Facing Out: The Week’s Most Interesting News

February 1, 2025

Photo of Fort William Henry guides posing on the ice of Lake George, N.Y.Fort William Henry guides, demonstrating a degree of bravery befitting the soldiers they portray, pose on the ice of Lake George, N.Y., where the community is preparing for the 63rd Annual Lake George Winter Carnival, which begins this weekend. Ashley Orzech

Dear Colleagues and Friends,

Upbeat and optimistic is what we strive for in Facing Out, and while there’s much good news to share, the week of growing pains, confusion and tragedy in our nation’s capital is hard to overlook.

First, the Trump Administration’s quick clampdown on federal spending unintentionally spiraled into a quasi-government shutdown. They were targeting continued payments to the World Health Organization and funding for diversity initiatives, but by the time the White House rescinded the freeze on Wednesday, Medicaid payments, senior meals, special education and housing stipends had also been disrupted. The Administration’s order to freeze nearly all U.S. foreign aid also reportedly intensified humanitarian crises in the Sudan, Thailand, Ukraine and elsewhere.

Meanwhile, newly confirmed Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth hurried to reinstate training material highlighting the celebrated Tuskegee Airmen and the Women Airforce Service Pilots after the material was pulled for revision purportedly related to the rollback of DEI policies, causing immediate backlash from both sides of the political aisle.

Then, on a clear and very cold Wednesday evening, the capital was struck by tragedy. An unexplained mid-air collision over the Potomac between a passenger jet and a military helicopter killed more than 60 people, including world-class ice skaters and coaches who had been attending the U.S. Figure Skating national championships in Wichita, Kan. Several were members of the Skating Club of Boston, prompting tributes from their city’s professional sports teams.

THE REPORT CARD: American school kids have continued to struggle in the years since the pandemic shut down schools and pushed learning online, with reading skills showing a continuing decline and little improvement in math, according to the most recent version of the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a biennial look at school performance known as the nation’s report card. One-third of eighth grade students scored below “basic” in reading, more than ever in the history of the assessment. It also shows growing inequality, with high-performing students regaining lost ground and lower-performing students falling further behind. New York hasn’t improved much since the last round of data was released. Probably not a convenient time for the Albany Times Union to break the news that the commissioner of the New York State Department of Education received $155,000 in pay raises over the past six months, in the process increasing her annual salary to $489,000, nearly 50% higher than it was in 2021.

ROLE MODELS: But there’s good news: Exposure to entrepreneurial adults as teenagers seemed to improve girls’ educational and career trajectories, according to new research published by the renowned Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern, which found that such girls were more likely to continue their education and had a lower risk of holding low-wage jobs throughout their working years. They also found that girls who had early exposure to entrepreneurs and then pursued their own entrepreneurial ambitions went on to create more successful and more women-friendly companies than the average entrepreneur. There is similar good news for kids mentored through Big Bothers Big Sisters of America — they earn more money in their early 20s compared to others in their cohort and also had better college attendance and healthier social bonds.

OPEN GATES: The Times of London scored a wide-ranging interview with Bill Gates in which the multibillionaire co-founder of Microsoft talked about his happy childhood in Seattle, his neurodiversity (he would be diagnosed “on the autism spectrum” if he were growing up today, he said), his marriage, his philanthropic pursuits and what it’s like to be a target of conspiracy theorists, among other topics. But it’s his comments about fellow tech magnate Elon Musk that were heard round the world. “It’s really insane that he can destabilize the political situations in countries,” Gates said. “I think in the U.S. foreigners aren’t allowed to give money; other countries maybe should adopt safeguards to make sure super-rich foreigners aren’t distorting their elections. ... If someone is super-smart, and he is, they should think how they can help out. But this is populist stirring.”

Photo of the forested trails at the Paul Smith’s College.The forested trails at the Paul Smith’s College Visitor Interpretive Center are a winter wonderland for the area’s many Nordic skiers. Nancie Battaglia

STILL POWERING THE WORLD: Over the next two years, GE Vernova plans to invest $600 million in American factories and research facilities and create 1,500 new jobs as it meets surging customer demand for electricity equipment at home and abroad. At its Advanced Research Center in Niskayuna, N.Y., GE Vernova plans to invest almost $100 million in 2025 to strengthen the center’s electrification and carbon efforts, enable continued recruitment of top-tier talent, and push forward innovative technologies including direct air capture, alternative fuels for power generation, the grid of the future, critical infrastructure security and more. The company will invest $90 million its historic Schenectady manufacturing operation, more than 1 million square feet in size and still one of the largest manufacturing facilities in the United States.

SCENT SENSIBILITY: Visitors to the Brooklyn Botanic Garden were treated to a rare, um, treat in recent days  — the blooming of a plant whose scent can best be compared to rotting flesh. Or, as one visitor put it to The Associated Press: “It smells like feet, cheese and rotten meat. It just smelled like the worst possible combination of smells. That was disgusting.”  The rare plant — Amorphophallus gigas, a relative of the Amorphophallus titanum, commonly known as the corpse flower — has bloomed for the first time since arriving in Brooklyn in 2018. 

THE SHOE STORE: After Suzanne Cohen’s mother and father died, she began sorting out old family photos and memories, and one in particular stood out. It was a photo of the shoe store in Witten, Germany, that her ancestors had owned — a shoe store that opened in 1864 and sold fancy footwear until the Holocaust when, the family believed, it was lost, as were most of their extended Jewish family. Imagine her shock to discover the shore store is still open and some of her family members are still running it. “It was just amazing. I had no idea that they had survived the Holocaust,” Cohen, a retired English teacher from Greenwich, N.Y., told The Washington Post.

THE PATH TO DESTRUCTION: David French is not what you expect in a New York Times columnist. He’s a veteran of Operation Iraqi Freedom, a former constitutional litigator and an evangelical Christian who has written about the pain of witnessing widespread cruelty and being ostracized by longtime friends and fellow believers over political disagreements. He often draws from history to explain his view of current events, and this week, he shines a light on the “friend-enemy distinction” to frame much of modern American politics. Harkening to the virtues espoused by Benjamin Franklin and other founders of our nation as “universal moral obligations that apply to our treatment of everyone,” he writes, “Dive too deeply into the friend-enemy distinction, by contrast, and it can become immoral to treat your enemies with kindness if kindness weakens the community in its struggle against a mortal foe. In the world of the friend-enemy distinction, your ultimate virtue is found in your willingness to fight. Your ultimate vice is betraying your side by refusing the call to political war. ... Because our civics depends on our ethics, we should be teaching ethics right alongside civics. Sadly, we’re failing at both tasks, and our baser nature is telling millions of Americans that cruelty is good, if it helps us win, and kindness is evil, if it weakens our cause. That is the path of destruction.”

01_Nuggets.jpgMODERN LIFE: “Were you dropped on your head as a child?” one outraged parent asks. “The only poison is what’s coming out of your trash mouth,” spews another. No, this was not a recent public meeting. It’s a Broadway play, Eureka Day, that tells the story of a community that “professes perfect consideration of differing opinions [but] turns out to be a hotbed of intolerance,” says Jesse Green, chief theater critic for The New York Times.

KEEPING SCORE: In the week since President Trump pardoned all the rioters who sacked the Capitol on January 6, 2021, one was arrested on a pending federal gun charge, another was shot dead by an Indiana sheriff’s deputy after allegedly resisting arrest, and another is wanted on a 2016 charge of soliciting a minor online. FBI Director nominee Kash Patel, meanwhile, said he disagrees with some of the pardons.

GREAT OUTDOORS: The New York State parks system logged a record 88.3 million visitors in 2024, marking the 12th consecutive annual increase. The April 8 total eclipse was among the driving factors.

TO YOUR HEALTH: A top UK nutritionist has created the healthiest three-course meal you’ll ever eat. To our great delight, it starts with a generous helping of cheese and ends with a chocolate mousse.

ANOTHER MASTERPIECE? A former curator of ancient art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York has teamed with a group of conservators, scientists and historians who believe they’ve discovered a previously unknown Van Gogh portrait of a fisherman plucked from a Minnesota garage sale a few years ago by an unsuspecting antiques collector for less than $50, The Wall Street Journal reports.

02_Lives.jpgDICK BUTTON burst onto the world figure skating stage at 16, just after World War II, when he won the U.S. figure skating championship. Two years later, he won the first of his two Olympic Gold medals and began a run of five consecutive world figure skating championships before surrendering his amateur status to perform in skating shows. An innovator on the ice and widely regarded as one of the greatest figure skaters of all time, he went to become a popular Emmy Award-winning TV analyst, his blunt delivery helping viewers learn not only the basics but also the nuances of a sport unfamiliar to most casual fans. “No other figure skater embodies the sport as much as Dick Button,” Tara Lipinski, the 1998 Olympic women's figure skating champion, said in 2015. “He is, and always will be, the godfather of this sport.” He died the day after the tragic midair collision in Washington that took the lives of 14 members of the tight-knit skating community, six of them from the Skating Club of Boston, where Button also skated and where the trophy room is named in his honor. He was 95.

03_Almost Final Words.jpg“This city is my home, and I won’t be intimidated. What happened to me was extremely traumatic. But I will eventually make my way back to the train.”
— Joseph Lynskey, who survived being pushed from a subway platform directly into the path of an oncoming train on New Year’s Eve, one of many recent high-profile crimes in the New York City subway system.

04_signoff.jpgBAD BET: More than 100 former spies and intelligence officers are urging Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin and the State Assembly to reject a new casino in the suburbs less than 20 miles from Washington, an area that is home to the CIA, the Pentagon and various defense contractors, arguing that foreign nationals could use the casino to penetrate national security by bribing intelligence officers and other military personnel.

05_Bottom.jpgSome of the linked material in Facing Out requires a subscription to read.

Principal Authors: Bill Callen and Mark Behan.

Contributors: Ryan Moore, John Brodt, Kristy Miller, Jim Murphy, Amanda Metzger, Claire P. Tuttle, Ashley Orzech, and Nancie Battaglia.

FACING OUT is what we do. We help companies, organizations and individuals work effectively with their most important external audiences – their customers, their shareholders, their communities, the government and the news media.  www.behancommunications.com

Facing Out features news and other nuggets that caught our eye, and that we thought might be of value to you, our friends and business associates. Some items are good news about our clients and friends, others are stories that we hope will leave you a bit more informed or entertained than you were five minutes ago. As always, we welcome your ideas and feedback. 

Let’s make it a conversationmark.behan@behancom.com

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