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Market Report: The Many Different Varieties of Eggplant - SM Mirror Santa Monica MirrorBATON ROUGE, La. (WAFB) - A Heat Advisory is in effect for all of SE Louisiana and neighboring counties in SW and coastal Mississippi from 10 a.m. through 6 p.m. Today’s high temperatures will top out in the low 90s for most, with the potential for heat index values to top 105° in some areas. The combination of widespread power outages and the ongoing recovery effort make today’s heat a real danger. Try to find ways to cool off, take frequent breaks, and drink plenty of water.
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While heat is today’s main headline, scattered showers and thunderstorms are once again in the forecast. The morning should start out mainly dry, but storms will begin to fire as temperatures climb into the 90s. And as we saw on Tuesday, locally heavy rainfall will be possible in any stronger storms.
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Another heat advisory is already posted for Thursday, with the expectation that temperatures will again climb into the low 90s and heat index values could reach 105° or above. Rain chances may trend a touch higher as a weak cold front approaches from the north, with a 50% chance of showers and thunderstorms in the forecast.
Latest guidance suggests that front may not have as much of a push to the south as shown a day or two ago, but it should still be enough to usher in some slightly drier air for the weekend. Rain chances for Friday and Saturday will run 20% or less, with a 30% chance of showers and thunderstorms by Sunday.
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Ida continues to be an issue today, with a significant threat of flooding from the Appalachians into the Northeast. Cities like Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, New York City, and Boston are all under the gun for potentially heavy and flooding rains as Ida’s remnants track toward the East Coast. A rare ‘high risk’ of flooding has been issued in some of these areas.
Elsewhere, Tropical Storm Larry formed south of the Cabo Verde Islands in the eastern Atlantic on Wednesday morning. Larry is forecast to become the season’s third major hurricane, but should remain over the open Atlantic for at least the next five days.
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Tropical Depression Kate continues to hang on in the central Atlantic, but is not expected to threaten and land areas. And the National Hurricane Center gives an area of low pressure in the SW Caribbean a 20% chance of development. It looks like land interaction with Central America and/or the Yucatan Peninsula may limit its development potential later in the week.
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A serious side effect of weight-loss surgery can take more than a year to appear. Vanessa Hurta is spreading the word.
Hurta, who completed her doctorate of nursing practice at UConn’s School of Nursing this month, has worked as a nurse practitioner in a bariatric surgery practice for many years. UConn’s DNP program requires students to conduct a scholarly project translating primary research into clinical practice. Hurta saw the opportunity to raise awareness of an uncommon but dangerous side effect of bariatric surgery: sudden, dramatic dips in blood sugar, also called post-bariatric hypoglycemia.
“People can have tremors, seizures, get confused, faint, or even fall into a coma,” from hypoglycemia, Hurta says. It can make it dangerous for people to drive, work with heavy machinery, or take care of children. Hypoglycemia can happen to people who’ve had gastric bypasses or other weight-loss related stomach surgeries. It often takes more than a year to manifest, and it can sneak up on people.
“You really don’t want to faint while driving,” or have some other catastrophic thing happen, Hurta says. Usually a catastrophic event isn’t the first sign of hypoglycemia. But people can miss the subtler warning signs.
So Hurta designed a few simple questions to ask bariatric surgery patients at their one-year follow up appointment such as whether they had ever felt confused or sleepy about an hour after eating.
And she tested them in her own practice. She and her colleagues began identifying patients who had mild hypoglycemia symptoms before a serious event occurred. Once they found a person was at risk, they could give them strategies for diet and staying safe, as well as tips for noticing warning signs before their blood sugar plummeted. Some also were referred to endocrinologists for further advice and evaluation.
Her practice plans to keep using these questions in routine follow up appointments, and Hurta hopes other practices adopt them as well and spread the word to primary care doctors, who may not realize their patients are at risk.
Hurta herself is planning on moving to a new challenge: director of clinical services for the Westport-Weston Health District.
“I’ve always wanted to do population health,” Hurta says. Her next research project? Conducting a community health needs assessment for the whole community the district serves.
Jessica Marie Ramirez attends a voting rights rally outside of the Texas State Capitol on July 8 in Austin, Texas. Tamir Kalifa/Getty Images
In Texas, more than 650 new laws go into effect Wednesday passed by the Republican-led state legislature in the 2021 regular session. Among them are top conservative priorities passed in other red states around the country this year, but none as big as Texas with more than 29 million residents.
Meanwhile, Texas Democrats have returned to the state after leaving to protest a restrictive voting law. That bill eventually passed Tuesday but won't immediately become law.
Here are some of the major new laws that do take effect Wednesday, Sept. 1, in Texas:
The Texas voting bill that's gained the most attention this year is the GOP-backed Senate Bill 1, which passed this week. That still needs Gov. Abbott's signature but some less talked about voting laws take effect Wednesday.
One bans Texas voters from registering using a post office box as their address, another allows the secretary of state to cut funds for voter registrars that fail to remove certain people from the rolls and one more makes it harder to apply for a mail-in ballot for medical reasons.
There are also other, less controversial, voting laws. One that allows people to track their mail-in ballots and another that makes it clear who can be in a polling place: voters, election workers, poll watchers, election judges and law enforcement.
A protester holds a sign outside the Texas state Capitol on May 29 in Austin. Thousands of protesters came out in response to a bill outlawing abortions after cardiac activity is detected in an embryo, sometimes by six weeks of pregnancy. Sergio Flores/Getty Images
Earlier this year, Texas lawmakers passed a bill that could ban the vast majority of abortions in the state.
It prohibits abortions once cardiac activity is detected in an embryo, which can happen as early as about six weeks before many even know they are pregnant.
Unlike other similar bills across the country, Texas' law doesn't set criminal penalties for violating the ban. Instead, the law allows private citizens to sue anyone who helps someone get an abortion.
Abortion rights advocates have asked the U.S. Supreme Court to block the law, saying that if it goes into effect it will essentially eliminate access to abortion in Texas.
"If this law takes effect, anti-abortion protesters could use this law to harass clinics with endless lawsuits that consume their time and resources and could force them to shut down," Marc Hearron, the lead attorney representing plaintiffs in the case, told reporters in July.
Teachers say they don't teach it. Educators say most people — including critics — don't know what it is. Still, this spring lawmakers passed laws banning the teaching of critical race theory in schools.
Nikki Jones, who teaches African American studies at the University of California, Berkeley, described critical race theory as a way to understand how race has been used to influence laws in the U.S.
"It's a way to see race," Jones says. "To see understandings of race, to see racism, in places where it may not otherwise on the surface of it be apparent."
The new law takes on critical race theory without ever naming it. House bill sponsor Steve Toth, a Republican, says the new law is aimed at teaching complex subjects like slavery and racism without making white children feel guilty.
"We need to teach about the ills but you can't blame this generation," Toth says. "Kids are being scapegoated."
Texas history teachers say they don't scapegoat anyone.
Texas protesters could face felony charges for blocking a roadway or entrance to a hospital after a new law takes effect Wednesday.
The bill was introduced after a protest in California that resulted in protestors blocking two deputies from entering an emergency room.
In Texas, protesters had faced a misdemeanor with up to six months in jail for that offense. The new law increases the penalty to two years.
"As a nurse who's worked in the emergency setting, seconds matter," says Republican state Rep. Stephanie Klick, one of the bill's authors. "A delay of only a few minutes to emergency care can mean the difference between life and death."
But Democratic state Rep. Joe Moody of El Paso says the punishment is too severe.
"What we're doing here is creating a mandatory minimum that is not congruent to anything else that we have," Moody says.
A woman explains handgun merchandise to a customer during the Conservative Political Action Conference CPAC on July 10 in Dallas. Brandon Bell/Getty Images
Texans have had the right to carry a gun in public since 1995. Since then, more gun-friendly legislation has followed. However, you've always needed to obtain a license to be able to take your gun outside your home or vehicle.
Starting Wednesday, that's no longer the case.
The new law allows anyone who can legally own a firearm to carry it in public, as long as it's in a holster. That's a first since Reconstruction.
Texas is now the 20th state to enact what some call "constitutional carry" – something supporters say is a right granted by the Second Amendment.
The law doesn't change eligibility for gun ownership. Texas handgun owners must still be at least 21-years-old and can not have served a sentence for a felony or family violence within the last five years. And the new law also adds several misdemeanors to the list, including assault causing bodily injury, deadly conduct, terroristic threat and disorderly conduct with a firearm.
The law is unpopular among some Texas law enforcement, and according to April polling data from The University of Texas and the Texas Tribune, nearly 60% of Texans oppose permitless carry.
"I think it will mean more handguns in public," says Gyl Switzer, executive director of Texas Gun Sense. "And data show us time, after time, after time that guns don't make us safer."
Another new law would ban homeless encampments across the state making it illegal to set up shelter or store belongings for an extended period of time, creating a new class C misdemeanor punishable by a fine of up to $500.
Many believe the legislation is a response to Austin decriminalizing homeless camping in 2019 — a measure that Austin voters voted to overturn in May. The law also limits cities from using parks for temporary camps.
Thousands more Texans will become eligible Wednesday for low-THC medical cannabis oil through the state's compassionate use program.
The new law makes all forms of cancer eligible for the program. Previously, only patients suffering from "terminal" cancer were eligible.
"It's arguable that any form of cancer could be terminal, right?" says Jax Finkel, executive director of Texas National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws. "So it felt like a very arbitrary descriptor."
It also expands use for people suffering from post traumatic stress disorder. Originally, only veterans were eligible. That was changed, in part, after an outpouring of support from veterans who testified that everyone with PTSD should have the same access.
The state's program, though, remains one of the most restrictive in the country.
According to a poll this year from the University of Texas and the Texas Tribune, just more than 10% of Texans believe marijuana should remain illegal in the state.
A new law could help the roughly 1.5 million veterans living in Texas get academic credit for skills they learned in the military by creating a universal catalog to translate which military training would apply to certain degrees and certificate programs at Texas trade schools and colleges.
Democratic state Rep. Alex Dominguez, who co-authored the bill, says it was about reducing redundancy for veterans and giving them quicker entry into the civilian workforce.
"My goal is to publish this list so that the veterans themselves can see what they would qualify for," Dominguez says. "A veteran might be leaving military service having always done work in, say, infantry, but they might notice that they have developed enough skills that would help them get a job in, say, law enforcement, or to be a paramedic, for example."
Houston Public Media's Andrew Schneider and Florian Martin; KERA's Bret Jaspers, Haya Panjwani, Ana Perez and Bill Zeeble; KUT's Ashley Lopez, Jerry Quijano and Andrew Weber; and Texas Public Radio's Carolina Cuellar and Jack Morgan contributed to the reporting for this story.
Because he said his family is being hunted — and any information about them could put them in danger.
Mohammed used to work for the U.S. in Afghanistan as a civilian.
"Because when I was kid, I was always saying to my mom that, ‘mom, I need, I want to work with the American people. I want to work with the American people’ — and my dream came through, thank God,’" said Mohammed.
But his dream job came to an end in his hometown of Kabul.
"In 2012, I got several calls from the Taliban,” said Mohammed.
"That if I continue working for the U.S. government, they're going to kill my family in front of my eyes and they're going to kill me too."
Fleeing danger, he came to America and earned his citizenship.
But now, after the U.S. departure, Mohammed said the Taliban is closing in on his family.
He said the Taliban recently ransacked their home, searching for any documentation on where they might be. He also said they are safe — in hiding — for now.
"I tried to do my best, I contacted our government, our senator of New Mexico and I contacted the department of the states and also sent an email for SIV visa about the situation and I never got any response from them. I'm really frustrated about my family, so much," he said.
Despite the lack of help from the government, he is volunteering to be an interpreter for the U.S. Army — flying to help communicate with the tens of thousands Afghans that were evacuated.
Even though his family was left behind, he said he’s hopeful.
“That's OK, I am trying to help to get help from them. Hopefully they can do something to help my family," Mohammed said.
He has faith he will be with his family again.
ELYSIAN PARK (CBSLA) – Amid devastating fires in Northern California, fire crews in SoCal are reminding homeowners to clear out brush as the area remains under extreme fire conditions.
“This stuff will burn through here really quickly and push up into the eucalyptus trees,” said David Ortiz, with the Los Angeles Fire Department, said of the dry brush near homes in Elysian Park, vegetation similar to what many of the hillsides in Southern California look like as a result of the ongoing drought.
READ MORE: Police Investigate Fatal Shooting Outside Super 98 Market In Jefferson ParkAcross the state, there are 15 wildfires burning, so LAFD is reminding homeowners, especially those that live in fire-prone areas, to cut back overgrown trees and do brush clearance around their homes.
(credit: CBS)
“People who live with this stuff behind their homes to be prepared,” Ortiz said. “They have to make sure they maintain that defensive space. If they do their part in maintaining that defensive space, then that helps us do our part.”
Fire officials, according to Ortiz, are concerned about areas like Elysian Park that, historically, have burned over the years. He said the department and residents were surprised by the Pacific Palisades fire back in May because it started in an area that hadn’t burned in decades.
“The Palisades was a surprising fire because the factors that we normally expect for extreme fire behavior were not there, and so we are finding all these areas we’ve done a good job putting fires out, in decades in the past, are starting to burn now,” Ortiz said.
READ MORE: Lawsuit Claims Beverly Hills Police Officers Racially Profiling MinoritiesWith no end to the drought in sight, Ortiz said that residents should not let their guards down.
Luis Rodriguez, a homeowner in Elysian Park, said that being prepared comes with the territory of living close to a hillside.
“I have a tendency to always cut around 100-150 feet perimeter within my house. My backyard is the park area, so I have to be very vigilant about that,” he said.
As a preventive measure, the Forest Service said it’s closing all the national forests starting Aug. 31 through Sept. 17 to decrease the chances of wildfires breaking out.
MORE NEWS: 1 Rescued, 5 Unaccounted For After US Navy Helicopter Crashes Off Coast Of San Diego
The problem is not unique to the Biden administration, said the head of a nonpartisan group that tracks vacancies.
One of the running criticisms of the Trump administration was how slowly it nominated and won confirmation for hundreds of high-level government officials, especially in critical agencies like the State Department and the Department of Homeland Security.
But things aren’t going much better with the Biden administration. And arguably, the situation is worse: In the middle of a pandemic, there is still no confirmed head of the Food and Drug Administration, and there is no confirmed ambassador to Afghanistan to help manage the crisis there.
To understand what’s going on, I turned to Max Stier, the head of the Partnership for Public Service, a nonpartisan organization that tracks vacancies and advises the government on how to improve the nomination and confirmation process.
He made clear that while the Biden team was woefully behind, the problem was not unique to it — or to the Trump administration. Rather, he said, it’s typical of a broken system that has led to a long string of government failures.
“You can go back in time, if it was the response to Hurricane Katrina under the Bush administration, or the botched rollout of healthcare.gov under the Obama administration, or any number of issues in the Trump administration,” he said. “There is an execution gap of consequence. And one of the big reasons for that is that the leadership system is broken.”
A transcript of our interview, edited and condensed, follows.
Where does the Biden administration stand in terms of its nominations and confirmations?
There’s a set of 800 positions that we consider the most fundamental, and of those, they only have 127 that are confirmed, and they have 206 that are waiting in the queue. That still leaves a pretty substantial number that needs to be nominated.
It’s hard to believe, but we’re past the seven-month mark in this administration. You have a Senate that operates like a two-lane country highway, and you have a big traffic jam because you’ve got legislative priorities and budget issues and judicial nominations.
And why is this a problem? Don’t they have acting officials in place?
When no one’s there, you do have someone in the acting role, but they’re the substitute teachers. They might be amazing educators, but we all know that the substitute teacher doesn’t get respect from the class, and they don’t see their job as taking on the long-term problems because they don’t know if they’ll be around tomorrow. What I’m painting for you is a broader system failure in our government. You wind up with workarounds like acting leadership, or in the last administration, an effort to simply avoid a confirmed leadership in many instances.
Speaking of the last administration, how does President Biden’s record compare with Donald Trump’s?
The Biden team is ahead in their nominations of where Trump was at this point in time, but they’re actually neck and neck in the number of confirmed people.
It’s easy to see why the Senate could be a roadblock for confirmations, but what explains the lag in nominations?
There’s an interrelationship between the two. One of the challenges any administration faces is thinking about the likelihood of getting people confirmed. A difficult confirmation process impacts the nomination process. There’s a lot of risk aversion. And, frankly, their ability to recruit is hurt. Think about all the people who would throw in their hat knowing they’ll be a part of that cool-your-jet package. Everything you do gets scrutinized enormously, and you have to be thoughtful and careful about what you should be doing that might get you in trouble.
And to add a complication, a current nominee can’t also serve as the acting leader, according to a relatively recent Supreme Court decision. For example, if the Biden administration nominated Janet Woodcock to serve as the F.D.A. commissioner, she would have to step down from her present role as acting commissioner. Congress should fix this.
Which agencies worry you the most?
I think the State Department is plainly one of the most obvious places with significant gaps. Of the positions we track, the State Department has the most gaps of any agency. But the truth is, you only have 127 confirmed positions, so there are problems pretty much everywhere. The most noticeable ones are the places where there are current, obvious needs. So, there’s the international issues, whether it’s Afghanistan or China. You think about health care, where the lack of a confirmed F.D.A. commissioner is clearly a problem.
The Office of Management and Budget director is not as obvious, but I think it is a truly fundamental role. There is very little in the federal government that is focused on the enterprise as a whole, but the Office of Management and Budget is. It’s a tiny agency when you think about the entire government, but it’s the nerve center, and to not have a confirmed director is a problem.
Let’s take Afghanistan as a case study. How does the lack of confirmed positions hurt us there?
It’s impossible to show a causal relationship, but we don’t have an ambassador to Afghanistan, and while ambassadors aren’t everything, they are your key point of contact in any given country. And yes, there are plenty of people involved in Afghanistan, but you’d want every resource you could possibly have, and that’s one of them. I’m looking at the list of unconfirmed positions that might be needed over there: under secretary for public diplomacy, there’s no nominee. Assistant secretary for conflict and stabilization operations. There’s someone nominated and been reported out, but they’re waiting. Not good. The list goes on. There will be someone there, but they’re in acting capacities. That’s just not a recipe for the best we need for our agencies.
It’s not good for dealing with our allies, either.
Absolutely. And you do hear that fairly consistently. Our allies don’t feel they have the people they need to talk to. All these problems are better solved through multilateral exercises, so coordinating those relations with all those countries and international entities is fundamental to putting our best foot forward.
I keep coming back to this: The design of our system is broken. And we still have to work within the system until we fix it, and we’re not doing that well, either. But we could. For example, historically, right before the August recess, the past several presidents have gotten substantial packets of nominees through the confirmation process, on average about 60. The Biden team got 11. And that’s not good enough.
So what do you see as the solutions?
The easiest answer to having too many positions is to reduce them, substantially. This happened before, in 2011, when there was a reduction of about 160 positions. We need to see many multiples of that. You could cut in half the number of Senate-confirmed positions and not diminish the Senate’s important oversight responsibility. The Senate doesn’t lose if it has 600 rather than 1,200 confirmed positions, because it’s not actually getting the confirmation opportunity for those 1,200 positions.
Instead, some of them could be career positions. Some could be nonconfirmed political positions; some of them could be term positions. Depending on the nature of the job, you’d want to see different things. At the Department of Energy, Secretary Jennifer Granholm wants the cybersecurity position to be a career position, not a Senate-confirmed position, because she says there needs to be someone in that job longer than two years.
On the Senate side, you should improve the process. It doesn’t have to be so ugly. To go back to the two-lane highway proposition, it’s worse than that: It’s a two-lane highway that has a lot of potholes in it. They require people to submit their data multiple times, and there’s a huge amount of questions that get asked.
Out of that 2011 legislation, there was a commission created to talk about how to improve it, and there are a lot of recommendations that are out there. For example, right now, any Senate-confirmed position requires a full field investigation by the F.B.I. But doesn’t it depend on the nature of the job, whether you’re C.I.A. director versus the person in charge of public housing at Housing and Urban Development? They don’t distinguish, so the intensity of investment and intrusion is the same.
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Is there anything you think we’re missing? Anything you want to see more of? We’d love to hear from you. Email us at onpolitics@nytimes.com.
