’t need that traditional candidate,’ said Iowan Jason Bruce, who sometimes wishes for a ‘more professional’ candidate but said the former president, with his ‘bulldog attitude’ remains his top choice.
He’s not alone. Polls show Trump far ahead of DeSantis and other rivals in Iowa, other early states and nationally, even as he faces growing legal peril and has been indicted three times this year. If he is to be stopped, many Republicans say, it must be done in this state’s caucuses, which will kick off the nominating process next January. Rivals such as DeSantis are banking that showing up and putting in the face time will be key to accomplishing that….” Read more at Washington Post
Hunter Biden
“Republicans criticized the elevation of David Weiss, the prosecutor in the Hunter Biden inquiry, to special counsel status, saying he had been too lenient.” [New York Times]
“With a special counsel overseeing the investigation, it may be harder for the White House to dismiss questions about Hunter’s conduct as politically motivated.” [New York Times]
Texas Revamps Houston Schools, Closing Libraries and Angering Parents
As part of a state takeover plan, libraries in underperforming schools are becoming spaces for disruptive students to watch lessons on computers.
Reporting from Houston
Aug. 13, 2023, 3:00 a.m. ET
“Cheryl Hensley, a librarian in Houston, was excited for the start of school. A veteran of four decades in the city’s public school system, she had stocked her library at Lockhart Elementary, a mostly Black school, with $40,000 in new books, and won a statewide award for her work.
Then, late last month, Ms. Hensley, 62, was told she was no longer needed: The school’s library would be one of dozens turned into multipurpose computer rooms and used, in part, for discipline.
The decision to fire librarians and effectively close libraries in some of the city’s poorest schools has been the most contentious yet made by a new set of Houston public school leaders who were imposed on the district and its 187,000 mostly Black and Hispanic students this year by the administration of Gov. Greg Abbott.
The state of Texas this spring took over the Houston Independent School District, one of the nation’s largest school systems, and replaced its elected school board and the superintendent. The move had been years in the making, following chronic poor performance at some schools, past allegations of misconduct by school trustees and changes in state law — backed by a moderate Black Democrat from Houston — that made it easier for the state to take over school districts.
Since then, the new superintendent — a former Army Ranger, State Department diplomat and founder of a charter school network who has no official certification for the Houston job — has moved swiftly to adopt a new plan for educating the district’s children, focusing on rapidly improving reading and math scores in dozens of elementary and middle schools.
‘The future is here, and we’re behind,’ the superintendent, Mike Miles, said at a community meeting this month, describing persistent achievement gaps between Houston students and others around the state, and between the district’s Black and Hispanic students and their white classmates. ‘It means we have to do bold things now.’
State takeovers of troubled local school systems — a common occurrence around the country — have a mixed record of success, said Beth Schueler, a professor at the University of Virginia School of Education who has studied them. Those that succeeded were generally carried out in districts that were already among the nation’s lowest performing, she said, and on average they have had a neutral to negative effect.
“This is one of the largest takeovers we’ve had,” she said of Houston, and could provide a pathway for others to follow, or to avoid.
As the takeover began this year, many parents and teachers in Houston, a strongly Democratic city, complained about the loss of input into their schools, and worried that the ultimate goal of state Republican leaders was to undermine support for public education and drive Houston parents to charter or private schools.
More on U.S. Schools and Education
Florida Schools: As a new school year begins in Florida, parents are facing bureaucracy and new rules on gender, books, bathrooms and pronouns, an offshoot of Gov. Ron DeSantis’s muscular push for ‘parental rights’ in education.
Reading Crisis: Many states are taking steps to improve reading instruction for struggling students. But New York, once a national leader in education reform, lags behind.
School Voucher Experiment: Arizona is the first state to make every student eligible for private school subsidies — on average worth about $7,200 per student annually. So far, it has often benefited wealthier families.
But others, including parents and several of the replaced board members, said the district had not done enough to educate students in its struggling schools and urged patience with the new leadership.
The takeover started in the spring, as Mr. Abbott, a Republican and charter school supporter, was crisscrossing Texas to promote the use of state money for private school vouchers. The governor said his push for ‘parental empowerment’ was separate from the Houston takeover, which he has called for since at least 2019. The Texas education commissioner, Mike Morath, has said the takeover was necessary to quickly address needed changes at the poorest-performing schools, despite improvements made even before the takeover. The district last year earned a “B” grade from the state.
With the first day of school approaching on Aug. 28, critics of the takeover have grown louder. On Saturday, more than 200 people gathered in protest outside the district’s headquarters. ‘Houston Occupied School District,’ read one sign. ‘Even prisons have libraries,’ read another.
‘It doesn’t feel right,’ said Jessica Campos, 41, a parent at Pugh Elementary, a Spanish dual-language school slated for immediate changes. ‘I lose sleep over this. It’s a serious thing. These are our children and we’re not having a say in our children’s education, and that is not OK.’
The new state-run administration said it hoped to create a ‘new education system’ in elementary and middle schools that feed into poor-performing high schools. The new approach includes a focus on reading and math, paying teachers more when their students score higher on standardized tests and shifting time-consuming tasks, such as making copies or grading work or writing lesson plans, from teachers to other staff members. Schools will also hire community members to teach elective courses like photography and spin classes.
Under the plan, libraries in some schools would become ‘team rooms,’ which may be a bit of a misnomer, a department spokesman acknowledged: Though some students could work in teams, those sent there for disrupting class would be expected to spend their time at individual desks, watching their classes on laptops.
Mr. Miles has said that given limited space and resources, the decision was a trade-off and that students in schools where libraries have been converted into team rooms would still be able to borrow books before or after school.
Still, Sylvester Turner, Houston’s mayor, said the effort risked creating two systems.
‘He’s gone too far, and he’s dismantling the largest educational district in the state of Texas,’ Mr. Turner said of Mr. Miles during a City Council hearing last month. ‘You cannot have a situation where you are closing libraries for some schools in certain neighborhoods, and there are other neighborhoods where there are libraries, fully equipped. What the hell are you doing?’…” Read more of New York Times
K2 Climbers Criticized Over Continuing Ascent After Finding Dying Porter
One of the climbers, Kristin Harila, said she continued her summit of the mountain after finding a porter who fell from a cliff and later died.
Aug. 12, 2023
“A Norwegian climber defended her decision to continue a record-breaking series of climbs last month after encountering an injured porter who later died during her ascent of K2, the second-highest mountain in the world.
The climber, Kristin Harila, became one of the two fastest people — along with her guide, Tenjin Sherpa — to ascend all 14 of the world’s 8,000-meter mountains in three months and just under a day, surpassing what was already considered an exceptional record of six months and six days set by the Nepalese climber Nirmal Purja in 2019.
But two other climbers who were on the mountain on that day, July 27, said that Ms. Harila, her team and other climbers ignored an injured man — Muhammad Hassan, a 27-year-old father of three from Pakistan — because they wanted to reach the summit rather than abandon their climb to attempt a rescue.
Mr. Hassan fell from a particularly dangerous stretch of the climbing trail on K2 known as the bottleneck and later died.
‘There was no rescue mission,’ Wilhelm Steindl, an Austrian climber who provided video footage of other climbers stepping over Mr. Hassan on the narrow mountain path, said in an interview with Sky News. ‘Seventy mountaineers stepped over a living guy who needed big help at this moment, and they decided to keep on going to the summit.’
The authorities in Pakistan’s Gilgit-Baltistan region, where a portion of the mountain is located, identified Mr. Hassan as a ‘high-altitude porter.’ They said they were investigating whether ‘adequate efforts were made to rescue’ Mr. Hassan, whom Ms. Harila said was part of another team.
The authorities said they would examine the conditions of Mr. Hassan’s climbing gear and ‘ascertain who authorized him to climb with equipment that might have been insufficient for such high-altitude expeditions and his level of experience.’
People frequently die summiting the tallest mountains in the world, including Mount Everest and K2. The treks are so dangerous that the bodies of fallen climbers are sometimes left behind, and some are never recovered….” Read more at New York Times
HE WEEK AHEAD
What to Watch For
“Amazon executives are scheduled to meet this week with members of the Federal Trade Commission, which is contemplating an antitrust lawsuit against the company.
The Georgia investigation into Donald Trump and election interference is expected to go before a grand jury on Tuesday.
President Biden will travel to Milwaukee on Tuesday to mark the anniversary of signing the Inflation Reduction Act into law.
Spain and Sweden will face off in the first Women’s World Cup semifinal on Tuesday, and Australia and England will meet in the second on Wednesday. The final is a week from today.
Kai Carlo Cenat III, the social media streamer whose promised video-game console giveaway unspooled chaos last week in Manhattan, is due in court on Friday on charges of inciting a riot.” [New York Times]
”Lives Lived: Tom Jones wrote the book and lyrics for a musical called “The Fantasticks” that opened in 1960 in Greenwich Village and ran for an astonishing 42 years. He died at 95.” [New York Times]