Category: US

(CNN) — There’s something in the air in Seattle. And while at first sniff you might assume that it’s coffee, nose a little harder and you’ll notice that Seattle doesn’t run on caffeine — it runs on innovation.

It’s not for nothing that this city has spawned Microsoft, Amazon, Boeing and Starbucks, for starters.

Even Pike Place Market — famous today for its tourist count as much as for its stalls for locals — was founded in 1907 as a way for farmers to sell produce directly to customers.

“This town always comes back,” he adds, calling the city “gritty, gritty.”

Tossing fish at the Pike Place Fish Market.

CNN

The northernmost major city in the contiguous United States, perched on the west coast around 100 miles south of the Canadian border, Seattle as we know it is relatively new. The city was founded in 1869 and named after Chief Si’ahl, a Native American leader of the local Duwamish and Suquamish tribes. The settlement was, of course, built on indigenous land.

Just 20 years after its foundation, the entire central business district — 25 city blocks — was razed to the ground in the “Great Seattle Fire” of 1889.

But Seattle rebuilt. Within a year, the CBD was back — and it was over 20 feet higher in some places.

Decades later, Seattle did it again. The city was preparing for its time in the spotlight as host of the Century 21 Exhibition, or Seattle World’s Fair, which would draw in nearly 10 million visitors in 1962.

The Space Needle, which towers 600 feet above the city with a rotating deck on top, was built in just one year. It’s still an iconic landmark not just of Seattle, but of the entire USA.

“We don’t necessarily invent things — we make things better,” he adds.

Leonard Garfield: “We don’t necessarily invent things — we make things better.”

CNN

Drinking up the magic

Residents of over 80 countries around the world drink up Seattle’s innovation every day. That’s the number of countries where Starbucks has its over 32,000 stores. Whether or not you’re a fan of the company, it’s done what few businesses manage — making its product a truly global one.

The general store — in what today is the SoDo area of Seattle — became a place for the neighborhood to gather and catch up on what was going on.

Sound familiar? In fact, in a twist of Seattle fate, the original location of Cone & Steiner is now the headquarters of Starbucks. Meanwhile Cone’s great-granddaughter, Dani Cone, reopened the general store in the Capitol Hill neighborhood in 2014. She now has two locations.

“I think this area is a fertile ground for ideas, for innovation, and for considering what’s possible,” she says. “There’s just something in the DNA of this place.”

Flying high

Boeing’s first plane.

CNN

Starbucks isn’t the only Seattle company to reinvent its entire industry, of course.

This is the home of Amazon, of Microsoft — and of Boeing. Its innovators, says Garfield, see room for improvement where others see perfection.

“They’re like Bill Boeing. They look at the boat, it sails beautifully. He can make it fly.”

While Amazon and Starbucks might have changed our everyday lives, Boeing has changed the planet — for better or worse. So, then, has Seattle.

“If you think about our DNA, it’s Boeing, it’s computer engineers with Microsoft, it’s cloud engineers with Amazon,” says Garfield.

“We’re great engineers.”

An old-school ‘cultural history’

Scarecrow Video: Seattle’s leading retro movie format emporium.

CNN

Why so many? That’s a terrible question, says Lynch. “You wouldn’t walk into the Louvre and say, ‘Why do you have so many paintings?’ Somebody has got to keep this stuff alive and kicking and available to people who want to see it.” He calls it “a cultural history that you’re not going to find anywhere else.”

The feel is of an old-school video rental store — though the organization isn’t your average. One section is labeled “Little Bastards” — “for anything tiny that wants to kill you, like “Chucky” or “Leprechaun,” says Matt Lynch.

“It’s not nostalgia, it’s history — cultural history,” he says of the store. “We all have communal experiences. We all see the same movies, experience the same art. These movies collect all those experiences for us.”

And that’s the other side of Seattle — one that refuses to march with the crowd.

From the 18-foot sculpture of the Fremont Troll, clutching a car in its hand in a freeway underpass, to grunge music, which became the sound of a generation, Seattle’s history of innovation means that it always does its own thing.

Editor’s Note: David A. Andelman, a contributor to CNN, twice winner of the Deadline Club Award, is a chevalier of the French Legion of Honor, author of “A Red Line in the Sand: Diplomacy, Strategy, and the History of Wars That Might Still Happen” and blogs at Andelman Unleashed. He formerly was a correspondent for The New York Times and CBS News in Europe and Asia. The views expressed in this commentary are his own. View more opinion at CNN.

CNN
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On May 1, 1960, an American pilot, Francis Gary Powers, took off from a military airbase in Peshawar, Pakistan, in a top-secret U-2 spy plane to fly 3,000 miles across the Soviet Union, and take high resolution photos of military facilities.

His specially-designed plane, flying higher than any other, out of the range of Soviet interceptors, was thought to be impervious to identification or attack. Wrong.

The Soviets knew it was coming, and fighter jets shadowed it from below as soon as it entered their airspace. Eventually, as it passed over an advanced air defense location, a Soviet S-75 surface-to-air missile shot it out of the skies. Powers ejected from the plane, and was captured, marking a diplomatic setback between the US and the USSR, which consequently torpedoed a critical summit between Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev and President Dwight Eisenhower, who had personally green-lit the U-2 program.

And this week we had the Chinese balloon, which was shot down by the US military Saturday afternoon over the Atlantic Ocean shortly after the Federal Aviation Agency issued a ground stop for three airports in the Carolinas. The balloon was first spotted flying over Montana earlier this week and drifted its way to the coast of the Carolinas before exiting the continental United States. China quickly claimed this was a civilian weather balloon that had somehow gone astray, though on Friday Pentagon officials said it was maneuverable and “violated US air space and international law.”

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken decided to postpone his upcoming trip to China in response to the flying of the Chinese balloon over the continental US.

Last November, a Chinese Long March 2D rocket blasted off from Xichang Satellite Launch Center in southwestern China, inserting three highly-sensitive Yaogan-36 satellites into orbit 300 miles above the earth. This was the third such launch of similar satellites and China’s 54th last year. Between 2019 and 2021, China doubled the number of its satellites in orbit from 250 to 499.

Perhaps, though, Chinese officials believed that Americans wouldn’t even notice a balloon or two floating 60,000 feet up. But the United States has the capability of following launches virtually from liftoff in China, like the time the US Space Force pinpointed the launch of the Long March 2D rocket at 7:23 am EST on November 27, 2022, for instance. That’s part of its job, although it’s unclear just how sensitive its monitoring technology is in terms of the ability to pick up balloon launches.

Canada also apparently spotted the balloon this week. And the Pentagon also reported another balloon was flying over Latin America.

So, the question is whether China carefully considered the consequences of its actions. Intentional or otherwise, if it was indeed monitoring air flows, their engineers might have suspected these weather phenomena would eventually take these balloons over the United States.

In that case, one could be forgiven for imagining the darker scenarios — that the Chinese might have been seeking some excuse to ditch the visit that Blinken was scheduled to undertake, beginning Sunday.

Expectations for the trip were never very high. Relations between the US and China have been on a decidedly downward spiral for some time. The Biden Administration has slapped stiff controls on the export of equipment to manufacture advanced semi-conductors and just this week persuaded Japan and the Netherlands to sign on.

The US is also in the process of establishing access to two key military bases on the Philippines’ northern island of Luzon — keys to any operations in the South China Sea or around Taiwan in case of any efforts by China to stir the pot there.

After all, the US did mount major offensive operations against North Vietnam out of Clark Air Base and Subic Bay Naval Base, both in the Philippines, during the entire Vietnam War.

Then there is the visit to Taiwan that House Speaker Kevin McCarthy is said to be planning and which Beijing has already pro-actively warned against. At the same time, Russia has announced Chinese President Xi Jinping will visit its leader, Vladimir Putin, at an unspecified time this spring, though the Chinese side has not yet confirmed it.

Blinken does seem to have been game to try his best to level off this downward trajectory in bi-lateral relations. As he told a press conference with his South Korean counterpart, “In our judgment, [the balloon] created conditions that undermine the very purpose of [my] trip, including ongoing efforts to build a floor under the relationship as well as to address a very broad range of issues that are important to Americans, to Chinese, to the entire world.”

It’s hard to believe China would use as ham-handed a provocation as a spy balloon to send any contrary signal. Especially since this has got to be as embarrassing to China as the U-2 incident was to Eisenhower.

Back then, Eisenhower tried to minimize it at first, ordering the NASA press office, stunningly, to say the U-2 had been conducting “weather research,” and that Powers might just have strayed a trifle off course and wandered over top-secret Soviet military facilities after he’d “experienced difficulties with his oxygen equipment.”

Now, finally, the US has shot down the balloon safely and will hopefully recover the remains. Then the world will really know — and America can demonstrate, just as the Soviets did with Powers’ mission so long ago. Perhaps the Chinese rubble will even find its way to the Smithsonian as the recovered wreckage of the U-2 spy plane has proved to be an immensely popular item on display at Moscow’s Central Armed Forces Museum.

CNN
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Republican presidential hopefuls have begun casting themselves as impassioned defenders of “parental rights,” turning schoolbooks and curricula, doctors’ offices, and sports leagues into a new political battleground as they work to distinguish themselves ahead of the 2024 GOP primary.

The issue had already emerged as a major vein in the GOP bloodstream, emanating partly from the coronavirus pandemic, when school closures and vaccine mandates upended family routines and rankled vaccine-hesitant parents. But it took off after Republicans watched Glenn Youngkin defeat Democrat Terry McAuliffe in Virginia’s 2021 gubernatorial election following a campaign that placed “parents’ rights” at its center.

While critics have denounced the theme of parents’ rights as oppressive, 2024 Republicans have nevertheless plowed ahead, seeking to one-up each other with provocative campaign pledges and legislative actions – the most obvious moves in recent weeks coming from former President Donald Trump and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.

Several Republican governors – many with presidential ambitions – responded to Youngkin’s success by championing parental rights in their states, enacting bills that give parents and guardians unfettered access to school curricula, books and learning materials, and, in some instances, requiring school principals to review parental complaints about textbooks and lesson plans before they can proceed with using the material in classrooms. In some states, such as Texas, Florida and Iowa, parental permission is now needed to discuss certain topics with students. Other states, such as Georgia, have put parents and school communities in charge of vetting books their children could encounter at school for signs of race-related or sexual themes, appealing to conservatives who have voiced concerns about “radical” literature.

But Republicans have also since turned parents’ rights into an umbrella term for a host of cultural issues. Declaring that parents deserve a say in what their children are taught, some GOP power players have pushed to end diversity and equity programs in public schools. Others have sought to restrict lessons about sexual orientation or gender identity. And some have looked to prevent schools from using a child’s preferred pronouns without parental permission.

“We saw it with Youngkin’s race, and [Florida Gov. Ron] DeSantis has been playing it up for the last year. The issue has been building from Covid and extended to where we are now,” said Jennifer Williams, who in 2016 became the first openly transgender delegate to the Republican National Convention. Both DeSantis and Youngkin are said to be eyeing 2024 presidential campaigns.

The sprint to get ahead on the issue is likely to play out over a combative presidential primary, while allies and advisers see it as an opportunity to appeal to a broader electorate if their candidate becomes the next GOP presidential nominee.

“There are more parents than teachers, so it’s an easy equation. If you’re on the side of parents, that’s going to win you at the local level, and it’s going to win you at the national level,” said Keith Naughton, a longtime Republican consultant. Still, he also cautioned Republicans against “moving too far away from the consensus.”

But public opinion around parental rights remains murky.

A Quinnipiac poll released in February 2022 found that nearly 8 in 10 Americans considered efforts to ban books in schools and libraries purely political, versus 15 percent who said the efforts stemmed from content concerns. And as Republicans confront sensitive issues such as transgender rights while championing what they describe as parental empowerment, they could face similar political peril. A separate November poll by Marquette University Law School found that while a majority of Republicans (82%-18%) believed transgender athletes should be prohibited from participating in sports competitions – a topic the GOP has devoted much attention to in recent years – independent voters were nearly evenly split on the matter. The same survey showed that Republicans favored the 2020 Supreme Court decision that the 1964 Civil Rights Act bars employers from discriminating against gay and transgender workers by a 47-point margin, underscoring the political risks 2024 GOP hopefuls could encounter as they link LGBTQ rights to their parental rights push.

Sarah Kate Ellis, president and CEO of the LGBTQ advocacy group GLAAD, said Republicans are using the guise of parental rights “to eliminate people, history books and marginalized communities.”

“This is not about parents. It’s a tactic that DeSantis found really whipped up his base in Florida and so [Republicans] are taking it out for a run to see how it does. Their goal, it seems, is that these politicians are trying to turn parents against each other and make classrooms a battleground so they can further their political ambitions,” Ellis said.

GLAAD is expected to launch a messaging campaign in March that Ellis said will “fill the knowledge gap” that Republicans have “exploited.”

“They tap into the worst anxieties of any parent,” said Ellis, a parent herself.

Trump, currently the only declared candidate in the GOP presidential field, is one of several 2024 hopefuls who have elevated “parents’ rights” to new prominence as they work to curry favor with the party’s base.

Trump pushed to create a “patriotic education” commission and ordered the federal government to end diversity trainings during his term in office, though much of his focus over the past two years has been on relitigating the 2020 election. Recently, though, he has refocused his attention on the kinds of cultural battles that have enabled some of his likeliest rivals – most notably DeSantis – to gain considerable popularity among Republican voters.

In two straight-to-camera videos this week, Trump suggested that parents should select school principals through a “direct election” process and threatened to end federal funding for schools that teach “a child that they could be trapped in the wrong body” if he were to win another term.

Even those who agreed with Trump’s proposals suggested he was playing catch-up with his fellow culture warriors – especially as he also went on the attack against DeSantis recently, calling the Florida governor “disloyal” and a “globalist RINO” in separate broadsides.

“Obviously, DeSantis taking on Disney has shown a lot of leadership on this issue and frankly, I think it’s why Trump came out with his statements this week because in a lot of ways he sees himself running against DeSantis,” said Bob Vander Plaats, a social conservative activist who runs the Iowa-based Family Leader coalition. Vander Plaats was referring to the Florida governor’s push to strip the Walt Disney Company of its special governing powers after the company criticized his legislative efforts to restrict lessons on LGBTQ rights and gender identity in Florida classrooms.

“Trump is saying, ‘How do I get to the right of DeSantis on this issue?’” Vander Plaats added.

Allies of the former president rebuffed suggestions that he is taking cues from rivals rather than setting the agenda. They pointed to actions Trump took during his term in office to develop a counter-curriculum to the 1619 Project, an initiative launched by The New York Times to teach American students about slavery but which conservatives have decried as “propaganda.” And they cite the many instances in which Trump has condemned the participation of transgender athletes in women’s sports, a topic he first weaved into his stump speech at the 2021 Conservative Political Action Conference and one that tends to draw some of the biggest applause lines at his campaign rallies.

“This isn’t anything new,” Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung said. “On the school education stuff and critical race theory, he’s been talking about it since 2019 and 2020. And when he talks about gender ideology, he’s been mentioning that in his rallies, too.”

“He’s a candidate now, and he’s focused on forward-looking policy proposals,” Cheung added.

Some conservative activists who are still waiting to see how the 2024 primary field takes shape said Trump appears to be taking steps to ensure he isn’t outflanked by opponents on the issues that currently animate Republican base voters. Terry Schilling, executive director of the socially conservative American Principles Project, said Trump is “trying to play catch-up, but it’s good.”

Referring specifically to Trump’s recently unveiled plan to curtail transgender rights, including ending medical treatments for transgender teens, Schilling suggested the former president was “making sure he’s the most conservative candidate on this issue.”

“I think he’s just trying to ensure he doesn’t lose any ground or get outflanked. … It’s tough because DeSantis and Youngkin have actually been changing the policies on it, which is why I think he is going above and beyond … to kind of get a leg up,” Schilling said.

A spokesman for DeSantis’ political operation declined to comment, but the Republican governor’s actions suggest he will not cede the issue by any stretch as he marches toward a potential campaign for president. This week, DeSantis released a 2023 budget framework that repeatedly emphasized the importance of “protecting parents’ fundamental rights,” nearly a year after he signed a “Parents Bill of Rights” into law that banned instructions on sexual orientation and gender identity to K-3 grade students.

During the 2022 midterms, DeSantis took the unprecedented step of vetting, endorsing and campaigning for school board candidates, generating a wave of like-minded conservatives to carry out his agenda in districts across the state. Meanwhile, at DeSantis’ urging, a state medical board stacked with his appointees has effectively banned medication and surgeries for minors seeking gender transitions. DeSantis has decried such interventions as “chemical castration.”

In leading these cultural clashes, DeSantis has become a superstar among highly engaged conservatives. He and his wife, Casey, were treated like rock stars at last year’s Tampa summit of Moms for Liberty, a group that mobilizes conservative matriarchs across the country, where he was heralded onstage as an “American hero” and a “shining light” for parents across the country who wish that “Ron would be their governor.” The Florida Republican was reelected to a second term in November by a 19-point margin, a victory he touted at a news conference earlier this week following a fresh round of attacks from Trump.

Tiffany Justice, a co-founder of Moms for Liberty, said parental rights weren’t on the forefront of minds during Trump’s first campaign in 2016 or when DeSantis first ran for governor in 2018. But DeSantis was among the first to recognize during the pandemic the parental angst around closed schools, mask mandates and an apprehension to ideological creep into the classroom, she said, and it has him well positioned when parental rights becomes “a litmus test for all candidates in 2024.”

“He’s being rewarded already by having his colleagues and peers watching what he is doing and emulating him across the country,” Justice said. “Ron DeSantis stood up for parents when no one else was. I think he’s a leader that way, and parents across the country have recognized him for that.”

Indeed, DeSantis’ actions have spawned copycat bills in statehouses across the country this year. The National Center for Transgender Equality is tracking 231 bills in state legislatures across the country that seek to curb transgender rights – 86 of which would restrict access to transgender care. In a sign of how swiftly Republicans have pivoted to this issue, as recently as 2019, not a single state legislature in the country was debating cutting off access to gender affirmation treatment or surgeries, said Rodrigo Heng-Lehtinen, executive director of the center.

“If you rewind to 2018, this was not a political matter. There were no bills in statehouses. There were no presidential candidates talking about it. Transgender people were getting health care without a problem, and it was universally recognized as essential care by leading medical institutions,” Heng-Lehtinen said. “It was almost literally overnight we saw these bills pop up.”

“And the places where we’ve seen the most aggressive actions against transgender people,” he added, “are in states where there’s a governor with all points suggesting they are seeking higher office.”

Among those governors is Texas Republican Greg Abbott, whose administration has investigated parents of transgender teens for child abuse. In Iowa, where GOP Gov. Kim Reynolds already signed a bill to give parents and guardians more access to their children’s educational lives, lawmakers are now considering whether to ban instruction of sexual orientation or gender identity through eighth grade. Another potential 2024 Republican candidate, South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, authored and signed a bill in 2022 that banned transgender women and girls from female scholastic sports, and in December her administration canceled a transgender advocacy group’s contract with the state’s Department of Health. There is also Youngkin, the term-limited Virginia governor who held a donor summit last fall to explore a possible presidential campaign and who recently rolled out a series of policy changes aimed at transgender students, one of which seeks to require parental sign-off for students who wish to use names or pronouns that diverge from what is listed on their official record.

But not every Republican agrees with the policy fights being waged by the party’s potential presidential contenders as they aim to give parents more control over their childrens’ education.

“When Youngkin and DeSantis do things like this, they aren’t taking into account the discrimination that can result,” said Williams, the former RNC delegate. “If parental rights are constantly about gender identity and critical race theory, it doesn’t seem to be about education. It seems to me it’s about making sure I can shield my kid from anything other than what I want them to know.”

CNN
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An Indiana man died after falling from a cliff in Puerto Rico while trying to make a video for TikTok, according to his family.

Edgar Garay, 27, of Indiana, was on a recreational day trip to the southwestern coast of Puerto Rico on January 29 when he fell off a 70-foot coastal cliff near the lighthouse in Cabo Rojo, according to a news release from the US Coast Guard.

The fall was reported to the Coast Guard that evening and Garay’s body was recovered the next day by a Puerto Rico Emergency Dive Unit. 

Edgar’s brother, Carlos Garay, called his sibling a “daredevil,” according to CNN affiliate WTHR. Carlos was not in Puerto Rico and said a cousin had taken his brother sightseeing along the cliffs at that time.

“My brother has a TikTok account that he loved to upload videos to,” said Carlos. “Unfortunately, that was what he was trying to do when he was closer to the edge than he should have been.” 

Carlos has set up a verified GoFundMe to cover the costs of transporting his brother’s body back to Indiana.

“Our family is now on a mission to bring our lovable sibling home so that he can be laid to rest among friends and family,” he wrote in the fundraiser description.

Coast Guard officials also expressed condolences to Garay’s family in the release.

“We express our most heartfelt condolences to the family and loved ones of Edgar Garay and pray they find closure and strength during this most difficult time,” said Captain José E. Díaz, Coast Guard Sector San Juan commander, in the release.  

“We appreciate the efforts of all the Coast Guard, Puerto Rico Police and partner agency emergency responders, especially the Puerto Rico Emergency Management Bureau dive unit that was able to locate Mr. Garay’s body in such a highly inaccessible and challenging environment.”

US President Joe Biden has been constantly briefed throughout the day on the suspected Chinese spy balloon as it hovers over the US, including calls with national security team officials, according to a senior administration official.

There was another briefing scheduled for when Biden arrived in Wilmington Friday evening. 

The military options Biden asked for at the start have been maintained and updated as the situation has evolved, the official said, noting that no options had been taken off the table.

Why hasn’t the US shot down the suspected spy balloon? Biden and national security team officials have discussed options including shooting the balloon down, the official said.

Earlier, the military had advised against shooting down the balloon due to the risk of falling debris, but the situation could change as the balloon moves towards the East Coast.

The official said multiple options were being considered, but declined to detail what those options may include.